The Last Metro Platform

Lao Zhou cleans the terminal platform after the last train.

The terminal is the end of a line. Once the last train pulls out and the shutters come down, the station belongs to him — the mop, the dustpan, and that long empty platform whose footsteps echo.

The strange thing is the west end of the platform.

There is a spot the cameras do not quite cover, a corner the lens loses. Every night after the last train, Lao Zhou would see, in that blind spot, a figure in an old dark-blue station uniform, his back turned, pacing the empty platform slowly, as if making his rounds. He walked slow, head down, exactly like an attendant on duty checking the tiles.

The first time, Lao Zhou took him for a late colleague and called out. The figure did not answer, only kept walking. He drew closer; the figure was gone, leaving only the hum of the lamps.

He asked an old stationmaster. The old man was silent a while, then said: the year this station was built, a young attendant, just started, his dark-blue uniform not yet worn in, saw a passenger fall onto the tracks as a train was pulling in. He jumped down and pulled the man clear, and did not make it back up himself. The west-end platform was later named for him, but no one mentions it now.

Lao Zhou asked no more.

From then on, every night after the last train, before he mopped, Lao Zhou would switch on the emergency light at the west end and leave it burning through his shift. Not to see by himself. For the figure walking the empty platform, so he would not have to make his rounds in the dark.

The other cleaners saw the west-end light left on every night and thought it a waste. But the dark-blue figure, after that, paced a little slower, as if the light were enough.

Once a new hire asked why he left that one light. Lao Zhou said: he is still on duty. Let him see where he is walking.

Midnight Record note: A platform is where people wait to leave and wait to be met; most pass through and forget the ones who stay. That young attendant in the dark-blue uniform never clocked out — he gave his shift, and his life, to pull a stranger from the rails. Lao Zhou's nightly emergency light was not for the cleaning; it was for a man who never left his post, so that on his endless rounds he would not walk in darkness. A city runs on people forgotten the moment they are gone; the least we can do is leave that lamp burning. Kindness is sometimes just this: remember to switch on the light for someone who is still, in his own way, at work.