“The Pulse Beneath the Concrete”Düsseldorf, 3:17 a.m.

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You don’t remember falling asleep on the U-Bahn.
But when you wake, the car is stopped, humming low, lights pulsing faint violet like the inside of a synthetic womb. Outside: the platform at Heinrich-Heine-Allee. Empty. Silent. Too silent.

Your phone’s dead.
But the music hasn’t stopped.

It thrums in the walls—
not Muzak, not static,
but something old. Something analog.
A flute echoing through circuitry,
a guitar fed through a dying effects pedal,
a ghost of a jam session from 1973,
looping through the tiles.

You follow it.

Up the steps, past the advertising screens still blinking frozen images of watches and soft drinks.
The city is empty.
Like everyone walked out of their lives mid-sentence.

You wander into the Altstadt, where bars usually burp techno into the night, but tonight, silence.
Except for the rhythm—low and slow—growing more insistent.
It draws you down the Königsallee, past the mannequins in glass coffins, past the statues with rain on their stone shoulders.

And then you see him.

A man in a silver suit, no older than you but with eyes like reel-to-reel tape:
always spooling, always replaying.

“I’ve been waiting,” he says, voice like an overdubbed whisper.

You laugh.
Because of course, the city is a loop.
Of Heine’s dreams and Beuys’ scars and Neu!’s repetition.

He hands you a cassette player—old, clunky, warm.
The label says KOLLEKTIV – Live, Ratinger Hof, 1974 (Unreleased).
You press play.

And the world glitches.
Time melts.
The buildings breathe.
The air tastes like solder and ozone and rosewater.
You see the city not as it is, but as it wanted to be:
not rebuilt, but remixed.
A harmony of broken things.

You lie down on the pavement of the Königsallee,
as the song plays out.

A poem scrawled on a bench reads:

We are all circuits longing for completion,
caught between ruins and the future,
syncing to a beat too old to chart.

When you wake, it’s morning.
Your phone’s at 100%.
The streets are full again.

But the cassette player is gone.
And you still hear the song
in the crosswalk beeps, in elevator tones, in the blink of traffic lights.

Düsseldorf never stopped playing it.

And now neither can you.

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