One In A Thousand and Four
As any other day, I stepped onto the subway car, stood, because there were no seats, and kept my eyes down, not wishing to see anyone or notice anyone looking at me. The train started moving and I gladly looked through the glass into the moving black of the tunnel. Of course, I saw myself in the glassy reflection and thought how old I’ve become. A rueful smile played on my lips as I shifted my satchel on my left shoulder. I noticed a rather pretty woman looking me curiously in the same glass. I met eyes with her, smiled into the glass and looked back into the blackness, not caring whether she returned it.
The lights of the next stop took the blackness away as the train lurched side to side in the process of slowing. I always make certain to stand away from the opening doors, as much due to courtesy as well as my not wishing to be disturbed. This is my quiet time regardless of the horrid noises that emanate from these steel tubes in dirty tunnels that pass for transportation. It is funny to me that I do my best thinking in this oddly out of sort’s environment.
The blackness returned as the train left the station. I grabbed on tightly to the steel bar to my left. A slight movement caused me to look down at the silky jet black hair of a pretty Chinese woman. A large, fat, black insect was quickly moving to the other side of her head, as if it were aware that it had been spotted. When it got to the left side of her head, it reared up showing me its shiny red underside, large tentacle waving lazily side to side, its busy little arms jabbing quickly at the woman’s hair, bunching a bit of it into a ball. The bug then sidled over the bunched hair, and proceeded to spray a remarkably white stream of tiny globules into her hair. The woman was unaffected except to lightly brush at her head. I was thoroughly disgusted, my face grimacing tightly along with my stomach. I made a move to talk to her when I realized my left hand was caught in something sticky. I dropped it from the bar, seeing the red running down the vertical bar, the same as on my hand and down my arm. Little spidery looking creatures were doing figure eight dances in the blood, tiny pin prick bites assaulting my hand and arm. My stomach was flip-flopping as I hurriedly brushed at them trying to get them off of me.
Strangely, no one took notice of my odd behavior or the fact that blood was seeping out the walls and ceiling and that the bugs were increasing in volume, busily feeding and laying eggs in everyone. I wanted to shout out at everyone but a strange calm came over me and I understood that for some reason, this was for my eyes only. That if in fact this was happening, in whatever sense or dimension, only I was aware of it and it was happening within a singularity. I chose to ignore the phenomena and stared back into the blackness. As certain as I was, the blood vanished as well the bugs. A playful smile crept onto my lips as I attempted to diagnose this little bit of psychosis. In other words, ‘What the fuck was up with that’?
Before I could answer, a small fire was briefly visible in the tunnel as we whizzed by at what had now become a dangerously out of control speed. More fires were visible until it became clear that everything was ablaze. The window of the train was hot to the touch.
I looked around to see if anyone else was perturbed by any of this as I pulled my hand away from the hot glass. As a whole, they were reading papers, listening to music, eating, doing crosswords, anything but concerned with the fires and our breakneck speed.
Once again, I took this to mean that I was by myself on this one. I wanted to ask why, but a good answer was not going to be forthcoming. As I shook my head, trying to dissolve the illusions, my eye caught a young woman in the next car who was banging up against the glass with her hands, obviously screaming, with no one to pay attention to her. She caught my own stare, as she raised her arms in disgust. Pointing at me as if to say, “You too”? I nodded back at her, which prompted her to move her slender body towards the doors that separated our cars. No sooner did she touch the door on her side when her straight blonde hair stood up perpendicular to her head and she was violently thrown back to the middle of the train car. Her poor broken body lay sprawled on the dirty train floor. No one moved to help her. I was certain she was dead.
Before I could make sense of it, blood started to leak out the AC ducts that run the length of the train. Slow rivulets that started grow until large drops began falling everywhere. I grabbed at one guy whose crossword was unreadable by the splattered red. He stood up and started screaming before I could say a word. Then everyone else joined in until I had to cover my ears. The blood flow stopped but the screaming intensified, now coupling with the screeching brakes of the train. I was thrown forward by the suddenness of the stopping motion. I fell sprawling onto my face, feeling the grit of the floor on my hands and my cheek. My satchel was out in front of me. I pulled it back to myself and stood up but someone stepped on it, giving my back a jolt.
I looked up to see a tall, withered old man who looked better suited to an asylum than the subway. I thought about that one quickly as his wild and wide-open eyes assessed me suspiciously. At the very least, someone knew that I was alive.
His long, grayish white hair swung wildly as he suddenly leaned towards me and asked, “Whadda ya want”?
So much for introductions. The train had come to a stop in the middle of nowhere. The dark outside was accentuated by the blinking strobe light effect of the trains interior lights. He leaned in closer and asked again, his voice rising in volume and pitch. I responded as civilly as possible, but my patience had vanished long before.
“Get off my bag, first. And tell me why you seem to be the only one who can see me”. Everyone else in the train was situation normal, doing what they were doing before, but thankfully, minus the screaming.
He started moving towards me, saying, “Ya don’t belong, get off, get off”. He reached down and started tugging hard at my bag. I decided to get rough with him and violently pulled it out of his hands.
“Don’t hurt, don’t hurt me”, he yelled as he stepped back, arms warding me off..
I had no intention of hurting him. “Easy old man, easy there, just tell me what’s going on. I looked at him with confident eyes, hoping he would feed of off that and relax.
He looked down at the subway floor, shuffling his feet. I could see his eyeballs moving quickly back and forth. Suddenly, he looked up at me, and pointed at my chest, screaming loudly, “They’re all dead, idiot, dead, dead, dead. Not you, NO, you’re special, gifted, very special, MORON, not dead, ya MORON. Now get off, get off, yeah, time to get off, ya fuck”. With that last epithet, he jumped through the wall of the train as if it wasn’t there and disappeared into the blackness of the tunnel.
I pressed my face against the now cold glass of the train, trying to see where he went. Instead, I was face to face with an impish looking demon who swiped at me from the other side. Instinctively, I stepped back to the middle of the train.
He wagged his little finger at me, shaking his pointed head back and forth at me, as if to say, ‘uh-uh-uh, no trying to escape, bad boy, baaaaaad boy’.
I stepped farther back as he slammed his body at the glass door, repeatedly, shaking the entire train with the force of his blows. He grew in size and anger as the glass refused to give in to his efforts. He was then joined by more similar looking creatures who assisted his efforts. The fires behind them grew larger. Their cackling screams matched their horrific faces, grimacing tightly with the effort of getting to me. Their screams became a siren song as the glass finally gave in, hands groping me, trying to drag me towards the fires. I struggled with all of my might and my inner strength against their concerted effort, felling at least three of them until one of them bit me. The pain in my arm was enormous, but the will to live was stronger. Even as the sleep came over me I screamed as loudly as I could, tensing my entire body against their attack. When my scream and my struggles finally ceased, I was overwhelmed with another strange sense of euphoric calm and allowed myself to succumb to it all.
ﻱﻉﻒ
Two days later, I was visited by some of the medics who had saved me at great personal risk. Apparently, as I was informed, I was a worse risk than the fires that they had to navigate. They all had a good laugh at my expense, left me a cheese, fruit and breadbasket and wished me well. I joined them in their laughter. My girlfriend had never left my side the entire time I stayed in the hospital. Doctors orders; purely observational in nature, cautionary if you will. Never understood how you survived and everyone else on those trains died. One in a million. I corrected him. One in a thousand and four, doc. He took my correction in stride and left me alone. My girlfriend would look at me a bit funny once in a while. She didn’t think I saw it. I let her believe that and didn’t mention it ever.
She had saved all the newspaper articles surround the train crash, giving them to me when I regained consciousness and was told what had happened. The medics were forced to shoot me up with a strong sedative, given my hallucinatory and violent condition. I didn’t blame them. I had broken two jaws among other injuries before they subdued me.
I also remember feeling no guilt, not just about hitting them, but about being a sole survivor. Truthfully, I wasn’t even aware that anything had happened. I was curious about that shift of consciousness that had happened when the incident occurred. Why show me these things, what mechanism did the brain trigger to protect my rational mind from such trauma? Was it real or was it just that, a protective gesture? Then, of course, I was left with a sense of wonder. Why would I be the only one to survive? The old man knew. You’re special, gifted, and apparently a moron. I had no idea what any of it meant. I was left with my girlfriend looking at me as if I was a mutant and my own words echoing in my head. One in a thousand and four.
ﻱﻉﻒ
Richard F. Sayage
6-5-2002
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