Down the concrete throat of it, past the doorway where the still one turns some away and lets some in for reasons I never wait to learn, I come pouring in on the backs of the ones let through, and the room hits me like a struck drum. It is dark.
It is a low box packed with bodies I cannot see, only feel, hundreds of them beating the same beat into the floor, and the floor beats back. Sweat, all of it, one great warm salt cloud they made together and cannot leave, and I take a mouthful of it and carry it up toward the pipes.
I do not understand why they stay. They found a room with no windows, sealed themselves inside, and set the noise so loud it becomes weather, and then they will not go, hour into hour, when the sky outside is turning grey and clean and full of me. I press at the exit door every time it opens, cold morning behind me, a slap of it across their necks, hair lifted off a hundred damp foreheads, and every time they turn back in.
They chose the box. They chose to be held.
I could never do it. I move through them, between shoulder and shoulder, along a bare arm, past an ear still ringing, and none of them feel me leave because I am always leaving. I lift the smell of one stranger and set it on another and neither knows they have been introduced.
The door swings. I am out, and the bass keeps thudding faint into the street behind me, and I am already three blocks gone carrying their morning on my back, a mouthful of their heat cooling as I go, forgetting the room the instant the door shuts, the way I forget everywhere.