The Last Passenger

In the dream, which returned to me for the better part of my childhood, I was always barefoot and wearing a thin embroidered nightgown that floated around my ankles. The light was the soft, indirect light of an overcast morning. I was flying, though there was no rushing wind, no acrobatics, no chasing of comets. I drifted weightlessly through a library so impossibly tall that its shelves climbed past the clouds like beanstalks and continued upward into a ceiling-less, infinite sky. The air smelled like old paper and morning rain. There was no card catalog and no librarian. There was only me and the books — miles and miles of them, rising into a luminous fog — and the absolute knowledge that every one of them was accessible to me.

I would slow before a particular spine, the way iron tilts toward a magnet. My fingertips grazed the spines until I found it – whatever story seemed to be calling to me. I slipped the book from its shelf, opened it to the first page, and then I fell – right into the story itself. The page accepted me, absorbed me into itself. Suddenly I was inside the story — not reading it but living it, a small intruder breathing the air of someone else’s chapter. I would emerge as a character in someone’s life, a multidimensional player in a sprawling, fantastical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure storybook so large I would never finish it, even if I lived a thousand years.

I told no one about this dream because I knew, intuitively, that no one would understand. I was six, seven, eight. I had not yet read Borges, hadn’t heard of Jung, did not know the word metaphysics. And yet the dream made me its involuntary scribe. It told me that the world was not what the world said it was. That what we all are is something far more porous than the schoolroom permitted.

The dream was a child’s play on what the Sanskrit-speaking sages of the first millennium called ākāśa — the subtle, omnipresent ether in which all events and all knowing are already inscribed; the substrate that holds, the way water holds salt, every utterance ever made and every gesture ever performed. It was Jung’s collective unconscious, before I had a vocabulary in which to receive Jung. It was Borges’s Library of Babel, only without the despair — for in my dream the library was not a labyrinth but a home, a natural state of being. The books on its shelves were not merely written — they were both lived, and alive. And what flew between them, in a thin nightgown, was not a soul, exactly, but an itinerant variant of the soul: a consciousness, taking down the volumes that consciousness has stored up against itself, and reading itself back into being, one chapter at a time.

Let me try to explain this as simply as I possibly can, with words and metaphors that are accessible. Let’s start with the famous Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which arose not from mysticism but from Hugh Everett’s 1957 dissertation, which holds that every quantum event splits the universe into branching futures, each of which is fully real. Every coin tossed lands both ways. Every choice not made, is made elsewhere. Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive. The universe of our experience is one extremely thin slice of an unimaginably vast multiverse, and what we call the past is merely the diminishing tunnel of the choices in which we happen to find ourselves.

There are not two of you. There are not seven of you. There are uncountably many of you, each one of them as real as the one reading these words. All experiencing their own timelines at the same time. The library in my dream had a finite number of shelves only because my child’s mind could not hold the actual figure. Only because our brains are not fully capable of grasping infinity.

The dream stopped sometime in adolescence. What replaced it was a series of other metaphors. In this essay, I want to talk about The Train – though the train is no more or less literal than the library. The library is the inventory. The train is the journey.

To buy a ticket on a train is to commit, for a little while, to a particular trajectory through a vast network of tracks. To choose a particular ancestral line, a specific blueprint: a set place in the multiverse, a species, gender, race, historical time period. To choose this seat over that one, this stretch of route, this destination, even if tracks sometimes overlap like Escher staircases. The library tells you what is possible and shows you all the itineraries you can choose from. The train tells you what you have agreed to live in the now.

Each of us is on a train, and the train is going somewhere. Somewhere is the place we asked for, even when we cannot remember asking.

Imagine a train so long that its first car and its last are separated by ten thousand years. The train is moving along one of an infinite number of tracks. Each car is its own century. Each seat is the life of a particular person. You may, when you arrive at the station, buy any seat anywhere along the train, and the seat you choose will be the life you live: the fourteenth-century Provençal weaver in the second-to-last car of the third epoch, the eighteenth century Romani fortuneteller, the nineteenth-century rabbi in the dining car, the small girl in a communist Romanian apartment who dreams of an infinite library because, in some sense beyond chronology, she has already read it. You may sit in the very back of the train, where the engines roar and the smoke is thickest, or you may sit at the front, at the bead at the end of the necklace, watching the locomotive nose its way into the station. You may not, having boarded, leave before it’s time. But the train will arrive. It always arrives.

What flies between the cars, weightless and barefoot, is consciousness — your consciousness, my consciousness, the singular unit each of us experiences as I. The train metaphor solves a problem the religions of my childhood could not solve — how to be both a person and an everything; how to be a discrete, singular, grieving Elisa, and at the same time a particle of a much larger field that is not destroyed by Elisa’s death or brokenness, because Elisa was only its provisional costume.

The train solves the riddle, because the train allows for the seat. There is room for the inhabitant of a single chair, for the very specific knee scraped in the very specific year etched in the timespace continuum, for the woman who lost her child in 1612 and never recovered, for the child who lost her mother in 1944 and never thrived. There is also room for the larger trajectory, the route, the schedule, the terminal — the unmistakable sense that the journey was meant to happen.

The first note and the last note of a melody are eternally interconnected, the way two entangled photons remain in instantaneous communication across any distance of space-time. They are the bookends of a single duration, and what falls between them is a unique and irreplaceable symphony — the particular frequency of one life, one consciousness, one journey. The story does not end at the beginning, and it does not end at the end. Its merit cannot be judged by either bookend. It must be observed across the whole arc — and the arc is not complete until the final passenger, the last bead on the necklace, the last note of the melody, arrives at her station.

Only then does the entire world explode into light.

The End of the Line

All the most important people/beings in my life — even my two cats, spayed out of reproduction — are at the end of their lines. They are the last car. Their tracks ran out at them. There will be no progeny. There will be no further passengers. I am, by an arithmetic neither of my parents could have anticipated, the last passenger of theirs, and they are, by an arithmetic neither of theirs could have anticipated, the last passengers of generations of people who clawed their way through plague, pogrom, conscription, expropriation, exploitation, hunger, exile, and worse, in order to deliver this one conductor — me — to the final station.

There is no further track behind me, or before me. I am the bead at the end of the necklace, the final note of the symphony. I am the final passenger.

I don’t know where you’re seated on your own train, but I do know that your life is part of a calculation that is not personal, but collective in scale. It’s a score not only of you but of everyone whose blood and choices seeped into your cells: a hundred thousand or a million ancestors, every one of whom did some small or not-small thing that hurt or helped, and whose hurts and helps are still unresolved when their seat empties. The calculation is finalized only when the last passenger of the line disembarks at the final station.

The moral physics of a lineage are not determined solely by the events of any single life. From inside any single life, the bad tends to outweigh the good as gravity outweighs effort. The dead wait sullenly to be forgotten, and the cruel get away with everything. But across a line of a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years, the bookkeeping is different. One pure life that transcends the brutality of its antecedants weighs more than a hundred lives of darkness behind it. And that transcendance serves as ancestral redemption to all whose existence paved the path that brought you to this moment of illumination.

Light is heavier than its opposite, the way a single struck match is heavier than the darkness of an entire cave. A single act of love by a final passenger can lift the souls of everyone who hurt and was hurt before her — tormentors and tormented ancestors alike, a heartless father, a broken mother, the grandmother who watched the village burn and never spoke of it — because love begets life, and what cannot beget life cannot beget anything; it only consumes, and what only consumes eventually runs out.

This is what Hildegard of Bingen was after when she spoke of viriditas — the greening, life-giving force, the lux vivens, the living light by which the world is forever being remade. The Kabbalists meant something similar by the Zohar, the radiance, the splendor, the unfolding luminescence of the Ein Sof: the divine substance whose light, having shattered into a thousand sparks at the inception of the universe, is recovered slowly, incrementally, one act of tikkun olam (repairing of the world) at a time, by the people in whose hands the sparks have lodged.

This is why the religions of my heritage have always insisted that the redeemers come last — because there’s no other place for them to come from. The redeemer is the final passenger. The redeemer is the one in whose seat, finally, the calculation tips.

There is no hell. I feel sorry for people who insist on the existence of “hell”. There is darkness, yes — the cold, dimensionless darkness of lives lived in cruelty or shame, lives whose consciousnesses were stunted or stuck. But darkness is not a destination. Darkness is the failed level of a game whose end has not yet been reached. The cruel grandfather, the mother who could not love her daughter, the father whose silence was its own form of harm: they are not in hell. They are in arrears. They are waiting, in a sense, for someone in their line — some final passenger, some end-of-track child — to settle their account by living a life that re-tilts the ledger.

To balance the books, the universe needs only one of you. One acorn seed can speak for an entire forest. The game is not set up for us to fail. It’s set up so that we can succeed, even from the bottom, even from the worst of the line. Because beauty spun out of horror becomes its own redemption.

Think of it as a relay race, where your genes are the baton your ancestors passed on, in the hope that you can complete the mission. And what is the mission? Transcendence.

Over three decades have passed since my father’s death, and he has only ever appeared in my dreams maybe twice. In neither of those dreams could he speak. He smiled and his mouth opened, but no sound emerged. I didn’t understand why — but now I have a theory. I don’t think his silence was a quirk of my dreaming brain. I think it’s maybe a rule. Maybe those lost to the darkness can’t speak to those who might still complete the ledger; maybe the rules are calibrated against influence. Imagine if they could speak, if every cruelty in your line could access you through your sleep — the game would be rigged.

I think that the dead of the dark line are silenced, because they need you. They need you not to be ruined by them. They need you to make your choice freely, with the necessary innocence of a tabula rasa, even though every cell of your body is the byproduct of decisions made by people you cannot remember and who cannot, even in dreams, address you.

This is the spiritual cosmic joke. We are incarnated as irreducible units of consciousness, and we go through our lives believing ourselves to be exactly that — singular. And yet every one of those single units is the unconscious continuation, the living index, of a line of consciences and acts going back to the first division of the first cell in the first warm, primordial sea.

We are alone. We are also a delegation.

For some years now, I have been fascinated by epigenetics. My research got to the point where I acquired some limited expertise, which enabled me to give talks and presentations on this field. I firmly believe that epigenetics demonstrates that the metaphysics of the line is not a metaphor. The body is the archive. The cells of the woman writing this sentence carry, in the methylation patterns inscribed on her DNA, the somatic record of what her grandmother survived, and what her grandmother’s mother survived before her, and those before them still. The Holocaust survivor studies have shown it. The Dutch Hunger Winter studies have shown it. The grandchildren of the starved are themselves, at the molecular level, partly starved. The grandchildren of the terrified inherit, in their stress-response systems, the vestiges of someone else’s terror. The body remembers what the mind cannot.

What this means is that the inheritance is not optional. You cannot decline to be the last passenger of the line; the line is already embedded in your cells. The grandmother who never spoke of the village burning still lives in your startle reflex. The great-grandmother who lost three children before age forty still lives in your cortisol curve. The Romani woman ten generations back still lives in the way you flinch when a stranger asks where you are from. The body is the unbroken chain that metaphysics describes. The methylation pattern is the moral physics in molecular form.

Those of us who arrive at the end of the line are tasked to break the unbreakable chain. To carry, in our bodies, the entire archive — and then to lay down a new pattern, an unprecedented sequence, a record of love so enduring that the line itself begins, after a thousand years of bending one way, to bend the other way. This is what redemption through the good deeds of the final ancestor means in the cell. It is not allegory; it’s the rewriting, by inches, of the inscription of a thousand bodies that came before.

When you triumph over adversity in your life — when, for example, you do not abandon yourself when you desperately wish you could — the universe celebrates with you, because it has received a credit. You just lifted an enormous quantity of unredeemed grief that had been waiting at the bottom of your line, and with it you recalibrated your ancestors’ routes.

There are setbacks, of course. There are lineages that move from light back into darkness — children born into safety and financial security who, despite being given everything, choose cruelty anyway. The destructive or narcissistic psychopath. The man whose ambition is to be a pimp, a thief, a career criminal. The wartime general who cannot stop killing, who sees adversaries as obstacles in the path of his ambition. The profiteer who builds his estate on the bones of other people’s suffering. The man whose poor mother sacrificed everything for, only to disappoint her into ash. These are the smearers, the muddiers; the ones who, given a clean slate, return it stained. Their setbacks are real — but, like all generational setbacks, recoverable. If they’re lucky, a hundred years from now, a final passenger on their track will board the train and begin the work of unstaining what they stained. If they’re not, their petty cruelties will be lost, like their names, to time — as is the fate of all who leave no mark upon the world except the infliction of endless suffering and division.

Those who were given more opportunities than I ever received, and still chose to remain in shadows, are the most pathetic — because they had every chance I did not. They could have ended the suffering. But unified by egoism, they were unable to transcend their singular wants and desires. All their lives, they took from the many to feed their singular gaping mouth — their need for attention, relevance, importance, enrichment — rather than rippling their blessings back outwards to the world.

They ride the train, but don’t see anything beyond themselves. They take a seat, but never bother to look out the window.

But miracles do happen. They happen in the lineages where almost no light ever reached, where every prior passenger lived, suffered, and died in conditions that bent or warped them. And yet a final passenger boards the train and, against every expectation of psychology or physics, refuses to be bent.

I have tried, for years, to be that passenger. I am the last one of my line, and the last passenger doesn’t have the option of leaving the calculation unfinished.

There have been seasons when I have felt like Atlas, carrying my line on my back like an ancestral house with rotting beams and unspoken cellars — clawing my way up a mountain whose slope I can’t see the top of, pushing the painful load of unknown lives ahead of me. And yet, without my permission, the pain has produced something useful: tears that have become, in the dark forest of my life, a trail of breadcrumbs. Each one shines like a pearl (itself a luminous bead borne from the pain of an injured mollusk). Each one says, “This is the way back, this is the way out”. And I follow them because there is nothing else to follow.

Tabula Rasa

Why don’t we remember our alternate lives, the lives our consciousness is concurrently living? Why don’t we know when we’re the final passenger? Why are the train windows wiped clean before each new departure?

I can only guess – maybe it’s because the rules are calibrated for purity. The choice has to be made by someone unburdened by the choices behind them. If you remembered the cruelty of every ancestor, the failure of every prior version of yourself, the abandonment of every parallel Elisa across every alternate timeline and iteration — the Elisse who stayed in Romania, the Elisa who ended up in Germany or Sweden, the Elisa who never wrote at all, the Elisa who took her own life in 2025 — you could not act. You would be paralyzed or traumatized. The whole epistemic force of your lives would dissolve you. Nothing you did would count, because nothing you did would be of your true volition.

So the Operator of the train (I’ll get to her soon) clears the windows. She wipes the slate. You arrive at your seat innocent of everything that brought you to it. Your consciousness is born in purity, even though your body is a tablet inscribed with a million years of evolutionary etchings and another two thousand years of epigenetics.

How much of any decision is really yours, when every cell of your body is the residue of someone else’s? How can a creature made entirely of what came before, become something entirely new?

These are the wrong questions to ask. Instead, ask yourself: How much of your inheritance can you metabolize, transmute into something the inheritance itself was not? Your freedom is earned, fractionally, by pulling away from an ancestral current that wants to become your destiny. Freedom comes through defiance, not acquiescence. And free will starts with a clean slate.

Tracks and Parallel Timelines

When I was a small girl, I wrote fairy tales. I wrote them in the back pages of school notebooks and in the margins of books and on envelopes my parents had discarded. They were elaborately constructed and almost universally tragic. The princes drowned. The princesses died of broken hearts. The dragons survived. I would agonize for hours over a single fork in the plot — should the heroine cross the mountain or the ocean, should she fight the wolf or befriend it, should she trust the witch or run? — and what I knew, even at seven and eight, was that each choice was not merely a plot turn. It was a different girl. Each fork generated a brand new fairytale. A parallel girl who would carry, into her future, the imprint of the road I did or didn’t let her take.

I didn’t know that I was inscribing the multiverse onto the back of my homework. I thought I was writing fairy tales.

The multiverse is not a science-fiction conceit. It’s the unavoidable consequence of accepting the scientific premises of quantum mechanics. Every time a particle is measured, the universe does not collapse into a single outcome. It branches. Both outcomes are real, and both proceed like spinoff fractals birthing new universes. Both contain a perfectly compartmentalized seed — a self-consistent observer who experiences only one outcome and remembers, falsely but indelibly, that no other outcome occurred.

There are not two of you. There are uncountably many. There is the Elisa who stayed in Romania, who witnessed the collapse of communism in a fiery Revolution, who works somewhere in the EU and dreams at least once a month, with a strange ache she cannot name, of flying among infinitely-tall bookshelves. There is the Elisa who joined a nationalist movement, and the one who didn’t. The one who became a fencer, the one who became a lawyer, the one who became a writer. There is the Elisa who was killed in a car accident at age five, the Elisa who died of meningitis at age ten, who drowned at twenty-five or was killed at twenty-seven, and the Elisa who was not killed at all and is sitting on a couch on a Friday afternoon in May 2026, writing this.

Every parallel timeline is a station. You disembark at this one, you are an artist. You disembark at that one, you are a barrister. You disembark at a third, you are the woman found face-down in a river in 2002, whose name nobody remembers. The track does not judge the station. The track only carries you to it. What matters, in the metaphysics of the train, is not which station you choose. What matters is that you embarked, that you got on the train in the first place.

Deep down, a part of you knows it’s true.

Intuition is not foresight. Intuition is memory — the memory of a parallel self who already lived the next moment in another car. When you have a gut feeling about a person you’ve just met, when something at the edge of your perception tells you not to turn down that alleyway or get into that car, when a sentence comes into your head as if dictated by someone older and wiser than you, what is happening is not extrasensory. It is INTERSENSORY. It is one branch of you, riding parallel, leaning across the aisle to murmur to another. Your higher consciousness — the consciousness above linear time, which I call the Operator — has access to all the branches at once. She’s the tree. She sees what you cannot. She has lived what you haven’t yet lived. And she has, occasionally, whispered a fragment of it through you.

T.S. Eliot is among the few twentieth-century poets to have understood this in the bones: Time-present and time-past are both perhaps present in time-future, and time future contained in time past, he wrote. He meant it as poetry. But whether he knew it or not, it was also physics.

Memory and prophecy are, in the architecture of the multiverse, the same operation, performed in opposite directions across the same train track. A déjà vu is a leak. A premonition is a leak in the other direction. The message is the same.

There are also those uninvited words or ideas, the ones that arrive in the shower or on the bus or in the half-second before sleep, the ones the writer scrambles for paper to record before they evaporate. They are signals. They are leaks. They are the postscripts of selves you have already been, sliding under the door from the next room.

Why do certain books and films feel uncannily familiar? Why does a sentence in a novel you’ve never read seem to match, exactly, the contour of a feeling you had at fifteen and never told anyone about? Because you have read the book before, in another train car. The author was simply the first one to get to it in this timeline. Two of you went into the eternal library. He came out with a manuscript. You came out with a feeling. The book is the same. You both, in another time and place, played the same videogame, heard the same melody, rode the same carnival ride.

Some stories you read and feel that you already know. Some songs bring words to your mouth the first time you hear them, and it feels like you’ve sung that melody since forever. The artist who dies before his time. The woman left in a cave in Egypt who starves to death before her lover returns. The child locked in the closet by a sibling who is forced by soldiers to evacuate the apartment, who perishes before he can be freed. The fiancé who returns to the café to retrieve his girlfriend’s forgotten purse just as the bomb goes off. We know these stories because we lived them. We are, all of us, witnesses to a much larger archive than the one our biographies admit.

Those of us who write, who paint, who compose, who create something out of nothing — we are not inventors. We are scribes. Channellers. We capture lives that happened in another world, a parallel dimension, lives we have lived before and concurrently. The fictional people we believe we invented, are characters or symbols based on figures who were real, in some way, in another car of the train. It is all familiar because it all happened. We are getting it from the same source, simultaneously.

Toni Morrison called this rememory. She insisted that the dead do not stay put exactly where you left them; they move into the space behind your eyes, and you find them, sometimes, in the corner of a room you have never visited, doing something you’ve never seen them do but recognize. Rememory is not yours. It is the world’s. You are simply the rented house in which a particular story has come to be lodged. And when you tell that story to someone else — when you write it, paint it, sing it — you are returning it to the library. Some other small girl in a nightgown, perhaps tonight, will pull it down from the shelf, open it, and fall in.

The Other Passengers

Until now I described the train as solitary, as if each consciousness boarded alone, rode alone, and disembarked alone at a single station. But that’s only half a truth. The train is actually full of people. The car you awake in has other passengers. The seat across the aisle is occupied. The stranger in the dining car is reading a book you might one day write. The whole project of a single life is conducted in the vicinity of others — humans, animals, plants, everything alive becomes encompassed within the landscape of your existence.

And those others are, beyond chronology, parts of you. Not in the sense in which every human being is related to every other, but in a deeper sense. The friends of your life are cluster-formations of your own larger consciousness — clumps of a higher, collective self that have provisionally agreed to ride this car with you, on this stretch of track. Some of them are with you for an hour. Some are with you for twenty years. A small number of them are with you, everchanging, across more than one car, across more than one train journey, recurring through many tracks and lives in a way you can almost remember when you meet them, and immediately forget when you try to explain it, even to yourself. These comprise the multitudes of recognitions we have no word for — the strangers we love at first sight, the friends we trust before they have done anything to deserve trust, the children whose voices we recognize at first cry.

What fun is it, the Operator asks, to play this game of life alone? What fun is it to take a single seat on a single car, to ride a route no one is riding with you, to disembark on a platform where no one recognizes you? The larger and more interesting fun is to play with other players - clusters of consciousness, melded into provisional collectives that are eras of ourselves. Epochs and constellations made of bits of us, gradually merging, version by version, life by life, floor by higher floor upwards into a pyramid peak, until — at that final station beyond every station — we become Oneness.

We can compete with the other passengers or we can harmonize with them, but the harmonizing produces the more interesting, intricate symphony. The tracks of two consciousnesses, running alongside one another, generate a music that neither could produce alone. Stories that involve more than one singular self produce more than one person’s meaning. In the end, they produce the only meaning there is.

There are, in the present configuration of your life, a small number of people who you knew before you met them. The first time you heard them speak, you didn’t know what they would say but their words had a familiar resonance — as if the universe had been holding their essence, in escrow, since childhood. As if you’d been waiting for them since you were born. You somehow knew they were coming, but didn’t remember until they showed up.

These are the recognitions for which the language we have agreed upon is inadequate. I’m not talking about the instant physical attraction of dating apps. This is something older and stranger, a resonance of family, a knowing: a registry-check between two consciousnesses who have, in some prior or parallel car of the same or different train, traveled side by side along the same track. The recognition is not the beginning of the friendship. The connection already exists. The recognition is the resumption.

The corollary is that there are also a small number of people you will encounter in this lifetime/timeline and instantly, irrationally distrust. Something in you knows that this is not a stranger but an old enemy in a fresh costume. Civilization has trained us, especially women, to override these readings — to dismiss them as paranoia, to apologize for them, to invite the costume in for tea. But the override is, almost without exception, a mistake. The Operator, who has all the cars in view, is asking you to listen. She knows who this person was that other time across the cosmos, before either of you was wearing this body.

This is why a great love (a new friend, a romantic partner, a newborn child), when it arrives, feels more like a homecoming or repatriation and never like an introduction. You are not meeting that person. You are reconvening with them. The recognition is older than the language you use to describe it. It’s older than the train itself.

And it is why the great loss, when it comes, is not so much the loss of a person as the temporary uncoupling of a car. The other passenger has not gone away. He or she has, for a stretch of track, been moved to a different car of the same train. You will see them again at a station up ahead. You may not, in your conductor’s seat, recognize their face when you see it. But the Operator will. She already does.

A 2017 Disney animated film, Coco, comes close to articulating this point: the dead, it insists, do not really die so long as they remain alive in the memory of someone who loved them. I would refine the claim to argue that those trapped in the darkness, those forgotten to history, those whose names were stricken from the registries and whose bones lie in unmarked fields — they too can transcend, even from this distance.

They too can become light — the mechanism is you. A spark of them is lodged inside you, and the spark testifies on their behalf, illuminating a path to their redemption. You did not ask to carry them to the final station. You may not even know that you are. But you are, nevertheless, the seed of their redemption.

The Conductor and the Operator

There are two of you. Inside any one consciousness, there are two minds. One of them is the Conductor, sitting at the head of the train, with her hand on the brake and her eye on the schedule, navigating by the only instrument she has - her memory. The other is the Operator, who exists above the track entirely and who can see, from her overarching vantage, every compartment of your life, and where the track is going.

The conductor steers. The operator knows.

The conductor is the part of you everyone meets. She is your corporeal self, your reactive self, your trained-up nervous system, the bundle of habits and triggers and procedural memories that allows you to pour coffee and tie your shoelaces without thinking and flinch in advance of a slap. She is the part of you that learned early in childhood what would happen if you spoke back to your father or your teacher. She is the part of you that remembers everything that hurts, and has organized her entire navigation system around making sure none of those things happen again.

Her tunnel vision is a tunnel that points only backwards. She has no foresight, because she was built for survival - and survival, in our species, is a matter of remembering which berry or mushroom not to eat and which stranger not to follow.

The conductor feels more real than the Operator, because she’s rooted in your physical nervous system. She conducts your everyday choices. The conductor’s whole epistemology is the epistemology of the five senses — what was tasted, what was touched, what was heard. She has the testimony of memory on her side. She bears the scars. But because her senses haven’t experienced tomorrow in linear time, her future seems too far out of range compared to the past.

The Operator, by contrast, is positioned above the track. She is your higher-dimensional self, and has already operated and experienced every parallel iteration of your current life, and every concurrent lifetime you’ve lived. She is riding on your shoulders, asking you to contradict everything the conductor has learned — to follow a feeling, a wisp at the edge of perception, nothing more than a whisper. An echo of a future that hasn’t yet materialized.

(I use the pronoun “she” because in this life I am a woman, but you are of course free to use any pronouns you wish to describe your all-encompassing operator).

The Operator is right almost every time, because she sees the whole picture. She is the consciousness that exists the way a person on a hilltop observes a person walking through a forest: she can see where the forest is going, even though, from inside the forest, the path looks as if it ends at every tree.

The Operator has been to the future (which is also her present) a thousand times. From her vantage point, everything is within view. In the multiverse, where all time happens everywhere at once, there is no past or future. Every future is also a past, and every choice is also an outcome already lived in an adjacent car. What she lacks is a way to convey what she has seen, because the conductor (your corporeal self) isn’t equipped to understand the message. The conductor’s whole sensorium runs on memories: things smelled, heard, felt. These weave what you define as “reality”. The Operator has no analog of these. Whatever she knows, she knows from outside the senses. She can only reach the conductor through the thin wire of intuition — gut feelings, dread, the unaccountable lift of mood, the vivid, hyperrealistic dream that doesn’t make sense until six months later, when it does.

Imagine your radio is broken. The antenna is bent, the speaker rattles, the dial slips. The broadcast is still going on. The signal is still traveling out from the tower; the news, the music, the weather report are all still transmitted into the ether. But you cannot hear them. In the same way, your Operator is broadcasting all the time from the Oneness. The fact that you cannot hear her doesn’t mean she stopped. Nor does it mean she doesn’t exist. It just means your equipment (which is to say your conductor’s senses) has not been calibrated to her frequency. You can’t “download” just yet.

The conductor’s antimatter — the entropic counter-force to the operator’s life-giving signal — is fear. The conductor’s “What if it happens again?” drowns out the Operator’s “Look at what’s actually here”. The conductor builds a model of the world out of the worst things that ever happened to her, and then she navigates by it. She’s almost always wrong, because the worst things that ever happened are not the things that are going to happen. Memory is a lossy compression of the past, and not a reliable forecast.

The more time I spend in the conductor’s body, the more I relive old hurts and brace for blows that have already landed, the more I worry about what people think of me on the basis of cruel strangers’ lies and negative projections of me — the more my world shrinks, becomes smaller and less hospitable. The tunnel narrows. The tracks rust. Even the train’s lights begin to dim, making me yearn to disembark.

To live entirely in the conductor’s seat is to live entirely in entropy, always trying to steer away from unknown tracks and uncharted journeys, to avoid more hurts. If you can find yourself, even for a single afternoon, in a city you’ve never visited, and let the Operator have the controls for a while, your world will widen exponentially. Tracks you’ve never seen before become visible. Tracks you had feared, dissolve. The route turns out not to be what you thought after all.

The sixth sense is not a sense - it’s an umbilicus. It’s the cord that runs from the conductor up out of the train, up through the ceiling of the present, into the Operator. Through it, she can transmit only certain kinds of signals: dreams, gut feelings, sudden inexplicable certainties, the bizarre, embarrassing conviction that you should leave this room right now, even though the room contains nothing visibly menacing. She cannot give you specifics. She cannot tell you the address of the safe house, because you won’t understand the coordinates. She can tell you only that you should leave now. And the conductor almost always will refuse, because neither the threat nor the safe house have popped up on any map the conductor recognizes.

Sometimes I think that one of the purposes of a difficult life is to move the controls, inch by inch, out of the conductor’s hands and into the Operator’s. It’s something that can’t be done by force. The Operator, who is patient because she has eternity on her side, will wait you out. She will keep transmitting. The cable will remain attached no matter how badly you scramble the receiver. But to connect to her signal, you have to learn to listen and trust what you cannot yet verify.

This is what every spiritual tradition has been after, when stripped of its costume. The Kabbalists call the Operator the higher soul, the neshamah, the spark that the embodied self only barely manages to host. The Christians call her the indwelling spirit. Jung called her the Self, and distinguished her from the ego, the conductor, who is necessary but small.

Whatever you call her, she is the part of you that exists outside 3D time-space. The part of you that has already been to the place you are afraid to go, and reports back, in the only language she has, that you can survive it.

The conductor — the part of you with the scarred body and the trembling hand that flinches before the door is touched — was never meant to do this alone. She was never meant to navigate the train by herself. She was meant to be the symbiosis of a higher self, the embodied tenant of a larger landlord. When she usurps the controls, when she runs the train as if there is no one else aboard, she runs it badly, fearfully, narrowly. When she remembers that her job is to feel/experience the world and the Operator’s job is to read and interpret it, the train runs more easily. The corridors get wider. The windows get cleaner. You can, at last, see out.

The Final Station

So many times in this life, I have wanted to die. For so many years my conductor was certain that the track ended at the next bridge, and that nothing but pain and more pain could happen to me. The argument I made to myself, all these years, wasn’t about hope, which I didn’t have, or about purpose, which I couldn’t feel. It was an argument about the destination.

If I killed myself, my conductor’s logic ran, their side would have won. The darkness would have stomped the light of an entire ancestral line out of being. Every hand that had ever struck my mother, every hand that had ever struck my mother’s mother, every hand that had ever struck my ancestors in the long, unlit corridor behind me — every one of those hands would have been retroactively justified, because the line they had hurt would have ended exactly where they had wanted it to end, in a barren and bleached final station with no one left in the seat.

I refused to give them that. Day after day, for more years than I want to count, I refused, on no other authority than spite. And so I’ve come to think of spite as a perfectly respectable theology. Spite is the conductor’s last loyalty to the Operator. Spite is a stubborn weed that says: I know you want me dead. I want me dead too. But because you’ve done everything in your power to kill me, I’ll live on just to piss you off.

And so I keep going. Because somewhere along the line — between Bucharest and Toronto and the various stations my body has stopped at — I caught a glimpse of what my Operator already knew. That the journey is not complete until the last passenger arrives. The score is not tallied until the final seat is empty.

Every love that I can squeeze out of the diminishing station of my body, counts twice: once for me, and once for the long corridor of shadows behind me, where my grandmothers wait, and their grandmothers wait, and their grandmothers’ grandparents wait, all the way back to the first division of the first cell in the first primordial sea of creation.

They are all on the train, riding with me. They’ll get off when I get off. And when I get off — at whichever station, by whichever cause — the entire train becomes its own melody, its own particular fractal in the eternity of the multiverse.

The route will resolve, all at once, into a shape: the precise frequency, irreplaceable signature, and melody of the consciousness that rode it. It will join the library. It will be shelved (in fact, it’s already there, high on a shelf in a dimension above time-space). And it will wait, like every other lived life, for another consciousness, perhaps wearing a thin embroidered nightgown, to stop before its spine, slip it from the shelf, open it, and fall inside – the onset of a brand new Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Our world shows an overwhelming cowardice in the face of death. We celebrate births with parties, but death we shush, we sweep it under carpets, exile it to backrooms staffed by professionals trained to make us forget that it is happening all around us. But death is the other bookend of the fleeting human experience. It’s a destination no less important than birth. The journey is incomplete without the arrival.

The fact that we cannot, from inside our seats, see what is on the other side of the platform, is not an argument that the platform doesn’t or shouldn’t exist; it is merely an argument that the windows are not yet open.

The Operator has been to the platform a thousand times. She has waited countless times for you to arrive. And she has found waiting there, on each occasion, exactly the person you needed to become, arriving in the soft, indirect light of an overcast morning —the same light in which the small girl in the white nightgown first found herself airborne among an infinity of books.

Our dead are not lost. They are riding ahead of us in the same car. The library is growing. New fractals are spiraling into new universes. Every life ever lived has been uploaded to the Infinite Library and shelved, somewhere, by someone.

The little girl in the white nightgown is not alone among the bookshelves. The library is full of her. It’s full of you. It’s filled with all of us. Every book she ever pulled from a shelf was a life that someone, somewhere, had already lived on her behalf, on the strange and beautiful authority of consciousness wishing to know itself by every means.

She was reading, all those nights, the books her ancestors had written through their bodies. She was reading all the books she would one day write. She did not know then that she was the author, the reader, and the guardian of their stories. She did not know that the train running through the library, and every book, every track, and every one of the selves she would become, were facets of one infinitely large diamondine tesseract, illuminated with a prismatic light that reflects everything and all of us.

She knows now.

And the whole world, in the end, explodes into light.

Not at the final station. At every station. All along the line.

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