Chapter Text
The underground subway is cold at night. Those fluorescent lights, flickering, some relic from the seventies, they haven't been replaced since. But it continues to endure in its plastic cage. It screams in electric silence, buzzing to prove it's still alive.
And Jean Loo watches it half-heartedly. In its futility and desperation to survive -- it's not empathy, but it's not apathy. Perhaps an acknowledgement that he had traded his prison cell for another in a reckless pursuit, filtered by the rose lenses of idealism. This fluorescent light has only known one goal, and it is to obey the commands of its wiring, straining under its twenty-four-hour presence in the darkness of the subway.
The light pulses before giving up.
A spot of darkness in a row of a dozen fluorescent lights, Jean's gaze shifts. He stands on the platform, trying to find somewhere else to fix his eyes. In front of him, there are the railway tracks and a flat concrete wall. He can see what is the gasket for a billboard, but it's empty. There is nothing special about it, but it taunts him, whispering in a low breath that at least it once got to do something. Become the vessel for something greater, even if it was the greasy hands of corporate greed. Jean can only stare, idly, passively.
He scratches at his tie; his briefcase sits on the floor beside his feet.
This is the weapon he traded his life for; his entire world fits within that suitcase. Tax reports, financial cycle predictions, and derivatives of assets that exist as ones and zeros in a computer. He is not the man he wants to be, and while the thought is simultaneously liberating, it ropes him into the dilemma of who he is. Who he is meant to be. There used to be purpose, even if it was porcelain mundanity. This was meant to be his second chance, realisation was meant to be the catharsis that liberated him from the burden of his responsibilities. As he watched, one by one, the successes and triumphs of his peers. He'd drawn the short end.
The only evidence of success he has is the two feet he stands upon. The fact he is still breathing, is breathing, is nothing short of a miracle. So why does he feel as though he's wasted it? Life is only wonderful if life is wide, but it's suffocating him with the mustard tie he picked out of a discount bin. It's like he missed a memo, a crucial meeting held between all the other objects on how to slot themselves into the jigsaw puzzle of this world. And yes, he knows this is what it means to be human, to fumble aimlessly in the dark until something, anything happens. But he's been walking in a straight line for what feels like centuries into an uncaring abyss. At what point should he stop resisting?
Jean wanted to tame the world at one point, to seize it in his hands. Win it over with conviction and verve, where the meter in his rhymes would change the fabric of the universe. He imagined people would like it too; it's all he wanted since his time in that bathroom. As he looked into the jaws of the world with his starry-eyed ambition, it had fallen upon him. Jean believes it was then that he realised that life was an unstoppable force and an upward battle.
His eyes lowered onto the platform ahead of him, waiting for the last train in the dead of night. He stayed back tonight because his client was frantic, spouting lunatic prophecies about financial ruin while Jean had to practically beg them to 'Not liquidate their assets and make a run for the Carribeans'. Looking at it now as he stands upon this platform, he should've relented. He would do it if he could, too. But no, whatever obligations that bound him to the horrors of accountancy have him running on the world's worst hamster wheel. So now he has to wait for an infuriatingly late train that won't seem to come, and quite frankly, he isn't even sure if it is going to come.
What is he to do now? Suspended between two choices. He can try to ditch plan A, so long as he gets off, he's willing to fall anywhere, even if there isn't anything to catch him. He'll climb the stairs again, try to hail a cab in the dead of night and kiss whatever meagre funds he has goodbye. Or he can continue to stand here, a crumpled train pass in the pocket of his polyester pants that do little to stave off the cold. For a train that might not even come, and by then, catching a cab won't even be possible anymore.
His life has been composed of verses of regret; each step he takes, forwards or backwards, hurts him, and now he questions why moving at all. Jean had not been someone in his previous life, and it appears the world is unwilling to indulge him in becoming something in this one, at least. What happened to seizing the day? To the ember that fueled his existence? When will the investments pay off? How much of his suffering needs to be measured in the value of hours before he can leave?
There's a low rumble in the tunnel ahead, a blur of light skipping along brick slabs. It's the train.
But Jean is frenzied now, running his hand through his hair. Trying to push down that choking feeling in his throat, which is draining him of air the longer it persists. At some point, his button-up stopped being tucked, and his tie clip is lopsided. The train slows to a grinding halt under the strain of mechanical forces. The doors slide open to a dimly lit fluorescent carriage.
And as he stares into its interior, he can't help but wonder. Maybe that illusion of choice had always been there in the first place.