The hum was the first thing I noticed when I stepped outside. Not the hum of insects, nor an electrical fault, but the collective hum of five million souls moving in unison through the concrete arteries of Mexico City. It was white noise, a constant vibration that got under your skin and, after twenty years, had become the metronome of my existence. For me, Kenji Tanaka, that hum was the sound of autopilot.
The doors of the Faculty of Arts and Design slid open, spewing me onto the hot pavement of the afternoon. The June sun beat down, bleaching the colors of the worn murals and making the tin roofs of the crowded street stalls gleam. It smelled of ozone, of fried food, of the dry earth from the scrawny trees struggling to survive in their concrete cages. Another day. A day identical to the last and, with depressing probability, identical to the one that would come tomorrow.
I walked, submerging myself in the human tide. Shoulders brushing against shoulders, the murmur of a hundred foreign conversations, reggaeton blaring from a phone in someone's pocket. I was an island in that river of people. I put on my headphones, old Sony ones my father had given me, and the world drowned under layers of distorted guitar and furious drums. It was my ritual. My daily baptism to endure the journey home.
My reflection flashed briefly in the glass of a newspaper stand. An elongated face, a strange mix of my father's sharp cheekbones and my mother's softer jawline. Light brown skin, the eternal Mexico City tan. And my eyes, they were my father's tell-tale inheritance: slanted, dark, an unmistakable signature that always prompted the same question: "Where are you from, güey?" From here and there. From neither place. My father, Tanaka Haruki, was an engineer from Osaka who had fallen in love with the organized chaos of Mexico on a business trip. My mother, Sofía Ramírez, was a woman from Coyoacán who had fallen in love with my father's organized calm. I was their peace treaty, their geographical and genetic midpoint. I grew up eating chilaquiles for breakfast and miso soup for dinner, celebrating Day of the Dead with the same fervor as Obon to honor ancestors. The result was a permanently uncalibrated internal compass. In Japan, I was "the Mexican." In Mexico, I was "the Japanese" or, more commonly, "the Chinese."
The music in my ears was both balm and barrier. It allowed me to observe without participating. I saw a student couple laughing, sharing esquites from a styrofoam cup. Their knowing glances, their genuine smiles. They were part of the hum, contributing to it. I was just a receiver. Further on, an office worker with a loose tie and sweat-soaked shirt talked on the phone, gesticulating with frustration. His life, his problems, his drama. A movie projected on a screen I couldn't hear.
My feet carried me along the memorized route, a path traced by repetition. Turning the corner at the hardware store, dodging the puddle of dirty water that was always there, ignoring the man who sold phone cases and who every day offered me "a nice one for your mobile, young man." Everything was a set, a stage that repeated itself with minimal variations.
The mouth of the subway, the big orange M, swallowed me whole.
The change was instantaneous. The hot, sticky humidity of the street was replaced by a dense mugginess, laden with the metallic smell of the rails, the aroma of burnt rubber, and the sweat of thousands of bodies. The external hum was replaced by a new one, deeper and guttural: the echo of footsteps, the screech of turnstiles, the monotonous voice of the woman on the loudspeaker announcing the arrival of a train in the opposite direction.
I bought my ticket, a small magnetic cardboard card that felt obsolete and familiar. I inserted it into the turnstile slot. The sound of the mechanism releasing was the click that marked the next act of my daily play. I went down the stairs to the Line 3 platform, direction Indios Verdes. The crowd was thicker down here. A sea of tired, indifferent faces, all waiting for the same orange worm that would take them to their respective niches.
I leaned against one of the yellowish tiled walls, stained by decades of grime and half-erased graffiti. The music still hammered in my skull. It was an instrumental post-rock band. No words. Words complicated things. The pure emotions of a melancholic melody were easier to digest. They allowed my mind to wander without a specific anchor.
And it wandered. It flew across the ocean, to my grandparents' house on the outskirts of Kyoto. I remembered the smell of tatami and green tea. The stooped figure of my grandfather, Oji-chan, tending his small rock garden. His hands were gnarled and his skin like rice paper, but his eyes, so similar to mine, shone with childlike mischief. The last time I saw him, I was fifteen. He made me promise him that I would learn the art of kintsugi well, the repair of ceramics with gold. "It's not about hiding the fracture, Kenji," he had told me in slow, careful Japanese so I could understand. "It's about making it beautiful. About accepting that something broke and that now, for that very reason, it is stronger and more unique."
I had nodded with the solemnity of a teenager who doesn't fully grasp the depth of those words. I promised him I would. My grandfather died two years later. I never took a single kintsugi lesson. The box with the tools and resins my father sent me from Japan was still gathering dust at the back of my closet, along with other broken promises and good intentions. The fracture in my life didn't feel beautiful. It felt like a dirty crack I tried to cover with indifference and loud music.
A gust of warm air and a growing rumble announced the train's arrival. People swarmed toward the edge of the platform, an eager mass pushing unceremoniously. I waited, as always, for the first wave to rush towards the doors. I was not in a hurry. Time felt like stretched, tasteless chewing gum.
I got into one of the last cars. It was full, but not suffocating. I found a space to lean against one of the doors and clung to the metal handrail, cold to the touch. The doors closed with a hiss and a soft thud. The train shook and began its journey through the dark tunnel.
Fluorescent lights flickered above, bathing the passengers' faces in a pale, sickly light. An elderly woman with market bags dozed. Teenagers watched videos on their phones, canned laughter escaping from their cheap headphones. A man in a suit read a paperback, frowning in concentration. Each in their own universe, all sharing the same physical space. We were atoms bouncing in a metal box, temporarily united by trajectory.
I closed my eyes, resting my head against the door's glass. I felt the car's vibration in my skull. Hidalgo Station. The doors opened. A torrent of people exited, another entered. The ritual of compression and decompression. The train resumed its journey. Guerrero. Tlatelolco.
The music in my ears shifted to a slower, more atmospheric piece. The notes of a solitary piano fell like raindrops on a dark pond. My breathing synced with the languid rhythm. The day's fatigue, a dull ache in my shoulders and eyelids, began to win the battle.
My mind slipped again, this time to a more recent, more poignant memory. My sister, Akari. Last week. I found her crying in her room. She had broken up with her boyfriend, one of those teenage breakups that feel like the end of the world. I stood in the doorway, uncomfortable, not knowing what to do or say.
"Are you okay?" I asked. The stupidest, most useless question in the world.
She shook her head, her face flushed. "I feel like an idiot."
And I, in my infinite emotional wisdom, shrugged. "You'll get over it," I said. Then I turned and went to my room to play video games. I heard her sobbing through the wall for an hour. I did nothing. I didn't go back. What could I say? "Don't worry, emotional kintsugi will make you stronger"? It sounded ridiculous even in my head. The fracture was hers, not mine. I didn't have the gold to repair it. I had nothing.
The rattling of the train felt softer now. Or maybe it was I who was becoming softer, dissolving into the invisible seat of exhaustion. The music seemed to come from far away. The piano notes distorted, lengthening, as if time itself were melting. I opened my eyes with effort. The car's light flickered violently, once, twice, and then changed. It was no longer white and cold. Now it was yellowish, almost sepia, like an old photograph.
I looked around. The car... was empty.
My heart pounded. I sat up abruptly, tearing my headphones from my ears. The silence was absolute. There was no rattling, no hum, no canned laughter from the teenagers' phone. Only a dense, heavy silence, like that found miles underwater. The train continued to move, gliding through the tunnel with an impossible, ghostly smoothness.
Outside the window there was no darkness dotted by tunnel lights. There was absolute blackness, a void that seemed to absorb the little light the car emitted.
"Hello?" My voice sounded raspy, strange in the oppressive silence. No one answered.
I walked down the aisle. My footsteps made no sound on the rubber floor. I passed from one car to another through the connecting doors. Empty. Empty. Empty. It was my train, my Line 3, but at the same time it was a wrong replica, a scale model built by an entity with a bad memory. The advertisements on the walls were blank. The subway route maps had no names, only colored lines that ended abruptly in nothingness.
Panic began to bubble in my chest, cold and sharp. This was a dream. It had to be. A nightmare caused by fatigue and last night's reheated dinner. I pinched my arm, hard. The pain was sharp, real. And nothing changed.
The train began to slow down. A light appeared at the end of the tunnel. It wasn't the familiar light of a station. It was a single, solitary light. With unnatural smoothness, the train stopped. The doors opened with a hiss that echoed in the silence like a sigh.
Outside there was a platform. But it wasn't Tlatelolco or La Raza. The architecture was brutalist, bare and stained concrete, without a single tile. There were no signs, no benches, no trash cans. Only the concrete platform and, in the distance, a single staircase ascending into impenetrable darkness. The staircase seemed out of place, almost like an architectural error, rising and rising until it was lost from sight.
An irrational impulse made me look back, toward the car I had exited. The interior light flickered one last time and went out. The entire train was swallowed by the darkness of the tunnel, disappearing silently. Now the only sound was the beating of my own heart, a frantic drum in the cathedral of silence.
I was alone. In a station that didn't exist, with a train that had vanished and a staircase that led nowhere visible. A shiver ran down my spine, one that had nothing to do with the temperature. It was the cold of absolute isolation.
I looked at the staircase. It seemed infinite. Each step was a block of rough, uneven stone. It clearly gave the impression of going up, of ascending towards something. But something inside me, a primordial compass I had never felt before, screamed the opposite. It screamed with terrifying certainty that, despite what my eyes saw, the only way was down. Far, far down.
I took a deep breath. The air was stale, still. I had no other option. I advanced, my sneakers scuffing the rough concrete of the platform. I placed one foot on the first step. It was cold as tomb marble.
And I began to climb, feeling with each step that I was sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss.