305.0x

The boy resorts to the store every day. He wears the same black carpenter pants, dyed gray from years of cat hair. He’s conspicuously underage, white. The storekeeper is at least three times the boy’s age; the store is located in a part of the city where it is necessary to sell cigarettes as single units, in epithet “Lucy‘s”. There is a lighter attached to a string behind the cash register.
It took some time for the boy to gain the storekeeper’s trust. At first, the boy would pay homeless men lingering outside of the store to buy him malt liquor. Then the boy would attempt to bring the bottles or towering cans (they reminded the storekeeper of the leaning tower of Pisa) to the register with a hood up or headphones on so the storekeeper couldn’t get his attention: the boy would leave the money on the counter, over-tipping, and evade. The boy was pertinacious, and eventually the storekeeper, succumbing to pseudo-paternal and mood-congruent empathy, stopped demanding I.D.
The boy would nod his head in appreciation after every transaction, tactfully slipping the black plastic bags into is backpack; the storekeeper had never heard as much as a clank. The boy, though underage, had the adept discreetness of a professional alcoholic. He walked with his shoulders charismatically slumped; always alone, most likely having mastered the precariousness of coping with solitude. The storekeeper often imagined where the boy drank.

The boy studied while riding the subway because it helped him focus. He enjoyed the assurance of going somewhere without having a specific destination. The rattling of the train-cars, the muttering of the homeless; the chaotic ambience honed his acuity of mind. He’d ride the A train back and forth, for hours, chugging malt liquor silently between stops. Being confined to the train while it was in motion prevented him from procrastinating, and it also quelled his constant need to be productively active. Pacing, writing, studying; if he was potentially wasting time, he loathed himself as inutile. Sometimes he had trouble initiating his priorities, and in turn, would get stuck, obsessing about how he wasn’t doing what he should be doing, how he would do it if he was doing it, what could go wrong, the order it needed to be done in, at what time of day it was most convenient to do so. He comprised methods of forcing himself to switch his priorities to irrelevant activities so he could procrastinate, while accomplishing through means of inverse procrastination, his true priorities.
However, doing so was very complicated and unreliable, so he mainly resorted to drinking. He helped women carry their baby-strollers down the platform staircases. He had polarizing conversations with strangers on opposite platforms, yelling louder than intended. Sometimes he wobbled down the car aisles, from car to car, stumbling into poles and people, even collapsing and sprawling on the squalid aisles themselves. He took pictures of strangers without asking, often causing them discomfort. He once miscalculated the size of one man (and his tattoos) and was punched in the gut until he fell over, the wind knocked out of him, then subsequently kicked on the floor.
He rarely ever drank too much, but when he did—despite his claims to himself that being drunk did not disinhibit him—he’d plop down next to women and ask them if they would kiss him. The drunker he was, the older and less attractive the women he sat next to became. This gradually increased his chance of having positive results to around fifty percent of the time.
The problem that always impertinently arose at least once during his underground ventures was the need to urinate. He’d either leave the station, hoping to find a vacant alleyway up top, or huddle over to the farthest and darkest corner on the platform and urinate onto the tracks. He was scared that if he urinated on the track directly that it would send an electrical shock up his emission and cause him to lose balance and plunge haphazardly onto the tracks.

The storekeeper made sure that St Ides was always in stock; the boy’s preference. He refused the tips the boy offered him. After midnight, when the storekeeper was usually high, he’d ask the boy if it wasn’t a little late for him to be out. The boy would grin elusively and skedaddle without responding.
Past one in the morning, the bridge would close, and the boy would have to hide the rest of the night in the relatively safest and highest urban nook he could find. He often didn’t make it to the bus station in time, and would drink the entire night while surveying the street below him, usually rife with entertainment. To his own surprise, he shied away from drugs. He was strong enough to hold his own, but avoided physical confrontations, even sexual, except for the harmless kisses he was always too drunk to remember on the train.
He had class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, though he wasn’t a matriculated student at the college he attended them. He was often disappointed that the classes he chose were packed with adults, and that he had difficulty befriending anyone because of the age gap. He listened to trance, mostly the upbeat subgenres emphasizing angelically computerized voices. He found this embarrassing, and would often turn down what he was listening to around people if it penetrated through his headphones.

“Why do you drink so much? Soon there will not be enough space to fit all the bottles in your bag,” the storekeeper asks.
The boy pauses, there being no one else around to divert the storekeeper’s attention. He concentrates on devising a plausible excuse, but fails. “Everything looks better when you don’t have it.”
The storekeeper laughs. “What’s that suppose to mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I drink.”
“You drink because you want something that you don’t have?”
“I don’t know. It’s a stupid thing to say, now that I think of it. I don’t know why I drink.”
The storekeeper laughs again. “At least you’re honest.” The boy begins to pack the bottles into the bag, readying to leave. “And what do you do with all this time you are drunk?”
“I ride the subway,” the boy says.
“You ride the subway?”
“Yes.”
The storekeeper shakes his head and looks in the direction of the store’s entrance; one of the regulars is waddling in. The boy glances at the storekeeper for approval to leave.
“Be careful. Livers do not support families.”
The boy laughs. “I will. And I don’t intend on having a family any time soon, let alone find someone to—” he stops, wary of what he is saying. He shrugs, indicating that to finish what he was saying would be redundant, smiles at the storekeeper wistfully and leaves.

His drinking causes him to worry about his mother. She is unaware of it; he wants himself to be responsible…stable, for her. Her responsibility of him has really become his. He takes care of her by keeping her uninformed. He doesn’t think it to be much of a problem, anyway. It’s temporary, he rehearses resolutely; he recently quit smoking cigarettes, and if he can do that, than he can quit drinking. He just drinks because there’s nothing else to do. And while drunk, he studies, so it’s not a complete waste of eventual organ damage.
Today he’ll take the first train down as far as it goes, get off, then get on and off random trains at random stops and try to find his way back home in time. He helps a man in a wheel chair down a flight of stairs.
“Thank you,” the man says.
“You’re welcome.”
They both look down the track at the incoming light and the mechanized worm inching its way towards them.
“Would you mind boarding me onto this train?” the man asks. “I’m afraid my arms are close to giving out.”
“No problem,” the boy exclaims. When the train arrives, he pushes the man onto the car, then sprints fervently into another compartment. He can’t fathom drinking in such a vulgar manner in front of the old man, or exhibiting vice in front of any of those who he has favored.
When the train grumbles forth he unzips his backpack and removes one of the bottles from the black plastic bag, keeping the other bottle wrapped inside it. He only buys the bottles with caps that can be twisted back on in case of policeable intervention. He inhales, hoping that the alcohol won’t accelerate the inevitable death of his taste buds. He chugs it in fastitidious spurts, unaffectedly, repressing the excess air that squeezes up his throat when he inhales so he won’t belch and draw attention to himself. He continues to drink until his mind is sufficiently absent, then tucks the bottle away.
“You got to drink the bad shit to make the good shit taste good,” a voice crones from the other end of the car, the haggard diction of a ramshackle black man. “You got to drink the bad shit to make the good shit taste good.” The boy delays ocularly locating its source, surrendering his head against one of the train’s windows.
“You got to drink the bad shit,” the man repeats. “The bad shit.”
A mother on the car clasps her hands over her child’s ears.
“All that bad shit.” The boy wonders if exhibiting his recognition of the man will subdue his outbursts. He rolls his head in his direction. The man is old, antiquated, almost as if he’s part of the car itself. He chuckles forebodingly, shaking his head in confabulated memory.

The next time the boy enters the store his change his waiting for him on the counter. He pauses, surprised, peering over his shoulder as he wades to the back of the store. It’s past one in the morning; he’s missed the last bus across the bridge. The storekeeper scrutinizes him filially, emerging his head from a tabloid. He is perceptibly drugged, his left eyelid fluttering droopily.
The boy approaches the counter hesitantly, considering if he should ask the storekeeper if he’s in need of assistance, perhaps fetching him one of the waters out of the store’s beverage aisle. He decides not to, nervously sliding the cost of the malt liquor onto the counter and pronouncedly exiting the store. Outside, he feels a befuddled remorse for not providing assistance to the storekeeper; even if he were to only keep him company. He huddles beside the entrance of the store, musing where to hoard himself for the night, where he will drink somberly and hopefully survey some form of degenerate entertainment. He reproaches himself for describing it as such, but the stupefaction of having been exposed to the uttermost depravity of man arouses him. He fosters the impoverished torment of others virtuously within him, as if simply observing their happenings gives them the significance and attention he believes they wholly deserve.
The boy absconds his dwelling by the entrance of the store, surreptitiously wandering in search of an obfuscated cavity in which to further dwell. A movie-rental store cues his memory of a former nook in which to hide, elevated onto one of the granite platforms that protrudes from the walls of the bus station. The bus station comprises of the entire block; the terminal itself about four floors high. Near street-level the boy hoists himself up onto the stone structure, which diagonally indents into an adumbral crevice.
When drunk, a dreamy quality obscures him from others, as if other drunks are the only ones capable of truly distinguishing him. He laps from the bottle silently, ensuring that the crinkling of the bag which it is inside of is inaudible.
“Hey kitty, c’mere why you little thing, why you come here now…aren’t you a cutie-pie, why yes you are! C’mere now, just a little closer…”
The boy freezes at the sound of the voice, originating from the descending street behind him. He listens; a cat howls frantically, desperately attempting to deter its attacker. He listens to the thud of the cat’s body as it’s kicked against the street; he can hear it purring softly, remembering someone once telling him that cats purr in dire pain as well as content. He puts his hands over his ears.
Moments later he scans behind him, espying the cat’s ragged corpse stuffed cursorily into a drain. The way its body is contorted, the blood soaking the mangled fur; he can’t imagine it ever having been alive. An entropic sediment of disgust curdles in his stomach. The assassin is nowhere in sight; most likely drugged, with no consciousness of himself or retention of his actions, the boy begs to believe. Perhaps the poor stray was on its ninth.
He continues to pensively dawdle, drinking, predisposed to the angst-ridden grief that will inevitably ensue. A pair of distinct, eagerly expressive homeless loutishly swagger forth from the terminal corner, boisterous upon detecting the boy.
“What’s that you’ve got there; out this late? What is a boy like you out this late? Have you missed the bus?
“White night?
“Is that a bottle of Jack you’ve got there?”
“No, no, St. Ides.” The other, reticent and overtly disoriented.
“May I?”
The boy nods fraternally; all-night is every night to them. He passes the bottle to the blustering wretch vernally, nodding again in empathetic assent.
The wretch, delighted, and with the enthusiasm of a besotted fraternity member, proceeds to chug the entire contents of the bottle, returning it to the boy with waggish conceit.
“You wouldn’t be able to spare any change for beer now, would you boss?” The boy complies resolutely, scrunching up a few quarters and flopping them into the scamp’s grubby hand, relieved to finally have an excuse to rid of him. The pair totter off, raucously ungrateful.
The boy thinks, thinks, magnificent! He reels inwards, temples compressed between his knees. He has another bottle, a companion, a bondage. He writhes idly, consternated by the turpitude of this district and its inhabitants’ glaring apathy towards it.
He fumbles despairingly to the subway with the intention of deluding himself from the recent abjection he was so fortuitous to have been subjected to.

The subway platform is deserted. An eerie ringing echoes remotely in the distance; there is a placidness to the surroundings much like that of gondola with no steer, aimlessly gliding across a bizarrely still body of water. The boy is distrait, harassed by his inability to keep himself from jittering. An occasional moan or rustle of litter inquires if the platform is inhabited; the ringing renders a hollow spatial effect; those arriving home disaffectedly from the graveyard shift.
The boy waits for what seems like hours, anticipating the advent of the train and twittering impatiently. He paces at the edge of the platform, peeking into the tunnel in hopes of descrying the golden light that relievedly streaks across its walls. He wonders if he’s the only one that is ever beset by the unwanted urge to jump onto the tracks, increasingly so the further he nears the precipice.
Eventually the gleam of light splashes towards the platform. He gathers his bag and hunches towards the edge, shutting his eyes as the surge of air emitting from the passing train whorls his surroundings out from beneath him.
In contrast to the platform, the train is crowded with people. He sighs in dismay, withstanding the insufficient privacy to indulge in his spotlight-effected vice. He plots himself on the floor, cross-legged. The train rumbles grumpily as it sets off again.

He rides the train insensible of time, only with the destination of passing it. He gradually apprehends that a crowded train is no different than that of an empty one; no one pays attention to him as he extracts his temporal remedy. He compulsorily picks his nose. He puts deodorant on. He fails to even obtain a transitory glance. He kneads his snot together between his thumb and middle finger into a ball, then flicks it into the aisle. He begins to ritualize this, snot throwing. The malt liquor barely phases him; he imagines lewd, drunken girls dancing and distributing themselves indiscriminately. They do not understand, he presumes. He imagines what she could possibly be doing without him right now; surely not drinking on an underground public transportation system. They do not understand how irrelevant the time of day is. They do not understand such a grim resort it is! Or the bleakness of its incentive.
“You got to drink the bad shit to make the good shit taste good,” resonates from the opposite end of the train. The boy’s head springs up from his lap in a bustle of disbelief and unease. Could it be? The man cackles and hoots with a malevolent presentiment. He is incorrigibly giddy at having caused the boy’s attention such alarm. He knows!—knows the inevitable outcome of the boy’s predicament. Trembling, the boy flings himself off the train at the next stop.

When he surfaces, he is utterly and irrevocably lost. He is somewhat relieved by how helpless his situation is; the fault no longer his own. He, already helplessly intoxicated to begin with, now has a viable excuse. The district he’s staggered into isn’t particularly welcoming. He ponders idly whether or not he should submerge himself back underground; though desolate, it’s safe. When you don’t belong anywhere, you belong in transit, he resolves. Or you can belong anywhere, as long as you’re not in stasis. As long as you’re not in stasis, unfinished resolving, trying to stand still but wobbling; he’s aware of what he should be feeling, but feels nothing. He’s aware of the wind, and how cold it is, acrylicing his face, but he’s not cold, and feeling much like a voyeur of his own body and mind, correspondingly inebriated, stumbles back down the subway entrance, limply dragging himself along the wall.
Once underground he walks through the white paneled tunnels and up and down various flights of stairs and escalators until he is once again sufficiently lost. He boards a train that’s destination is another borough. He is running out of malt liquor, and gets off at the next stop with the goal in mind of returning to the store. Overwhelmed, he collapses onto the platform floor, groveling against one of the support beams. His thoughts are atavistically meretricious, and he envies the sordid world he imagines himself invariably alienated from; a world that would never find solace in riding the subway or have the patience to ride it, perhaps even finding such a frugal means of transportation degrading.
He, with a drunk’s automated perseverance, seeks out a map of the subway system and traces his finger along the impassively prismatic lines until he pinpoints his destination. He will have sobered up upon reaching it; this thought causes him to panic obsessively, and he debates whether or not to chance various delis in hopes that it’s late enough they’re selling indiscriminately. If that fails, there’s always bribing the homeless. This gust of inspiration is fleeting, and the boy resigns to risking sobriety.

The various means of birth control, the mistakes, the morning-after pill, the dread of infertility at eighteen. He’d sultrily pin her arms behind her back and tug them down, amatorially jutting out her chest. He was anxious if he should pull her in close to him and writhe, lissomely, or remain slightly distanced to observe her, allowing her recognition of his awe. He’d gape at the faces of pleasure she’d make, similar to those of extreme agony, astonished that he was capable of eliciting them from her. They’d gone to Colombia together, where he bought silver rings for fifteen dollars a piece, and emerald and gold necklace adornments for sixty. He was not religious, though he wore a cross: mostly because he liked the look of it, but also taking into account the aspect of irony. In the attic of the house they were staying at—her great uncle’s—, also partially a gym, he’d indulge in giving her corporal pleasure for hours while denying her the chance to requite the same, of which he believed he did not deserve.
They stayed there for a week; there were nights he would come home so drunk that he woke up in the same state, damning alcohol until offered another drink the following night. It was on her birthday that the ring slipped out, and she wept in a vicious circle where she yearned for comfort but any sort of comfort that he offered her would only remind her of why she was grieving and subsequently magnify it. It was the second time she’d had to take the morning-after pill; the “Plan B” pill, he’d learned. He gave up all attempts at consoling her and sat inutilely by her bedside, irritated that he had no effect on her and that he could be so callous as to not understand what caused her such sorrow.
Under the false belief that using the morning-after pill too often caused sterility, she was rashly despairing. When he left her side she became frustrated with him, as logic is incompatible with emotion. He supposed that making her angry would distract her from her sorrow, and convinced himself that he was somewhat of a benefactor, even if she was unaware of it.
145th street. When the train stops he opens his eyes. She always said implicitly ominous admonishments that if pointed out, she would deny as impossibilities, and become further infuriated with him for even suspecting ulterior meanings. No one gets on board except a gigantic black man wearing vinyl white pointed dress shoes and an immaculate and fluorescent white suit. He crosses his legs effeminately upon sitting down. The boy estimates he must be around seven feet tall, and about half that in width. He sits down directly across from the boy and abruptly glances at him coquettishly before fixating on the floor.
There were over twenty people in her family, compared to the one left in his, discounting his two cats. Her family was very ingratiating and fawning, though gossipy and extrovertedly sensitive, opposed to his tendency to confine his sensitivity to himself and substances. When his melancholic emotions culminated or he became outrageously tumescent, he almost assumed a catatonic state, impotently exposing himself to the assumptions of others. He was most often accused of feeling too much or as emotionlessly aloof. He often abided his time observing and failing to rationalize the cathartically affected behavior of others.
His father had shot himself when he was fourteen; in his car as to not bloody the house, on his mother’s birthday. Hence the idea of family wasn’t a relevantly tangible subject to him. He assumed the lack of it, and found the affection amidst others phony, or their selfish and decadent motives concealed. The food in Colombia was spectacular and nominal, though he didn’t understand why the milk and juices, and even sometimes the liquors, were marketed and stored in bags instead of cartons.
The man in the white suit continuously glances at the boy, evoking a wearied tension from him. He was content reminiscing over times that he fancied as immutable without being interrupted by a potential pedophiliac rapist’s facial flirtation. The night before they left Colombia he had taken so much Xanax that he had forgotten it entirely; twelve milligrams, at least, and he woke up the following morning amnesic to the events that took place the previous night. They had gone to a bar where nobody spoke English and his feeling of alienation dilated to its nadiral; he at first started drinking, which with everybody speaking Spanish disheartened him; one of his girlfriend’s cousins saw him taking two pills and relayed the information to his girlfriend who in turn he lied to, denying that he had taken them as to not make her feel responsible for his withdrawal; he admitted to taking the pills—she was furious; how would she like it if she lied to him about such things?
He gathers his belongings and shambles to the parting doors; 175th street. Three blocks underground to emotionally fluctuate until reaching the terminal. The drinking only further abates his hankered plateau of apathy.

The boy traipses to his goal; the storekeeper’s inexplicable empathy and succor. Who is he, with such a quotidian and existential life? Much like his own, inured to riding subways with no other means of surmounting the seemingly illimitable time. And the storekeeper, selling loose cigarettes for fifty cents, diurnally, and quenching the groveling, conceded drunks; a dollar for a twenty-four ounce leaning tower of malt liquor.
He apprehensively treks the tunnel that leads to the bus terminal, hood raised as to not draw attention to himself, shoulders punctiliously slumped. His acquisitiveness to resume his state of automated, functional befuddlement is superseded by his desire of the storekeeper’s company; the ineffable bond their pursuit of hegira has emanated; the hopeless twinkle of empathy that flickers in their eyes during their transactions; a pursuit that is inevitably doomed, withstanding their recognition of it.
He barely keeps his eyes open winding throughout the bus terminal until he emerges onto the block away from the store. The streets are relatively vacant: a few muttering homeless huddled dankly in obscured corners, or splay with decrepit unconscionability. Still, he remains apprehensive; the media’s drug associated violence and kidnapping correlated with this neighborhood is epidemical. He clandestinely approaches the store, flushing mildly, his heart complacent. He is somewhat afraid that the bond he has perceived between them is only perceived by him; overly susceptible to instinctually erroneous mortification.
He nudges open the door obsequiously; the bell entrance alarm jingles. Half-way upon opening the door he hears the wistful whoop of the storekeeper, overwrought with amenity and zest. It appears that the boy was evidently expected. The storekeeper is also evidently drugged; the boy cannot distinguish exactly what he’s on, but his eyelids are languidly fluttering and his movements are phlegmatic, often requiring excogitation. The boy tentatively approaches the counter and scoots his elbows onto it, concernedly complacent. He is relieved at ascertaining the rest of the store as empty except for the homeless loitering meagerly beside its entrance, most likely also drugged.
“How are you?” the boy asks.
The storekeeper nods and grins senselessly. “Two? I will,” his head dips and lolls, “give you two, for the price of one. Of one!”
“Not tonight.”
“Hrm!” He lets out another magnificent whoop, exaggeratedly transfixed.
The boy steps back from the counter and stares inside the glass casing beneath it. One of the homeless groans outside. The storekeeper engraves the impression in the boy of a pedagogue trying desperately to be informal or perceived as on the same level as his student. The boy searches for something to focus on in the glass casing so he has an excuse as to why he’s still standing inertly in front of the counter. He doesn’t know how to tell the storekeeper that he has no where else to go.
“I kind of want to sit down.”
“Then do so,” the storekeeper orchestrates, with a bow.
“Where?”
“Wherever you want.”
The boy peeks behind the counter, and the storekeeper, noting his inclination, nods his head. The boy shuffles his feet. The storekeeper notices his waif-like qualities; when he’s content, his eyes sparkle, when he’s not, they’re forlorn. The boy is thinking about the scarves his girlfriend would wear; from H&M, from Colombia. She was remarkably thrifty. She put herself together in a manner in which one wouldn’t be able to accurately imagine her otherwise.
The storekeeper, on observing a blurred image of the boy from his vantage point: “You look like you come here every day.”
“I’m not sure, but I think I do.”
The storekeeper laughs heartily, a little too long. The boy traces around the end of the counter, significantly distanced from him.
“You want something to drink?”
“No,” the boy says. The storekeeper sighs and retires onto his stool. The boy notices how short he is without the counter’s intervention. The storekeeper clumsily shakes his head, unaware when to stop.
“Have a candy bar.”
“No thank you.”
“You don’t like candy bars? You can have any one you like. You can have two.”
“I don’t like candy bars.”
“Alright.” The storekeeper refuses to look at the boy during this stifled exchange of an attempt at situating. Muddled, he swirls his vision towards the floor, slightly tilting over. The boy, now having secured himself a lodging for the night, debates what he’s thinking about, what to think about, what to say. Was there anything he wanted to say to the storekeeper in the first place? He feels a bit uncomfortable, standing next to a stranger so much older than himself.
He’s thinking of her, naturally. All the fights they’d get into over trivial matters; imagining who she masturbated to other than him. He’s trying to specify the colors of one of her scarves but can’t seem to recall the fourth color out of blue, white, and brown already educed. Who would she have masturbated to other than him? Celebrities, ex’s, strangers—fabricated adonises daydreamed about in fantasies. She surprisingly didn’t have a lot of ex’s; he had enough jealousy issues trying to inure himself to her gregarious expertise engaging herself in male-infested social events already.
A homeless man trundles into the store. His beard is that of Santa Claus having spilled a noxious batch of coal on himself; his arms raw and rangy. He begs blindly for a cigarette, scrambling frantically within the store. The storekeeper, semi-incoherent, fails to fully comprehend the man’s blundering presence. The boy rushes to his aid, valiantly lunging for the closest pack of cigarettes in sight only to cause the entire rack to collapse. The storekeeper starts laughing hysterically, slapping his knee; the boy, sighing lachrymosely (though without actual tears; perhaps at the sight of), haphazardly picks up a pack of cigarettes on the floor and hands them to the homeless man who, already jumbling for his own, swats them out of the boy’s hand. The man trips in his rabid disarray and crushes the majority of the fallen cigarettes. The boy sighs, again, glancing at the storekeeper who is still laughing hysterically.
“Every night, you see. Every night; you’ll see.”
“What?”
“I always…I always, always put my Q’s before my A’s,” the storekeeper bellows, clenching his stomach in merriment. “Mean nothing.” The homeless man, having heaved himself off the ground in a whorl of liberated cigarettes, scampers out of the store; cigarettes sticking unctuously to the bottom of his shoes. “Nothing!”
The boy slams the door behind him and huffs to the back of the store, scrounging for a garbage bag, a broom, tossing the garbage bag upon finding a pan. He scoops up the muck of cigarettes, meanwhile picking one off the ground and lighting it; non-menthol, tosses it, unmistakably flustered. The storekeeper coyly observes him, grateful for his company, piqued by his perseverance and unconditional compliance.
“Are you just going to sit there? Your store is in shambles.”
The storekeeper giggles and shrugs with a pococurante giddiness. “It has been for quite some time.”
“How will you replenish your stock of cigarettes by tomorrow?”
“You have no idea the cost of a brand. What you pay for, what you get.”
“What?”
“Do not worry. There are enough cigarettes in the back to grubstake lung cancer for those in need, for now.”
“I’m sorry, for—”
“C’est la vie!” The storekeeper sways, stammers over to the boy and gives him a boisterous, jocose bear hug which is futilely resisted. His drugged state is gradually exacerbating; nearly soporific now, rendering the boy fretful, disputing whether or not he should seek out help.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine yes.”
“I believe it would be best to close for the night; I don’t know how to work the cash register. Unless you want me to distribute your merchandise without charge.”
The storekeeper fondly considers the boy’s suggestion, then deliriously lops his head back, resigning himself to the boy’s disposal—hopefully who will continue to reconcile such a disastrous situation! he jests, knowing the outcome nevertheless irrelevant.
The boy searches for the keys to the store; finds them in a drawer behind the counter along with small bags filled with a brownish-yellow powder, handfuls of camouflage-tinted marijuana, smut magazines titled and advertised in a foreign language, mounds of scrunched up Kleenex balls and an assortment of other slovenly littered paraphernalia. He retraces around the counter and locks the store.
The storekeeper, drowsily yet keenly attentive to the boy, scrutinizes his actions with forbearing pity, having also once had the same vivification that comes with such tragically impressionable youth.

She had wide and slender hips; slim, delicate wrists; a peculiarly ladylike way of walking that emphasized the indeterminable sensuality she aroused in others, and her own. Her upper-body was unaware of its own emotive perkiness, especially her shoulders, and she often made others believe that she was attracted to them, unbeknownst to her. She was feisty, effusively dependent; a perfervid, visceral temperament. Her emotions: logically, melodramatic; emotionally, radiantly precocious. Her zealous faithfulness…her peremptory neediness; there was nothing, not a single*perhaps perceived by others as defects or shortcomings—flaw (if such a trait even exists, flaws most often allures him to others) that he could find, nor did he feel the need to identify them in the first place.
The boy, finally recognizing that he’s been incognizant of his own intoxication for quite some time, realizes that he’s been relating these thoughts out-loud, to the storekeeper. The storekeeper, though somnolent, has been listening intently; occasionally nodding, pensive albeit doped (plausibly the cause), affirming his attentiveness.
“I miss and long for you so much right now, to have your legs intertwined with mine, to rustle your hair with my breath and uncouth hands. I am dreadfully sorry that I put you through such misery tonight; that I burdened you with my detachment on the phone, a burden that you in no means deserve, for I love you and always will, regardless of what state I'm in. And I am happy, right now. I am deluged with passion just by regarding the mound of movie ticket stubs I have amassed in my drawer. I am tempted to watch all the movies I have watched with you again, imbibed and flushed by your affection, coiled with such eager delicateness beside me; to be comforted, and loved, and cherished, which is all I scramble anxiously to impart to you. I love you, my dearest. If you ever feel neglected, conjure the sensation of my lips trickling up your spine, anointing the tenderness of your neck, encompassing your cheekbones, your pleading eyelashes, unwinding and submissively resigning yourself to me—
The storekeeper begins to sway maniacally on his stool, his head flagellating and colliding with rows of merchandise stored behind the counter. He rummages—the intensity of his frenzied state apexing—for the bags filled with the brownish-yellowed powder that the boy uncovered in his drawer earlier. He seizes them all, scattering them on the counter with a vital urgency parallel to that of one fastening the noose in suspense of the chair stood upon soon uphove amiss the wrangle and thrashing aloft of asphyxiation.
“your breasts...should be hanging over me, right now, and your room, the lights confused, the sheets a shoreline and its ebbing and you, you're above me; shifting my eyes between your own and your breasts expectantly, secretly worshiping, struggling to keep unapparent—your body is pendulous, swaying above me, above me, and your hair dangles onto my face and I'm...grateful, to be with you, bodily confiding in you in ways that I would no one else. I love you.” The boy crumples onto the floor, irrevocably drunk, unintelligibly continuing to profess his love. He raises his head, vision spinning, and beholds the storekeeper snorting the rashly dispersed powder, overwrought with intemperance and negligently smearing it all over his face.
Having had his full, the storekeeper unsteadily saunters over to the boy, yanking him against his sunken chest until his lips are nestled against the boy’s ear.
“You don’t know how much you’ve missed someone until you’re with them, pansón.”
With this, he staggers backwards buoyantly as if content with what he impassively hopes aren’t his last words and reels over, clamorously tumbling onto the floor.

In her parent’s bed, rubbing her furiously, she pleads, “Tell me something.”
He tries to think of something erotic to say, something that sounds improvised, but nothing comes to mind.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpers in annoyance, shaking her head from side to side. Her eyes are shut rigidly.

The boy, having called 911 anonymously from a payphone an hour or so ago, sits restlessly awaiting the bus to reach the other side of the bridge. If the storekeeper happens to have died, the boy’s fingerprints will surely be found; he shivers at the thought of being taken into custody for interrogation. He ought to have stayed at the store and waited for the police to arrive, explained the situation—but he was too drunk, and dismayed, ashamed over becoming embroiled by it in a state of loveless vulnerability.
He trudges the short distance from the bus-stop to his apartment. The sun is up. He is still considerably woozy. When he reaches his apartment building he delays going home and strolls through the plaza at the back of the building where there is a pool and some villas. He sits down on one of the picnic tables that surrounds a public grill. He has no desire to go home, nor does he feel it as a source of refuge that he believes is a necessity that should coincide with homing. He tries to think of nothing, which only emphasizes that he doesn’t have anything to think about, further stimulating what he doesn’t want to think about. He sees a man walking his hound-dog and remembers seeing a sign upon entering the plaza that forewarned residents not to walk their pets in the plaza; pesticide had recently been administered to the grounds. He expects to see the hound-dog drop dead, but it continues to walk all the way back to the lobby of the building, unharmed.
He recalls the dithyrambic soliloquies that he drunkenly shared with the storekeeper, who if hadn’t been so drugged, probably would have thought him raving mad. He finds it no wonder that androgyny is so seductive, that nights spent alone are so easy to hyperbolize…he is likewise not confounded by his emotional instincts. He drags the last bit of beer he has in his bag out and finishes it, afterwards lighting a cigarette. He calls her, hanging up before the phone has a chance to ring.
“I’m sure you find me to be overly sententious.” The haggard voice of the ramshackle black man peeps out from beneath a sewage drain; the boy, hyperaroused and blanched, jounces up from the table. He sees the man’s eyes gleaming in the drain, vacuously glaring at him as if he were transparent and he was behind himself. The boy, having never noticed the drain before, skepticizes how he could have overseen it having promenaded throughout this plaza innumerable times. The boy can’t distinguish anything of the man’s face aside from his sallow, bloodshot eyes. They reverberate with an impish mirth; he realizes they are indubitably inhuman, and that the situation, the phenomena of the drain never having been there before, the even greater phenomena that the man who he once thought by chance he’d repeatedly encountered on the subway is floating beneath it, likewise.
“You are remarkably sangfroid, most likely attributed by your psychosomatic-adolescent dipsomania. I’d expected you to be the least bit frightened of me.”
“And who’s to say I’m not,” the boy stammers. “And accusing me of dipsomania is somewhat harsh. I can control my cravings quite well, thank you.” The boy takes note of the man’s eloquent and grandiloquent way of speaking, further amplifying the surreal aspect of the bizarre concurrence. He recalls that the man barely articulated himself aside from profanity while barking and drawling on the subway.
“Can you now? That’s quite a bold claim, seeing how I just came upon you suckling on that bottle even after it was long empty.” The man giggles with a condescending frivolousness.
“And that is none of your damned business.”
“Whoa there, Nelly, now hold onto your lugubrious britches. My intentions are impartial, drink as you please.” He giggles again. “As you please.”
The boy lights another cigarette, dumbstruck and composed, resuming his seat at the table. Though bewildered, he remains speculative, his interest piqued. He scrutinizes the man’s eyes, how there’s not a single blemish on the drain implanted just moments ago.
“Let us put our petty squabbles behind us. Would you mind a drink? I have a thermos full of brandy stuffed into one of the pockets inside of my overcoat. I feel it becoming antsy. Anticipative.”
“I don’t trust you, nor do I drink liquor, nor do I drink from someone else’s flask or thermostat.”
“Thermos.”
“Meh.” The boy is gradually unenthused. The initial placidity from the beer he finished earlier has deserted him. He groggily lifts his gaze from the ground and beholds the drain the man had been voyeuristically heckling him from has transformed into a subway entrance stairwell. The man piddles on the top step, sighing graciously and dragging on a cigarette without exhaling the smoke. The subway entrance guidepost has the letter N encircled in maroon on it. The boy ponders listlessly, he has never heard of the N train. It occurs to him that the impossibility of a sewer drain morphing into a subway entrance stairwell does not phase his rationality. He has become desensitized to the antics of magical realism. He regards that the once ramshackle black man is now impeccably dressed in a pin-striped suit, a voluminous pitch-black top hat and an ivory cane dangling elegantly from his white-leather gloved hand. He exchanges the cane from hand to hand, trifling with it in an undulating manner between his fingers. He winks at the boy.
“So,” the man says, springing up from his perched position. “Care to accompany me?”
“Not particularly. You remain but a stranger to me.”
“Oh, we all grow up and become strangers eventually. Familiarity is fleeting, likewise circumstantial, especially if to one’s own benefit.” The man winks at him again. “You yourself are already a stranger.”
“To whom?”
“Why, yourself, no doubt!” The boy listens, retaining nothing. He is disappointed with the transcendent convenience of the metaphysical, most likely dribbling towards the idealistic. He lights up another cigarette, and another, his legs lackadaisically crossed.
“So,” the boy says, explicitly imitating the man. “Where does the N train lead to.”
The man, with a debonair air about him, twirls his cane. His eyes glisten as he evaluates the boy, puckishly sizing him up. “Well I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, especially seeing how you spoil yourself so charitably.”
“Spoil myself?” The man does a jig; the boy now cognizant that he’s wearing polished tap-dancing shoes. They sheen blindingly. The man laughs hysterically while performing his dance that the boy feels inapt to, unacquainted to the name of it; jitterbug, salsa*a foreign language to the stiffness and clumsy abashment of his tenemental physique. He could never dance, too shy to initiate or accept. He had never understood the point of it; an excuse for corporeal flirtation, he supposes.
After the man—the boy persists on identifying him as ramshackle, having been an unshakable impression—simmers down, he motions the boy to follow him, trotting frolicsomely down the stairwell.

The subway platform is chimerically immaculate; there are no turn-styles or littered Metrocards. The flooring is ostentatiously marbled; the billboard advertisements absurdly not defaced; advertisements to products and movies that don’t exist. The pillars with engravings displaying the street numbers are constructed of opalescent jade. Subsequently the boy notices there are no street numbers, just pillars of opalescent jade that seem to have no purpose or need of supporting the mosque-esque sky dome above. The boy is unmoved by the lavish and gaudy ornamentation of the subway platform, sulkily rumpling his hands in his pockets.
“It should be here any minute,” the man says complacently. “This train has never failed to be exactly on time.” The man hands the boy his thermos of brandy and the boy eagerly swigs a mouthful equivalent to four or five shots. Rations for digging to China, the boy besottedly surmises, grinning with a similar impishness of that of the man’s grins.
The train deluges the entire platform with an incandescent pale-ochroid light.

The train does not rock, jolt or jerk; its transit is superfluously silent and fluid. The boy despises this as it accentuates him; he begins to ramble about the various over-medications he’s on, her, his cats, his favorite authors, and how artistically and aesthetically his generation is prodigiously incompetent, ranting fanatically about the destruction technology and media-oriented avarice has reigned down upon it. The man courteously pretends to listen intently, nodding his head with animation.
“So,” once again imitating the man, this time explicitly intoxicated. “Where does the N train go.”
The man sighs deeply, cocking his hat back in preparation of the formidable information he’s to relate.
“This train…happens to go no where.”
“What?”
“This train, it goes no where.”
“What do you mean it goes no where.”
“Well, you see, it doesn’t go anywhere, in specific. It runs perpetually. It has no destination.”
The boy reels back in his seat, further unmoved. He squirms, turbidly disentranced, beseeching the floor for support. The floor smiles back at him.
“Is it possible to get off?”
“You may get off wherever and whenever you please.”
“But if it goes no where and runs perpetually then how can I get off?”
“In going no where it happens to also pass by everywhere. Convenient, no? And with the snap of my fingers,” he demonstrates sanguinely, “I can cause it to come to a screeching halt.” The train halts at the snap of his fingers immediately, demurely.
“I was never a fan of adverbs. They’re the most common grammatical article used by the pathologically, prideful verbose,” the man exclaims triumphantly.
The boy looks at him in disenchanted stupor.
“I don’t think I really want to go anywhere. I would prefer to watch the movie Alien right now. I have quite an affinity towards that movie.”
“Dear, would you stop using the word quite? The horse is long dead. And for God’s sake don’t start calling me sir, if you’ve even thought of it.”
“I am riding the horse!” A forty-ounce bottle of St Ides is magically conjured forth onto the boy’s lap. He ogles at it inquisitively…peppily! The man smirks at him fondly. “I am riding the dead horse!”
“Yes, yes you are.” The man stands up and tiptoes over to the adjacent benching. He folds his hands together and tautens his brow, unfurling into an upright fetal position. “And now?”
The St Ides bottle vanishes into thin air dispensing a rupture of smoke in its place. The smoke envelopes the entire car, fogging the windows and birthing a purblind haze.
“You have impregnated the train,” the boy drawls. “With smoke.”
“That I have.”
“Why?”
“Same reason you justify your malt liquor abuse.”
The boy broods over the profundity his intoxication has generated concerning the man’s statement.
“I don’t justify it. To be honest I’d rather abuse a substance that didn’t cause me such physical distress, especially the head-aches, I’m sick of the goddamn head-aches.” He lights a cigarette, bemused by his own voice. “I’m really goddamn sick of the head-aches. I’m also sick of obsessing over this girl, this girl; if I hadn’t such self-restraint I’d have constructed a shrine in my closet of her by now.”
“You are beginning to cloy me with your prolixly dramatics.”
“Then why don’t you conjure something forth, oh majestic spellbinder.” The boy leaps from his seat and races back and forth between the car’s aisle. “Cloy! Cloy? Why not use a more accessible word, e.g. tire, bore, exhaust.” The boy begins to do pull-ups on the hang-rails. “Here’s your bad shit for you. I presume you’d prefer it on a platter.”
The man, his intrigue once more tickled, conjures a platter of steaming, soggy, fly pestered shit.
“Brilliant, really. Absolutely brilliant.” The boy saunters towards the man brazenly. “Rot, rot!” He begins to dance with himself, promiscuously close to the man. “Absolutely bloody brilliant!” The boy mopes back to his former seating. “To be honest, I just wanted to sound British. Always have.”
“You have that forlorn-waif look of someone eager to share drug-related experiences with as many people as possible,” the man absently retorts, preoccupied by his omniscience.
“That’s what the storekeeper thought of my eyes: waif-like, forlorn,” the boy relates unsteadily. “I don’t do drugs.”
“What if I were to conjure up that unrequited love of yours. I could let you choose what she’d wear, her make-up stylization, asymmetrical as you like it.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Why I—”
“Don’t you fucking dare.” The boy, woozily coming down, odious with despair, gazes at his shoes impassionedly.
“Now now.”
“Get me off this train. I want to get off right now.”
“You can’t have the whole cake and eat it too or whatever the proverb is.” The man clasps his hands together with an over-enthusiastic politeness. “And now, on to more important matters.”
“Get me off this train you fucking nigge—”
“Pendulously!” the man bellows, cackling like a mischievously jocund witch. The boy clamps his eyes shut.
“You got to drink the bad shit to make the good shit taste good. The bad shit.” The man’s voice reverting to the rickety crone the boy initially heard upon coinciding with him; it echoes spectrally, muting all other audible sources of sound. Coughing up the smoke that has increasingly engulfed the entirety of the car, ultimately driven mad by the unremitting repetition of the man’s proudly devised aphorism, the boy opens his eyes.
The smoke evaporates instantaneously and she’s standing before him, cocooned elegantly by her luscious-navy waistcoat, buttoned prudently, scarf daintily coiled around her neck the fourth color turquoise oh how, how could he have forgotten? Her hair is dutifully pinned back, cheeks garish enough to be mistaken as rouged, boots of a duller-navy, the legs nestled below the creases of her knees, earnestly composed. Contacts in; she resembles an urbanized geisha.
Is she wearing gloves?
Aghast, he gapes at her, overcome with wistful nostalgia. She remains motionless; he feels the awkwardness of being in an elevator next to a stranger, obliged to bade them goodnight despite it only afternoon. Amid meticulously worshipping her he regards that she is not breathing. She stands rigidly erect, seemingly catatonic. He debates reaching out to her but then remembers how loutishly besotted he is and resigns himself to continue merely gaping at her.
All the novel prospects, their names always start with J: Jacob, Jesse—or B: Ben, Billy; A: Alec, Aidan—busy imagining her carnally knotting with someone acquiring all the qualities he lacks in the passenger’s seat of a car he doesn’t own with tinted windows he fails to notice that she’s been whisked away right before his eyes, replaced by the black man, howling uproariously with laughter.
“Go ahead, slap your knees, clench your stomach.”
“Don’t mind if I do, chief,” the man retorts, catching his breath. Neither of them speak for an extensive interlude; the train accelerates, rapidly increasing in momentum. The boy becomes dizzy gazing languishingly out the windows and vomits violently, his organs rattling audibly. He thrashes helplessly, indifferent to the critical amount of blood that tinges his vomit. He slips onto his knees and sags his mouth an inch above the aisle, dry heaving, sliding on his own vomit like a deer feebly squiggling to stand upon just being born.
“Still want to get off this train, chief? I’m thinking, you might want to stay on awhile, clean yourself up a bit.” In response, the boy heaves up an amorphous lump of something indistinguishably hideous. “Here, let me get rid of that slobber for you,” the man snaps his fingers. A tendril of drool webbed around the boys fingers disappears, along with the vomit sloshing convivially from one end of the aisle to the other.
The boy abruptly reels backwards against the benching edge, effete. He faints.

When he comes to the car is deserted. He moseys over to the other end of it, stumbling as he recuperates from his fainting spell. The train is still in motion, gliding solemnly, noiselessly. The plastic windows, partitions most often scratched, tagged with hearts by lovers and witticisms, gang symbols; the plastic windows are immaculate. There are no voices to tune out, no creaks or moans from the tracks; harrowing introspection. With no destination, akin to life, he contemplates if there is any point to getting off the train. He has nothing to read, and the social scenarios he imagines her involved in comparison to his unaccompanied confinement; she subsists contently without him.
He reckons he will starve but upon this thought a gourmet meal is presented before him on a resplendently engraved-silver platter. The voice of the black man blares from the intercom, reminding the boy that he has to taste the bad shit etcetera. The boy begins to eat; some sort of exotic fish, a side of heavily buttered cauliflower, a waffle with a mound of whipped cream smothered on top, a wineglass filled with grapefruit juice.
When he finishes, the boy gets up and heads towards the door that leads to the next car. To his surprise, it’s not locked. He walks over the adjoining platform into the car, letting the doors slam behind him. It’s empty. He continues onto the next car, which is also empty. He advances from car to car, each one as empty as the last; a peculiar smell that seems to thicken as he progresses goads him on. He begins to sprint. The man’s voice intermittently blares from the intercom, each time conveying an increasingly unintelligible proverb. Once he inquires as to the boy’s sexual orientation, upon which the boy rolls his eyes.
Eventually the boy comes across a car where a baroque-attired woman is churning a metallic rod in an all-in-one home appliance-sized cauldron. The cauldron bubbles ominously. The woman pays no attention to the boy’s arrival, continuing to churn the contents of the cauldron in trance. The cauldron appears to be more alive than she is. Every now and then it rumbles impatiently, tilting back and forth on one leg; it seems agitated that it has been destined a mere cauldron in this existence. After staring at the obscure arrangement for awhile, the boy begins to wonder if it is not the cauldron that is churning the woman. The boy quickly hurries on to the next car.
In which there is a photographer sitting in every seat. They talk pedantically of technical things: portrait lenses, post-modern aperture. None of them actually take any pictures until the boy reaches the other end of the car, when they all use flash to photograph him at the same time while berating him to stand still.
In the next car there is a yeti, his head and shoulders slumped. He is not abominable. The boy, cautious but undergoing merited derealization, creeps by him hesitatively, wondering why he immediately identified the creature as a yeti having never seen one before. It is a lot more wooly than he ever imagined a yeti to be, calling forth similarities to those giant, long-haired creatures from Star Wars that the boy can’t recall the names of. The yeti takes no notice of him until he passes within arms length of it, in which it grunts, “Gruh!” The boy grunts back, tryingly, creeping onto the next car. The yeti stares at the floor longingly, having remained inertly slumped while grunting, his shoulders briefly bouncing as if having burped.
In the next car there is a myriad of people whose clothes are talking to each other.
“It’s easier this way,” one of the people remarks upon noticing the boy’s entrance. The clothes babble on, swooping upwards as if caught by wind in an action resembling drinking wine. They talk about the music that’s playing, how they all love this song, can’t remember where they’ve heard it before, but they really really love it, really. The boy, terrified, hurries onwards.
In the next car there is a gaunt, ungainly man seated next to a large boulder. “I’m just a myth,” he pouts, imploring the boy’s attention. Next car.
The next car is empty. The boy, weary and panting, sits down, wiping his brow. His sweat is soaking through his clothes, his hair drenched; he pines desperately for air-conditioning. He closes his eyes, somehow finding himself sedated amid the constant barrage of phantasmagoric chaos. While drifting off into sleep he hears a distant rumble; he drowsily perks his vigilance. He suddenly remembers the boulder, widening his sallow bloodshot eyes spasmodically.
The car’s prone-to-grating-slams sliding-gate barges open tumultuously, trampled over by the rampageous propulsion of the boulder. The gaunt man, with chimerical strength, is frenziedly steamrolling the boulder forwards, bowling through the aluminum balance-support poles and blasting them into glistening splinters. The boy springs up and takes off for dear life, the boulder bounding behind and gravely gaining on him. The boulder seems to have a petulant and irascible mind of its own, the man screaming obscenities close behind; the entire car begins to collapse, plastic-coated windows bursting forth in a crescendo of belligerent shards. The boy clashes against the door, trembling and scrambling for the handle; grating slam; the mid-platform between cars, shaking so profusely he can barely keep his hands on the next door’s handle. The boulder bombards the former door just as the boy slips into the next car; grating slam—the boulder caves in the mid-way platform and disconnects the berserk, perishing car from the one the boy merely managed to scrape into.
The boy, wobbling backwards, stares at the disconnected car as it loses conjunction with the track and grinds against the tunnel walls, squealing in vain. It swivels horizontally, flipping onto its side, and within seconds of wriggling a few inches further, fulminates. The boy instinctively ducks, clamping his hands over his ears.
“Hmph,” the voice of a woman behind him mutters. He twirls around, startled, and bunglingly falls over. The woman has on a pair of erudite-glitzy reading glasses on, hair primped into a scholarly uncouth bun. She cocks her neck and shoulders back and gives the boy a cursorily condescending glance, folding her hands in her lap with an affected decorum.
“Words not to describe breasts as.” She begins to recite from a list she removes from her man-purse. “Firm, supple, voluptuous, voluminous, ample, asymmetrical, shapely, curvaceous, shy, gnarled, tapered, compact, petite, modest, generous, drooping, dainty, perky, robust, garrulous, sultry, bravely sensual, timid, meek, coy, blubbering, swollen, bold, audacious, coquettish, vulgar, obtrusive, pert, tawdry, sycophantic, unctuous, fawning, oleaginous, mawkish, earnest, valiant, effusive, tumescent, reserved, acicular.”
The boy, exhausted of consternation, takes a seat adjacent to the woman. He estimates she’s in her mid-sixties, perhaps a professor at a run-of-the-mill college that writes short-stories during her lectures. Her glasses are impressively snobbish, brambly with resemblance to her age. She raises her beaked, crooked nose and scrutinizes him brazenly, her glasses sliding out of position. She nudges them back into place, flustered.
“Look, now see here. I’ve been…I don’t even have the breath to explain myself. Just tell me how the hell to get off this train, I miss her.” The last blip gushes out of his mouth; a Freudian slip, finds the concept dubious at best; he can remember all the names of the defense mechanisms, psychoanalytic fixations; the drabness of the classroom. He dizzily inhales dramatically, fed up with himself. The woman scowls.
“You murdered Sisyphus.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” The woman triumphantly glares at him. “Young man.”
“I murdered who? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Uneducated, as usual. They always are,” the woman murmurs.
The boy gets up and grabs the woman by her blouse collar.
“Tell me how the fuck to get off this train.” The woman sniggers at him, imperturbable, and spits in his face.
“There is no way off this train, and even if there was, I wouldn’t trouble myself with telling you.”
The boy glares at her, fringing on sheer lunacy, licking her spit off his face. He spits back, directly into her glasses, then scurries off, nearly tripping over himself and falling over again, without the heart to look back.
He drags himself onwards through an infinite amount of nebular deserted cars, goading himself further and further despite being gravely devitalized. At last he reaches a car that is once again spotlessly immaculate. An automated sign located on the roof of the car informs him that the conductor’s hub is just beyond the next set of doors. The boy, corporeally derailed yet shrewdly satisfied, plummets to his knees and drifts off into a wakeless slumber.

When he comes to consciousness he immediately attempts to slide open the door to the conductor’s hub. As he had surmised beforehand, it’s locked. He plops down onto one of the seating rows and lies down, stretching his arms and legs out and cracking his chest. Remaining desensitized to the illusory predicament he’s confined to, he wistfully wades through memories he’s obsessively stored of her, all easily cued forth due to equally obsessive priming. Nostalgia is a grueling though often successful incentive for him; artistically, academically, managing to get through the day with the affliction of such mortal and persistently undesirable thoughts.
“So you want to get off this train,” the familiar grunting undertone of the yeti; the boy contorts back into sitting position, having not expected the yeti capable of talking aside from unenthusiastic dumbstruck grunts. “Me too.”
The boy, briefly taken aback, inquires if he knows any possible way.
“I’m afraid that I don’t.” He hastily reconsiders. “I could try bashing the door down.”
Suddenly the boy realizes that the yeti had been on the part of the train that had detached and ostentatiously exploded. He decides it best to keep this realization to himself.
“I don’t think that will work. And besides, if we just barge in on the conductor I don’t think he will take to an amiable impression of us.”
“This is true,” the yeti lumps down next to the boy, contemplative. “You look like you could use a drink.”
The boy chortles incredulously. “I’m just going to presume that you have a bottle of Jack burrowed beneath all that fur.”
“I don’t.” The yeti chuckles. “Just a bottle of red wine.” The yeti notices the boy’s facial dissatisfaction. “I…I might have something else somewhere, stronger. Or you could just have the entire bottle, I don’t mind.”
“Normally I don’t accept favors, however, I must say,” the boy delighted by his new preternatural company, “under the current circumstances.” The yeti digs into his agglomeration of fur and proudly presents a bottle of, the boy uncultured to wine, red wine. The yeti’s proud demeanor suggests to the boy that the wine is quite aged; he doesn’t know the effect that aging has on wine but has heard adults claptrap about it numerously.
“Why were you sitting like that before? I thought you were dead until you grunted at me,” the boy asks, lapping nearly a third of the bottle in one draft.
“I was asleep. I had a dream that one of my ears was clogged with earwax. I kept trying to unclog it until I would wake up and realize that it wasn’t clogged. Then I’d fall asleep and it would be clogged again.”
“The last time I was asleep I had a dream that I was dozing off next to my ex while she was reading a book that I had recommended to her. She really liked it, the book. We were in a hotel suite and her mother had let us sleep together on the roll-out couch, nearly six or seven feet away from her mother’s bed. I had to put my headphones on to drown out the sound of her mother watching TV. When I woke up—in my dream; I was still asleep—it was midnight and I still had my headphones on. I remember feeling sad because for the rest of the night my ex didn’t cuddle with me much.”
“That’s a pretty intricate dream.” They yeti removes a bottle of absinthe from his armpit. “You must really love her.”
“Oh, I do,” the boy replies, obvious to the bottle of absinthe the yeti is uncapping.
“What’s her name?”
“Michelle. But I’d always call her M., or Elle. She preferred Elle.”
“Why? I’d have preferred M.”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the name of a fashion magazine or something, or maybe because it sounds French.”
“Ah.” The yeti takes a gulp of the absinthe that would be nearly fatal to any human except a condemned alcoholic.
“On the topic of dreams, I daydream about her too. A lot.”
“Yeah? I daydream too. It’s about all there is to do on this train. Sometimes I daydream about being a human, but then I remember what’s the difference, I’m never getting off this train.”
“In my opinion, there’s nothing special about being a human. Everyone is individually united,” taking another swig from the bottle of wine, “they’ve got their own philosophies, mostly compiled by tidbits they borrowed from others’ philosophies, until they come to some epiphany that leaves them with the satisfaction at having a lack of philosophy altogether, or…religion, social circles and ladders; psychology, attempting to scientifically explain ourselves. That’s about it, really,” the boy boasts imperiously. “The hedonists have it best, in my opinion, milking what little pleasure there is out of life.”
“What about love? Your ex. Being a yeti is comparable to being the abhorred miscreation of Dr. Frankenstein; I can’t say my race passes through this train very often, let alone any suitable as life companions,” the yeti says drearily, with an underlying hint of bemused pragmatism.
“You…have encountered other yetis on this train?”
“Oh, no. I was just being an ass,” the yeti slugs back another mouthful of absinthe, blasé.
“My love…M. I suppose such a potent emotion could constitute bothering with life. But the fathomless chasm it eviscerates within you when it inevitably terminates isn’t worth the temporary high; is that not consistent with all forms of pleasure? Meaning, love is just another transient vice, not worthy enough to constitute stomaching life.”
“What about if it doesn’t inevitably terminate?”
“Infatuation neuro-chemically terminates after a year or two. Everything after that is out of habit.”
“Well, shit, soldier. If you put it like that then I guess you have it no better off than I do.” The yeti heaves his arm around the boy’s shoulders. The boy finishes his bottle of wine in a groveling manner.
“M., though…she was one of those girls that you imagined as too naïve…artless, to bestow herself to anyone else.”
The yeti shrugs. “C’est la vie.”
The boy perks his head up, pensively remembering the storekeeper having used the same expression. He giggles. “You know, I don’t believe a single thing I just said.”
The yeti smirks warmly. “Don’t worry about it. You’re not phantom enough for the opera anyway.” The boy glances at the yeti, trying to make sense of what it just said, but before he has a chance to respond the yeti asks if he still wants it to try to break the door down.
“No,” the boy ponders. “I don’t think so. Not yet, at least.”
The yeti laughs. “Yeah, I expected as much. It’s not so bad, after awhile. You get used to it. We all do.”
“You mean to say that everyone on this train knows each other?”
“Most do. There used to be a flamboyantly obese girl that resided on this car. She’d take half-naked pictures of herself picking her lips with sunglasses, then hang them all over the windows and walls. I figure she found it ironic.” The yeti pauses abruptly in a manner that suggests he’s remembering something that he’d rather not speak of.
“What happened to her?”
“Nothing. She packed up and moved cars.” The yeti offers the absinthe to the boy without looking at him. “It’s always better to taste than drink.” It says this awkwardly, knowingly drunk, afterwards motioning the boy to follow it back to its former car. Before sliding the door open, it glances at the floor behind it, meaning to look at the boy.