Staintaint

      At the first change in the leaves, you began to notice the existence of the stain artist. Few others did. Every time you saw him, he would be standing on the platform of one particular underground station. As a person, he was unassuming: a street individual with eyes that leered and exposed an excessive whiteness. It was not the case that people 'failed' to notice him. They ignored him deliberately. But, at that general period in your life, you had come to a conclusion - that you could no longer afford to look away.

     To be more precise, the stain artist would always either be standing on the platform, losing himself in the train tracks' mesmerizing filth, or stalking the white tile hallways beyond the turnstiles and the chiming terminals where people transferred magnetic fare values onto small plastic cards with rounded corners. The first few times you saw him, he had been relatively inactive; as you passed, he would do little more than bare his bewilderingly crowded teeth and, in what seemed a precautionary manner, would thrust his hand into a beaten leather satchel slung over his shoulder.

     On one of the rare nights when you were out past one in the morning, you managed to find him working. The station was empty, save for you, him, and a transit authority employee sitting in a bulletproof booth who never looked up from the screen of her phone. The man was standing in the carbonic hell beneath the platform, scattering some tinted fluid against the colloidal brick set into one of the far walls. 

     Incrementally, the juice breaking off in a mist from the tips of his fingers as he flung his hands created the deepening impression of a space that extended past the wall's limit. You found this virtual space to be something like a tunnel leading away into a gigantic subterranean chamber, smoldering in puddled darkness. 

     The stain artist stood with his legs astride the polished third rail as he splashed consecutive layers of faint liquid onto his work surface. Under his worn boots was a shallow bed of gravel, coated in a uniform layer of annihilated particles; some larger pieces of gravel would occasionally dart out from beneath the suspended third rail and run for refuge into a triangular gash in the base of the wall (this breach had been created by a consuming, poisonous runoff that had begun as rain in the atmosphere before filtering through the many infrastructural strata between the platform and the streetscape above). Sometimes, these frantic, animate clods would be stricken by a droplet of the artist's stains and would come to a dead standstill as a dimming, drying portal of imaginary space opened in its back.

     At first, you kept your distance, fearing that you might disturb him and launch a chain of sequential events, each one more threatening than the last; at best, he would merely cease what he was doing and you would never see him again; at worst, he might turn on you and give you a face-full of the potions sloshing around in his bag. But it became apparent after a brief span of time that the man was entirely absorbed in his technique and that no conceivable intervention on your part would pry him away. So, delicately, you approached him and took up a spot just before the place on the wall where the stains expanded and glistened with a pale, malarial palette of hues. 

     From such a small distance, you could hear how he muttered words to the rhythm of his slingings. Some of these words he uttered once and never repeated, while others recurred as if to punctuate and enclose the errant creatures of his speech.

     "Bliss. Beast. Shell, snap. Spoil, coin. Beast. Is. And yet. Beast. Is. And not. Push. Boil. Fog. Steam. Beast. Cool, hide. Cool, smile. Cool, smoke. Beast. Beast, grow. Beast, seed. Eat. Glut, cook. Taste, split. Pure, split, Beast. Is. And yet. Is. And not. Clean plate, Beast plate. Look. Stain. Look. Taint. Beast. Teeth, of not. Eat, and is. Smoke. Close. Is. Chew. Beast, true. Pit. Heat. Rise. Bead, Beast. Join, then is. Air. Cool. Blow. Shrink. Air. See. Beast, is not. And yet, is..."

     Along with the words, each new staining streak would bring forth an aspect of a visage as it was absorbed into the pores of the brick and the crumbling grout. At times, you felt you could see a mouth, speaking to you with wordless snapshot torsions of its corded plaits of muscle. At other times, there may have been a hideous dragon plucking splinters of exploded wood and curved shards of eggshell from suppurating rents in its scales.

     After an hour of standing there (not having been interrupted by the screeching arrival of a single train), you began to internalize the man's spoken cadence. Certain verbal formulae were converted for you into understandings.

     There is a Beast, an invisible Beast, which can bee seen at every moment if one but look. Sometimes, it ceases to exist, but that doesn't stop it from trying to break back into the world of 'appearances.' It is a Beast of Consumption. Sometimes, in seconds of heightened self-awareness, we actually see this impossible Beast - to see it is to shatter it, to make it a disjunction of unrelated surfaces. But, more often than not, the teeth of the Beast close around us, pulverizing with mandibles of a surfacing conspiracy. This state, you've since learned, is called 'The Crowning of the Beast.' This is when the Beast has climbed to the pinnacle of its reality, its solidity, its visibility - but, having consumed you, it has destroyed the one who might see and recognize it. Everyone, solitarily, has been submitted to this procedure, this routine. It is a paradox of earthly being which Christ condensed into the words, "The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

     Just before his disappearance, you began to see the stain artist propped up against a tile wall by the elevator shaft leading down to platform-level. His pant legs were rolled up to his knees; beneath them you saw weeping pits that revealed the bare bones of his shins. He could no longer walk. After about the fourth consecutive day of finding him in this way, you resolved to ask him explicitly about the catastrophe to which he had succumbed. You wanted to know: was it an ailment? What had precipitated it? 

     Through lips that could hardly open for the adhesive discharge settling in their splits and grooves, he responded with a single word:

     "Staintaint."

     This utterance, in its tone and consonantal mass, confirmed that there was nothing you could do for him. So you continued down the bend in the hallway and caught your train.

     The next day, he was gone. On the wall, just where he had been sitting, there was a fanning, indelible spray - a stain evoking commingled urine and rust.

     Thereafter, no effort made by the city's sanitation workers could efface it. You felt a great urge, at first, to study this spoiled region of tile - to read the testament that the mysterious man had left as a legend to his sudden absence. But, overcome with terror at the unknown consequences of such an unmediated cosmic knowledge, you chose to become a sightless coward. 

     Now, when entering the station, you make sure to file in with a flood of fellow commuters, and you ignore the concept of 'stains' altogether.