“Einsteigen!” Putting his mouth to the clunky chunk of the microphone, the station master utters the command with an efficient lilt, cool and faintly fatal. Prodding commuters inside, he elides the hard g of the word, the tip of his tongue touching the succeeding vowel with barely a whiff of air, so that the command no longer ends with a clean-cut gen, but with a weaker, albeit melodious ’n. Usually, though by no means always, the injunction is preceded by “Bitte.” Yet today, kindness is swallowed like a gulp of water. Without it, the command carried over the loudspeakers acquires something not only expeditious but definite, almost accusatory, like a reprimand for a chance forfeited. Or time simply lost.
      He can hear the doors slide shut behind him. Sitting down in the near empty car, he gazes out. The glass pane records the usual light-smear and erratic scraping, made, it seems, with an irritated key. Suddenly, displaced beyond the pane, he discovers the oblique blur of himself in the window of another train. Curious, he thinks. How real he looks. For a brief moment, he has the sensation he’s sitting not here, in this train, but there, in that. As far as he can tell, the only difference is that, because of the interplay of light and refraction, his reflection is facing in the opposite direction. There’s a sudden shudder, then a slow tug, whereafter the train, calmly and conscientiously, thrusts forward. Twisting his head, he leans forward. No. He’s no longer where he left himself.
      Having entered the Ringbahn at Treptower Park, not far from the city’s old observatory, he now travels counter-clockwise. Presently, the sun should be somewhere behind the tree tops that are swaying so peacefully on his upper left. Yet because of the time of day, or perhaps the position of the train, or possibly the curvature of the tracks, there’s no way to be sure. Instead, idly gazing out, he contemplates what he left behind. Whatever it was, perhaps merely a version of the world, in its wake, there’s a flurry of greens, grays, and shifty metallic shimmers, as well as the odd gloss from the light fixtures inside the train.
      Involuntarily, his thoughts are set in motion by the gleam spreading like a blond blotch across the pane. During a period in his childhood, he had been obsessed with the sun. Getting up in the morning, his first thought, while extricating himself from his pajamas, usually was: is it still there? Not until he had made certain that the slanting light that fell through his window indicated the sun was, indeed, roughly where it had been the week before, and the week before that, though not necessarily the one before that, he’d run downstairs, through the hall, and into the garden, arms outstretched, mouth agape, toward wherever the sun had chosen to be on its trajectory at that given moment. “Darling,” he’d suddenly hear behind him, the voice coming from the table in the verdant shade of the broad beech tree, where breakfast was just being served, “You know it hasn’t vanished.”
      At this reminder, he’d stop dead in his tracks, feeling the forward thrust of his desire careen through his body, still approximate, not quite awake. The motion would come to a standstill only a heartbeat, or possibly two, after his attention had been halted. Looking up, embarrassed to be in such shambles, he’d be unable to determine what he desired more: to continue around the corner of the house, toward the slate of sky, blue as a gas flame, onto which he assumed the sun, flattened out, would still be fastened, or to run back to the fresh loaf of bread he knew would be lying on the garden table behind him, full of fluffy dough, onto which he liked to trickle the smooth, glittering, somehow boundless honey, until the slice of bread was so saturated that, when lifted up, it would bend, slowly but gracefully, and release its soft interior as through a trap door. The gunk would perform exactly as expected, falling onto his plate with a thick, gooey thud. Like a sun collapsed. Putting his lips to it, he’d think: light materialized.
      Whence came this curious wish to make certain the sun was still there, spreading across the sky like a burning flower? Even as a five- or six-year old, he must have known it wasn’t likely to disappear. Sensing the train speed up, he suspects it had to do with something he’d been told: in order for light to reach earth, it must travel for eight minutes. Eight minutes… Among other things, that meant he wouldn’t be able to determine whether the sun had indeed vanished until, in a way, it was too late. Its disappearance would already be eight minutes old when he’d observe it.
      However hard he tries, he’s loathe to recall why that lapse in time troubled him so profoundly. It’s as if, in this particular regard, his recollection has been blotted out, almost as a safety measure. He assumes it had to do with the unsettling prospect that, in the interim, the sun might have been tampered with. But he can’t tell. He merely recalls that he was agitated to an uncomfortable degree, virtually besides himself. Of course, he was aware that he couldn’t stare straight into the light when attempting to discern signs of the sun’s imminent disappearance. Or rather, he knew it wasn’t exactly impossible, but if he’d try to, his eyes would stick to the sun, like the yolk of an egg to a frying pan. Within seconds, their gelatinous matter would set, and he’d be blind. Ever since, blindness, for him, has been a white film covered with an oily sheen, faintly brown and vaguely black at the rim, like the frazzled edge of a fried egg.
      Closing his eyes, he can sense the gentle tug of the train leaving another platform. He recalls that, for as long as he has thought of blindness in this way, he’s also been puzzled by the fact that, although the sun may have vanished in the eight minutes prior to his attempt to confirm its existence, he’d still go blind if he looked into what, in the event, no longer would amount to the sun, but rather to orphaned light. As a child, he never stared straight into the feral glow, although occasionally, the temptation had proved almost unbearably great. Instead, he’d try to trace its circumference, seeking to locate the precise point, or, more accurately, the exact border, between pain and vision. When he did, and he did so instinctively, not really thinking, he assured himself that he knew where the sun was, although he couldn’t be certain it still existed. That’s how it emerged to him: as the contour of its own exclusion.
      Would it be possible, he now wonders as he opens his eyes and notices the wires running along the tracks, accompanying, with nerve-like flutter, the stolid panting of the train, to imagine the past as a kind of sun? Impossible to behold directly, a source of energy beyond immediate reach, it’s eclipsed by time, yet available in the shape of its own omission. That’s to say: as memory. Yes, let’s assume the past radiates, he muses, suddenly jolted, let’s assume it has force, and let’s assume memory amounts to memory only for as long as it contains this delayed energy. Then the thrust he experienced as a child, running through the garden before stopping dead in his tracks, might still be lodged inside him, a promise unfulfilled. Although long since vanished, it could yet leave his body, like a strange compulsion, to continue through his bones and his skin, through the window and the air, all the way to the sun, if that’s where it wished to go.
      Perhaps memories that had been blotted out amounted to such energy strangely expended? As broad slabs of concrete swish by and the train starts to slow down again, he realizes that, in order to tell, he’d have to direct his attention to the very moment when the lapse of memory occurs. Noticing a recollection dislodge itself and swerve away would be a little like seeing a shape, part body, part blur, veer off like the street lamp the train just passed. Or not precisely a street lamp, he reflects, since it’s stationary, whereas the memory would be moving. But a train? Yes, perhaps a train, like the one from an hour ago. Or rather, he corrects himself, not that train, since it, too, had seemed stationary, but a moving train, like the one pulling into the station at this moment, easing up next to his, smooth as a shadow.
      As the distance between the two trains diminishes, it feels almost as if he’s returning, in time, to his point of departure, so that in reality, he’s now about to observe a memory in the making. Eliding his journey, however, it would be an eccentric memory, one that… He isn’t able to complete his thought, for suddenly there’s a metallic shriek, then a slow shudder and a stop, whereafter the doors slide open. He doesn’t notice the face reflected in the window of the other train, familiar but distrustful, moving, obliquely, away from him. Yet he understands he’s come full circle. Then he hears the voice shouting into the tinny microphone. “Einstei’n!” He gets out, his world somehow, irredeemably, dislodged.

May 29, 2005