Idea in Stone by Hamish Macdonald

Year’s, too: a secret. He sipped his punch, smiling at Paulo, though his throat tightened at the thought that this was his last New Year’s with these friends.
    Someone started the countdown to midnight, and everyone joined in. Stefan wondered how long it would take to count to August.
    Six
    Something to Show

    The subway car moved through the dark guts of the city, a length of stainless steel cud delivering human nutrients to its vitals—the businesses and shops. The lights flickered and the car shuddered to a halt. The passengers groaned. The momentary complaint unified the riders, then they returned to ignoring each other. Their eyes drifted to the advertisements above the facing passengers, to their shoes, to their books, newspapers, and magazines. The light was dim here in the tunnel, so any kind of sight-related activity was a pretence, but the passengers shared a tacit agreement to leave each other alone in their bubbles of privacy. That imaginary solitude was the only concession available to those who had to get to work this way.
    Stefan looked at his hands, examined his fingernails, coughed, then looked up at an ad for basketball shoes. Annoyed at the commercial invasion of his thoughts, he studied the subway car’s door, self-consciously adopting an expression that said, I’m just looking to see what’s happening . He checked his watch with the same forced deliberation. A voice came over the loudspeaker, but he had no idea what it said. This was not because of the second voice he always heard, but the quality of the sound: none of the other riders had any idea what the mumbled yet blaring announcement said, either. God love the Toronto Transit Commission , thought Stefan. For some reason, every transit worker he encountered seemed angry about something. He wondered what that was.
    A little girl sat across from him, playing with a plastic horse in the seat beside her mother, who read one of the daily tabloids. The girl caught Stefan looking at her. She smiled. A feeling filled Stefan’s chest, welling up to a geyser of a grin. The girl hadn’t learned the grown-up subway game yet. He hoped she never would.
    He wondered where the mother and daughter were headed this late at night. He looked left and right. The subway was unusually busy given the hour. He poked fingers at his throat, trying to relieve the tightness there. This had been a long day, with two ads to voice over, a movie trailer, and an adult film—in French. When he was young, Delonia and he sometimes spoke French to each other, their secret code when they were up to something and didn’t want his father to know about it. But that was a long time ago, and he found himself that day trying to make the proper names of body parts sound deliberate and sexy, since he didn’t know any of the street words for them. Luckily, he didn’t need to construct full sentences after the cursory set-up of the movie’s premise (patient meets nurse, nurse undresses patient to bathe him, patient and nurse quickly decide to have sex, doctor checks up on patient, also has sex with nurse, three other nurses join them, and so on). Once the sex began, the filmmakers didn’t care if the sound matched the on-screen figures’ mouth movements, so Stefan developed a stock set of moans and phrases, and could now do his part while drinking coffee or reading the paper.
    These other jobs all took place after a full day recording Green Brigade . His producer Jean and he had reached a détente that allowed Stefan creative expression in his voice-work as long as he kept quiet about the show’s writing and political intent. He didn’t feel bothered by this. He didn’t feel much of anything. It was February.
    His life was being bent out of shape by Cerise’s ability to drive: Delonia reneged on her gift and Stefan had to take the subway or a streetcar to his various jobs. Just as well, he decided, he was saving a lot of money this way. He could barely remember what he was