His form comes tumbling out onto the subway platform not five feet before the hurricane of steel rushes past him.

A woman gasps from nearby but Kierk, breathing so hard it hurts, silences her with a look. Beyond some glances and movement away from him he’s left alone to lean against the wall—he can feel every inch of his skin and his head is spinning, ripping from him in this heat where he can’t even catch his breath, so he ends up a staggered figure, just a heavy-breathing delicate chemical balance almost obliterated, a standing negentropy wave that had just escaped from materials harder and faster than it, a standing negentropy wave that is strongly reconsidering this whole investigation, that is reaching certain decisions vis-à-vis the pursuit of this strangeness (like finding that graffiti so far back on precisely the same subway where Atif had been disembodied, dissipated, and then the form itself, the thing towering up in the darkness, it must have been ten feet tall), specifically, he’s leaning toward abandoning the pursuit entirely—for left alone the strangeness might be harmless but in these investigations it is a strangeness that always seems to push back.

The minutes pass and he recovers himself. He’s watchful of the end of the platform where he had seen it but nothing emerges, everything passes normally. It’s Friday night, which he’d forgotten, and the citizens of New York are traversing the underground. Eventually he moves closer to the turnstiles where the art project is installed, sitting down on a nearby bench, his clothes streaked with rust and dirt, completely ruined. In the flow of those entering and exiting there is music. With each passerby a note is sounded, building until the chthonic music is an ambient étude, like listening to a great thought accumulating over decades, a pattern spaced out temporally to such an extent that it was only just recognizable as such. But the nature of the song is not threatening—just big and sad, a melancholy witnessing of the short lives passing through, utterly inhuman but not ominous at all, just a city-size organism unassailable by demands of morality or purpose. And now the patterns of the comings and goings seem finally to have given it a voice to slowly sing out its centennial song. And with that voice a peace has descended over the subway, and Kierk, lulled by this entelechy of city to sound, sits monkishly until quite late, his fear fading, his uncertainty growing.