An Isolated Incident (Un incidencia puntual)

Published by Perpetuum in No One is Coming to Save Us, selected works by Antonio M. López.

A writer sits in an empty metro station awaiting a train on a boiling summer’s day.  As the countdown timer enters an unfathomable loop, no train appears.  But a figure emerges from the tunnel:  a driver, somewhat shaken, emerging from an ‘isolated incident’.  As their conversation progresses, we slowly learn the meaning of this euphemistic phrase, and further still how uncannily close this real meaning is to the unhappy writer’s own life.  Despite his protests, the writer is forced to confront the discomfort of his own thoughts and feelings, entering a personal and philosophical debate with this most unlikely of sparring partners.  And not only that:  the station hardware also gets in on the act.  Was this the kind of ‘help’ that the automated on-platform assistance consoles were designed to provide?  One plucky bot is about to find out.  Antonio M. López’s biting black comedy takes the most distressing of contemporary realities and tunnels into its deepest, most existential places.

Listen, sometimes, life, this life, this life of ours, can be much worse than a fifty-tonne machine made of iron running over you at eighty kilometres per hour. It can be much more devastating. Because the mere fact of being here, permanently, puts us in an unacceptable position of suffering which, sooner or later, we have to decide about. We haven’t chosen this unacceptable position, but we feel obliged to stick with it. We don’t believe in this position, but we have to defend it. That’s what it means to come into this world. That’s what it means to wake up in the morning and close our eyes at night. Accepting that there has always been, and will always be, a monster much more terrifying than death hiding under the bed.    

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