Sydneys

	Sydney’d spent three hours looking at her wonky image in the windows of the trains. Her reflections passed by, changing too fast to get a hold of them. It was late at night. She’d grown used to the damp wind gusts from the tunnels, the cacophony of the station, the permanent leachate smell, so that she could only see herself on the trains while all around her was muffled with her intense focus. She would exist for a second, then once the train moved along, her reflection left with it. She’d sway softly from side to side, playing catch-up with the Syd living on the small glass squares. Her doppelgänger’s choppy movements made her think of old motion pictures, with their inhumanly fast actions. It brought to mind that one short they’d seen in Film History earlier that day, Sallie Gardner at Gallop. Just a few seconds of a horse running, showing all its hooves leaving the ground. The earliest film recording ever made, titled after the horse. It was a loop, so Sallie would just keep going, going and going, until Syd lost track of the initial image. Sitting at her desk she’d though, the film is infinite but it isn’t permanent, catching onto the rhythm of the frames. What if Sallie, the original Sallie, was gone? What if this was another horse, one exactly like it, but not Sallie herself? Every horse in every frame was a different one because it had moved, it had changed. The race didn’t end, and it didn’t start either. It all got lost as soon as you pressed play. Sallie never stops. It just goes and goes until the film becomes unplayable. Sydney pictured the celluloid jamming in the machine, light burning through whatever frame it touched. A puff of smoke rising to the ceiling. But they were watching a GIF, projected on the classroom whiteboard. It could go one for however long they wanted it to. There would never be burn out. It would never end.

	Sydney thought of things decaying. The collection of home tapes her mother had digitized after her father passed, like afraid if they didn’t preserve everything it would all rot away. How VHS tape would bloat and distort after being copied too many times. It reminded her of the times she and Sam were obsessed with that damaged tape aesthetic and shot little music videos and sketches on old cameras, or looped little clips of long forgotten movies and uploaded them as glitch art. Whenever she was abstracted from the world, watching those old clips, it struck her how much they looked and behaved like memories. They could be played back at any time, but they’d always be a little blurrier, darker than before. Memories always seemed to play in present tense. Worn out into deformed, sunburnt clips.
	The head as a camera, she thought. The camera captures a scene, it gets pressed into tape, and copied over and over. What got captured decayed until it was unrecognizable. Unlike the tape, the scene couldn’t be repeated, not exactly as it was meant to be. The real thing was gone and only a finite hint of it exists. And even the hint is just ever so marginally, more and more progressively wrong. Someone holding a small radio walked by her, and she took notice of the music bending out of shape on the station walls as they walked away. The trains kept passing. Syd’s clones kept going with it, always on the train, never sitting on the bench next to her, never in her place.
	She looked around and noticed the security cameras and the security booth, with its windows laminated so you couldn’t see the CCTV screens. She tried to think of what she looked like on the screens, sitting there, and saw her own face melding with the tape noise, the degrading colors. A vague outline at an arbitrary point in the station. A bird’s eye view from the camera mounted on the farthest wall. She couldn’t remember what color her eyes were. Countless times she’d seen them in pictures and mirrors. But they could’ve been entirely blank, for all she knew. Countless times. She stared at the security camera. How many times had she been on it? How many Syds had been seen daily by the guards, by whoever city employee was in charge of keeping watch. There for a moment then off on a train to a place where the camera couldn’t follow, and the recording of her exiting the car two, three, five, seven stations ahead showing a similar shadow hiding in the mass of people, leaving the underground into the outside world.

	What about the city cameras? Was she a recurring character on a street corner? The watchers saying there she is again as they saw her leave school, get home, become a blackened outline on the glow of her bedroom light. Had every picture with her face in it been distributed to all the other systems, like one small molecule in the waterflow of information? Was there someone, somewhere right now, watching her here, sitting at the station, breathing through her mouth and grinding her teeth together? She pictured the ocean, and being submerged in it, and thinking if she hadn’t known land before, this would be pretty normal. Darkness, slow movements, cold. The space in which she existed announcing itself, present, engulfing her. Cameras in brick walls and light posts and people’s phones. Sydney on the station, Sydney on the street, Sydney’s voice in a recording, Sydney through a window, Sydney eating, Sydney’s fingerprints in a government office, Sydney’s facial features hunted down by algorithms, Sydney’s body composition registered to its infinitesimal detail on medical records, Sydney’s thoughts catalogued and minced to their essential parts and filtered through a tube where it would land on someone else’s feed. Sydney as a long string of ones and zeros in the ethereal non-space. A billion Sydneys existing on the lens, being fed to a memory bank somewhere, falling into a hole so dense with information it could as well been empty.
Syd fished her iPhone from her pocket. It had almost no battery. Trying to use it, she fumbled with it, so it fell face down on the grimy marble, so she picked it up and looked at herself, the phone as a mirror, obscured and fractured in the cracked screen. She forgot was she was doing. Tipped it sideways so the light would hit it, so it would become a bright, white rectangle. The light flickered, buzzing loudly.

	She kept still on the bench beneath the headboard, keeping time by the amount of traffic in the station. People swarmed out of the cars like reservoir water, undefined and amorphous. Sometimes, she’d take her glasses off so her they’d become blurry. Syd felt that if she could clearly see them they would shift between each other, as if they all shared the same body, the same framework replicated endlessly. Their features melting in the underground heat, changing shape till they were nothing. She remembered some video she’d seen online of a dam being blown up and the river violently pouring through the rubble.
Her feet tapped. A muted thud, like hitting the rim of a snare drum. Still audible among the passenger’s ruckus. She closed her eyes and took in all the sounds around her. They’d always seemed to take shape when she thought of sounds. Footsteps look like heavy raindrops. Light fixture buzz is a sharp mountain range. Subterranean rumble is a grim drizzle. People’s speech is a cloud hanging low above the ground. All the sounds mixed into a lop-sided orchestra until they were not separate but a fog that entered even the space between her cells. She stayed like this for a while, painting images then watching them disintegrate, until the sound faded into a faint lull.

	The noisy flow of people dampened and left only junkies and rogue MBTA workers lying about apathetically. In the almost quiet station she looked down at her knees poking through the rips in her jeans. Her dirty boots facing the track. On her lap rested her hands, their veins and tendons lifting up the through the skin. Syd bit her lip and ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth. She turned to look at the camera again, then planted her eyes on the floor, taking her glasses off so it looked like grey, still quicksand. That way she couldn’t see anything but didn’t have to close her eyes. She balled her fist and heard and felt the crack of her knuckles. She dug her nails into the palms and acknowledged every part of her body, x-raying it through her clothes, past her skin, and her bones, until she was just a nervous system. Like those museum exhibits of taxidermized corpses she had seen years ago. A donated body’s layers painstakingly peeled off to show the structure. A brain with its bulbous eyes and yellow spine shooting its tendrils downward, compressed between transparent glass. People in a museum gawking at the nervous system on the glass. Sydney’s nerve endings sitting on the bench above the liquifying quicksand. Sydney’s nerves on shaky train windows like ripples on the water when a swimmer dives through it.

	At 1:30 AM the last train to Alewife announced itself by its lights opening the tunnel darkness and Sydney stood up, straightened her coat, placed her phone, wallet and glasses on the wooden bench, and flung herself onto the incoming train.