Charles chose his seat wisely. There were no official rules or methods of how to sit on the train, but for Charles, he sensed a cosmic force guiding him to just the right spot. It always changed, because there was no real consistency, although he would admit that he had his favorites. On this day, Charles found himself right in the middle of the bench. A pole to his right was the perfect barrier to give space between him and the many strangers who would inevitably squish their way in. While he secretly hated them all, he found a bit of forgiveness in his heart because he knew that everyone hated everyone on this train.
Charles heard once that only fools sat down in a train without first taking a scrolling look through its occupants. Secretly judging each one and taking stock; should there be a need of spotting a problem before it became one. Charles didn't wholly believe in this reasoning, but always thought of it amusingly, because it was something he had done and would continue to do. Knowing a little about his surroundings got Charles through a lot in life. Knowledge was always the best companion. On the train this particular day, Charles found the usual crowd from his neighborhood; the quiet families, the elderly Russian women, the Hispanic cleaning ladies getting an early start, one possible homeless man a bit down the car. This latter occupant was not always the norm for his morning commute. Charles was thankful that he had moved to a neighborhood that was lacking in the loud, inconsiderate, and homeless. All three of those things being very separate from each other. And on the very unfortunate occasion, the same in one. Long ago were the days wherein panhandlers would come from opposite ends of the car, yelling over each other and the screech of the tracks, begging for money and sending a blessing from God to each and every one. Now Charles found peace in his commute, and it was an almost necessary meditative moment to take many breaths before he got into work.
Charles's job was a bit of a complication. He had recently gotten a promotion. One that he didn't want, but one he had “supposedly” been working towards for some time. It was another of those inevitable movements in management. A door opened, and he was the next in line to walk through it. The money was a “blessing” - as the homeless would say - and came with perfect timing. The stress on the household bills was at an all-time high. Manageable, but stressful to the point of nearing burnout. But what Charles was trying to breathe out with each buddha belly breath, was the dread that came from working a job that had zero connection to anything that interested him. Millennial burnout was on the rise, and Charles found himself trudging right along into the trap that awaited him.
But this was all just a rabbit hole that he didn't have time to dive into. One that he needed to add to his To-Do List, right after buying filters for the air purifier. But for now, Charles decided to close his eyes and let his mind wander elsewhere. He also decided to put his headphones in, because the man at the other end of the train was most definitely battling a bout of morning paranoia. Further confirmation that he was probably homeless. Although Charles realized that you didn't have to be homeless to suffer from mental illness. They just happened to be a common denominator in this city.
As the music flowed through his body and drowned out all of his other senses, with his eyes closed to the nonsense of public transit, and his scarf pulled high over his nose to block out the pungent stench of bleach and body odor, he found his mind couldn't wander far from the angst he felt about going to work. It made him remember something his husband had said earlier that week. Being from a poor household in another country, Charles's husband had the foreign concept that dreams came true in America. But what his husband had learned was that apparently, you had to be a white male born in America for those dreams to become reality. So while he didn't necessarily blame Charles for being who he was, he did put magnitudes of stress on Charles for not understanding the advantages he had and for not using them to obtain his dreams. But dreams are hard to chase nowadays. Of course, Charles knew that he had an unfair upper hand in the game of life, yet that didn't make everything in life easier. Charles’s dreams were very much plagued by equally abundant nightmares. Those nightmares being fear. Fear of failure, embarrassment, and ridicule. Fear of not being the right one for the job. Dreaming was the easy part for Charles, it was the doing that halted him, and the weakness most held for life's monetary enticements that pushed him further up the ladder of bureaucracy. Where the ladder went, Charles could only guess, because he was always worriedly looking down into the darkness from where he started. Was there another route somewhere along the way that he missed? Could he dive back into that black rabbit hole and try again? These questions would always haunt the darkness of his past, and the fear of the answer stopped him from trying. So Charles kept moving forward because standing still didn't ever seem like an option either.
The melancholic song that was lulling Charles into the depths of his self-loathing sprang into a new, more upbeat, ditty. It woke him a bit from a sleep he didn't realize he was entering, but his nose scratching against the bag in his lap as his head sagged low was a telling fact. The change in music was welcomed, but the high-pitched whining and sound of clustered blabber didn't sound like any music he had ever downloaded. Charles noticed that a few more people had joined the train and they were all clustered down at the end - sans the homeless man who must have made his departure - and talking rapidly with each other and craning to look out the windows of the last set of doors. Charles popped out an earbud and heard the metallic whining fill the train car. It was followed by the rather urgent chatter of the other riders, which wasn't nearly loud enough to be coherent over the screech. Charles thought for a second to put the music back in and wait out whatever it was that always seemed to boggle the subway system and make him late, but then he realized, the same commuters he knew were loath to make eye contact with each other were now all huddled together and acting much more frantic than city people were known for. If something as prosaic as rail construction was the hold-up, wouldn't they too be in their seats, ignoring each other’s existence and bopping along to their music?
Suddenly, the train made a dramatic lurch. A few of the train-goers standing at the end fell to the ground in a cry. Charles knocked the back of his head on the wall and saw stars. He rubbed the spot for a moment as his mind asked the big question: What the fuck was going on here? The bang to his skull sent his balance off and he felt like he was tilting over to the side. But when Charles started to slide down the bench, it was impossible to ignore that it was the train car that was tilting, not Charles. With another sudden lurch and the accompanying sound of metal joints popping their rusty hinges, the back end of the train ripped off, taking with it the group of straphangers who were moments ago just staring out the windows in confusion, and slipped into a gaping black mouth in the ground, which ate it all up rather silently and politely. Charles saw all of this from his precarious angle, as he was then moments away from his feet slipping from the floor and sending him down as an aperitif. The train car perched at such a steep slope that Charles grabbed onto the nearest pole, imagining that his legs would soon be dangling in the open air below him. It all sat there in a freeze-frame, probably enough time for multiple people to have made a hasty escape, but Charles was too busy. Here it is, he thought, here is the moment he had been waiting for all these years. Those nights in the dark streets, imagining a blade slipping into his stomach with the smooth motions of a practiced mugger's hands; the beating anxiety of his heart expecting an earth thundering ‘BOOM’ to send him flying through the air as a suicide bomber chose the rush hour traffic to make a statement; the blinding, world-ending flash that accompanied the inevitable nuclear bomb pointed at Trump Tower. Charles thought of all the times he awaited death's destructive arrival and realized that moment had finally arrived.
And surprisingly, this made Charles feel more calm and prepared. Even though he gripped the subway pole with all his might, it didn't seem so different from the pressure he used when avoiding falling over on the speeding bullet of an express train. Charles confidently and swiftly pulled himself up along the increasingly steep tilt of the subway car. The current link of the train Charles occupied struggled in a fight with gravity, and the stronger of the two was winning. Luckily for Charles, he was quick enough to make it to the connecting door. He wrenched it open and forced himself through with a leap. Now in between the two train cars, the cacophony of it all hit on Charles's eardrums. The screams of the train were long and piercing. There was a greasy, oddly familiar scent of burnt all around him. It carried in a cloud of smoke that swirled around in elegant loops.
Charles kept his feet moving. He was through the next door and continued further into the train tunnel as he navigated down the cars. One he entered was plunged into darkness. A darkness everyone experienced once in their city life. An alien feeling of being trapped dozens of feet under the earth, encapsulated in darkness and steel, just a momentary glimpse of a future death. But now the unforgiving darkness was heavier and more permanent. Charles knew he had to keep moving forward in case this car too ended up being pulled into the hungry chasm behind him, but he had a moment's pause. Although he didn’t hear anyone in this car, he couldn’t imagine it was empty. Where had everyone gone? Charles swiped that from his mind and used the poles to guide him along. He was at the far door and entering the next train quicker than he imagined. A sense of relief began to melt through him when he saw the light in the next car, but looking at what covered the floor sent anxiety skyrocketing back up.
Everywhere, on the benches and overlapping on the ground, were dead bodies. They were all face down and covered in already drying blood. Each seemed to have been slashed from the neck to the hip. Most had their spines exposed, displaying the intricate intertwining of nerves and blood vessels. Charles defaulted to a commonplace of befuddlement and asked himself, “What the actual fuck is going on here!?” Although he screamed it out into the train filled with dead bodies, rather than asking himself.
The train lurched again and sent Charles careening forward. He tripped over more than one lifeless body and went spilling down to the floor, just barely missing a face plant into the jagged edge of a stranger's exposed spine. He got up quickly, only slipping twice on the blood-slicked floor. He noticed his hands and knees were covered in the coagulating mess, reflexively wiping his palms down the seat of his pants. Charles held his red-hued hands out in front of him and noticed in particular how much they were shaking. His sanity was leaching out of him. The only thing to do was to keep moving. So he stepped gingerly over the recently departed and made his way to the last door in the train. Through the blood-smeared window he could see out into the dimly lit tunnel. Charles had his hand on the handle but paused. It was clear that someone, not the bad timing of the aforementioned sinkhole, had killed these people. And if so, where was that person now? Probably out on the tunnel tracks, waiting for the escaping occupants to run into his swinging blade. But Charles felt he was better off facing one mad lunatic than taking his chances in the death-filled train car that was being pulled along to its burial hole.
Charles jumped and landed unceremoniously amongst the gravel. There was no immediate sign of a crazed killer, but there was a small sense of accomplishment in not being sucked down with the rest of that metal death trap. Charles's first instinct was to take out his phone and use the flashlight feature to guide his way. It was his second instinct to use the phone to call for help. With the light pointing down the tunnel, Charles tried dialing 911 but stopped before hitting send, as he noticed that there was zero service available. Instead, he kept the light trained in front of him and kept moving down the tunnel. He rubbed again at the sore spot on the back of his head from when this all began and thought about simpler times. With all of the years he lived there in the city, he believed he had already experienced the commute from hell, but this one took the cake.
As he walked further down the tracks, Charles felt growing anxiety about being lost down in the tunnel for days, never finding an exit, and starving to death in the darkness. There wasn’t much validity to this fear; he knew if he just followed the tracks he would eventually end up at the next station. But fears were never that easy to quench. Before long, there was a rustling coming from up ahead, a sound that Charles hoped wasn’t a mischief of rats forming a mountain of unsurpassable numbers. My how the darkness played with the imagination.
Before Charles could get close enough to see with his cell phone light, there were two loud echoing pops, accompanied by bright flashes of light. They were similar sounds to those Charles convinced himself in the night were only cars backfiring, or neighbors lighting fireworks in February. They stopped him in his tracks, quite literally, and he hid the light from his phone. Immediately there was a volley of the pops and lights, they sent Charles sprawling down onto the gravel, but he still kept his eyes looking forward. In the bright flashes, he could see the faces of the men who were pulling the triggers, their eyes just visible over the scarves pulled high over their noses. Their guns were pointed at the farther wall where people stood lined up, their heads covered with burlap, their backs to the shooters, execution-style. This, more than anything Charles had seen in the last 20 minutes, was the most befuddling so far. Did he just happen to stumble onto some gang war? Were these the elusive Mole People who lived in these undergrounds, partaking in activities beyond our scope of reality? Either way, Charles didn’t stick around to find an answer. He scurried back the way he came and tried to stay low, hoping to keep out of sight of the shooters, and out of the line of their firing.
Out of breath, and possibly out of mind, Charles stumbled his way back to the train. He was glad to see it was able to escape the sinkhole that most definitely opened up to another dimension. It was the only way to explain what was happening down in these tunnels. But Charles was sure that he would never be able to escape the image of what he had just seen. The irregular flashes from the bucking guns firing at their query still burned the gunman’s faces into Charles’s eyes. They were annoying bugs that hovered in his field of vision. Unable to swat these pests away, Charles only hoped that time would soften their image. As of right now, he didn’t seem to have time to contemplate anything about life, only the matter of keeping his intact. Charles worried that the shooters may be making their way to him. He saw a vision of a burlap-covered world, his back splayed open to the tunnel's dirty air, and a muzzle pointing against his temple. Perhaps his cold corpse would be tossed down into the black pit after all. No, that wouldn't do, he needed to keep moving.
Lucky for Charles, he was still quite calm and level-headed from all his mental preparation for doomsday, even with the things he had seen in the last 20 minutes. He quickly scurried between the train and side of the tunnel, hoping he could find a way onto the platform the train was earlier pulling into. He figured there had to be some way around the pit. And his hopes were fulfilled. Just a few steps down and Charles found a service door. Even though it stood ajar, Charles had to squeeze it open a bit more, causing it to screech on its rusty hinges. He could only hope that the sound wouldn’t be loud enough to attract any unsavories. He quickly slipped into the dark hallway behind the door and brought out his cell phone light again, its beam illuminating a narrow passage perpendicular to the tracks, a lone door standing very far away at the end. Charles also couldn’t help but notice the steep slant of the floor. The hallway was leading him deeper into the ground, definitely not the way he wanted to go. But there wasn’t much choice at that moment.
Charles ran down the passage, burst through the door, and was hit by a massive wall of heat. He could nearly hear the sizzle of his sweat as it immediately evaporated from his skin, even as the heat forced his body to double its production. The sweat suddenly seemed to fill his shoes, making him fully aware of his crotch being soaked through, it sent rivulets down his back and puddled in his ass. The heat was a bed of salt, quickly and efficiently pulling all the moisture out of him. While his body flooded like the Nile, his mouth became as arid as the Sahara. Charles realized how thirsty he was right at that moment. It was something entirely unto itself, separate from the chaos that surrounded him, its own screaming war within his body. His urge to hydrate simply overtook his mind and blocked everything else out for a moment. He had never felt such a basic need for something he always took for granted. It sent him into a near panic as he looked around the boiling hot room, searching for the answer to his body's demand. But all Charles could see was the new mess he found himself in.
The room he entered looked to be a construction site or a place to build something. He saw machinery that lined up next to each other for hundreds of feet. Each one produced rivers that glowed a bright orange-red akin to fresh magma. When he stepped in to take a closer look, a new wave of heat hit him. It dawned on him then; this must be Hell. The thought was as sudden as a heart attack at 25 and twice as scary. He may have wet himself at the thought, but his pants were so soaked in sweat he couldn't be sure. But as quickly as the thought came, his mind had shut it down. There was still a primal urge for water, but also to keep moving, to find help. Charles moved further down the lines of molten something, but the heat was too intense and it sent him staggering back. He made to double back and find another way, but the thought of going back to what he had just escaped was more displeasing than the heat. Instead, Charles pulled his dress shirt up over his head, protecting his face from most of the burning heat, his undershirt still covering his body but almost too thin to give much protection. Charles ran over to the nearest wall and pressed himself against it, hoping to escape the boiling river, and regretted it immediately. He had tossed himself onto a hot griddle, nearly searing himself to medium-rare perfection. He screamed for a moment, perhaps out of frustration more than anything, but it sent adrenaline rushing through his body at the least. Charles made another go for it and used the momentum of his emotions to run through the current roadblock.
It only took a short distance before his ragged breaths brought him to a slow trot. His heavy inhales sent the drying heat down his scorched throat, dehydrating him more than he could have imagined. His tongue was now an old sponge jammed down his windpipe. Thankfully, Charles saw a door coming up on his left. Learning from the wall, he tried to kick it open first, avoiding the need to touch it. It didn't open, but he could feel it rattle in its frame. He wrapped the bottom hem of his undershirt around his hand and tapped the handle a few times, testing the heat. His mind suddenly flashed to the scene in a movie he watched growing up where a burglar trying to break into a house, being guarded by a kid, put his hand boldly on a metal door handle that was being lit by a blowtorch on the other side. Charles burst out laughing in a fit of giggles that was grossly out of place, but it was something he couldn’t control, and it threatened to drive him to his knees. It took a second, but he got a grip back on his sanity. He tried the door again and was gratified when it swung open on smooth hinges. True to the night’s theme, he paused at the door before he entered it. Nothing good had come that night after he pushed through his hesitation of passing a new room’s barrier. Although he was still alive, so that had to count for something.
The space on the other side of the door spilled into a darkness so deep, Charles felt that he had instantly become bodiless. An unattached soul floating in the vast nothing. It was almost a welcoming feeling. His senses came back eventually, and he used the bundle of his shirt to crack the door back open. The orange glow of the strange molten rivers flowed into the room but didn’t show any apparent escape. Charles searched again for his phone’s light, but found that his phone was no longer operable. Perhaps from the flood of sweat that covered Charles, short-circuiting the electronics. Or the immense heat of the room, frying the little computer's mainframe. Technology be damned, Charles was determined to get out of the eye of this shit storm. So he kept moving.
Lost in the darkness again, Charles worried he would stumble onto another pile of corpses, perhaps beheaded, their necks displaying the veins, arteries, and nerves that were the highway of life, once supporting an animated body. Or maybe a gun would fire in the distance, sending a blossom of red spreading across his chest. Or, maybe worst of all, Charles would walk straight into another sinkhole, the floor disappearing beneath him and he would fall, and keep falling, screaming until his voice was long gone, perhaps dying from dehydration before he even reached a bottom. All of these thoughts awoke something in Charles. He felt a rumbling in his core; some hunger to live. Even while the world in this underground torture chamber seemed to be splitting apart, trying everything it could to suck in the lives of those nearest, Charles found a strength in himself that said he would fight to get through anything that may cross his path next. All he needed to do was keep on moving forward.
Finally, Charles’s outstretched arms bumped into a wall. Its rough, graveled texture eventually met the smooth metal of a door. There was no hesitation this time. He reached for the handle and eagerly pulled it open. Coming from the near darkness, the swirling dust filled with the sun's light blinded Charles momentarily. While his eyes adjusted and his skin greedily drank in the cooling breeze, Charles could hear the rhythmic thuds and metallic clank of heavy machinery. Perhaps he was right before, he had entered some sort of construction site, the rivers of molten steel part of the process. Maybe even the sinkhole was caused by some sort of error on the contractor's part. But then how to explain the mutilated corpses on the train, and the masked executors of the tunnels? He tried to put these pieces into the puzzle as he slowly made his way up a cement ramp and came to level with the ground floor, but the puzzle fell to complete shambles as his eyesight returned to him.
Marching before him in a bleak staccato rhythm, lined up in an endless parade that led right into the cleansing burn of the setting sun, were the most defeated, beaten down humans that Charles had ever seen. With dead eyes, each one stared into oblivion. They all held the shoulders of the one before them. Chains linked from one thick iron collar to another's, hands set in matching pairs, the chains of those linked to the neck of the leading prisoner before them. And that's how Charles saw them: as prisoners. It was clear, somehow he had ended up in a sort of hell, right next to the welcoming parade. He was watching them be led to an afterlife of torture and misery, their souls already broken, but surely the worst still to come.
Charles was glued to the spot, his feet unmoving, tears streaming down his cheeks, his hands covered a trembling mouth that was fighting back muffled cries. Somehow he knew at that moment that everything he had been running from was designed to bring him to this exact moment. All along he thought he was escaping from torturous methods of death, and he ran from each, even though he felt the hesitation with each door that he passed. Charles ignored his body’s instinctive instructions and played right into the hands of this engineered torture. He didn't know that plunging into that black hole that started this entire night of running was the way to escape a curated nightmare. Charles thought he was trusting the instincts he had built in his life. But then, he never trusted himself to take a leap of faith before, so what would have been different this time?
As quick as his next breath, Charles was whipped off his feet and shackled into the line. The weight of the chains was unbearable, but the full reality of what was happening was the force that drove him to his knees. His feet grew as heavy as the cement he walked on, fumbling underneath him, and tripping him up. With his legs numb from the waist down, he couldn’t get his feet beneath him again. All of his weight was being held in the collar that shackled him into order. Charles gasped for breath as it dug into his windpipe. He was being dragged along, his limp body nothing against the flow of the imprisoned horde. With his arms stretched out in front of him and shackled to the neck of another, he had no leverage to pull himself up, and even though the world was fading around him and his lungs burned for the sweet taste of oxygen, Charles knew that he would not die this way. He would just go on feeling the death surrounding him, building towards a horrific torturous climax. And all while this was happening, Charles could hear someone yelling far away. The voice echoed all around and demanded to keep marching on, marching on, the ants keep marching on! Hurrah! Hurrah!
With that one little nursery rhyme from Charles’s childhood memories, his mind pulled out of the hellish daydream his morning commute snared him into. Charles lifted his head from the makeshift pillow his backpack often roleplayed as, and loosened the scarf that pulled tight on his windpipe. Bewildered and near tears, Charles was equally confused and elated to find that he was still on the morning train. Although he must have looked like a lunatic whipping his head around and taking big shuddering breaths to calm himself, no one paid him any attention. Most were focusing on ignoring the singing lunatic who continued to scream out his nursery rhyme.
“The ants go marching seven by seven,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The ants go marching seven by seven,
The little one stops to pray to heaven,
And they all go marching down…
Down…
Down!”
Charles looked at the raving man and suddenly felt compassion as strong as it was unfamiliar. Charles stood up and pulled out a wad of cash from his wallet, not even looking to see how much it was, and stuffed it into the cup of coins the homeless man shook along to his rickety beat. The only response the vagrant gave was to cough out a smoker’s laugh, one that sent spittle flying into the air and clap Charles on the shoulder. They caught each other's eyes for a split second, but long enough for Charles to see the bottomless pit that almost ate him alive in his nightmare, reflected in the pupils of the man. They were tortured eyes. He wondered if it was the same look he had at that last moment before he woke, chained to all those people, each awaiting their death, once hungry for life.
Almost missing his stop, Charles jumped between the closing doors and stood for a moment on the station platform. Another beggar positioned at the far end was set up with a guitar and mic, his voice and choice of song much more appealing. Charles noticed how downtrodden the man looked, but how genuinely he smiled. A man who was no doubt down on his luck, but happy nonetheless, as he followed the difficult path that only fed into the well-being of his soul, not one that led to a shackled lifeless sham.
With the musician's voice still whispering in his ears, Charles turned back to look at the departing train to see if the homeless man continued to scare money out of the straphangers with the devilish look in his eyes and the scratchy ominous tone of his voice. To the dismay of the remaining train passengers, the man had taken off his shirt and was now dancing, the shirt whipping above his head, a lasso aiming to hogtie their money. But what caught Charles’s eye was the long line of knotted scars that ran down the beggar's spine from neck to waist.
Comentarios