A man who is more terrifying than a baby with a tattooed body steps onto the subway car. In a strange dream from the night prior, the narrator recalls a newborn bearing a multicolored snake painted along its back. The serpent slides down to the neck, coils around it, and its head hovers near the child’s cheek and mouth, its forked tongue flickering in unsettling rhythm. The baby wears steel piercings in the nose and the right ear, a stark symbol that something ahead of ordinary life has begun. The scene is presented as an ordinary event in the dream, as if this birthright feature simply existed from the start. The viewer visits a hospital to see the child’s mother who proudly lifts the infant for the audience to witness. The dreamer responds with a neutral reaction, neither warmth nor revulsion, a stance that still leaves a trace of unease when waking.
The man who enters the car carries an incongruous aura: he appears babylike despite his age, lacking any piercings that would mark him. His face seems perpetually young, perhaps around fifty, and the paradox is both terrifying and strangely protective, a combination that makes one hesitate between care and flight. As soon as the observer processes this tension, the man locks eyes with him. The blank, almost forensic gaze feels like a theft of identity, a touch that seems to pull a piece of the observer out of their own body. The act unfolds slowly, the man tilting the observer’s sense of self like a toy, rolling it across his skull as one might roll candy in one’s mouth. Curious about the watcher’s purpose and the time spent in the subway, the man remains inscrutable, inviting a deep, unsettling reflection on what it means to be seen.
The observer instinctively shifts away, but the sense of being watched remains like a living residue. A hallucination lingers in the brain, while the other passengers move with ordinary disregard, unaware of the tension unfolding between the watcher and the baby-faced stranger. The narrator exits at the next stop, lingering near the closing doors to ensure the child does not accompany the wrong person into the street. Once outside, the dream continues to pull the observer into a rapid urban rhythm, a city that seems to absorb and reassign bodies in an almost cryptic exchange. The face of the stranger remains a wandering presence, a mark left on the city that appears to belong more to the dreamer than to the person who wears it. Questions echo: how many such exchanges occur in the bustle of big cities after dusk, unseen and barely understood, shaping the lives of strangers who never meet again?