For some time, Gregory surveyed the train car. His teeth were slightly bared, while his upper lip rose in a fettered curl beneath the goiterous bulb of his nose. Perhaps this rebus of facial affect was a simple reflection of the train’s poisonous atmosphere. Or maybe it had resulted from the mechanical pathology of petrifaction caused by the lukies, whose own public transit system Gregory’s gaunt body had become.
Foregoing the arrogance of fiction, I must abstain from any decision in the matter.
Besides our host, there were few other commuters aboard. About half the car’s length away, sitting on the other side of the brutalized plexiglass barriers which hemmed in the sliding doors, was a black vagrant, splayed out with his legs obstructing the aisle. Neither quite sleeping, nor entirely alert, he dug his mossy chin into his clavicles and constantly muttered something from out of the swollen protuberances crowding out the lower half of his face.
On the far side of the train car sat a pair of plump women in their early twenties, both garbed in ensembles of ratty black clothing, swarming with pills of lint, bacilli of cat hair, and the occasional lukie. Their voices were rhythmic and shrill, beating and reverberating through the car’s cavity toward where Gregory sat and causing his eyelids to spasm open and shut.
Finally, across the aisle from the conversing pair, only slightly visible to Gregory now through four graffiti-etched panes of smoke damaged plexiglass, there appeared to be an individual sitting perfectly still. He possessed a perfectly ellipsoid head of jaundiced complexion and exuded the general impression of… perfection.
As the train bored ahead into the pitch night of a tunnel, the quality of light inside the cabin was immediately altered: a bath of photonic urine shrouded the riders.
They passed through the tunnel for roughly two minutes before halting again at the Belmont platform. Given the time of day, the expanse of brushed concrete quadrants which lay beyond the gonging train doors was all but deserted. Only one newcomer found his way aboard: a nearly spherical day-laborer wrapped in layers of paint-becrusted denim. The squat man was indeterminately Hispanic.
Seeing that the legs of the hypnagogic vagrant barred his way toward Gregory’s end of the car as a maintenance barrier might (¡Attención! ¡Cuidado! ¡Piso mojado!), he walked in the opposite direction. Initially, he set about surveying the row of seats just ahead of the stock-still personage of mustardic hue. But then, something caused his homely eyes to widen. He lurched backward into the two women, who immediately ceased their chatter and pressed themselves into the window niche, creating an air gap between the inner woman’s sweat-glazed shoulder and the man’s – we shall call him Ernesto – soiled back.
“Excuse me?!” one of the women shrieked.
Gregory, suddenly alerted to the growing upset, sat lower in his seat and watched. Ernesto paid no attención to the outrage he had caused. Instead, he grasped the chrome railing which crested the backs of the seats on either side of his pellicular frame, and pummeled the women farther into the niche, passing gas in the effort.
“This is borderline rape, motherfucker!” said one of them.
“¡Pero no! ¿Que es eso? ¡El hombre es Amarillo! ¡Ayuda me, Sagrado Corazon!”
“This man is a psychopath! Get him off!” shouted the other one.
The train increased its velocity as it streaked through the city’s lightless intestines. The violence of its speed caused the car in which Gregory sat to rock and vibrate. The perfect oval head on the other side of the cabin began mutely to oscillate. A sound of fracturing porcelain, only partially obscured by the deafening tumult of metallic friction, was the result.
It was this sound which simultaneously arrested the women’s blood-thirsty protest and caused the murmuring bum to leap into the middle of the aisle, arms akimbo and buttocks exposed. A toothsome epoxy of diarrhoea-infused lukies held the cheeks firmly closed.
“Y’all muhfuckas on some fuck shit!” he barked in a husky, beleaguered voice.
Stillness reigned amongst the car’s inhabitants as the train coasted to a halt at the Logan Square platform. The final inertial pulse of the brakes elicited yet another guttural crackling, this time much heightened in volume. Two oblique lobes detached themselves from the top of that veiled, yet perfect head and slid off, one thudding against the textured rubber deck by the mottled suede of Ernesto’s work boots while the other fell into a cradle formed by the dormant commuter’s shoulder (Pythagorean in its angular precision) and the window niche on his side. Now the head had been shorn into the sublime apex of an obelisk.
When the train car doors parted, a gust of air from the tunnels farther down the platform rushed into the stale compartment, riling an opaque plume of lukies from the fallen bowls of skull bone. At that moment, for all intents and purposes of the eye, that end of the cabin was erased from objective existence.
Soon the doors resealed themselves and the train plunged once more into the mouth of the tunnel.
From the agitated fray of the lukies, a jumble of flat voices reached Gregory and the homeless black.
“It’s getting in me! It’s getting in me!”
“¿¡Donde está la dignidad en la vida?!”
“Jesus Christ, my –”
“What is that? Who’s wet?! Who am I touching?!”
“¡Una plaga de… Gringas, el peligro blanco!”
“Get off, Paco!”
“Yo soy solo un trabajador… quiero almuerzo… ay…”
“Oh… oh-ohwww… Stings…”
“… Yellow in white …”
“O… Beber bebidas en Chihuahua…”
“He’s… standing… Girl, I…”
“O… Comer comidas en Oaxaca… lechuga y hongos… hamburguesa con cebollas… pero…”
“Euhuhh… Euy… my puzzy’s hard…”
“Pero…”
“They’re… inside…”
“Gheeh?... Gheeaugh?...”
“Pero… un huevo desp… después…”
“It sprout…
“Un huevo… desecaaaado… desecaaaado… ay puto…”
All the while as this chorus commenced, the black had been taking slow steps backward toward Gregory’s seat. The obscurantist cataract of lukies had already advanced and eaten half the seats in the train car. Now the vagrant was close to the emergency door, which communicated with the next car over. He turned around and wrenched the handle, crushing Gregory’s legs as the door swung open.
“Nigga, move yo shit!” said the homeless man, stomping the floor with a clay-sodden basketball sneaker.
Gregory sank ever lower in the flyblown plastic of his seat, compressing his vertebrae and innards with such forceful urgency that the percussion of a membrane snapping inside of him was audible to all parties present.
This rapid Gregorian contraction provided the seething escapee with the requisite leeway, and he lunged out the door, slamming it closed behind him. But while that portal had remained open, it had created a vacuum in the cabin, drawing the lukies closer to Gregory and diluting them with unencumbered air. At the same time, the train burst out of the tunnel and climbed above the street on its elevated struttings. Sunlight flooded the windows and ignited the lukies, refracting through them with molten brilliance.
Now the far end of the train car had reentered objective, visible experience, and the party who had suffered there was coming into view. Everyone – Ernesto and the two swollen boho-goths – was now cocooned in an even coating of hardened lukies. But they continued to move under this neodermis, which cracked and resolidified with each contortion. The commuting crustaceans raised their hands before their faces, muttering rhythmically. Ernesto lay in the aisle on his convex back, failing repeatedly in his efforts to sit up. His stubbed fingers kept burying themselves in the discarded skull leavings of the Perfect Yellow One.
This latter had maintained his erect posture from before, though now the obelisk at his bodily peak seemed to emit a cold, rational light of its own.
The train pulled up to the elevated California platform and opened its doors to the ripping winds outside. Gregory shot up to his feet with all the insistence of a pressurized metal slug in a butcher’s pop gun and shambled out onto the creaking wooden boards beyond the doorway. Not a second later, the train car sealed itself behind him and began to lurch forward. The wind dropped with a sudden swoon, so that now the world had become, in a sense, airless. As the train accelerated, a tracery of lukies unmoored itself from the aluminum carapace and hovered in place. Once the flashing, clattering worm of transit had fully departed, this inert, holographic ghost was all that remained.
Gregory descended a
rusted ziggurat of stairs into the street.
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