Pearse Station

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent weeks that I felt my eyes had been deceived. On some of the previous occasions, I’d been proven wrong, but on the ones that really mattered I was embarrassingly right. I would wake up the next morning not wanting to open my eyes and expose them to the light’s tricks, but then I’d remember that my mind projects worse tricks onto the back of them. This time, I’ll be amused if I saw what I think I saw, but I won’t have to clutch my stomach like it’s falling if I didn’t.

The station is busy at this time of day. Whoever placed an upright piano behind the barriers was playing a cruel joke on the sizeable captive audience that accumulates in the interval between trains, when pigeons can swoop down from the rafters to witness our unrest from their trench between the platforms. Not many people stop in the small space between the top of the stairs and the front of the barriers. It dresses itself as a meeting place, but just doesn’t manage to feel like one. The escalator feeds it with a stream of tired workers, students and shoppers, but they’re all caught in a current that keeps getting stronger until they find themselves washed through the front door of their homes. I’ve managed to escape from that current. I caught my hand just as it reached for my ticket, because there’s nothing better to see at home and I can’t lift the weight of any more uncertainty. 

When I arrived, no one was on the escalator. For a few seconds, the electric light seemed to dim into a muddier shade of yellow and the piano tinkling from above became muted. I heard one last tone of the gate opening to let someone through, then its usually incessant beeping stopped. As I looked up and watched the pulsing metal steps collapse and disappear, the draught coming from the entrance seemed to warm slightly and steady itself to match their mechanical pace. Then, what curiosity the breeze had to brush my cheek dissipated and if it still blew, I was left in the relief of hypnosis to wonder where and why. I indulged a clouded vision of how the steps might look if they could change direction on the same unpredictable whim that the wind takes, but I was soon torn from it by something unsettlingly close to that picture. They slowed abruptly to a sluggish pace, which would have sent my eyes reeling if a pigeon hadn’t done it by skimming across my shoulder at the same time. By the time I looked back, I was doubting myself already. 

I once thought that the leaves had stopped falling for a week in autumn. It felt like there was nothing the weather could do to induce that season to pass. Every time I walked under that grandiose canopy on the north edge of Stephen’s Green, a different line of people were posing for photographs under the same precariously hanging flakes of gold and amber, as if the trees had turned to stone. I was certain that not a single leaf had fluttered down to the pavement where they might be swept away; and yet the piles appeared, and whether or not I had felt it move, the year arrived at the heart of winter and the branches appeared as if they had always been bare. I wished with all of the heat left in my struggling limbs that in that one, hopeless fantasy, my perception had been proven master of its household. 

If I’m mistaken today, at least this attempt to slow time wasn’t as ambitious. The lurch back into reality won’t be as violent. It already seems likely, because the dimming of my senses was an invention. I can still remember it, but those parts are only there to decorate the memory. The lull in people using the escalator was rare, but that part was real. The wind, too, was real, but I’ve fabricated its synchronisation with the steps. It just remains to be seen whether their surprising change in speed actually happened. When I stepped onto it, I thought I felt it start to move faster. It must have a sensor that causes it to slow when it’s not in use. Someone came running to catch a train whose doors were already open on the platform, though, and the usual stream of people has continued ever since. 

If every part of memory was real, it would be impossible to tell whose past we were remembering. Its story would have no flawed human protagonist and we would know nothing about ourselves. That’s why O’Connell Bridge appears long enough to cross the Vale of Glendalough on the night when I rambled across it in a lamplit mist, listening to two light sets of footsteps and one melodic voice. On the day when I sprinted across it as if I could have simply leapt over the river, it appears in name only, like a shout from the past. Even if I know its true length, I can’t say I’ve ever seen it. Similarly, the procession of undated afternoons between one school year and the next spreads its grass cuttings and pangs of free-floating anticipation so far out of its place that I might as well still be on holidays. I could have been idle for a week or a year, depending from what angle I recall it, but I can be sure that the sun didn’t burn with the ferocious consistency that memory insists it had. It doesn’t matter how much sunshine or boredom I endured as a child, but sometimes one of these decorative inventions can be mistaken for a core component of the past. That’s when our eyes’ little deceptions start to hurt. 

There’s bound to be another pause in the flow of heads appearing over the top of the escalator. If I’m lucky, I might even miss a train before that happens. If I’m luckier, it may not happen at all. Then, I’ll get to suffer all night from such a trivial version of uncertainty. I’ve seen a lot of escalators in my life. I’ve seen their metal teeth chew and spit out thousands of bodies from London’s underground digestive system; I’ve seen them broken down and felt dizzy when my feet insisted that they were still moving, the same way my eyes insisted that a dead friend’s chest was still rising and falling; before I was even the height of their handrails, I froze at their edge, scared that I’d fall on the first step and be eaten by the last. I’ve dreamt about them too, but even in those dreams, I’ve never seen one that changed its speed. If it turns out that this one really did, I’ll never be able to walk past another one without watching to see if it happens. 

They’re a boring kind of object, not worth thinking about for any longer than it takes to use them. That’s what makes them the perfect character in a city’s cast of materials to find that I didn’t quite understand. If I hadn’t set aside this time to let an escalator’s movements sink into my awareness, I might have found myself interrogating an idea whose collapse would send shockwaves through me. I could have been leaning against the door in a busy carriage, looked into the pool of faces I was trapped with and seen my reflection among them. I could even have reviewed one of the treacherous, unscripted conversations that I fell into during the day, which can only damage my faltering nerves. Some illusions are vital to maintain, but I’ll be safe for as long as I’m anchored to one that only matters as much as it suits me to believe. The longer this parade of faces keeps me transfixed, the easier it will be to hold faith in the next illusion that comes along.

However complex its variations might be, they’re each wearing a full day of human experience on their face. That adds up to a relatively uniform veneer of mild exasperation. They look neither defeated nor encouraged, neither dejected nor enamoured by their myriad solutions to the riddle of another day alive. I don’t see any of them for long enough to stop their features from blending together, so the same blank face keeps appearing like dolls moving across a factory line. I can only hope that if a familiar face appears and stops my mind from wandering, I’ll have enough time to reassure myself that it wasn’t really that person. Some people’s voices and smiles materialise before me everywhere I go, but it’s never them. As the haze of commuters continues to drift past with no sign of stopping, I’m watching the traces of this morning that I took away with me after ten minutes spent sitting among the park’s sleepy stirrings. Very few people walk through it at that hour. Just like here, none of them stop. Seagulls floated around the inside of our shared bubble more peacefully than anyone would believe during the bustle of afternoon, chatting mournfully to each other from every corner. Even there, I was torn from my abstracted rumination because I thought I saw someone I knew. The moment I realised I was mistaken, one of the less tranquil gulls’ hysterical bursts of laughter echoed from just outside the gates. 

It feels like the same disarming smile is going to rise into the picture with every step that cycles its way back up to me. If I could rely on memory to show me what risks that entailed, I’d say I’ll be immobilised. On the days when luck granted my eyes the pleasure not to be deceived by that flood of light, I must not have needed to retain an impression of what continent my limbs were on, because they’re nowhere to be found among the glimmering warmth in the disembodied eyes beaming back at me. That can’t actually be how it felt at the time, of course, but for as long as I remain transfixed by the harmless matter of escalators, none of that will matter. Maybe the entire station will dissipate into a pink-edged sunset cloud if my name is incanted by the right pair of lips. All I can distinctly hear is a child bashing piano keys, though, so I’m free to venture further into my past and indulge more of its comfortable uncertainties. 

A day I spent in the mountains hovers in and out of focus around the river of bodies pouring onto the platform. Whatever really happened on that day, happened more years ago than I can admit to myself, but an appropriately distorted form of it is still here to comfort me with its benign fabrications. I can hear the drone of fist-sized bees struggling to move their intolerable burdens of pleasure through a sprawling maze of gorse flowers. It’s too closely blended with the escalator’s mechanical hum for me to commit to being in either place. All I know is that I’m waiting, in the midst of unknown things. The sun is always an immense presence, but on my day in the mountains it occupies a greater space than all the other named objects that memory could list. I can’t see it, but it weighs protectively on every tingling fold of my skin. In the park this morning, it was more subdued, but all of its intensity was latent in a varnished glow that draped the clouds. In the station, now, it’s as it has been every time my eyes were deceived and every time I wrote a healing twist into the story of that injury.

Future events can appear no different to a memory. Because they’re more susceptible to the influence of reason, sometimes they’re even more accurate. To my daily horror, though, their deceptions are no less sharp a knife than those of the past. When it comes to an hour whose probable courses I’ve exhausted in the theatre of daydreams, and something I didn’t predict still manages to filter in, knowingly glaring at me through the fog of chance, I always long to shut my eyes and run away. Despite my best attempts to release my thoughts into the park’s wash of mottled green and birdsong this morning, they were wishfully carried away. I dreamt myself onto the brink of disappointment. I’m not the only person perpetually haunted by absences; every one of the grieving hearts beating their way past me is, too. Just as we modify the past by by suffusing it with the present, all we can do in our ignorance of the future is clutter it with detritus from the past. My desire to run away is spread as evenly across time as that inescapable figure is across my desires. 

In the fantasy where Westland Row’s pavement stops feeding this disorienting rush, and only a trickle of strangers are left floating up the escalator, a lone face with the throes of a thousand others knitted into its brow approaches the top. The station’s artificial glow has turned to mud again, but it’s starting to crackle and flicker like firelight. Someone with nothing gentler waiting for them at home has stayed behind to take their shy comfort in the touch of piano keys. As I listen to their melodies’ muffled appeals, the new arrival steps off and trudges towards the barrier without looking at me. No one has stepped on behind him. My anticipation is worth no more than a smirk and a raised eyebrow, but there’s also a physical sweep of relief as it dislodges every other concern from my attention. A current of warm air catches my lip and then, as clearly as a dream could ever paint it, I see what I thought I had seen. Steps and music both slow to a painstaking crawl. 

If I could choose what way my daydreams take me, that would be the end and I’d continue to await my pointless amusement. My brow doesn’t relax or my smirk widen into something more satisfied, though. I remain fixated on the creeping steps. I notice dirt trapped in the shadows between their trampled silver ridges and rattles in the straining mechanism hidden underneath them. I examine every minute detail from initials scratched into the rubber railings to the litter caught in cracks, but still can’t accept that I’ve seen what I was waiting for. Every time my eyes adjust their focus and a face doesn’t appear, my stomach drops a little further, until I’m hit with a cannonball of that dreaded nausea and my hands cling to my gut like it could spill and pollute the cloudy grey tiles. The flickering lights rapidly start to dim, and as they splutter their final prohibitions to my dilating pupils, I’m sure that I see the escalator come to a complete stop. 

One mocha-feathered pigeon is resting in the corner, staring through the crowd just shy of its unforgiving torrent. I’m not sure if she’s been there since I arrived, or whether she’s injured, but I’d have second guesses about what I saw if I walked past that rich brown shawl pecking by my ankles on the street. A few others have come and gone, colliding with commuters as they scavenge for crumbs, but this placid outsider is in a trance. Later, I might doubt if she’d been real. No matter how many times this escalator surprises me by finding new degrees of freedom, I still might doubt if that was real, too. With any mercy, I’ll doubt the sprinkling of rain that tickled my shoulders as I walked up Nassau Street and the little pink flower that peeked up at me from between blocks of granite. Let me be deceived by books that I’ve read, scents and waves that assailed me as I dragged my heels in hot sand, illnesses I fought and any amusing detail that carried me from one day to the next, as long as it withholds me from that one devastating strain of illusion. When those smiling eyes that haunt me glide into reach of mine, I need the enraptured figure they see to be as real as the name they sing into the vast uncertainty between us.