There he was, slouched like a discarded fetus. Usually the mechanic and rusty repetitions of the B-line train would lull Jim to sleep. Not today. Today he gave the train’s passengers a hollow, blank stare. The other students fought to avoid eye contact with Jim, the janitor with dark insets under his eyes that gave him the gaze of a cadaver. I could not share in that pool of anonymity for I had shared small talks with Jim. I acknowledged him with a restrained nod. He gave a faint smile. It was laced with deep disquiet.

Sometimes, I would run into Jim during his night shifts at the chemistry building where I would study. I let him engage me about his past life, his job as a physicist for NASA and how they had fired him for compromising confidential documents for some short change on the side. “Those leeches!” He would shout intermittently, each cry infusing an energy that lit his dark features momentarily. I felt amusement and charity in the experience of talking to this nobody.

Not today. Today, he dragged himself off the train without a word. His limbs looked heavy as if he was straining to tug them from gravity’s grasp. I felt compelled to help, but comfortable in the distance. I stood aloof and watched.

I once spotted him telling a student about his achievements in college. “summa cum-laude” he said with a fading smile. The girl looked uneasy and awkward. She nodded lifelessly as if to swat the time by. I noticed that he noticed. He stood there quiet and still for a moment. His face had the emotions of a father who was being ignored by his own child. He returned to mopping the floors with a steady and repeated movement. It looked efficient and calculated.

Some days he would be more energetic than other days. I remember the day he came up to me and mumbled, “God is an astronaut.” I simply nodded.

“You know this already?” he asked with a sly smile. He took my indifference as a cue to go on.

“We entertain angels without knowing it,” he said with excitement. “besides…scientists have already discovered teleportation and are hiding it from the general public.” “I know this,” he loved to say.

I always nodded like I do when I listen to children, or the local asylum patients during my community service hours.

“I’m studying for a new job at the morgue you know…” he once said. “You’re not the only one that has to study. I have to study this huge textbook on corpse embalmment.”

Once, during a study break, I snuck into his office out of simple curiosity. What I found was a tiny rectangular space, the walls lined with mops, brooms, buckets, and cleaning liquids organized like a showcase. In the center of the room was a circular wooden table with a single, lonely chair.

The table was swamped with texts: an old Gideon’s Holy Bible like the ones you find in hotels; a rough and brittle copy of what looked like the Koran; the thick corpse embalmment handbook he had once mentioned; and strewn like a composer’s orchestral sheet music, what looked like scientific documents. Advanced molecular transport theory. Scribbles of graphite handwriting covered nearly every corner of white space on the documents, and besides it sat a pencil with deep bite marks that exposed the graphite. It was a dark and colorless scene, minus the blue pills sprinkled atop a torn page of the day’s Boston Globe.

I thought about these things as I watched him leave the train like an apparition. I mused about God and NASA and leeches as I held the brittle and mangled pencil that I recovered from his empty office today. I pondered about teleportation and morgues and angels as I remembered that his desk was cleared out today, completely devoid of the books, papers, and pills I had seen before.