by Lamb, Robert
It was amazing how one’s perspective on what was acceptable could shift overnight -- change entirely in the course of two weeks.
Still holding the railing, he heaved himself out from the wall. He took another step down, then another, just as the first arrivals began hurrying their way up from the terminal -- packs of rushing youths first, one older, Japanese man in a spiffy suit. None of them seemed to notice the morbidly obese figure on the stairs.
Fat fuck.
Then came the walkers -- assorted races, assorted positions on the socioeconomic sorting shelf -- they all moved steadily past him, up the stairway to the surface and sun. He made a point of not looking at them, tried not to engage them anymore than the mere sight of him was likely to.
Thankfully, many of them were already half-submerged in another place -- the cords of hidden iPods slithering up to plug their ears with banal tunes and rhythm. How long till those little white plugs stoppered nostrils against the stench? How long until they filled the mouth like a ball gag and packed gouged-out sockets with sights of the better-than and wish-it-were?
He still felt their gaze, though, felt them eye-fucking him through their peripherals. A lone Chinese woman lugged grocery bags that reeked of dead sea life. A punk girl with a face full of piercings carried a baby in her arms. Their youthful vigor hit him like poison. When the girl finally glanced at him, her eyes burned the question into him: How could you let that happen to you?
By the time he’d made it down to the next landing, the last of the new arrivals were surfacing: a few elderly loners, a bum. Last of all, a sallow-faced transit cop walked past him with the kind of deliberate inattention only an off-duty police could muster.
The noise of their footfalls followed them up the stairs, fading until he was alone again.
Griggs stared up into the circular, convex mirror in the corner of the landing, positioned near the ceiling, at his own murky reflection. His shabby, gaunt face was ridiculously disproportionate to the bloated torso that belled out around him under the trench coat. His eyes were bloodshot and bagged, his sunken cheeks covered with a week’s worth of scraggly stubble.
The echoes of the trains rose up to him.
He felt weary -- felt at one with the sickness that covered every surface of the underground. But there wasn’t that much further to go. One more flight, through the turn sties and then he could take a piss before the final decent.
Then you can sit, he told himself. Then you can finally rest.
He had to know. He had to bring the circle back around to what happened two weeks and 180 pounds ago. He knew the answers were down there in the tunnels, down where the trains wormed their way through the guts of the city.
Currently, it was all a blur -- a jumbled dustbin of fragmented memories.
It had been sometime after 5 a.m., on his ride home from another graveyard shift of IT work, the tail end of another empty night flipping monitors.
He’d been one of only five passengers in that particular subway car. He’d taken his usual empty-hours seat in the middle of the isle, pulled out one of those hipster magazines he occasionally picked up at work. There was an article in it about the war, another about global warming and -- more his speed at 5 a.m. -- an artsy photo shoot with some lush, 20-something in latex. She’d been photographed squatting over a silver bowl with a beef tongue in one hand and a machete in the other. The blade had been inscribed with three symbols, something like “NNX.”
One moment he’d just been sitting there, lost in the woman’s curves. The next, a jolt rattled everything to the core.
A groan of metal.
A tremor shaking through the spine of the train.
Something like greenish-black ink splattering across the outside of the windows.
The rest was hazy.
He remembered screams, the sound of something thudding against the roof of the car. There was a great deal of breaking glass and twisting metal -- then only darkness.
Later, the doctors had told him he’d been trapped in the wreckage for six hours -- just lying there unconscious in the dark while emergency responders made their way down. The surface world had tittered with rumors of terrorism. The nurses had told him it was a miracle he’d survived unscathed. After one more night of surveillance, they released him back to the wife and kids.
Five days later, he’d sent them all to stay with Gail’s mother upstate.
***
He was lucky enough to find the restroom both unlocked and unattended -- a rarity these days. He stuffed himself into the last stall and, once again, resisted the urge to sit down and relieve his aching frame of its ponderous burden. Instead, he leaned against the concrete wall and set his fingers to work unfastening the front of his trench coat.
His actual waist had been somewhat absorbed by the swelling, but he’d managed to secure his pants by simply lashing them tightly just above his groin. He reached blindly under the enormous bulge of his belly, finally rolling his chill-shrunken member out through the zipper.
For a while, he just stood there -- thinking about urination, opening the mental valves and pawing with his mind at the triggers of release.
He reached underneath the XXXL t-shirt with his other hand and, in what had become a familiar gesture in these final days, felt the surface of his belly. The skin was hard with swelling, just a membrane of pressure and pain coating an enormity of numbness. The more he ran his hand across his gut, the more he could feel the individual balls of globular tissue inside him.
He had convinced himself it was just some manner of water retention at first, maybe stress-related weight gain, but eventually there could be little doubt it was a tumor.
He’d Googled up a host of worrisome images: gaunt men and women with enormous sacks of flesh ballooning out of their side, human eyes staring piteously out of faces twisted into bloated mockeries. It spiraled into blood-slick surgical photos, the elephant man’s tortured skeleton. He learned the arteries inside larger growths could swell to the thickness of water hoses, the host shriveled and starving as the rouge tissue gorged itself on blood.
He’d panicked – and somehow, through the panic, had been able to convince himself nothing was wrong, as only a man facing the sudden onset of malignancy can do.
The swelling had continued. It wasn’t long before Gail was pleading with him to see a doctor.
On the fifth day, the globular nature of the tissue had become apparent. His energy had waned and he was finally forced to give into the shame and quit going to work altogether.
At last he’d sent the family away for the weekend. He’d told Gail he needed a couple of days to himself and that Monday, he’d go to the doctor. He’d told himself he’d think it through, just needed the time to process it all alone.
He’d left the apartment Sunday night and purchased several bottles of vodka before checking into a cheap hotel room -- a place to imprison his apprehensions, calm the terror growing inside him.
The spells of lightheadedness had begun to hit him whenever he made sudden movements, sending his mind reeling in backward summersaults, splitting a hundred different directions. And it wasn’t just the spins or vertigo either -- that he’d recognize. This was nothing short of a sudden leap through the kaleidoscope. It made him feel as if his mind were pouring out through a thousand different holes, into a thousand different possibilities, then back into himself, back into his squalid bed in room 308.
His skin had crept in revulsion at the thought of arteries the size of sausages, and he’d tried to drown the mental image in vodka.
He’d pondered over the bottle of sleeping pills on the night stand and watched black-and-white footage of the invasion of Normandy through a blood-shot haze, numbed himself with Cartoon Network and Animal Planet till reality began to seep into a Technicolor blur.
But it had only gotten worse.
Tuesday, the drink had just curdled to anger and self-loathing in his gut. In a rage, he’d grabbed one of the globs of tissue and squeezed
it until he could feel it burst under the skin. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected – perhaps the release of popping a zit or pulling out a splinter. He’d certainly felt the pressure shift inside, but it immediately turned into the sharpest pain he could remember, shattering through the numbness. His mind had performed another back flip, fragmenting a hundred ways through a sea of pain. He’d shrieked, trembled and wept. He’d drunk more and turned up the volume on the idiot box.
He’d grown more depressed after that. The tumors had continued to grow. His reflection was staggering to behold. He’d finally tried a couple of the sleeping pills with the booze. The darkness had taken him for a spell.
He must have slept all of Thursday and maybe part of Friday. He’d woken to the sound of animated characters chasing each other around a ship, wondering if Gail was looking for him, imagined her showing up at the door with some cop and the hotel clerk. The thought of her finding him like this had terrified him. He’d spent a large portion of that afternoon shuffling a pile of pills around his cupped hands, weeping uncontrollably.
That night he’d dreamt through the kaleidoscope again -- dreamt of running through a hundred underground tunnels, up through the base of the world spine and towards the sun.
Rise, he’d heard a thousand voices whispering in his mind.
At last he felt the slight release of urine trickling out of him, heard the sweet music of it splashing against yellowed porcelain.
***
Griggs shuffled out of the restroom stall, only glancing at the crimson cloud he’d left dispersing in the bowl. Slowly, applying great care to each footfall, he made his way down the last couple of flights to the terminal itself.
He braced himself against one of the oily support beams -- this one with a skull-studded sticker for a band called MAETH plastered to it -- and began waiting for the train.
He’d made this decision just 24 hours ago, day 14 of his new life. Back in room 308, he’d eaten the last of the pizza. The liquor was running low. The pills were tempting him more and more to just fold the fucking cards, close up shop and let someone else worry with his mess.
“But why here?” he had asked himself. “Why now when don’t know how? Don’t know why?”
His pill and booze-numbed mind had fumbled with wild theories: radioactive waste stored under the city, a terrorist’s dirty bomb, something in the air down there perhaps, gasses rising up through the cracks … The question had burned its way through his mind and he’d felt his desire for understanding move through a hundred different tunnels of consciousness. He had imagined the subway car twisting through the massive, tumor-swollen veins of the earth. He had thought back to the greenish-sludge flowing over the windows, of the screaming, crashing glass and rattling steel that filled the murky void between wreck and recovery.
So he’d decided to take the final journey of his unspectacular little life -- to leave his lair of self-destruction in room 308 and return to wherever it was on that dotted, crimson line beneath the city that everything had changed.
He felt the tremor of the train approaching, heard its roar advancing before it through the darkness of the tunnel.
He looked down and saw a rat crawling its way across the garbage-strewn tracks, moving haphazardly toward his side of the terminal. It paused here and there to inspect the surrounding refuse: coffee cups, cigarette butts, newspaper scraps already beginning to dance in the ozone wind of the approaching train.
And everywhere there were batteries. Why so many batteries?
The rat seemed unconcerned. It continued to move towards the terminal, finally disappearing from Griggs’ line of sight. For a moment, he was tempted to move closer to the edge, to follow the rat’s path towards the safety of some crack in the cement. He could see himself stepping over the warning line, falling to his knees and leaning his head out over the edge as if it were a headman’s block -- watching the rodent crawl to safety, even as someone screamed and the purging roar of the train rose to a deafening crescendo.
But instead he just stood there. Watching.
The train pulled to a stop and he waited till the deluge of pedestrians flooded off before boarding. Twenty-eight years of traveling the city’s underground told him right where to go: to the rear corner of the car, to that compact little tramp’s haven of four seats. He let himself collapse, sighed at the relief to his knees and back. The globular growths inside him settled into place.
The doors shut and the train began to move. He took another quick nip from the vodka bottle.
He thought of Gail and the kids -- and, as the train jerked to life, he thought of a thousand different Gails, a thousand different Ambers and Keiths -- should he feel worse for having left them? The three of them, after all, had just kind of showed up at different points in his life, unrequested but accepted marker points in what he’d always expected of a normal life. Gail had wanted to date him, so they’d dated. Gail had wanted to move in together, to marry, to have a kid and he’d agreed to all those bonds of normalcy,
Now they were severed from him. Where, in his current predicament, did he fit into their prime time TV world?
In the end, this was happening to him… He was the victim, the sufferer, the sad-fleshed vessel.
Things blurred further.
Rise.
He imagined a thousand burrowing tunnels…
Rise.
… a thousand frenzied eruptions…
Rise.
… a thousand brilliant, burning suns …
He forced himself to open his eyes and sit up a little, willed himself back out of the kaleidoscope. He mustn’t give into it just yet, couldn’t surrender before he knew.
To run was selfish, but what could a doctor have done? What would they do if he went to them now? Crush the growths one-by-one till the pain drove him mad? Slice him open and let this sad sack of skin fall like a bloody cloak from the bulk of his malignancy?
There was no going back.
***
As the train moved from terminal to terminal, each jerking stop sent his mind reeling. He soon became unsure where they were in relation to the stretch of tunnel that had changed him. But when he was there, he’d know.
For a time, he drifted in and out of slumber, subdued by the booze in his system, by the whine of the train and the steady throttle of the tracks. The human cacophony of his fellow passengers was almost comforting.
He dreamt of a thousand Gails weeping in surgical wards -- the doorways all strangely circular, the sterile hospital hallways beyond them curving upwards with the impossible angles of dreamscape architecture. He saw a thousand fetish models arching their backs for a photographer’s ring flash, the gleam erasing the last symbol from each ceremonial blade. He felt the jar of subway cars jumping their tracks as the windows washed with black-green ink…
A sharp jolt woke him and he found the train still clicking along through the underground -- except now it bore but two passengers: himself in his subway tramp’s cubbyhole, and a thin, ragged-looking man halfway up the cab.
The stranger stood in the isle, one arm hanging from an overhead strap. He swayed to and fro with the rhythm of their movement, a constant sweep of long, greasy black hair and trailing raincoat.
Griggs stiffened, gripped his belly as a sharp pain thundered through his insides. He gritted his teeth to keep from calling out, closed his eyes.
He looked up and saw a jumble of gaunt strap-hangers turning around to stare at him -- then just the one again.
Griggs gasped loudly, his eyes brimming with tears, but already the pain was fading into a web of pins and needles.
“You OK there, big fella?” The man asked. His beard was scraggly, his face emaciated. His wide, junkie eyes twitched with manic intensity.
“I’m fine.” Griggs grunted, looking back down at the floor, trying to calm his breathing.
“You sure about that?”
The stranger was walking toward him now. Free of the strap, he moved slowly down the aisle, swayin
g to either side with the movements of the train.
“I’m sure,” Griggs grated, sterner this time.
“Really? You don’t look so hot.” The man stopped and braced himself against the subway bar just a few feet away. “Where ya headed, bro?”
“Home.”
“That’s where the heart is…”
“Please leave me alone.”
“Hey, no problem…” The stranger smiled a yellow, toothy grin. “I don’t mean to hassle. I just know -- fuck man, riding these things can take a lot out of a fella.”
“Look, I…”
“Last time,” the stranger said, “they had to cut me out with a torch -- a fuck’n torch. Can you believe that?”
Griggs stared up to meet the stranger’s eyes again. “You were there?”
“Two weeks ago,” the stranger said. “We’re close to it, you know. Get off at the next stop and I’ll take you there.
“No… look, I don’t know --”
“Yeah you do…” The man said, nodding matter-of-factly. “That stretch of tunnel ain’t gonna be open again anytime soon. They gotta test, gotta scrape, gotta find out what happened… kinda like you, right? Kinda like me. Can’t say I blame ya for not really do’n all the math. Hell, I only know the score ‘cause I’ve been riding these lines solid the last 48 hours. And I want the same thing you do.”
Griggs looked up at the shabby stranger’s face, stared deep into those addled, blood-shot eyes. His pupils were enormous.
The man cracked his black and yellow grin again. “Yeah, we got ourselves changed in different ways. Did you see it before it got to you? I’m guessing not, since it did you up the way it did.”
The stranger pulled one arm from the sleeve of his raincoat, and then began untucking his black t-shirt.
“Me, I saw the fucker crash through the door,” he said, “saw it right before it did me up with this.”