I am sick, I am a tired man, I need rest. Can they not make these trains cease their shrieking? You do not know how I suffer every hour as they thunder past my attic room. This very moment as I write these lines to you, my oldest friend, I shrink from the cars’ shrill squeals and screeches.

What is night except a torment as I pace my chamber’s unvarnished floor boards and warm my hands at the meager remains of the evening’s coals? My neighbors slumber. Again, I see their lights extinguished, one by one, while mine alone burns brightly at my bedside long past midnight.

Is this torture a punishment for my sins — which, I confess, are many? Yes, they are innumerable and not for the ears of the innocent. But Merciful Creator, I cannot bear this constant interference with my peace.

The train ride today was a particular affront to my simple need to be transported to and from the cellar in the city where I toil for intolerable hours every weekday save one — counting, tallying, calculating, ordering, reordering, shuffling my employer’s papers. White sheets go to and fro, yellow sheets come and go, green sheets say yes and no. Will the wretched department that controls my days ever cease its immoderate, ceaseless fertility?

Oh, and I am complicit in its futility. Yes, I am complicit.

But what was I telling you? The train ride: it is soothing, restful when it deigns to be so. Its quiet, gentle rhythms often lull me into a restorative nap.

Do I contradict myself? But let me explain, dear friend. Be patient! We must practice patience in all things.

This afternoon, with a shriek and a jolt, the train that was delivering me from my place of business abruptly halted. And when I lifted my eyes from the yellowed pages of the tired volume in my untidy lap, a strange figure loomed above me, clinging to the railing that hung suspended, horizontal, from the ceiling throughout the length of the car.

It was a man of the middle years facing leftward toward the front end of the carriage. His left hand grasped the rail, obscuring his face but not his drab hair. His black bag — constructed from a cheap and faded cotton — swung unchecked, offensively close to my own unguarded forehead, and evoked in me a slight unease.

But a more objectionable provocation than this utter disregard for the well-being of a fellow passenger was his peculiar —

And I must be honest here, dear friend. If nothing else, I am an honest man — flawed, yes, but honest. I must speak my mind, or, or. . . .

Where was I? Oh yes, I’ll never forget this creature’s peculiar — let me reiterate this: most peculiar — stance.

Believe me, friend: this man’s brazenly indecent posture revealed his corrupted interior state, and it offended. Yes, do not doubt me. Were you to have witnessed this unnatural episode, you, too, would have shared my vexation.

I stared downward at my threadbare knees, shaking sleep from my poor, addled brain, when my eyes were drawn to the floor, where the man had placed, with deliberate exaggeration, his black-shod feet in an extraordinary position. His legs stood perfectly rigid in a wide triangle, knees locked as though set in stone, with both shoes pointing to my left — like the posture of some ancient hieroglyph in a dusty underground chamber.

As my eyes focused, I stared in disbelief as he continuously adjusted his alignment. At one moment, the spread-eagle feet were not quite wide enough apart. At the next, the clenched knees were not sufficiently rigid, the arm not suitably vertical, the elbow not close enough to the ear. The twitching and correcting occurred in silence, save for the intermittent shrieks of metal wheels against metal tracks at severe turns in the dark tunnel through which we were propelled.