Train

Who am I? Who are we?
Ask together with me here so I do not feel alone.

Follow white rabbit conducting the train.

Come on, let's get on board.

First stop:

One.

It's a warm summer morning in the backseat of a 1971 Ford. The morning is soft and prelapsarian and mom and dad in the front have finished their coffee and are arguing about direction. Two suns shine saffron in the gilded angle windshield reflection, as Dad hugs the gentle curves in the interstate the illusion disperses and two egg yolks converge into one scorching red eyeball in the midst of a fabric sky. Brown fields filled with life gone sour. Roots that never got enough wet love to mature. Then, suddenly, fields of flowers stream past, there should be a yellow brick road leading down the middle of them but there isn't. No emerald city absconding away the horizon either. Just trees, dark rough lines forming windbreaks in the distance, and the occasional decrepit wooden barn or shed.

Where darkness lurks.

Fighting is meaningless. They always fight. Roll down the window and redolent hot air harmoniously howls in to drown out the sounds of their quarrel. They are lost. Dad is just driving. The road is dirt. The road is dust. There is no road. The car stops, Mom threatens to get out and walk. An old dog walks up, sniffs a hissing tire and commences to take a leak. Dad sighs, and then follows her. "Stay here," he says and they talk in hushed tones for a while and come back.

Fools under and indiscriminant sun. Even this young, one can see there is no love. There are simply all these little components of attraction and the fact we've named them love is the single thing fools us.

I'm late, I'm late, cries the conductor. The train goes further back. Or is it forward? Who am I? Woh, woh, who?

Oh Oh! I'm late and we are

Lost.

Word vomit. Cashew, corduroy, pornography. Throw the words out there, one of them is bound to stick. Who knows which? Just keep going.

Neighborhood children running circles in their pajamas, dark skin and foreign tongued as their parents squat like crows in the dirt around grease-stained engines. As Jack says, Fellaheen, ornery and mean. Wild as the northern wind, and just as proud and confident.

Garage door wide open. A rudder on the shelf in the garage. Stopped steering the boat years ago, stopped going out on the water. Started wearing the same beige shirts, watering the same lawns.

Pass these dark muscled tribals on your way home. Thumping bass mating rituals cruise along the thoroughfare. Hot pavement beneath your bare feet— quick step—

comfort gives way like so many dreams, empty smoke packs along the highway. Children scrawling glyphs into a square of wet cement while the adults consult the figures. Only naïve brains could conceive of a leaving a permanent mark in stone. When rent is due the cosmic clockwork. How to pay? Pray. What might have been lost, is lost and more.

Quick step. Make the hard choices.

Unions rallied vow to destroy the control machinations of the sky. "Mommy how was I born?" asks a she-squaw. The world fucked me and we laid an egg of dark confusion that cost me everything. But death I still own. That's the only check I have left to cash. But the children commence to sing and clap. Playing a game of chase, they are Rorschach blot splatters from the collision of our hearts inertia. We fucked, we slept, maybe we dreamed, but who would have thought that night would lead to this? These lawns. These bills. These kids.

Great outcomes are but randomly connected to our conscious endeavors.

And yet we continue to act. To make the hard choices.

Keep moving until something big gets in your way.

Station stop. The train doors open and a wide slab of sunbeam plasters me in its warmth and I sit up and look. Only me. Somehow I alone am singled out in the smouldering glow of this slanting cast. As if a saint in a churchly scene at the center of some edenic world.
Suspended and breathing shallowly the air, everything shimmers and nothing is real, and I am in the centre of a very quiet world.

And then just as suddenly the doors slide closed and the world is garbled behind blue tinted windows and everything is dark and dusty and distant like a memory misted with time. A woman looks at her watch. Question everything that holds you together and watch your spine give out. Time is invertebrate. Try it! You'll see.

Everybody is crowded into this car. Students, teachers, drunks and kings. Neighborhood children rattle and tattle. Everybody. A man in a suit reads the sports pages.

Nobody

Won.

Normal people hide their feelings. If they're healthy, they find a way to vent. Sometimes that takes wearing a mask and saying what they couldn't otherwise behind an invented guise. Anonymity. Maybe it is in talking to friends underground, outside your circle. That's a mask. Maybe it’s the internet. Maybe you have a certain persona that you live up at work, and explain away to the wife when you get home as 'what it takes to climb the corporate ladder.

I wear a mask all the time, I am the mask. So, ironically, I can only express myself to her at safe intervals when I take off the mask. A normal guy, a little pale with eyes painted over, no longer fraught by natural fears. Frightened of losing her because she doesn't know it's me. Vicarious courting. Removed, I tell her things with this alter-identity that I want to say in person—

"What you think you should say," she interrupts.

"What?"

"You're not saying anything real. You're just saying what you think you should say. You're just acting."

Maybe. It is a lot of linguistic flourish with nothing much to say. Bill says you can't fake quality, or a good meal. Or a popular blog for that matter but who cares what people think. I do. I care to be seen with her in public. Her supple body and crass manner. That peppery smell along the inside of her neck.

"My boyfriend reads your blog." Yeah, great. That's just what a guy likes to hear.

"Which blog, mine? Or that boring literary sap who I'm so fond of. The one who doesn't need a mask—

"Acting."

"Can I buy you a drink?"

"Stop it. That's a line."

"That's not a line! We're at a bar, I—" I'm all about the chase but this is getting ridiculous. She sees through everything I do, far down to the fabled phallic void somewhere deep at the core of me, and all I get of her is shadows smoke and mirrors. Perhaps it's best to disengage. Normal people who hide their feelings would take this opportunity to withdraw the curtain of secrecy and face all that's left.

But who am I? Who are we? She seems to know better than anyone, and I'm not ready to face it if her eyes are any indication. A vacant look, unassuageable and bottomless. Her own mask, perhaps. I think it’s a mirror reflecting nothing, when really it’s a plea to be something.

Whites ring the pupil. White rabbit. White rabbit.
Train whistle sounds and the hour of our arrival is imminent.
Those that look out of the windows be darkened.
Day is night and time is nigh.

One o'clock.

Two.

Neighborhood children running circles in their pajamas too close to the tracks. Old Mr. Wrinkly Testicles, taking a piss in his green yard, peers over the white picket fence reeling in old dilemmas. Violent flashbacks and shaking. Now still.

Now is the violet hour. Bats with baby faces flutter about. Now the moon is out and the question boils in the depths of my thoughts inviolate, refining like a silver jewel on this deserted sea bed. Streetlights in lines that all fall apart. All falls apart now.

Now the city stretches out for miles. Now it is gone. Now the clanging of the tracks cannot be heard. Now the city sleeps and the little lights remain. Stars shining up at stars. Darkness in between. Sempiternal. The question is not the story.

No, the story is the asking. Our stories are the answer.

Now the train is stopped.

Now they disembark.

Now the lights are out.

Save one, who lingers here. Who are you? Who am I?

A light, alight, in the darkness.