On 11 March, 2004, the city of Madrid was hit by a series of devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of Allen Grossman’s work on Lerner, this paper shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature in terms of the actual poem and the virtual, impossible poem. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s work on democracy to come and the idea of a democracy that threatens itself, the paper then argues that an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of exposure to a literature to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. This response, in turn, requires us to think about the difference between what Derrida describes as “the good of democratic freedom or liberty and the evil of democratic license.” Concluding with the novel’s recontextualisation of the Spanish government’s response to the Madrid bombings, the essay argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.