Indolent Strolling

I was indolently strolling along the winding walkway of a modern, northern campus; one of those aspiring, ambitious, win now, progressively technological, objectively vocational institutions, where I had just attended one of its begrudged classes artistic nature. It was springtime.

I mean when I say it was springtime that it was early spring, the first melting of the hated winter that occurs, even in high altitude climes, well before the technical coincident of winter’s cessation and spring’s commencement, when mildly warm temperatures seem truly inspirational and reinvigorate the dulled skull of the young academic into absconding studies for the sake of such warm walkways as this, as well as lazy collegial fairways and fermented cedar patios where at the consumption of wine and cakes, and chances to wear bright clothing reveals an urge to bathe in the optimism, the optimism which seeps from the ground with abandon on just such spring days until, reserve stock from last fall used up, it is slain by March’s late lion, a second winter which brutally recidivises the so soon ago sunny students with a pointed, stifling absence of heat, and inverse preponderance of swift winds from the west. It happens every year, you could live it a millions years, but the first spring is always the best.

I too inhaled the optimism and found myself in pleasant anticipation of the night to come. To this end, I was partaking in that modern informatic exchange, identified so strongly with the green post-adolescents who flooded by me torrentially in each direction, or so I thought, and whom, in the strictest sense, I would be classified along with should a taxis be based on age and occupation alone. As I texted, wringing from my head the pithy brief trite note (Purpose: arrange that evening’s rendezvous), I became completely absorbed in the small rectangular cell-phone screen from which I sent my text; So completely engrossed in the interface of the flat vacuous two-toned media, that I believe my perception literally abated all peripheral inputs in the absolute; How can we say no to a television set when we so poorly resist even the modicum of stimulus provided in a text message? I believe my message went:

To-Knights move: not so white. Where shall we, into the rising bubbles, fall?

And in editing and reediting and slowly finding my finger’s way around the 9 digits so ineptly presenting the alphabet’s 26 letter array, my head and shoulders slumped and my feet, without the aid of mind, found their own way off the walkway and onto the regularity of a train-track with runs through the university, step, step, step, step. It amazes me the hold of a past era’s technology, no matter how sharply it comes to juxtapose modernity, on the shapes and economies of posterity.

And so, thinking little of my whereabouts, not being from that part of town, I construed in my internal compass only that I was headed north, towards downtown, towards the bars, pubs, and clubs: attraction for low-lifes and intellects alike.

I should excuse myself here to the veterans of the cell-phone texting, that being new to this form of dialogue I had not conditioned myself only to accord it no more than small quanta of neural resources and was not, as other more proficient texters may be, immune to the condition of mental absenteeism to which I succumbed in its use.While I finished reverting hyphens to brackets, then back to hyphens, and finally hyphens to commas, two thoughts simultaneously sifting around my brain. First was the humorous image of a face wrapped in perplexity as my whimsical dispatch was read by its intended recipient, a dimly lad, who shares in comparison with me only an affection for filling his personal tank beyond capacity with ale, one or two times per week or weekend. The second thought, more insidious, more sad, was an ethos which had been plaguing me on the days leading up to that one, as it has done on numerous days before and days since. In simplest terms, I speak of a periodic, subconscious - undoubtedly subconscious - desire to avoid people. It’s a frantic, foggy, mental state of fear, embarrassment, and weakness, which washes through me like a snow thaw flash flood. I feel it in not just in my mind, but every part of my body: a need to escape, to run, to hide, to seclude. I have been overcome with such feelings in childhood, adolescence, and apparently, by the severity of this bout, not grown out of it. Loneliness. It’s not that in such times I could rationally justify the sick revulsion I endured at the thought of people, strangers especially, but that instead of hunger, thirst and exhaustion, withdrawal became my most basic need. Knowing not what invites, or banishes such a condition makes it a most fickle visitor upon thee.

I have concluded more recently that those who don’t see other people, don’t talk to other people, or don’t work with other people regularly, as a matter of course in their daily lives, and aren’t put into such social situations with out a conscious effort to do so, are doomed to introversion, avoidance, and loneliness within a matter of months, regardless and any inherent social determinant such as upbringing, genetic make-up, or personal quality. But, notwithstanding of such unfounded theoretical opinions, I was at the time in a mood of recovery and quite eager, quite desperate, for contact, so that a night with a trustworthy but not intrusive mate seemed the cure for what ailed me. As such, when I clapped my phone shut, knowing I would be in touch with my friend later, and seeing no strangers around me, a subtle euphoria rinsed my spirit and I took a sporadic light skip forward along the tracks: glee.

I continued to walk hardly any farther before the issue of there being no one around me became troubling and I paused to take in my surroundings which I recognized not in the slightest. On each side of the tracks the land dropped away to leave me a most stunning, beautiful, clear view of two urban landscapes which will haunt me as long as my memory serves. I’ll save a description for now, because despite these epic sceneries, most astonishing to me then, was that turning around, I realized that directly behind me the tracks ran through a tunnel dug into a rock face. The puzzlement to my senses of course was that having seemingly just stepped out of it, I must have just walked though it, to get there, though for the life of me I had no recollection of doing so. An unsettling nausea rippled over me. It did not seem reasonable that I could have been so lost in composing a text message that I traversed a tunnel’s unique luminary and auditory landscape it without realizing.

Straining my eyes into the tunnel I could discern it was straight long and narrow by the tip of day light visible at the other end of it. Having no other alternative explanation I concluded stubbornly that I must march back across the tunnel whence I had come.

One step into the tunnel however, I was ensconced in the monstrous reverberating roar of a locomotive engine. The single white light of day to which I had aimed was replaced with two small yellow lights and a menacing front grill; eventually my eyes adjusted: a train. There was a train coming at me through the tunnel. Though my eyes couldn’t be sure, my ears informed me by the rising pitch of that monstrous rhythmic roar, ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca- chuk-a-chuk. Not only was it coming, it was coming fast. And though neither my eyes could nor my ears could formulate such a notion alone, some perceptive or imaginative fold, likely in the lowest simplest part of my brain, informed me that is was malevolent. I was a malevolent train driving towards me in the tracks on which I stood. Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk.

To a sober reader safe in their rocking chair, the personification “a malevolent train” is absurd. Granted. But there on the tracks, my head’s scope of possibilities dilated wildly, and that capricious concept took firm root.

I spun on the spot, taking my eye off the train and stepped forward once, bringing myself to the mouth of the tunnel. I surveyed to the left side of the tracks. I saw before me a meadow, not a meadow of tall grass, purple flowers, and grasshoppers, but a meadow of houses. Sub-urban homes, tidy soft edged crescents and cul-de-sacs, carefully laid down and obsessively pre-planned lot, well mowed laws in chain link fenced lots, flags flying taught in the now rigid breeze that also mildly twisted the swings on the deserted plastic sets in every second back yard. The houses were forts hiding from street view behind garages distanced from the road by manicured flower beds excessively tended to (sprouting crocuses through thick mulch), grassy moats, and an unoccupied ribbon of silver sidewalks. In the distance a shopping plaza of clay brick walls and a chestnut brown steel roof is surrounded in parking spots and featured stores named on yellow and white signs carrying blue and red letters in comic sans font.

Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk. Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk. I checked the train’s distance, then took another step and brought myself out into broad day light and look to the right.

The other side of the tracks, to the right out of the tunnel, featured a grid, though not a strict grid, but a grid of winding streets that bent at funny angles, a grid formed not for it’s own sake but as the negative space surrounding and supplying the scatter shot buildings tightly packed little squares, all side by side, all slightly different heights, styles and at haphazard angles, so that from the top each block seemed to make out a cubist interpretation of the chess board. The streets were bustling with life, a hot stink of sweet fruits rotting, sweat, and frenzied ambition filled my nostrils as I gazed at it. It was dusty, unkept, and honest, not lacquered over, not hiding anything. The small buildings seemed to spill out their contents onto the streets, unable or unconcerned with containing them. Wide arches served as doorways and invited interchange between the street and living rooms. People moved in all directions, rushing running, pushing carts, dodging cyclists, or chatting, a cigarette in one hand a red apple in the other.

Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk. Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk. I stared at the train, stared hard, and as if by dint of exquisite observation, the same recess of my being that had produced the notion of the oncoming train being ‘malevolent’ informed me that the choice at hand was a philosophical one, not a physical one, that I could get to the pub and have a drink with my friend on both sides. The train whistle sung out twice. Ooot Ooot. It exasperated me. The whistle then rung a third time, at a lower pitch, a hollow, resounding wail, and stung me, numbing my extremities. In analysis of the wordless, melody less, third whistle I finally become aware, with grave certainty, as if spoken to directly by the train, of the finally aspect of my quandary – the train was eternal. Literally endless, it would pour out of the tunnel beyond all time frames, so that my choice of sides was permanent, no amount of waiting would see out the last car and allow me to cross back to the side I had rejected. I was to be locked between a split, a rift, with only death by sudden violent impact as a third road for indecision between the panoramic dichotomy laid bare before me.

Ca-chuk-a-chuk-ca-chuk-a-chuk. CHUKACHUKACHUKACHUKA!

I took another step forward and stood facing the right; the train was now just about at the tunnel mouth and pass over the ground on which I stood. I gazed at tightly packed, squirming, mephitic, puerile, lively, and vibrant community in the grid themed city below. Though repelled by its overwhelming and awesome intensity, curiosity, intrigue seemed to blanket my perspective of it. I could picture clearly with out looking the suburban landscape behind me of Las Vegas, or Colorado Springs, or Providence, Topeka, Ottawa, Montpellier…it was a trap, it was a labyrinth, a labyrinth one dies in not because the walls are too tall to see over, but because it so winds and sprawls one gives up, convinced that it has is no end, let alone an exit. None of these factors, however, weighed upon my action.

The sound of the train reached its apex and not long could I make out ca-chuk-a-chuk, only the constant, monotone harmony of iron, coal, and fire.

So in my defence of my choice, let me reiterate that the social suspicion, withdrawal, dread of human contact, fright of other people, which resides in me, is subconscious. It lay, and still lies in a part of me I’ll never know. It originated in me, while I lived a house just like those suburban fortresses, accessed by autos and antennae, by men and air waves respectively. And just before the train flew past, looking into the tight hopscotch of the unplanned, unaffected, immortal neighbourhood, I took a step backwards, letting the train pass in front of me, and turned without pause or backwards glance, to stumble on, heading down to the solitary road, eyes fixed on my vibrating cell phone, alerting me to an incoming message.