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"jesus, jesus help me, i’m alone in this world, and a fucked up world it is too."- David Evans

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I am The Invisible Man.

From all corners of the city, people haemorrhage into the station. From the trains and the buses and the tubes and the streets, we act out of habit. We are creatures of routine. We go to the same places we do every day. We see the same people. We kiss the same faces goodbye in the morning rush. We do the same things. We stream in, show tickets on entrances and exits, and we travel to somewhere we don’t want to be so we can leave there and go somewhere else we don’t want to be.

Work is the curse of the thinking classes.

We are cells in a blood vessel. Each of us an individual particle, each with lives, loves, hopes - and some of us secret lovers. Each of whom have lips that kiss, hearts that beat, dreams that dare to breathe, people they hope to see again.

Being alive is being beautiful.

Incredible How I Can.

Camera Nine sees something that no one else has seen. On a greying screen in a control room, a bored man on the early shift notices something strange. He tried to stay awake, tries to stay focused. Work is tedium, but this is more of a punishment. He blearily yawns, takes another sip from a cup of coffee in a brown cardboard cup, and tightens the focus. The blurred edges of a man sharpen, but are still indistinct through neon tube.

In eleven minutes time, he will be dead.

He sees him, but he sees through him. Not someone who doesn’t exist, but someone who you do not see, except as a shape, an object, something to be avoided when you approach it. Not a person, not a face. Nothing.

Do you remember when you are walking down the street, and your on your way to meet your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, mistress, your date, and you’re in such a hurry, racing to get there, that you walk straight past them? That you see them, but you only see the feet, you only see them as a presence to be avoided.

That’s how he saw him. Through him.

See Right Through You.

There are training courses for these things. For a few hundred pounds per day, a seminar could be yours : where you are trained to see things that look strange and different, to detect the telltale signs of malcontents and disintegration from societry.

Trained to look for familiar faces, gestures, and stance. The body language of the mugger. The faces of known beggars, pickpockets, the homeless, the career criminals, people who were threats to others. You aren’t trained to look for people who could be a threat to themselves.

There’s training courses held in anonymous hotel conference rooms for several hundred pounds a day where people are taught how to identify potential problems through these screens. Unusual walking gaits. Erratic, inconsistent, jerky behaviour. Unkempt, untidy appearance. The body is a language to be learnt. Switch back to the station concourse. The camera watches the knees of women. The open toed sandals of summer commuters.

The camera zooms down a woman’s top. Even in black and white, it would be aesthetically pleasing. Contours of flesh, geography of aureole, visible in the braless commuter light. Further down the corridor, the rhythmic tapping of a supervisor walking nearer. Flick back to camera four at the station entrance. Past the Big issue seller, looking for known muggers, truants, cunts all of them. A nation of cunts. A nation of white-trainer wearing, tracksuited, backwards baseballcapped adorned idiots with a ring on every finger, selling stolen phones down the pub to their mates, asking if you’re looking for trouble, and if not, do you want some? Cunts them all. And somewhere on the mainframe, a photofit guide to the persona non-grata went ignored.

When you see this many people you end up not seeing any people. There’s a human overload. Too many people. You withdraw into a selective world. Where most people are simple kipple, flesh pollution, parasites on the face of the world.

You just saw nothing special. Nothing but an unusual gait. Just hundreds of people, a faceless mass, a lump of ever changing flesh in shoes, walking from station to station, from train to tube, from bus to office, travelling to work, as people always did this time of day. Drones for the queen.

In six hundred seconds, he will be dead.

Sure, there was the odd looking guy, but you got used to it. The world was full of odd looking people, doing odd things. Art students hijacking trains to provoke reactions from passengers. Weirdos handing out leaflets proclaiming that Christ is The King Of Kings. Beggars reciting the same tired lines as they try to eek an extra few pence of life. That strange woman who always carried the same 17 bags all day long on the Circle Line. We’re all strange, we’re all unique, we’re all beautiful. And we’re all utterly normal. There is nothing special about you, or me. Or unique. Or beautiful.

We are all alive. And the miracle of life is utterly tedious.

In the end you gave up trying to fathom people out. Instead, you ended up just analysing who could be a danger to others. In the end you zoom in and look down people’s blouses.

Most people walk in straight lines, but this guy, he was walking in broken lines, stopping, starting, as if you could see the thoughts race from synapse to synapse. Someone who clearly didn’t know quite what he was doing. Didn’t know where he was going. Someone who was making it up as we go along. Some kind of shuffling zombie gait.

He was trying to walk properly, but couldn’t quite do it.

Like the rest of us. We improvise through life, trying to fake our way through life, hoping no one ever uncovers the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing, faking our way through. We improvise and bullshit. And then we die.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Somewhere in the building, remote motors whirr and lenses sharpen, zoom in. Controlled by unseen hands. Curious eyes. Watching from darkened rooms somewhere in a building, that sees all. Like God. Who sees everything yet is nowhere. But not on him, on everywhere but him.

God can see you masterbate. God is everywhere. The point is not that he can. But that he is watching something else.

You can never escape yourself. No matter where you go – you will always be there. And no matter what you do, you can never leave. Unless you die.

In six minutes, he will be dead.

You’ll always be your own shadow.

The bored man in the control room taps a button. Camera Eight now. In the ceiling a camera the size of a golf ball rotates to track movement. He was one of them - just another face in the crowd. Wearing a uniform like everyone else - suit, tie, shirt, trousers, black shoes. How utterly normal.

The wounds on the inside do not heal and cannot be seen. The thorns that stick in the soul. The pain invisible.

…. And forever’s a mighty long time.

On a grey 12” square monitor, set deep in a bank of grey plastic buried inside the building, a monochrome figures stumbles. 240 colour lines, 365 black and white lines. Monochrome is cheaper. You don’t need colour to perform a successful ID. Everything’s done on the cheap here. The television monitors with their greys and browns are antique now. Retro, if you prefer. Facial recognition software is cheap now. Vegas has a lot to answer for.

This monochrome man. This clear cut, black and white figure. Nobody really notices. Just another cunt, like everyone else. In the crowd and the bustle of the commuter train they’re all too busy. Eyes elsewhere, avoiding the gaze of others, as if they doesn’t exist. Life is easier that way. In ignorance. Pretending there are things we don’t see. Begging children. Sleeping forms. Stumbling men. The fear and the unhappiness etched into our faces by years of existence.

On the screen he’s just another shape, one is seen, but unseen. And not long from now, he will be a ghost. An Unperson.

We are taught to live with our eyes wide shut. We choose not to see. As long as we have somewhere warm to sleep, something to eat, we can fool ourselves that somehow whatever is wrong in this world doesn’t apply. That everything is alright. We are all guilty of the good undone.

Let there be light.

Deep down in our hearts we know that the world is wrong, that there is something at the core of capitalism that fundamentally does not satisfy spiritually. Any rational person would be loathe to say capitalism has a heart, for it does not, so it has a core. But we pretend we can’t see. We pretend that there aren’t people sleeping on the streets and in shop doorways.

If you sympathise with one, you have to sympathise with all. You shut down your empathy in order to survive. You feel too much or you feel too little.

When everyone else has gone away, you’ll always be left behind.

We are born this way. Taught not to see. Taught to see only things that fit into our view of the world. A cloud of ignorance that hovers over our vision, viewing the world selectively. A presidential world view.

Like Christ, there are none so blind as will not see.

It’s the modern disease. A place where we see only what we want to see, where we believe only what we believe.

Like electricity. I exist without form.

This is the culture we live in that allows our Grandparents to die in their sleep, and not be discovered for two weeks, whilst night and day their TV buzzes like a fridge, and their goldfish starve to death. Whilst their post piles up under the door and their Scottish Terrier starts to eat itself from the inside, yapping to gather their deceased attention, or gently nibbling their flesh, first to try to wake them, then in some kind of desperate hunger, pulling skin away from meat and bone. As eyes shrink inside sockets, as flesh retracts, sags and loosens. Until the neighbours complain about the smell.

Your grandparents are an insects dinner.

Like God, I am everywhere. In everyone.

Three minutes to Ground Zero.

Muscles ache, and the heart, that is, - the soul - feels some vague thing lacking deep inside. The thing that makes us whole. The thing that gives a life a narrative, a direction, something more than just eating, breathing, working. We all need the thing that justifies the acts of being. Even something as seemingly insubstantial as sleep. Inside an anonymous Westminster building, a man counts down the minutes to 8am for the shift change and takes another sip of coffee. He rubs his eyes, wishing he could take them out and wash them, and yawns. It’s no life for a man his age : commuting into work at minimum wage with the drunks, watching the sun rise out of a corner of the office window, commuting out against the tide of employees, daysleeping.

Like God, I can see all.

Commuters bustle past. He barely feels them anymore. They hit him in their rush to get somewhere, anywhere else, and they have no time to think. He barely feels anything anymore. Sleep is the one hit you can never get and never give up. Deprived of it, we will do anything for it. Even kill. After a few hours withdrawal the body becomes agitated, vision blurs, logic fades. The body begins to collapse, like an addict deprived of the narcoleptic fix.

I have all the time in the world.

Without it, one can barely operate, let alone think. One lives as an automaton, a functioning, integrated zombie in some kind of isotope insomniac half-life. A muscle that is reflexive and unthinking. Everything is a low-definition pale imitation. The world becomes some kind of half-lived dream. Sounds are deafening yet muffled, experiences clear but vague. The world looks strange. Drunk on exhaustion. Short-tempered with endurance. This is the way the world is. A world of sleepophobics and consciousnessaholics.

Time enough for love.

Camera Three ignores his irregular slouch and gait. Then, briefly, in relief, he is like everyone else, just another face in the crowd. People crowd from trains, then disperse into bottlenecks at the entrances and exits. And then he is alone again, like we always are.

In a crowd this big, one ceases to be an individual. One becomes a cell, part of the mass, just another organism. Like blood round the body. A heart beat pushes the blood further up the vein for a second. And then the heart stops. Recovers. Takes another gasp. The blood retreats back. And the heart beats again.

Two minutes and counting.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

He counts the nights since he slept, but that takes the type of concentration that’s impossible. Focus, focus. Gimme Ritalin. Strattera. Caffeine. Something, anything. Whatever it is, I need it.

All he knows is that it’s been a long time since he slept properly. A long time since there was an unbroken night. After a while dark and light merge into one. Everything becomes some kind of washed-out grey. You can start hallucinating after just fifty hours without sleep.

It ceases to matter how long it was since you slept. All that matters is that you haven’t slept. And you need it. Like oxygen and water. When the things that keep you awake are the things that haunt you when you close your eyes. When you can no longer sleep because the bed you used to sleep in is empty without her. When you can still smell her on the unused pillows and the abandoned furniture. When everything is falling apart in your hands : when the more you try the less you succeed.

You can’t sleep if you don’t know if you’re going to wake up.

When there’s something on your mind, sometimes nothing else in the world exists.

Because she was perfect. And everything about him was wrong. And without her, everything was wrong.

Switch to Camera Seventeen at the top of the station stairs before the descent down into the Underground. The operator stifles a yawns. Not long now. Twelve minutes to go.

In training courses, all one is taught is to watch for signs. You’re not meant to raise an alarm, interfere, unless there is something unmistakably clearly requiring intervention. Crime mostly. The eyes of fear watch and wait. For our protection we are monitored by unseen eyes at all times.

I know what this feels like.

He fantasises that the voice will leave him alone. Fantasises of a pristine white duvet. He hasn’t shaved for days. Just can’t. A blade is a dangerous thing.

But I’ll never stop.

It’s not yet time. This can’t be happening. The only voice in that head is his. And if the only voice in his head isn’t his, whose is it?

It’s mine.

This peace, this seclusion, this privacy to think whatever he wants. It’s a refuge. You never know when it can be taken away. When someone can unwrap your every thought, your every hidden intimacy, and use it against you is when life becomes fear one might lose the little one has. Without it, your identity itself starts to unravel. One becomes unglued, one ceases to be oneself, but somehow becomes part of everything.

Privacy. A thing whose value you don’t even know you have until you don’t have it anymore. A gift that you couldn’t wait to be rid of, yet no matter how much you want it, you can never have back.

Because even if you have nothing to hide, you hate the thought of someone watching you. Someone analysing your every move for something they can use against you. I am not a commodity. I am not information to be manipulated and controlled. I am someone.

You’re wondering where the voice is coming from.

Forever, this beautiful symphony of silence will be. Like yesterday. Like tomorrow. Like the next thirty years of our lives.

T minus 90.

I’m inside your head. I will never leave.

Huddle and wait. A chill goes through his body. Hands shake. Not even the hands know why. Insert a travelcard into a mouth that spits it out. Descend amongst the rest of them on the escalator. The heat is enough to invite sleep. The beautiful release. Down on the platform. Trying to ignore the voice in his head. No man can fear what he cannot see or touch.

Yes you can. Yes you do.

The world is curved. We often we mistake what we want for what we need. But what we need is different. It isn’t an artificial need, an imposed need, like a fast car, or drugs. It’s more basic, more fundamental than that.

The things that keep you awake are the things that make you want to sleep.

Life is a ghost. Occupying the same physical space as others, but this psychological space, this world we live in, is unique, to us and us only. Even someone seeing the same things, living the same life, with seeing through our eyes would still feel a different world.

To forget.

Any shape of sweet relief, anything that can ease this, anything that can lift the darkness.

Stumble, fall, sweat. Everything feels different. It only looks the same as normal.

Forever is more than you can imagine, less than you can enjoy.

He can feel that he’s being watched.

Switch to Camera Fourteen on the far end of the platform.

A rumble vibrates the air. Air pushes down the tunnel and tickles the hair of women. Rats freeze for the briefest of moments, then scatter to small holes hidden in walls. A light throws itself against a wall inside the tunnel. A dull roar of machinery and petrol. A shape. A train edges nearer, a bullet down the barrel of a gun, slowing towards the end of the platform. As it exits the confines of the tunnel, the train is still at a lethal, killing velocity.

Peace is just a step away.

Statistically, tube drivers encounter a fatality every 11 years. Or 100 suicides a year. The knowledge that every 11 years you will be the deliverer of a lost soul, a killer, the man who stands just inches away from someone as their meat is compressed against the window of your cab, their limbs and torso fall beneath the wheels and are dragged under, as eight pints of blood explode underneath the steel but are held by inertia and momentum to the front of a cab for a second, just a second, propelled forward in defiance of gravity, before gravity pulls the meat down, and under. Skulls explode from the pressure. The flesh is squeezed in a surreal collage of blood, bodily fluids, and internal organs.

These are called one-unders. And 11am is a very dangerous time.

You can’t help looking as their face is pressed against the glass for the last second of their life, see in their eyes that maybe this was a mistake, that if they could go back in time maybe three or four seconds and change everything, they would.

That’s the face some people see when they close their eyes.

Today is gonna be the day I’m gonna bring it back to you

T minus 10.

There are only 9 non-suicide fatalities a year on the Underground. Of the 91 other fatalities, One-Unders are the worst. Given the low clearance of tube cars and the large amount of body mass, cleaning and removing a suicide is a time-consuming, messy detail : it takes an hour at an absolute minimum to return a station to working order. Coroners and policemen need to be alerted. Photographs taken. Evidence collated, identified, reports to be written and compiled from CCTV footage. All these things happen at an instant’s notice.

Sometimes, the smell of meat in a supermarket can bring back for a second – just a second that feels like a year – the memory of trying to pick up all the dissected, random splinters of flesh that used to be a person.

To avert suicides, and also to aid cleaning up, most tube stations have Suicide Pits - deep gulleys of two or three feet deep below the main lines. When the body starts to fall, these initially throw the body at high speed below the wheels, where, whilst badly injured after impact, the passenger stands a 200% increased chance of survival than if there were no pit. Some people look down, trying to assess their chances. 50% / 50%. Take a chance on me.

By now somehow you shoulda realised what ya gotta do

Heads are thrown up, land at commuters feet. The most important thing you see today may be the last few seconds of someones life gushing from their severed arteries at your feet, ruining your shoes.

Outdoor stations are the worst. The head can go anywhere. Two days later, the head may be found. Hanging on the end of a fox’s mouth, or by a cleaner walking on a corrugated iron roof. Soulless eyes staring out at nothing, hung by their hair from the mouth of a fox foraging for food. This is the final exit.

A roar. A flash of light. Looking forward there is barely enough time to catch the driver’s eye, especially at the speed he is travelling. Someone mouths a word at him, trying to apologise for this. A briefcase remains open and unlocked on the platform. Someone’s secrets are in there, the explanations, the final, scrawled apology. The emptied bank statements, impending repossession orders, divorce documents from strange and estranged people.

Most suicides don’t leave notes. Most suicides are mysteries. The great unsolved murders of our time.

I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now

Originally, in the 30’s, tube trains were painted red due to the large number of suicides. You didn’t have to wash the blood off.

Go on motherfucker. Jump.

T minus 1.

Someone walks forward, and a body jerks like a plastic doll thrown against a moving wall.