Ndong.

In his story, on the right-hand doorpost of the cab where he works, there's a small round mirror, the pocket-mirror kind, stuck on with electrical tape and turned inward; it's been there for years. If anyone asks, Ndong says it's to see the platform, though the platform is easier to see through the window, and everyone who rides the train knows it. Nobody presses him on it. The blue of his face, by the way, is structural color: collagen fibers under the skin that bend the light; the red does come from blood vessels near the surface.

In his story, Ndong's family doesn't live in Owendo: they live deep in the forest, in a community of more than six hundred people. It's a number so large that almost nobody in the city believes it, so he stopped repeating it long ago. He goes up there in the dry season, between June and September, and for those weeks he stops being the engineer of the local and becomes, simply, one more member of a community so large that even he doesn't know every face.