THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE LIKE THE LIFE I'M LIVING

59. THERE'S NO AFTERLIFE LIKE THE LIFE I'M LIVING:

I was born on a hopeless train the hazards of anyone's guess and I managed to ride the rails for a rather long time - sometimes confused disheveled and sad but always listening and watching what went by and whatever went as it was going I witnessed what it was showing : declaiming nothing no dimension no contention commenting only on the silence and all the dark (sometimes the awesome sometimes the meek - the doctor walked in my mother went weak) and one day I watched two girls looking at pictures all the way to Cleveland - five albums of incredible shit - they never looked up or seldom and stayed immersed within themselves the two in conversation as every picture - reviewed - was talked about endlessly and I never did see the pictures but I heard the chatter - babies baseball weddings and the rest - an incredible array of normal life while all around them rushed the innumerable exceptions to everything AND they could have LIVED those two but chose instead the diabolical pursuit of ennui and banter - the kind of high-school stuff that keeps kids going and makes them weak and wince at anything not considered normal or to be expected but that's why football fields are filled with dreck - the passable living of the passable wreck - and I finally did put a towel on my head and fell asleep trying to think of where to go : but I could not sleep nor go anywhere not pre-determined (this was after all a train) thus I stayed awake trying to reach a sleeve of light to hide in but instead ALL I GOT WAS Melville's 'white' : ''for all the associations the color white has with whatever is sweet and honorable and sublime there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood' and that was the fog-mind-blanketed-whiteness into which I was headlong falling - crazily askew and driven forward by the energy elixir of this train on rails I was forced into some whiteness just SOILED by girls - and they did go on yet I stayed my course and when we docked at Cleveland's tempting station I did what only was left to do - let the drained train turn me around and head me right back home (another ticket enhanced by desire one more fare for nothing and paid for by fire) the conductor said "aren't you getting off?" and I replied "not on your life - give me another" and it all took place in the space of some lethal ten hours (as I recall it) the return trip much nicer than the one out - I watched the business folk perambulate the car water elixir again magazine book newspaper and briefcase EVERY one a simple gem unto itself and then it hit me : 'if this world is an abstract place drawn like water and some ink into a runny scene of passing moments then I'd better learn to read inscriptions wherever they may be and if I can read them then is it not also incumbent upon me to decipher for other men just what it is I see and read and understand BACK to tell them too?' but such questions cause no answers from other people (settled in as they may be on other chores and small concerns) but AT THE LEAST the twiggish girls were gone and I'd need not be concerned with that again and for such small blessings we wash our hands of blood in pools of holy water.
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"People are amazed / to see / a frog / in an office" it sounded like some strange poetry to me but was two guys mumbling something back and forth about the place they worked - a going concern of environmental bounty or whatever connected to wholesome endeavor and evidently the office had a grand lobby in the building and in that lobby was a veritable Amazonian rainforest of dimensions deep and filled with pooled water ferns and trees koi and carp and FROGS too - which caused that enticing comment I'd heard - but all I did was worry about warts on the secretaries' hands but for what it was worth NONE of that was ever mentioned.
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"Are you OK ? you fell down like a wayward thump and we all saw your head snap back as if your very neck had broken ARE YOU SURE you're OK?" someone said that to me right square into my face beefsteak breath alcohol stink and tobacco smoke all mixed together in one distasteful blend of human animal and pushy ogre (for I could care less whatever would happen to him) but for some reason 'concerned' they all were and I said 'I'm fine I'd just fallen asleep and I guess I fell from the chair" for lack of anything better to say for in actuality it was in my dream that I was flying too and with a broadened thump I did hit something but it was some sort of evil wall around a Heaven of my imagining and that TRULY YES THAT had been enough to wake me up and APPARENTLY TOO enough to heave me right out of the chair I'd been in which coincided alright with our arrival back into Pennsylvania Station or whatever was the last stop on this detestable journey - dreamtime realtime imaginarytime I'd never know again - and I just got up and shook a few hands and said "thank you for your concern and worry" and all of that and walked away with some sort of limp I was sure they'd notice (my stupid leg had fallen asleep in a very big-time way).
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There's usually a way to salvage everything.