Death and the City
one of the north-bound trains hit someone.
it's the third time it's happened since i've been taking the train: seven months. the loud kid in the back -- his nebulous male relative blames their grandparents for all his problems, won't take responsibility for his own life, and mama, I'm totally with you, she's the biggest, dumbest fucking bitch I ever met -- calls up someone to say he saw the body, a dead man with red hair and blood all over --
and i glanced out the window. gone, and i'm just as glad, but the impulse sickens me. why do i look, why do we look? fascination with death, with other people's woe. glad it wasn't me, poor fucking son of a bitch. is that it? no. someday it will be me; is _that_ it? no. not for me, anyway.
human curiosity. strange sick thing. experiencing by watching. experiencing being creamed all over the track by a train going sixty miles per hour. no, thanks.
what was he doing there? suicidal? drunk? careless? is there a cosmic meaning to it? i don't really think so. fate is what you make it.
two hundred sixty years. a little more than double our current lifespan; that's what they -- infamous they -- lived in the book i just finished reading. two and a half centuries. make your own fate in that time. make your own past, your own future, your own life. in that much time or less.
try not to step out into oncoming traffic. especially trains.
the lights are going on an d off, in the train. no, the conductor says, you're not having flashbacks. i was the only one who laughed immediately. some older people -- mom and dad's age -- laughed when the lights came back on. maybe they can't think in the dark. no one my age understood why it was funny.
weird, that. i asked at kinko's the other day for something to be brad-bound. the girl behind the counter looked at me very oddly. she'd never heard of brads.
and she was my age, for heaven's sake.
interesting, that. my age, working at kinko's. beyond my imagination--well, no, well within it, but strange never-the-less.
straight up, the loud boy says, a body lying on the tracks, not covered up at all, cops all over the place when we're going by. fuckin' dead. so i'll be there by 8 o'clock. i'll be there, chica. i'll be there.
my hands are cold and my lower back hurts. i'm wearing a pale yellow shirt. ted says he likes the color on me. i always thought i looked like a banana in yellow. he thought i should wear a jacket this morning, but the one i have doesn't match the outfit. yellow t-shirt. loose beach kahkis. sandals over white socks. a grey blazer doesn't match.
and such small things are a life made of. dead man on the tracks. what choices put him there? certainly not wearing a dark grey blazer over a summery beach outfit. dave barry said once he believed that the average successful 43-year-old who killed himself wasn't suffering from depression or a bad marriage or a rough job, but that he'd suddenly remembered something hideously, painfully, horrifyingly stupid he'd done in seventh grade, something no one else remembered, and he could no longer live with the humiliation and had to do himself in.
dead man on the tracks. i don't think he was that businessman. i'd like to think he didn't do it on purpose: hell of a way to kill yourself, by making someone else do it. cruel. someone's driving the train, you know?
ted was listening to the warden of some prison in texas where they put people to death. it was the first time ted ever reconsidered his position on the death penalty. not because of what it did to the person put to death, but because of what it did to the people who had to put him to death.
one of many reasons i don't believe in the death penalty. an interesting conversation, though. what choices do you make to become the man who pushes the fatal button? there are things worth dying for and things worth killing for.
being a prison guard is not one of them.
what was worth dying for today on the track? alcohol? loneliness? the end of pain, the coolness of oblivion? a taunt at society? if i must die, i will fuck up your life too? make you late for dinner, make you swear and swear into your cellphone, like it will do some great good, or make the trains move faster?
or do you just think, now it's time to die, and step in front of a speeding train?
imp of the perverse, kevin called it. the impulse to open the emergency window at 36,000 feet. the thought that surely _you_ will be all right; a man with a gun couldn't shoot _you_. is that the way we deal with mortality? by denying it so vigorously that once in a while we have to step in front of a train to check it out?
well, of course it is. look at religion. most of them provide a way out, a way to live forever. most of them don't, granted, suggest stepping in front of a train as a way to emphasize your belief in the eternal soul, but hey, whatever works.
flippancy. another way to deal with death. dylan thomas wrote a poem, a refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in london. the last line of the poem is, "after the first death, there is no other." so true. and someday i'll write about that, too.