man on bart

The subway was hot, and I was tired. In no mood to join the motions of the crowds around me, I looked for stillness. Space and light gasped for air in the shuffle of people around, searching for a parted leg or a raised arm. I looked for these pockets of peace to rest my eyes and mind. I was beneath and between.

It was a violent endeavor as these atmospheres collapsed in the volatility of movement around, this search was rapid and in these spaces I found stillness, a state that transcended the physical constraints of the moment. The subway burrowed deep through industrial earth, dark and decaying. As it penetrated deep into the darkness, it continued with the utmost confidence towards an inevitable destiny that had been previously programmed within.

The lights sanitized the passengers in a bath of green florescence to protect us from the depth and possible deathly disease that may seep in from the outside. The light illuminated the terrain that we were falling through. The rust and the shadows fell like flesh upon the cold concrete walls while electric cables floated in the atmosphere of exhaust and fermentations.

This passed so quickly as the train picked up speed, and soon it gave up its form and merged into a rolling film across the windows. From brown to grey to black to deep green it morphed before me, for me. And in front of this rolling spectrum I made out the form of a man, who slowly began to emerge from a stain on the wall.

He was dressed in drab, cubicle clothing that fell along certain geometrical contours that made me question if a body really lay beneath. It seemed as if he had clothed himself with shavings from the dirty, dark walls outside. He sat still and exuded eternity, like heavy machinery in an abandoned industrial warehouse. His body slumped and belly bloated with a head that rolled like a marble in the bowl of his concaved neck. His hair was sparse and seemed to have been collected from the fallen dust and follicles on the floor.

His dark eyes were swollen and their lead glassy weight pulled his face downward, searching for expressionlessness. A monolith amidst men condemned to motion. He sat so heavy, he had time. The train jolted and tossed some of the passengers off of their balance, which again shuffled the spaces between, giving me new openings to seek and sit.

But the man sat, still unaffected. I had a vision that this man was built into the mechanics of the shrieking subway car and would follow it to its logical end, on these tracks. He would either slow down at the end of the line where he would eventually rust into the earth, or in a violent crash he would remain still, a moment of peace amidst the last mayhem of many.

I imagined him dreaming of alternatives, of him escaping from the seat, the subway and the subterranean and to find himself above, away from the still, stale air, the density of the atmosphere below that allowed him to congeal as pieces into a person. But my vision found its tracks, as I saw him smile at the sight of sun and sky while his form found a delicacy that would disintegrate upon the slightest breeze.