(Continued from the April 2021 issue of Exotic)
The End Of The Line wasn’t much different from the beginning. I stepped off the train, onto another platform of dripping shadows, but this time, there were no lights or stairs. The doors of the train slid shut and it stayed put, blocking the tunnel in the direction ahead, and back the way I came wasn’t going to solve any cases. So, I did a few rounds of the platform and then stopped in the middle, looking at my shoes and pondering what that weirdo on the train was planning for dinner on a night like this. The drip start ed to sound like the walls were salivating and grinding their jaws around me. I tried to think of it as rain, and as I did so, I noticed something funny. It wasn’t dripping on me. In fact, there were no puddles around to speak of and the air seemed dry. I walked around again, listening at the dripping and trying to discern a source. It moved around on me, one moment across the tracks and the next just over my shoulder. I decided that the dripping was fucking with me.
Not being one to back down from an impossible situation, I started shuffling in a slowly expanding spiral, as I heard that ants separated from the nest and people lost in the woods, should do. On about the third turn, I was sure that the drip ping was coming from somewhere off to the right, where there was a wall. It was a solid wall. A wall that asked who’s asking. I quit the spiral and went to see what was up with the wall.
It was trying to pretend it had nothing to do with the small crevice, hidden by a shadow in the corner. Just out of reach, drops plunked sweetly into puddles on the other side, playful like. I squeezed myself against the wall and reached an arm and leg through, knee and shoulder protesting. A small kind of music started from somewhere down there, light percussion sweeping up with the dripping, while a few strings strummed in tandem with the rushing sound in my head. As I exhaled all the air left in my chest and scraped my way through, ribcage crush ing, panic in my head saying turn around and also saying too late now. I gritted my teeth and pushed through the claustrophobic crevice, thinking rats can squeeze themselves down to a quarter of their size or something like that...and it was too late to turn back now. After a lifetime of inching forward, I was birthed onto the wet pavement, ready to kick off my stubborn, right ankle that even tually came with me. I took large breaths on the cracked floor, as all my exposed skin burned raw with a phantom infection from God knows what was on those walls. A small drip splashed on my head. Another drip followed it, and together, they trickled down through my eye brows. The music was in stride now, the brush strokes on hi-hat light as a feather and the strings droning something like a transition song between scenes. A gloaming music. It faded as I stood up.
If turning back was unlikely before, it was impossible now. I’ve never been good at making decisions and prefer to be at the whim of things outside of my control, so while some would consider being stuck in a place like this to be a bad spot, I felt right where I should be, if I were some one who said shit like ‘should be’ or ‘destined to.’ Regardless, the darkness be fore me remained and I let the tunnel be a tunnel. I walked forward at a leisurely pace and let the dripping start up the song from earlier. It played an odd tempo this time, as if someone were missing from the ensemble—the drips hitting every other spot on something like a 4/4 rhythm.
The air was warm and humid and smelled musty and metallic-like, in side something rather than just under neath something. After a short time of walking, the tunnel curved to the right and then to the left and so forth, until I could no longer pretend to keep track of the direction I was heading. Some times, the walls would grow closer and then farther apart again, and if I got to stepping faster, they would seem to pulsate like something breathing. Or, they were digesting. My feet were getting wet from slogging through the puddles of the dripping. I was starting to think, this was the wrong sound to follow in the first place. After a few more gurgling, sploshing turns, I took a break and sat on my haunches in the posture my middle school gym teacher used to call ‘Ho Chi Minh City Squat,’ because Saigon wasn’t a place anymore. He thought he was re ally clever. I pulled out a cigarette and lit it quickly, as if feral enemies lurked out of sight. Smoking in total darkness makes the darkness that much uncannier; you expect to see the smoke leaving your face, and when it doesn’t, you get that vertigo-sick feeling of some thing’s not right. I pulled out the flask and it was getting down to the sad part. Panic started to set-in as I cursed and threw the cigarette off into the nothing. It bounced a few times, before sputtering out—the cherry leaving a pinwheel arc of red, like the saddest, loneliest fire work on a deserted planet—long after the bombs had dropped, when the grid was knocked out and the gasoline went bad. I whistled a few notes of a happy tune that dropped dead and echo-less around me like invisible leaves in the darkness.
I started getting flashbacks to the time I’d spent in solitary as a younger and smarter man, so I stood my ass up and kept walking. Not the time to start talking to myself. The Blue Jay would’ve loved this place.
As I continued to turn this way and that, I started feeling that this would be a pretty good metaphor for my life— counselors and therapists standing up in their seats, on the edge of a breakthrough. A labyrinthine exploration of both the outer and inner landscapes, etc. I took a second break and squeezed my eyes shut hard, until bursts of light formed on the wine-stained curtain of my eyelids, and I didn’t wake up in bed, with clean sheets and the sun slanting through the shades, with small, quiet birds chirping just outside, while I wasn’t late for anything. I pinched my arm. I crouched down again, against a moist wall and finished the flask, pouring out nothing for the fallen. The wall was mossy, wet and I figured that I could start sucking on the stuff for nourishment in a day or two. The whiskey did its slow-burn thing down in my gut and I nodded off. I opened my eyes in a dream of gossamer blue light that threatened to shatter if I coughed or something. I held my dream breath and watched as a beta fish drifted past, its fins as light as kelp in the current or breeze. It turned its hollow fish face to me and opened its mouth and closed it; the fins drifting bloomed fully in such a delicate way, for such a martial creature. The fish evaporated, as red cream stirred into a blue coffee and out of the purple murk Jane’s dead face hung for a moment and blinked blearily at me, and then it all went black. When you live your best life the way I do, you get used to waking up in places far from the last home you remember, but opening my eyes in this tunnel, still got my goat. Aside from the aphasic darkness and damp, it was a different tunnel than the one I’d passed out in. The mossy walls were mossier and closer. The air was stifling and wet now and smelled like blood and urine, with a musky, slumbering animal tint to it—like a leather jacket draped over the driver’s seat of a decaying backyard Chevy on blocks in the rain. I put my hand against the wall to stand up, but quickly withdrew it. It was warm, like flesh. I tentatively put my palm back again and held it there until I could be sure. It was unmistakable. This fucking wall had a pulse.
