Chinese numbers distinguish between two different types of zero, which are really two types of nothing: one is an absolute nothing, the one that I suppose shapes the limits of the universe, where no particle of any kind has ever existed; the other is represented by the character ling 零, which denotes the lingering traces of something left behind, like the humidity that hangs in the atmosphere after a storm. An absence defined by the vestiges of what was, and of how it was.
In those static days, everything was ling; a gap where before there had been something. However, this is not a story about that time of stillness, but rather the tale of one long night.
By the time I had been offered the job in London the worst had already happened, and at that moment I found myself at Atocha station. In those first summer days of 2020, walking was a freshly unboxed toy it seemed we would never grow tired of. I would wander aimlessly around every day, often ending up at Moncloa, at Atocha, at Príncipe Pío. The train stations housed all the movement we had missed: streams of tourists, tardy passengers, waiters carrying coffees; even in the central pond, the Atocha turtles were climbing up onto the rocks and slipping back down into the water. From the bench where I had sat down, I could see them, slow and Jurassic, some soaking themselves, others drying in the sun. A man came over with a broad smile and a shopping trolley filled with leaflets. He had been watching me, he said, as he held out one of the little folded flyers with a photograph of a group of children on it. The kids were standing in a meadow, surrounded by white doves and gazing up toward a cloudy sky in which a ray of light could just be seen. I gave him a look that was in fact a question, and he indicated the text in the leaflet: What is life. With no question mark, and in the same font as Telepizza. With the conviction of the mystics, he announced that he was there to save me. I thanked him for his good intentions, but no thank you, I had already been saved, and so had he and all the rest of us who were in Atocha station that day. He looked at me, confused, and I took advantage of an announcement over the loudspeaker to get up and take out my phone. Instinctively I opened my email: they were offering me the job in London. Distancing myself from the mystic at that moment meant moving away from Madrid. I could simply have stood up, but leaving Atocha and leaving the country were one and the same.
Sometimes decisions such as ending a meal with dessert or coffee (or having white or whole wheat bread alongside) take more time than the ones that entail a significant life change. I wondered which two things this visionary with his delusional pizzeria leaflet would be choosing between. When faced with a choice, do we not always opt to launch ourselves onto the roulette wheel?
A gaggle of American women pulled heavy suitcases, tourists spun around using their phones as antennae, a swarm of people blindly followed an umbrella. Movement always catches up with us.
*
In my new role at WorldTrans, I was based at the London branch, but I had to spend one week per month in the Scottish office. On the penultimate Sunday of every month, I would take the sleeper train, waking up in Edinburgh on the Monday. There, I stayed in a little hotel until Friday afternoon, when I headed back to London. I tended to arrive at each destination drowsy, my legs as swollen as my spirit was deflated, as if the volume of the latter had been transferred to the former. They were long nights and, unlike in the past, a sense of lightness did not come of its own accord; I had to summon it.
I had already lived in the UK capital some time ago, taking a writing course in English and working as an au pair. This period of cold sandwiches, old carpets, and a feeling of lightheartedness was the story of a parenthesis: it existed without roots or gravity, so much so that it might just as well not have happened.
This was a time apart, and before long I returned to Madrid, where life went back to being less carefree. I studied for a master’s degree and worked, among other things, as a freelance translator; it was a precarious situation, but in the silence of those solitary months, translating helped to create the illusion of company. During that time, the silent microscopic enemy emptied the streets, turning them into a film set from which the cameras had fled. And we, the spectators, watched the mass tragedy unfold from inside our homes, doing only what was necessary in order to keep going, speaking in whispers, breathing just enough, rocking a little. The whole world was holding its breath as if under water, pretending not to exist, not to be there, so the ambulances wouldn’t find us.
After those motionless days, silence, fever, and loss were left behind. A time that felt so elastic concluded, and I, keen to start moving again, found myself once more settled in London.
Although all stories come to an end, not one of them does so completely; they are slowly woven together, just as these fragments were, waiting to form a larger tapestry.
*
Of all the train journeys I took, the one at the heart of this story was the most memorable. Perhaps it happened because I forgot to take a book along for the trip. Reading on night trains has always been a refuge for travelers; in motion, a book could be shelter, could be comfort, a lantern, as Walter Benjamin said. Even the dreaded airplane cocoons us in a cradle when we have a book. The lights in the cabin are switched off and the individual seat lights illuminate us like clouds dropping water onto a little cartoon character. As we cross the black void, we read a story that is at once brightly lit and shrouded in shadow. But that night, I did not have a book with me.
When the next station was announced (the only stop the train made on its nocturnal route), I left the compartment and headed for the café car, where the waiter behind the bar was fiddling with his fringe and moving around unhurriedly as he served mini bottles of gin and the small cans of tonic that went with them. He crossed the length of the island of Great Britain more frequently than I, and perhaps he had come to loathe the stations and the constant movement.
The carriages were divided into compartments whose seats could be brought together in the middle to form a bed made out of their lower halves, but this would mean obtaining the consent of everyone in the carriage; and even if it were granted, it would be rather awkward to recline next to strangers in the resulting proximity. These nights generally elapsed with all the passengers sitting upright, trying to avoid one another’s gaze in the strange intimacy of the little cubicle. That night, there was no one else in my compartment, and as I walked back from the café car I imagined that, without a book, my only company would be the semi-darkness outside and the gin in my belly. But I was wrong, because as I entered the carriage again, there was a story waiting for me, one that was about to become entwined with my own.
At the previous stop, two men traveling together had got on. They were sitting opposite my seat and smiled at me as I entered the carriage. I wondered what the connection between them could be. They conducted themselves too carefully with each other to be related. They might be friends, although one was much older than the other, but there was a glimmer of a worshipful student–professor dynamic between them. The younger man could be a favorite postgraduate student. I had known several relationships based on this unrivaled formula: a man who yearns to be listened to as he is starting to become obsolete, and a younger man who longs to be chosen from among an already select group of students. They were American, and they were speaking about a novel; the younger man was doing most of the talking.
“I don’t think your book is selling just because of the scandal,” he said tentatively. “There are lots of reasons to read a story. It sold quite a few copies in the weeks leading up to Donovan Seymour’s article, and in any case—who cares what the reason is! What’s important is that it’s being read.”
His companion was staring out of the window with a melancholy air, as I imagine so many beleaguered writers have done. With the outside almost devoid of light, he would only see his own reflection, and perhaps this image caused him some despair. I guessed he must be around sixty, but his pitiful aura made him seem older. He hadn’t responded to the younger man’s attempts to cheer him up, and at one point he seemed to take note of the image he presented to my eyes, as occasionally happens with strangers.
We leave home, tell stories, laugh, and uncork bottles of wine with whoever consents to join us. And so the days go by, until we catch our reflection in someone else’s eyes. The gaze of others is a mirror there is no use trying to escape, one of those claustrophobic spaces at an old-fashioned fun-fair where concave and convex mirrors reflect back an ever more distorted image of ourselves. None offers an objective reflection, but it’s not as if any of us has ever seen our own face either, except in the form of an inverted symmetry. It seemed to me that the professor felt a shred of this bewilderment when he saw himself in the eyes of an unknown woman.
The student was attempting to convince him that many books had become successes despite having been accompanied by some sort of scandal—in some cases because of such a scandal. I listened to this conversation while pretending to read a magazine I found in the compartment.
“I don’t care how much the book is selling. It’s gotten buried under this thirst for gossip—it’s a bestseller with the beating heart of a reality TV show. There’ll be nothing left of the novel apart from that after the article.” His sorrow seemed genuine to me, and I thought that perhaps he was truly despondent and not simply playing the role of downhearted writer.
The young man looked at him, intrigued. “But is it true?” he asked.
“Is what true? What Seymour wrote in his article?”
“Yes,” replied the younger man. “I thought that most of the accusations were invented. If that’s the case, can’t you sue him for libel?”
I was unable to resist raising my eyes from the magazine. I saw in the professor something akin to gratification at my interest. My gaze, while timid, was asking whether this story they were discussing was true or not. The younger man was looking at him expectantly, waiting for a reply, and occasionally eyeing me with what seemed to be pique; I had intruded on their story, even if only silently. I could have left them alone to speak openly, but I had already started listening, and it’s true what they say about how ears have no eyelids. Hearing stops only with sleep.
The professor looked directly at me for the first time: “And you? Are you also interested to find out if what Donovan Seymour wrote is true?” He held out his hand with a smile I had no time to interpret. “Terence Milton—pleasure to meet you.”
__________________________________
Excerpted from I Made You Up Inside My Head by Marta Pérez-Carbonell, translated by Rosalind Harvey. Copyright © 2026 by Marta Pérez-Carbonell. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
