Oriol knew he hadn't committed a crime. But, he couldn't shake the feeling that he must have done something terribly wrong in this life or his past one to have such inconsolable suffering and a sentence meant to punish the rest of his living days.
In all his 16 years as a train conductor, he had never see anything like it. All those young kids crossing the tracks at the same time. Sure, every once in a while a car would rush across just seconds before the barriers would touch down. Never, though, anything like that balmy June night. The images flickered in his memory. Flashes of girls, their hair tied back, in white skirts, guys in t-shirts. Screams suspended in frozen silence, trapped in the icy depths of his mind.
He sat on the cold tiles for a long while. He watched the sunlight play on the floor, coaxing him to get up, to dance, to live again.
Oriol hoisted himself unto the toilet seat. He swallowed hard, pretending he didn't notice the bile-tasting spit that most other days would have made him vomit. He had to get ready, put on his best suit, put on his best face. The lawyers, investigators, transport officials, insurance claims officers. They still had lots of questions for him. Oriol would sit there, again, for hours, answering yes or no to the same questions. Months later, pieces still didn't fit, they said. He didn't know what to tell them any more. He had already lived this night over more times than he cared to count.
"Rosa, can you bring me my white shirt, and the blue tie," Oriol shouted from the doorway towards the bedroom.
"I thought you wanted to wear the red one today. Didn't you wear the blue tie last week when you met the human resources team?" Rosa called back, her voice muffled from the closet.
Oriol couldn't care less which tie he wore. He only owned three of them, and everyone involved in the case had seen him in all of them already. All this fancy dressing. All this frigid politeness. Oriol just wanted to go watch the sunset at the beach and find the peace of mind his doctors kept promising him would come as time healed his guilt-riddled heart.
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Here's what I found so haunting about this, the fact that there is so much discussion about the tie, that Oriol now had to think that he has worn all three of his ties already, that everyone involved in the case has seen him in all three of the ties he owns. That is wife still cares. This details makes everything so real and so vivid, I couldn't get this character and what happened to him out of my mind. Terrific!
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