The Last Stop

Aris woke before dawn, took a towel from the hook behind the door, and dragged himself to the bathroom. During the rainy season, the water felt like ice, but he was used to it. The force of the water knocked a cockroach onto the rusted drain cover. The insect paddled briefly in the puddle before slipping out through the gap beneath the bathroom door. A lucky cockroach. He would have crushed it if he had seen it.

He went to the mosque for dawn prayer. His shirt was never ironed—only hung up after drying so it would not wrinkle. He had been wearing the same trousers for two days. He changed his socks once a week and had no fixed schedule for washing his shoes. Heavy rain was falling when he left home at 6:05.

He arrived at the station fifteen minutes later and forced his way into a packed train car, squeezing toward the middle. One hand gripping the overhead rail was enough to steady himself against the constant pressure of other passengers pushing in. He stood like that for the entire ride, staring at the rain and thinking about the same things he had thought about yesterday and the days before.

He arrived at the office at 7:22, his clothes half wet. He left his umbrella on the terrace beside the pantry, put his bag under his desk, and changed into flip-flops. He hoped to read for a few minutes before work, but several urgent notes were already waiting on his desk.

He worked in the file section, handling file requests, organizing records, and putting everything back in place. The job sounded simple, but it required patience, precision, and physical endurance. He handled twelve file requests that morning. During busy hours, which usually began at 8:30, staff members were already lining up to borrow files.

He never prioritized people who arrived late, even when they invoked the names of managers or directors—and people respected him for that. When a file was difficult to locate, usually because it had not been returned or had been moved to someone else’s desk, he told them to retrieve it themselves.

The work came almost without pause. If he wanted to eat lunch, he had to lock the file room door. He often ate inside the cramped room, and sometimes locked himself in just to rest for a while, letting people wait outside or leave request slips on his desk.

During his first year and a half, he worked alongside a senior employee who had already been there for four years. Two years later, the man was transferred to another department on the third floor, and Aris had been working alone ever since. Now he had nearly spent as much time in that department as his senior had when they first met—with twice the workload.

Time passed quickly in that room. It was quiet when no one needed him. There was only him, the work, and Sheila on 7. He stepped out only to use the bathroom and perform afternoon prayer, then returned to his desk and disappeared into the work again.

The office closed at five, but he had his own time to leave. After preparing files for the next day, he waited to go home by reading. He had loved books since college. Any kind of book. For the past week, he had been trying to finish his first novel in English.

At 5:28, a cleaner came to sweep around his desk, collect the trash, and switch off the lights in the empty room next door.

He left at 7:30 and continued reading on the bus and while waiting for the train. Even though the train was not crowded and he got a seat, his tired eyes kept him from reading for long. He spent the rest of the trip thinking about the same things he had thought about that morning, yesterday, and the days before.

He had a law degree. He should have been working in legal—or something close to it—not spending his days in a narrow room. But he was not the kind of person who put himself first. His father would retire next month. One younger sibling was still in college, and another was in junior high school. It would be difficult to become the family’s sole breadwinner on his current salary unless he found a better job. Or started a business. These were the things he thought about on his way to work and on his way home.

He arrived at Bekasi Station at 9:11 and moved with the other tired faces toward the exit, where motorcycle taxi drivers called out their offers. He waved them off and said, “My house is close.”

He crossed a slightly congested road, turned off the main street, walked along a dark road behind a row of buildings beside the river, passed trees whose leaves rustled in the wind, a parking area for scavengers’ carts, and a row of food stalls. At the fifth intersection, he turned toward the main road, climbed the pedestrian bridge, crossed the quiet highway, and stopped at the corner of a shophouse to buy a plate of siomay.

Three bicycle vendors sold siomay there, all from the same kitchen. He stopped there at least twice a week after work. Three times if he really craved it.

Though he went there often enough, he never got to know the vendors and never felt the urge to talk. For ten thousand rupiah, he got siomay that tasted just as good as the kind he once ate at Cikini Station a year earlier.

He thought about nothing else as he ate—only the siomay, the potatoes, the cabbage, the tofu, and the quiet of that place.✦