The eleven-forty to the coast left at eleven-forty, which Jian had not expected. He arrived at eleven-forty-one, watched the last carriage move out beyond the end of the platform, and stood there with a bag of fruit he had bought for his sister because he had been certain there was time.
The next train was at two. He had two hours and nineteen minutes in a station he had passed through perhaps fifty times and had never once looked at.
His first response was the normal one. He found a seat near the information board, put the bag between his feet, took out his phone, and began the familiar work of making time disappear. Messages. The news. A game he did not enjoy and played anyway. After thirty-five minutes he noticed that he could not remember a single thing he had read, and that his neck hurt.
So he put the phone away, which felt strange, and looked up.
The station was a large square hall with a high roof and windows along the top, and the light came down in wide bars through the dust. He had never seen it because he had never been early. In nine years of traveling through this building he had experienced it only as a distance to be crossed at speed, with a ticket in his hand and a departure time in his head.
An old man was cleaning the floor in long slow lines, moving backward so as not to walk on the wet part. Two children were counting the people coming down the stairs, loudly and inaccurately. A woman in a grey coat stood under the board with a suitcase, reading every line of the schedule twice, the way people do when they are afraid of getting something wrong in public.
Jian bought a cup of tea he did not need and sat by the window on the south side. The tea was too hot and slightly bitter. He drank it anyway, slowly, and discovered that he had no idea what to do with himself when there was nothing he was supposed to be doing.
It was not a pleasant discovery. He was thirty-eight years old and could not sit still in a railway station for two hours without treating it as a problem to be solved.
Around one o'clock he took out a piece of paper and, without any clear plan, began writing down what he could see. The cleaner. The children. The woman with the suitcase, who had by then been joined by a young man she clearly had not seen for a long time. He was not good at it. The sentences were flat and he crossed most of them out. But for about thirty minutes he was completely awake, in a way he had not been in a station or anywhere else for a long time.
The two o'clock train arrived. He got on it, found his seat, and put the fruit on the shelf above.
His sister asked why he was late. He said he had missed the earlier one, which was true and explained nothing, and then, because she is the kind of person who waits, he told her the rest of it: that he had been given two hours he had not asked for, and had spent most of them finding out how badly he uses the time he does choose.