The cone-shaped can

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

– Franz Kafka

“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”

– Marcus Aurelius

When Paul woke up that morning, he had no idea that his life was about to change forever. The 27-year-old man awoke to the drilling sound of an alarm clock that had been killing Paul’s wish to get out of bed every morning. Surely someone at the phone company had suffered mornings like Paul’s — and in revenge, sitting already at his afternoon desk by a cold Stanley cup of kiwi smoothie, invented this merciless alarm sound. Paul turned off the alarm, grabbed the phone, and slowly crawled to the toilet. On his way, his foot caught a metal can, leaving a thin cut on his leg — a modest souvenir from last night’s gathering, when Paul and a few friends had celebrated with cheap beer, now memorialized in the cans strewn across the floor. Seated on the privy, engaged in a process known to all and spoken of by few, he devoted his customary ten minutes to scrolling through TikTok. After a small surge of cheap dopamine, Paul rose and moved to the kitchen to resume his morning ritual. Cheap sausages, bacon, and a couple of eggs in a frying pan have been his breakfast for many days now, including this time. Another working day began. When done with breakfast, he then resided on the balcony with a cup of morning cappuccino, probably an expensive one, and watched as his junkie neighbour was petting the bush, perhaps believing it to be his beloved hound, who passed away of cancer around two years ago. While observing this rather Shakespearean scene, Paul somehow extracted from his shuffled memory a pretty intriguing piece of the puzzle – today he would meet his new boss, so it’s better to arrive punctually and at least try to present himself as a responsible worker. He then rushed to choose his armour for today: firstly the choice felt on a grey, crow coloured tuxedo, but then, after a rather prolonged processing, he went for a somewhat (but not much) provocative dark-red tie and classical to bone black suit, picked up from the messy writing table some change for lunch, and got out of his old and tiny apartment. The warm and gentle early March sun greeted him, slowly bringing Paul out of his winter hibernation while he was waiting for the ever-late bus commute. The chill wind of the nearby lake system indeed delivered a devastating breeze for human flesh. Paul tried to burrow deeper in the folds of his parka. He hadn’t been at the company long, but already earned a reputation for unreliability. A raise was obviously out of the question. While regularly collecting such dimes of a decent employee image, he still couldn’t afford a car and was forced to use crappy and often spooky public transport. He was working as a creative designer for one of the many banks that the metropolis is famous for. The company is located downtown, so in addition to the bus, Paul needs to continue his daily journey on a subway (which was even dirtier and smelled of such a huge variety of odours, impossible to describe). Recently, things have not been going well for him. Solutions he offered, instead of attracting customers and making their service experience better, and their reviews shorter and friendlier, only wasted users’ time, thus transforming their ratings into an ocean of long and threatening Twitter posts. Thus, he presented himself as the perfect candidate for dismissal, risking the loss of even the modest income he still has. Yet despite it all, Paul continues to maintain what he insists on calling a “social life.”. Constant parties with alcohol and various light substances, like yesterday’s one, clubs, video games, and other delights of youth, occupied the predominant majority of his free time; the rest he spends scrolling social networks.

Immersed in thoughts about his controversial design skills, Paul did not notice how a pretty girl of his age got on the bus. Only the smell of her hair brought him back to reality as she sat across from him. Catching his gaze, she awkwardly fixed her hair, smiled, and then completely dived into the world of her smartphone. Oh yes, this legal mephedrone, the one that doesn’t leave any physical signs of abuse. However, now it was playing into his hand. Paul allowed himself to stare a little more at particular areas of her, after which, being afraid of new possible eye contact, he turned away and gazed into the plastic window. While noticing a couple of familiar houses, it seemed strange to him that the bus had almost reached the station so quickly. Suddenly, the vehicle slowed down, passed the last stop a little, and the driver opened the doors to let the new passenger board. He turned out to be a middle-aged man in a blue-collar uniform and a stained backpack. The outfit, oddly enough, reminded Paul of Tom — a frequent guest at his parties. Tom worked in the same subway Paul was heading toward; Paul remembered seeing those same clothes in his friend’s wardrobe more than once. Besides, Paul recalled that yesterday Tom mentioned that he and the brigade had finally finished work on the subway’s line section, which includes the station at which the red-roofed bus was already about to stop.

The young designer tried to follow the lady, but this time, the choice of a homeless weirdo fell on Paul. The bearded creature, with a deft movement of its fingers, grabbed Paul’s trouser leg from the giant and saturated flow of people and mumbled for something. It was almost impossible to make out anything in these communication attempts of the beggar, so Paul disgustingly threw a couple of coins in the approximate direction of his toad face, after which the grip noticeably loosened and he managed to continue the way. But the moment was gone. The lady’s unremarkable outfit has already dissolved in the crowd. Paul cursed quietly, somewhat indecisely and rushed towards the trains. A couple of sticky escalators, and now he was already on the platform, filled with the smell of the whole variety of wastes. But unfortunately, it was too late. Right in front of him, the train driver, with a light press of a finger, closed the doors, and considerably sweaty Paul only had a couple of seconds to look as the pleasantly smelling curls moved away inside the coach, eagerly declining to dissolve in the passenger crowd this time. For a brief moment, he even attempted to make peace with two consequentual losses, but an unseen raw stream of blind hate and fury overwhelmed his neurons. Paul turned around and, unexpectedly for him, slammed his fist into the wall in numb rage. Chance was missed. Maybe the surrounding mob that kept arriving from the escalators parted, assigning the same social and mental status to Paul as to the bearded creature upstairs. A moment later, with the pain piercing his hand from the blow (and freeing him from the numbness just a bit), Paul heard a loud, growing crack that slowly trickled into the screams of the crowd. Turning again to the tunnel into which the silver carriages had left, he shockingly witnessed a wall of fire slowly devouring the train. After a couple of moments, passengers engulfed in flames ran out of the tunnel. However, he so hypocritically quickly lost any interest in the screaming and moving crowd, howling of which meticulously bounced off the station’s narrow ceiling. Awe feeling of emptiness and senselessness, stormed his neurons this time. Later, it would be impossible to recreate any possible emotions he had at that moment. Everything just washed away his senses in this unified blend of hormones. In the rear window of the train, his mind finally found familiar hips, or rather what was left of them, already quite dear to his eye. This time, distant notes of her shampoo smell mixed with burned human flesh, slightly but swiftly, reaching him, and even replacing the scent of waste on the platform.

Paul was one of the last ones who reached the exit. Blind terror and stupor lowered him on the cold tiles as he looked at the burning train. However, over time, adrenaline and some vague, distant, basic human reflexes put him back on his feet and forced him to run along with the leftovers of the crowd towards the exit. Upstairs, firefighters’ trucks and ambulances were already approaching a human pile. After making sure that Paul was just shocked and not physically injured, the medic quickly attended to the others, who clearly required more serious medical attention. As some employee of the rescue services later explained to him, during the train departure, due to the giant load on the electric rail, a strong short circuit occurred, which was then accompanied by a sharp and strong flame. Such a sharp sound frightened the driver, and he harshly stopped the train, hitting his head on the dashboard, swiftly losing consciousness. Because of this, the train froze in the tunnel near the station and quickly vanished in the fire’s silence, trapping screaming passengers inside. At first, people tried to break the windows, but they were plastic, and their effort, understandably, went in vain. After, they decided to open the doors manually using the special emergency mechanism; however, there, on the tracks, the burning electric rail, still transferring watts, was already waiting for them. The panic forced people to leave the carriages as quickly as possible, right on a live electric rail. Survived only those who managed to use the burned corpses as a gasket between them and a rail. They were still counting the trampled, wretched bodies when he spoke to Paul. Soon after, the train itself was fully engulfed in flames, and the remains of those who did not get out into the tunnel also fell into the arms of heat and smoke.

Paul was given a day off. He walked back home and got drunk the rest of the day. Already in the evening, when processing the accident, he turned on the news. Subway employees and rescuers have already managed to find out the cause. During a recent track repair, a worker incorrectly installed a new electric rail, which caused a short circuit and, thus, later the fire. Additionally, they identified the employee. He turned out to be 24-year-old Thomas Green, who, due to a state of light alcoholic intoxication, made this costly mistake. The image portrayed a boy Paul knew so well, whom he had befriended back in college. Tom, once cheerful and sociable, even attractive, now looked rather exhausted and ill in the photo. Paul failed to notice how constant parties with their favourite sweets - mephedrone, cannabis and whiskey turned that promising and energetic young boy into that tired, pale and lifeless scarecrow in an orange, wretched working jacket, a new-made butcher and arsoner of 68.

Somewhere far away, the ambulance buzzer howled again. While the car is approaching his house, Paul realizes that the cyclic sound is quite familiar to him. The guy was sipping his kiwi smoothie. When Paul was woken up that morning by the alarm clock in cold sweat, he had no idea that his life was about to change forever. However, after Paul stepped on an empty beer can, he began to remember the nightmare. By the time the young man reached the kitchen, he already knew what to do. Paul threw the sausages in the garbage can.