The Last Carriage

The train is already moving when I open my eyes.

White lights flicker overhead, one after another, like a row of tired stars. I am lying across a blue vinyl seat, though I do not remember sitting down. The carriage rocks beneath me. Outside the windows, there is no city—only black glass carrying back the pale reflection of the passengers.

Every one of them faces the window.

No one speaks. A woman in a wool coat holds a paper ticket in both hands. An old man leans his forehead against the glass. A child sits perfectly still with a schoolbag on his knees, looking at something I cannot see beyond the dark.

I push myself upright.

The train answers with a long metallic groan.

My first thought is that I have missed my stop. My second is Shuyin.

I stand too quickly. The carriage tilts, and I catch the pole beside the doors. My hand closes around it. The metal is cold, but there is no pressure in my fingers, no sense of weight passing from my body into the pole. I can feel the shape of it without truly holding it.

The doors at either end of the carriage are shut. Above them, a narrow display glows red.

MIDNIGHT LINE.

The words vanish before I can read anything more.

I move to the nearest window. At first, I see only my own reflection: a pale face, hair flattened on one side, a dark smear at my temple. Then the train leaves the tunnel.

The hospital appears below me.

Not a hospital I recognize from the outside, but I know the room when I see it. The window is on the third floor. The blinds are half-open. A monitor casts green light over a bed, and beside that bed Shuyin is asleep in a chair with her cheek against one hand.

My body lies beneath the white sheet.

For several seconds, I cannot understand what I am seeing. The face on the pillow is mine, but it looks emptied out, reduced to its outline. A tube disappears between my lips. Clear lines run from my arm to a machine. A strip of tape holds down a dressing near my hairline.

The accident returns in pieces: rain on the windshield, Shuyin's voice telling me not to take the expressway, headlights spreading across wet glass. Then nothing.

I press both hands against the window.

“Shuyin.”

No sound leaves me. Not even breath fogs the glass.

She does not wake. Her hair has come loose from its tie. There is a crease along her cheek from sleeping against her hand. On the small table beside her sits a dented silver thermos, its lid covered in a strip of faded yellow tape.

I know that thermos.

I bought it from a station kiosk on the first winter we spent together. The lid leaked. The handle broke. Shuyin kept saying we should throw it away, but every time she packed for work, she filled it with tea and put it in her bag. The dent came from the day I tried to catch it before it fell down a staircase and caught only the thermos.

It has been with us for six years.

Seeing it there hurts more than seeing my own body.

A door opens in the hospital room. A woman in a white coat enters carrying a folder. I recognize Fang Yiru from the sharp line of her bobbed hair and the way she pauses before approaching the bed. She checks the monitor, looks at me, and then looks at Shuyin.

She does not wake her.

Instead, Fang places the folder on the table beside the thermos. One sheet lies on top. There are several marked lines near the bottom, and a pen clipped to the cover.

The form is close to Shuyin’s sleeping hand.

I understand enough.

The train begins to slow. Outside, the hospital slips backward, its lit windows stretching into pale bars. I run along the carriage, though my feet barely seem to touch the floor.

“No.”

The passengers do not turn. Their reflections remain fixed on the dark windows. The old man’s eyes are closed now. The child has lowered his head.

I reach the end door and strike the red emergency handle. My palm passes through it. The train continues on.

There must be a way back. There has to be. I have not said goodbye. Shuyin has not said goodbye. She cannot be left alone with a form and a sleeping body and people who call surrender kindness.

The lights flicker again.

For an instant, the hospital room is gone. In its place I see a black tunnel rushing past. Then the room returns, smaller and farther away.

The display above the door lights up.

TWO STOPS.

I go back to the window.

Shuyin has woken. Fang stands beside her, one hand resting on the back of the chair. Shuyin looks at the folder. Her lips move. I cannot hear her, but I know the shape of the question.

How long?

Fang answers carefully. She points first to the monitor, then to the form. Shuyin stares at the sheet without touching it. When she shakes her head, it is not a refusal. It is the movement of someone who has heard the same unbearable thing too many times.

I put my hand against the glass.

The thermos is less than a meter from her fingers.

I think of its dent. The station kiosk. Her hands warming around it on cold mornings. The ridiculous yellow tape she replaced every winter because she said the old tape looked lonely.

I reach for it.

Nothing happens.

I try again, harder. My arm begins to ache—not the muscles, but something deeper, as though the effort is pulling me away from the train. The carriage darkens around the edges. The hospital window blurs.

The thermos trembles.

I stop.

It settles.

Fang picks up the folder. Shuyin turns her face toward my body. Her eyes are swollen and red. She puts one hand on the sheet over my wrist.

I cannot bear the distance between us.

I reach again.

The train lurches. Somewhere behind me, a passenger gasps for the first time. The thermos rolls across the table. It bumps against the folder, knocks the pen loose, and drops to the floor.

Shuyin flinches.

The sound does not reach me, but I see her look down. The thermos lies on its side, yellow tape bright against the white tile.

She picks it up.

For a moment, she only holds it. Then she turns the dent toward herself. Her thumb passes over the metal, exactly where mine had once been pressed after the staircase.

Her mouth forms my name.

I strike the window with both hands.

“Shuyin.”

This time, she looks up.

Not at the window. Not at the ceiling. At the empty space beside the bed.

Her eyes narrow. Fang says something and reaches for her shoulder, but Shuyin pulls away. She places the thermos on the mattress near my hand. Then she looks at it, looks at me, and slowly sets the folder face down.

She does not sign.

The train pulls forward. The room begins to recede.

Shuyin grabs the thermos with both hands. Her lips move again. I read the words only because I know them.

You hate this thing.

A laugh catches in her face and breaks before it becomes one. She presses the thermos against her chest.

I try to tell her that I hate many things. The hospital. The train. The uselessness of my hands. The way she has learned to sleep sitting up.

What comes out is silence.

The display changes.

ONE STOP.

Fang picks up the folder from the floor. She does not put it back near Shuyin. Instead, she carries it toward the door. Shuyin watches her go, still holding the thermos.

Then she leans over my body and touches the tape at my wrist.

Her lips move once more.

I’m here.

The last view I have of her is not her face, but her hand closing around mine.

The hospital window goes black.

The train carries me onward, and every passenger turns toward the dark ahead.