To the Terminus and Back.

The ticket costs the same whether you use it sensibly or not, and this loophole, printed plainly on the tariff and exploited by almost nobody, is the whole foundation of the voyage. Board the tram with no stop in mind. Take the window seat, the one over the wheel that nobody wants, and let the vehicle decide the itinerary, which it does with the serenity of a thing on rails: it is going to the end of the line, and now, therefore, so are you.

The first stretch is the city you already know, performing its downtown self: the good facades, the shops with intentions, the passengers in office clothing who board and alight with the crisp purposefulness of people being awaited somewhere. Ride past your usual stop. Something small and specific happens at that moment, a click of release, because you have just become a passenger of a different order: everyone else on this tram is going somewhere, and you are only going. The distinction is invisible and total. They are spending the ride. You are riding it.

Then the city begins to undress, which it only does at the edges, and which is the real spectacle on offer. The facades drop their stone for stucco, the stucco for sheet metal; courtyards open up and show their laundry; the billboards give way to hand-painted signs for vulcanizare and second-hand everything; allotment gardens appear, with their beanpoles and their improvised chairs, the whole tender infrastructure of people growing tomatoes at the city limit. Depots slide past, and cemeteries, and the yards where the municipality keeps its spare benches and its retired kiosks, the backstage of the urban theater, stacked and unashamed. No tour includes this. The terminus ride is the only guided visit to the parts of a city that were never meant to be looked at, and are therefore the parts that tell the truth, the way the back of a canvas tells you more about the painter's circumstances than the front.

The passengers thin as the truth thickens. Every other rider is subtracted by their purposes, stop by stop, an old man with a netted bag here, two nurses at the hospital gates there, until the vehicle belongs to you and the light, the long yellow light of late afternoon coming flat through both rows of windows with nobody left to interrupt it. The announcements continue for your benefit alone, naming stops that sound like villages the city swallowed and never digested, because that is generally what they were. And then the loop: the terminus itself, which is almost never a place, only a widening, a circle of rails in a field of weeds and gravel where the tram turns with the slow dignity of a liner coming about, and stops, and exhales, and becomes for four minutes not a service but an object at rest.

Here occurs the small human ceremony the whole ride was secretly aimed at. The driver leaves the cabin. He walks the empty aisle without glancing at you, this being the etiquette, and takes his stand at the far door or on the gravel outside, and unwraps a sandwich, or lights the cigarette, or simply stands with his hands in the small of his back looking at the weeds, a man briefly between directions in a job that has only two. You are both off the clock now, in the exact middle of nowhere the city could spare, and the silence at a tram terminus has a quality found in no other municipal silence: it is scheduled. It happens every twelve minutes, all day, and nobody has ever attended it on purpose except the weeds, the driver, and the occasional student of idleness with a valid ticket.

Then the destination board flips, or these days blinks, and the front of the tram becomes the back, and the whole film runs in reverse: gravel, gardens, sheet metal, stucco, stone, until the city has its costume fully on again and passengers with purposes reboard by the dozen, unaware that the vehicle has been to the edge of the world and back since they last used it. You disembark at your own stop, having gone, by the ledger, nowhere. The ledger is wrong, as usual. You have made the cheapest voyage on sale in any city, the complete transect, out to where the truth is stored and back before supper; and the fare, I repeat, was the same as everyone else paid to go half as far, in the wrong direction, on business.