As they passed over the bridge he glared at the statue’s little island, trying to remember why she’d brought it up excitedly a few weeks earlier, some story or something he could not place.
―Okay, well, so I’ll see you at home. The train stopped but the doors did not open as he approached them. Moving closer, his nose nearly against the glass. He could feel his face folding up at the, he thought, motherfucking obsolescence, the bullshit purposefully, systematically laid out before him, to ruin him or anyone like him. When the doors did open he pushed his way through the damp coats and breath, the obese and used up and anyone else who might have been at his whim of some impossible generous spirit, if not for the endless cosmic interference, inconvenience, then and everywhere, and all of them its architects. How many seconds delayed each step, climbing the stained and cracking tile, each dark and unbound hang-up at the hand of an unnamed or seen or known train traffic that had been ahead of him? and there, all around him, closing in, a relentless force of days wasted, sitting, waiting, looking over the shoulders of people in front of him, wondering without answer. Every one a, and he couldn’t think of the word, a… something of the next. Something sitting and waiting, the imposition of the vacant placeholder, the terrible forerunner like the constant replacement and reproduction of the population, the weeks, their lack of definition and his self. He sprang up the stairs, skipping two at a time and felt the rush of the sick air. Two tourists posed, gesturing Vs with their fingers in front of a black cube mounted on its corner. His stomach tightened, mouth filling with hot saliva at the thought of another day, as he spit, as he crossed in front of a honking SUV, its windows tinted, weaving between the mass of pedestrians, across the commercial avenue and toward the university.