2003-12-13 - 2:49 p.m.

***

Transition

I don�t know if she got there.

The day seemed to be at odds about whether to rain or not and the ground was slick and glistening in sunlight. The cars on the street below were splashing about in newly formed puddles like the children across the street at the nursery school were. The clock read 12:14, which was a shame because the train was scheduled for 12:12 and time was running out. Time is always running out. I see the clock and think to myself that it�s running backwards and that the timer is slowly reaching zero.

I had been by myself for about 15 minutes when a young girl came walking up from the street to the platform. She swung a shoulder bag from one arm to the other and started digging through it as if there was some golden relic hidden away inside. She looked young and I guessed her to be a high school student but I passed through the high school�s yard on my way there and school was still in session � another Monday stuck in a jail. She squatted on the ground and began removing things, putting them on the dry part of the concrete, underneath the roof of the platform. A train came shooting past at ridiculous speeds, erupting with a horn and making a hell of a lot of noise but all without stopping. If it did stop, it would bring me to NYC had I gotten on and I was looking to go in the other direction, so the experience was wasted on me. I was not impressed either way.

She looked fragile and scared, as if any minute a monster would have grabbed her from inside her bag and swallowed her whole. The sun beamed even brighter after escaping the grip of the clouds and lit everything up in a triumphant brilliance. The girl hardly noticed.

Two police officers began their walk up the stairs and I clenched my bag tightly. Even though I had done nothing wrong and there was nothing in my bag but resumes, I had always been nervous around cops on the basis of I don�t know all the time if there might be something I�m doing wrong. There seem to be plenty of rules out there and the chances that you�re breaking one of them seem pretty high without you even knowing it. They laughed and joked around with each other, each with a hand on his baton. The black stick glared at me with the eye of the sun shining off its well-polished body, looking me straight in the eyes. There was something about this guy being drunk and that guy passing out and the two of them burst into laughter, clenching their batons tightly. I started to walk away, but then realized that this might draw attention to me, so I took a few more steps and leaned up against the wall to the waiting room, which had the distinct odor of piss and sitting around too long. I realized I was probably messing my pants up a little by leaning against the wall and I wanted to sit down because my shoes were killing my feet. However, sitting in the waiting room would make me reek like I had wet myself before arriving and had used a hair dryer to remove the evidence.

Across the tracks at the other platform, the train for the beach line stopped at the station. It screeched and whined as it slowly slid its way into a cuddle with the platform, opening its doors to let people out. Why anyone would get out of the train puzzled me because if they just stayed on for 10 more minutes, they would have been to the beach instead of this town. I looked around the platform I was on and realized I wasn�t even following my own advice. I�d love to be at the beach today � the waters rolling to the sands as the sun played on top � but the resumes in my bag weighed me down to my current position and wouldn�t let go. I�d have to find a job before I could find happiness because although money doesn�t buy happiness, you can�t find happiness for free.

Someone spoke from the train and the doors snapped shut. There was a short burst of air and the train slowly took itself from the embrace it had with the platform and marched on through the same set path to cuddle to go see if the next platform would cuddle with it. On and on it would go until it got at last to the beach and shared an intimate half an hour with the platform there before retracing its steps all the way back to the City. I actually envied the train in a way. Not in the sense that it was cuddling with gigantic slabs of concrete continuously all day and not in the sense that it had to repeat the trip laid out for it over and over and over again with little pause for rest. I envied the fact that it was going to be by the beach and smell the salty air, hear the rushing crash of the water on itself and feel the breeze from the shores as it washed over it. It took me very little time to remind myself that the train felt nothing anyway and that all of the cuddling, breezes and sounds were wasted on it. I envied the ideas that were happening to the train and that alone made me feel very alone on that platform until I turned around again.

The platform filled up a little more as I stood there daydreaming about my escape to the beach. A few businessmen stood around, looking up the tracks then off into nothing then down at their feet as if they were asking their feet for permission to look elsewhere. The girl had filled her bag back up and was nodding her head to the music blasting out of the golden relic she found buried in her bag. A lone man was standing behind me, reading the news and finding nothing new in it. The same death, the same business, the same sports scores. Only the details change � only the flavors to the same treat change. But it's always the same treat.

The cars were splashing below us all more and more - the volume increased in size not loudness. Each hit like a baby cymbal crash in the symphony of the everyday. The rush of the day played in the background, that hushing swirl of noise just off in the distance that sounds like someone left the TV on static everywhere you go. The trees reached over the edges of the train tracks and waived noisily. Everything seemed to make noise at once in this furious storm of sound but it was as if the volumes of everything were turned way down low. The rustle of the paper behind me seemed loud.

As I listened to the song of the day, a strange clicking seemed to come out of the mouth of the staircase from the platform on the other track. It sounded like the face of a clock shouting. Slowly and surely, the mouth of the platform vomited a tuft of hair, which grew to a woman's head and finally a woman's body dressed in a business suit-like dress that was attached to the head. Her face seemed done up in all of the colors of the Mary Kae rainbow and her hair was a gnarled mess of red disaster done to perfection by at least a can of hairspray. You could smell faint traces of her perfume from where I was standing, which was considerably strong if you take into account the acrid smell of piss coming from behind me. I didn't know what to think of her at first. Was she trying to go to the beach in her business suit and missed the train? Was she going to the city? I had no idea. Neither did she.

"Excuse me?"

She said it to nobody. She didn't say young man or sir or ma'am or lady or anything to show that she was addressing anyone except for those who would be dumb enough to answer.

"Does this go to the city?"

You wondered if the 'this' was the platform, the piss-stink waiting room, the people next to me, the trees waiving, the kids in the playground, the cars in the puddles, the cops, the old men, the young girl, the bag or anything else. None of which was going to the city.

"Yeah," I said and I had no idea why. One of the guys on the platform looked over at me as if to say "What the hell are you doing?"

"Do you know when the train comes?" She started standing on one foot with the other one toes down. It was the standard pose of the vapid trying desperately to look seductive. She parked her chin to her chest and looked up at me with sad eyes. This older woman was acting like a flirt from across an entire length of train tracks. "I don't know how to get there."

She was acting as if, with just the right amount of tact and cleverness, I could get her into bed with me. Of course, she was 20 years my senior. The fact that with all of my tact and cleverness put together and multiplied four times I still wouldn't have been able to do so had I wanted to made it painfully obvious she was just too lazy to look things up but not too lazy to flirt.

"Just look at the chart downstairs," chimed in one of the officers. He was either trying to call her on her flirting or just sick and tired of her already.

"But I don't know how to read it?"

I looked down the platform to the young girl nodding her head to the music blaring out of her headphones. Even she could read the timetable downstairs and she was younger than I was. I was so glad this girl couldn't hear the mayhem going on outside of her world of music. I didn't want the lame practices of this businesswoman rubbing off on this girl, showing her that with a little flirting and a little stupidity thrown in, you can get almost anything handed to you. It's a trait of life I find silly and abusive, pushing your looks onto someone else to gain for yourself. To top it all off, this lady didn't have much to push. Then again, if it were I on the looks pushing side instead of looks receiving side, I wouldn't have much to push either.

A horn blew down the track and our train chugged its way down the track a whole fifteen minutes later than it should have. The lady started to look frantic, realizing that without people there to show her what to do, she'd have to do something for herself.

"Come on, someone please help me," she shouted across the tracks. I looked her right in the eyes and the train burst right in between us, cutting off the supply of attention and information. She would be stuck looking at charts and realizing she was about 20 minutes late for the train, which had arrived at the platform the same time I did. She would have to find the next time the train showed up, cuddled up to the platform and swallowed her whole, charging its way to the City as it ate up all the passengers on all of the platforms. I rested my resumes on my lap, prepared to begin my days of doing business. I looked out the window and noticed the older woman smoking a cigarette, waiving one hand in the air as another held a cell phone to her face as she screamed into it.

I turned around and looked at the girl who was sitting there, bobbing her head to her music and I prayed that she never got to that place, never became that person.

I don't know if she got there.

BMC

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