The train had been running for forty-three minutes when I got on. I don\'t know the exact time because I don\'t look at my watch anymore—that was a habit from when I was a driver, checking the clock every few minutes to make sure I was on schedule—but I know it was 11:47 because that\'s when the light in the car shifted from yellow to fluorescent and the doors closed at Roosevelt and nobody got off.

I am Frank Kowalski. I am fifty-two years old. Three months ago, I was a train driver for the Chicago Transit Authority. I drove the L Train, mostly the Brown Line, sometimes the Red. I knew every station, every schedule, every quirk of the system. I could close my eyes and tell you exactly where the tracks shifted from above-ground to below-ground and back again.

Then came the memo. Automation. Efficiency. Cost reduction. They replaced fifty drivers. I was one of them. They gave me a severance that lasted six weeks. Then I started drinking in the mornings. Then I stopped bothering to shave. Then I started riding the trains at night like a ghost haunting the machine I used to operate.

The car was mostly empty. I had the window seat, which I always did, because it reminded me of the driver\'s cab—the window looking out over the tracks, the city passing by like a strip of film through a projector.

A woman got on at Chicago. She was Mexican, I could tell from the accent, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. She wore the uniform of a cleaning company—blue pants, gray shirt, a name tag that said "Maria" in cursive letters that were peeling off. She sat two rows ahead of me.

The Professor got on at State/Lake. He was a homeless man, though I use the term loosely because he didn\'t fit the category. He had a backpack full of notebooks, and he wore a suit jacket that had been clean at some point in the last decade but was now the color of a sidewalk. He sat next to Maria.

The kid got on at Harrison. He couldn\'t have been older than seventeen, wearing a jacket two sizes too big and shoes that were clearly secondhand but kept clean with effort. He had four dollars in his pocket—I knew because he counted them out at the turnstile, and I was standing right next to him, and I felt the weight of those four dollars like a physical thing.

The train started moving. We left the Loop behind, heading west through the neighborhoods that the morning commuters never noticed—the ones where the buildings are shorter and the windows are darker and the streets smell of something that isn\'t quite coffee and isn\'t quite anything.

It was at Midway that the lights went out.

Five minutes of darkness. Five minutes where the train was neither here nor there, stopped between stations like a held breath. In the dark, the kid spoke first. His voice was high and cracked and full of something that wasn\'t quite crying but was close enough.

"I didn\'t steal it. I didn\'t. He told me it was for Mom, for her medicine, and I believed him, and—"

"Your uncle," Maria said. Her voice was calm, the way her voice must have been when she was talking to her children before bed, even when they were sick and wouldn\'t take the medicine. "Kids steal from uncles all the time. It\'s not the worst thing."

"It\'s everything," the kid said.

The Professor was writing in his notebook. I could hear the scratch of the pen. When the lights came back on, he looked up and said, "In five minutes of darkness, you can either learn something about yourself or confirm something you already knew. It depends on what you\'ve been doing in all the light."

Nobody said anything. The train pulled into the terminal. Maria got off. The Professor got off. The kid got off and walked away without looking back.

I stayed on. The train idled for ten minutes, then started back east. I was the only passenger. I had the whole car to myself, the way I used to have the whole track to myself when I was driving.

I got off at the next stop, walked up the stairs to the street, and stood under a streetlight that was flickering the way all streetlights flicker in Chicago, like they\'re trying to decide whether to stay on or go off.

I lit a cigarette. The smoke tasted like everything and nothing. Tomorrow I would do the same thing. Tomorrow I would sit on the train at 11:47 and watch the city pass by and wonder if there was a difference between being alive and being on schedule.

The light flickered once more, and then it went out.