His peripatetic wandering, cut with wonderment and fear, has taken him once more to Bleecker Street Station. Entering down the stairs is like descending into a clay oven that is simultaneously an organ breathing away in machine dreams. Even through his dress shoes the ground radiates an organic heat and the metal he touches hums hot. In this aquarium air he swims about, misting, uncertain why he’s been driven here again—perhaps by the agent’s words, perhaps by the events of the morning, perhaps by thoughts of Carmen. Swiping his MetroCard he enters and is surprised at the ping of sound, a note, as the turnstile revolves. Examining it he sees that it is some kind of art project. A woman clutching numerous shopping bags pushes through after him and another, different note sounds, lingers.

First he paces the track for a while, timing the subway trains coming and going. The mean is every eight minutes, with a standard deviation of about a minute. The music from the turnstiles is haunting but he ignores it, concentrating instead on where the man vanished and where Atif must have died as well (given where he’d seen the toe), right by the liminal space where the subway platform ends and the dark tracks begin. The direction where the train comes from. For that space seems a dark labyrinthine siren, promising an answer. Kierk goes back and forth with himself as he paces—for no argument pro the action he is leaning toward could be summoned, only intuitions, fantastical intuitions; but under the influence of such phantasmagoria he at last makes his decision and waits at the ledge, at that dark lip, for the train to come. And after its departure, Kierk, looking surreptitiously around as the platform empties, makes his move into the black mouth as the train screeches away.

At first he is just groping blindly, one hand out, back pressing against the wall behind him, sidestepping. He eats up little space with his inching, yet somehow the tunnel swallows him whole immediately. Ahead of him lies the curving wall to his right and the tracks following that curve, lit only by distant emergency lights. The wall is an amalgam of rock and metal, grimy, while below him the shelf seems impossibly narrow, not even a foot wide really. He doesn’t know if that foot is enough space for the train to not reap him if it comes—if the sucking wind of its passage will pull him in, or unbalance him, or if there’s any hitch of metal protruding from the train that might tear him apart easily. After a few feet he’s more sure of where the ledge lies under him and so now he can scuffle sideways at faster pace.

Ten feet out and he feels like he has been ontologically separated from the lit world of the platform. That he is violating some deeper order and is now irrevocably apart.