The Canary Sings: a Moonsilver Tale

Inside a vast warehouse, where dusty shafts of sunlight filter down through grubby windows high, high up, there is a railway track.
     I'm standing on the platform. You are there, too. You are holding a canary in a gilded cage. The canary whistles, and its song bounces and multiplies off the struts across the high ceiling, and disturbs a flock of roosting doves.  The doves whirl in circles above my head, a blur of white wings and black shadows.
     'Why are we here?' I ask.

    You don't answer. You swing the cage a little, and - but no, I'm mistaken, it isn't you swinging the cage. It is a breeze, looping and charging down the tunnel towards us: a train is approaching.

     There are other people, too,  crowds pushing against us, threatening to spill us onto the tracks. I lean backwards. The train explodes from the tunnel like a bull into the arena. It shrieks to a stop. The doors open with a whoosh. They open on both sides of the train, although there is nobody on the opposite platform.
     The crowd surges around us, pulling us with them. Onto the train, straight through the double doors on the far side, and off the train onto the opposite platform. We are taken with them like flotsam on the tide. The doors hiss shut, the train slides away.
    'What was the point of that?' I ask. I look across to the platform we were just standing on; it is now empty. Around us, the crowd is dissipating.
    You smile at me.

    'Look around,' you say.
     I look around.

    It is not the same platform as before. Not the one I was looking at from the other side. No, this platform is no longer merely a platform. It is the gateway to a bazaar. The crowds have flowed into the alleyways, the passages, the narrow paths that wind into the marketplace. Turbanned men shout their wares; robed women keep up a steady stream of bargain prices. I can smell spicy cardamom and cumin; I see a child burying his wet face in a huge slice of watermelon; the ground is scattered with puddles and rinds of rotting fruit.

     'I don't understand.' I turn towards you, but you aren't there.
     A moment of panic. Then I see you, or rather, I see the canary, its cage swinging jauntily, among a small crowd of girls, who are aah-ing and ooh-ing and trying to whistle. I fight my way over and find you there, talking and laughing with an older woman who is handing you little cubes of something gold and white. You see me, and smile, and offer me one.
     I put it in my mouth. It is ginger, chewy and sweet, and dusted with coconut. I'm not sure if I like it, but I eat it anyway. 'I don't understand,' I say again, but my voice merges with the crowd's voice and melts into nothing.
     You buy some black sesame seed sweets, which are like a biscuit, and some nougat which a man is stretching and wrapping and throwing around a post like a sticky white conveyor belt. Before I can get your attention, the air vibrates, and shudders, and another train arrives behind us.
     'Quick!'

     You pull me with you, and we run. We make it just in time, and the doors slam behind us and the other passengers.

     But - again! we are pummeled and squeezed and shoved through the opposite doors and back onto the opposite platform. As the train leaves in a whirlwind, I can see the platform we have just left, and it is empty. There is no bazaar, and no people waiting. Slowly I turn around.

     The lofty ceiling of the warehouse is threadbare, now, but it is still above us. There are no walls. We are facing a street, outside, where the sun is low, sulking on the horizon.

     I am afraid. I reach for you, but you are already walking away, into the street, with purposeful stride. I follow you, hesitant.

     Derelict. Abandoned. Broken windows reflect the burning red of the sky. No sound, except for our feet, crunching on shattered glass. The canary is silent. There is nobody here. The people who disembarked with us have vanished.

     'I don't understand,' I whisper. 'Where is this? Where are we?'

     The faintest breeze stirs the litter, makes it whisper and crackle at us. You kick it into the air, and it rocks a few times, gently, before settling on a drain, where it shudders to stillness.

     'Don't you know?' you say.

     You stop, and turn around, and look undecided. I can see the station platform from where we are standing, and above us is the warehouse roof, of what is left of it.

     'No, I don't know. Tell me. How can all this,' I say, waving my arms around, 'fit inside a warehouse?'

     You open the door of the gilded cage, and after a moment, the canary hops out and perches on top. But it doesn't sing.

     'The warehouse is vast,' you reply. 'Nobody has ever explored it all, and nobody ever will. It is bigger than anything you have ever seen. It holds everything you can possibly imagine.' And you shake the cage, and the canary lifts into the air and flutters away down the street, into the darkening sky, a fading speck of butter and rust.

     I don't know how to answer this. But you don't seem to expect an answer. By the time I turn back to face you, you have gone.

     This time, you are nowhere to be seen.

     I stand there for a while, and as I stand and wait, the answer comes to me.

     The railway lines are not railway lines.

     They are neural networks.

     The trains are not trains.

     They are neurons.

     The stations are not stations.

     They are synapses.

     I am inside a brain. A vast, unimaginable, borderless brain.

     Where everything that was ever imagined, is here, somewhere; where everything that was ever thought, exists. Where every dream, and nightmare, and possibility, waits for me at every station.

     My own brain; my own mind.

     Somewhere in the far distance, I hear the canary singing.