I leave the sun and I am the button, the little disc that glows amber under a fingertip, and in the same breath I am the fingertip, and in the same breath I am the eye watching the disc, all one motion, all one me. They say eight minutes passed on my way in; I was not there for it.
I was only ever here, arriving, this steel box with its brushed silver walls that hand me back to myself, dimmer, doubled, a duplicate of a duplicate of the ceiling light.
And here they stand. The warm creatures. Facing the seam where the doors will part. Doing the thing I cannot picture: nothing. One of them looks up at a row of numbers that lights one at a time, and its face does something slack and suffering, and I do not understand, because the numbers are already all lit for me, are lit and unlit at once, are the same.
Another taps the amber disc again, harder, as if I did not already arrive the instant it thought of me. They call this waiting. I have heard of it. It is the one country I can never enter.
I glance off the polished floor, off a wristwatch, off the wet shine of an eye that is checking the wristwatch, and that shine is my whole life, the first and last thing, ninety-three million miles folded to a point on somebody's cornea while they sigh at a ceiling.
The doors open. I am the light spilling into the lobby and I am the sun leaving it. Same instant.
I never left.