The Subconscious Subway

The first thing the man felt was the rattle of his head against the window behind him. The first thing the man heard however, was much less familiar. It was a high pitched repeating beep, as foreign to him as stepping into one’s childhood home, only to find that that home now belongs to a new family,

(beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep)

The man opened his eyes, and to his surprise, he found himself on a train. Well, not exactly a train, but a subway car. The kind that they have in cities to get passengers to and from their destinations.

The man looked around himself, he was alone. Had he fallen asleep? Is that why he couldn’t place where he was at the moment? That didn’t explain why he couldn’t remember what he was doing before this, where he was going, why he was going there, or what his name was.

The man, shielding his eyes from the harsh fluorescent lighting, looked out the window behind him. The man expected to see dark brick lining the sides of the tunnel, but he couldn’t have been more incorrect.

He saw a vast expanse of colors and patterns swirling, dancing on the winds of this strange land beyond the familiar. Turning his attention back towards the train car, the man stroked his chin for a moment, pondering the situation. Feeling the constant hum and vibrations of the train the man could tell it was moving fast, faster than any vehicle that he could fathom through this world of chaotic and churning colors.

Looking to his right, and standing up from his seat, the man saw a door, leading from one car to the next. After a brief moment of consideration the man reasoned with himself that he should journey to the next car. The alternative was to remain seated of course, but the man didn’t like how fast the train was moving, and he wanted to know if there was a conductor who could slow them down.

(beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep)

The man gingerly stepped towards the entrance of the next subway car, the doors retreating in an instant. The doors shut automatically behind the man, and inside the next car, a broken window had let some of the twisting and swirling colors into the room, writhing and contorting into different shapes. At first the man felt fear envelop him, but he soon calmed as the colors and shapes made no advances towards him.

The man timidly walked a bit closer to the colors and warping shapes they made, inspecting them, and suddenly he saw it. Viewed from the subway train’s windows, these were but colors and their patterns, but up close, these colors were small pockets of life, of moments on earth, slices of existence.

Peering into this living moment, the man saw a small apartment, a young boy, a mother, and a father. The young boy looked as if he was loving every minute of his life, as the mother and the father gave him gifts for what seemed to the man like a birthday party with just the three of them.

The family after the boy had opened all of his gifts gathered around a table in their kitchen with a cake, white and blue icing adorning the top and sides, and five candles proudly displayed on top. The mother and the father were saying something, maybe singing something to the boy, but the man couldn’t quite make out what it was, the sound of these slices of life seemed to be unfortunately nonexistent. A shame, he would have liked to have known what they were telling the little boy.

The last thing the man saw was the little boy blowing out his candles, and the mother and the father’s big smiles for the boy. The man couldn’t help but smile to himself, the little boy looked so happy after all. The colors evaporated from the subway car, flooding back out and into the whirlwind outside, save for a single orange flame that looked like it could be a flame on top of one of the little boy’s birthday candles.

The flame dashed and danced in front of the man’s face, seemingly urging him onwards to the next subway car. The man instead turned to the shattered window, the glass crunching under his shoes as he walked towards it.

(beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep)

He considered trying to climb out, but after another moment of rational thought, decided against such foolishness, he didn’t know what would happen if he lost his footing and slipped into that whirlwind of color, and with the train moving so fast, he would almost certainly lose his grip and plummet into… well plummet into whatever was outside.

The man strode forward, following the flame through the set of doors and into the next subway car. In this car there were multiple broken windows, and a bigger swirling mass of colors congregated on the floor. The man, the same as before, peered inside the bubble of color to see… the boy and his family! They had all gotten older, especially the boy, he looked like a young man now! This seemed to be the day that he was to leave for a university. The mother was crying, but with a smile on her face as she watched the boy load the last box of a dozen or so into a brown station wagon.

The boy shut the trunk and noticed the mother with her tears, walking over slowly and embracing her as the father looked on smiling with tears running down his cheeks in tandem. The boy pulled away from his mother as she had stopped crying. She continued smiling however, as the boy then went to the father and embraced him, pulling away after a few moments. The boy then went to the brown station wagon, taking one last gaze at the apartment where he spent so much of his time, and climbed into the seat, waving from the open window of the station wagon. The mother and the father waved back at him, still smiling. The boy pulled out into the street, and as the boy saw the ever familiar green light on his street to move forward, the colors faded and warped bringing the man back to his reality, a single green circle floating in the air near him.

(beep beep beep beep beep beep)

As before the green circle of the streetlight floated in the air for a single moment, before flying towards the next door of the subway car. The man knew to follow, and the colors knew to guide.

The man again entered a different subway car, the doors shutting behind him once more. All the windows of the train were shattered now, leaking an obscene amount of colors that were swirling in patterns on the floor. Patterns so thick they looked like soup or a syrup-like consistency. The man was calf deep in swirling colors, in awe of their majesty and simple presence. Once more upon inspection, the colors provided a slice of life, a piece of existence to the man who rode the subway.

The colors warped into a scene where the boy looked even older now. The boy was beyond his years at the university where he studied to become what the man judged to be a professor due to the elbow patches on the boy’s tweed suit jacket. The boy looked handsome now, the effects of maturing gone from his life, no more acne or hormones to fret over, he was in control. Save for the fact that to the man at least, he was in a desperate rush to get somewhere. The man could tell the boy had been running for a good while, likely a few blocks, as his chest heaved in and out, his face a light crimson. The boy flew down a set of steps at breakneck speed, barely managing to catch himself as he nearly tripped at the bottom of the staircase, stumbling through a set of subway doors and slamming into a girl, who dropped the papers she was carrying.

The girl looked at the boy and started laughing, not at him, the man noticed, but at the absurdity of it all. The doors closed behind the pair, the only two in the subway car, the only ones who mattered. The girl extended a hand, and the boy took it, laughing as he pulled himself off the floor, the pair talked and laughed with one another, the boy helping the girl pick up her papers. The colors distorted and faded from view, the moment of life gone in a flash before the man’s eyes.

(beep beep beep beep beep)

As the vision faded from the view of the man, a loose white beam of light, similar to one of the papers knocked out of the girl’s hands, drifted away from the man and slid underneath the door to the next subway car. The man rushed to grab at the light, this time stumbling and flailing into the next room, falling to the ground where the paper-like light beam rested.

The doors closing behind him, the man reached out for the paper beam. Why had this one stuck around when the others didn’t? Examining the paper, the man flipped it over revealing an invitation that simply states “Wedding! July 16th, RSVP for the Bride and the Groom!”.

The man looked at the paper confused, what day was it anyways? He should try and go to the wedding. The bride may not know him, but the groom? He felt like he had known the groom his whole life, as if this groom were a different version of himself. Distracted by his thoughts, the man had not noticed that there were holes punched into the ceiling of the subway car, not to mention all the obviously shattered windows.

The colors swirled even faster here, sticking to the ceiling as if they were held in place by an unseen tether. The man couldn’t stop his curiosity, and this time rather than peering into the colors, the man jumped into the ceiling of colors, and they held him in place, securing him inside, showing him the wonderful slice of the life that they held.

The boy had grown a few years, but not by much, he looked to be close to the age the father was when the boy had his birthday. The same could be said about the girl and the mother, although the girl had an everlasting beauty that the mother had not. The boy had chosen a very beautiful girl indeed. The pair was dancing in the kitchen of an apartment, wearing casual clothes, the girl’s head pressed to the boy’s chest, his chin resting atop her forehead as they swayed together. The man this time felt that he was so deep into the colors that he could hear the sound of the little moment of life for the first time.

A song played, a song more beautiful than the man had ever heard, it made his eyes water, and tears fell from his face. To see two people so deep in love, so bound to each other, so wonderfully and irrevocably decided as soulmates, it could make even the deepest evil soften for the briefest of moments.

The man cried heavily now, heaving sobs from his chest, although he knew not what he cried for. It was not the fact that he had never had a moment like this with someone, but for the sheer beauty of the moment, the fleetingness of which a moment like this lasted.

(beep beep beep)

The moment again warped out of view before the man’s eyes, a single golden music note drifting out of the colors as the man was released and dropped to the floor. The colors then faded, as they always did. The best moments always did last for an eternity and for no time at all it would so seem.

The music note drifted between the seams of the door begging the man to follow. The man was reluctant this time, but what choice did the man have? He had to get off of the subway and go home, wherever that may be.

Taking a deep breath the man ran forward to confront the conductor. He slammed through the doors, feeling like he had matched the breakneck speed of the train now, watching the musical note puff into the thin air of the next subway car. The man saw not a conductor, nor a control panel, but colors in this room that were more blinding than he had ever felt, there was barely any subway left, it was simply the floor of the subway car amidst the sea of color.

The other times the man had felt like he should be appreciating this beauty, the light, see the patterns twisting and curling into beautiful brief flashes of the great world in which so many called home, but not this time, the man knew what these amounts of colors, lights, and patterns would bring to him. The man for the first time in his journey on the subway felt true fear. The man tried to run, he tried to flee back to the escape of the other cars, pounding on the doors he had come through, hoping, praying that he could go back to his safe and quiet car. The man however, felt he knew the rules of this place, the subway may only move forward, never backwards.

Against his will, the man was pulled in by the color, swallowed by it, absorbed into the fullness of the moment that existed before him. He could see it all in full.

A doctor talking to a now aged boy and an aged girl. They looked to be at the age the man himself felt to be, nearing middle age, likely having a few children, all at different ages, not young enough to be babies, but not old enough to go off to college or a career. The doctor said something that the man couldn’t quite make out, other than one word of course.

One word which the unfortunate and sickly know all too well. Cancer.

Slices of life flashed before the man’s eyes like pictures on a screen. The boy telling his children of the news, his children crying, the girl attempting to comfort them. The girl reading a book to the boy as he sat in bed, clutching her hand. The boy growing nauseous then vomiting in the bathroom as the girl rubbed his back. The girl stopping to brush the boy’s thinning hair from his face, placing a kiss on his forehead as he fell asleep in his hospital bed after his treatment. The boy’s younger children jumping on the bed to hold his hand and tell him about their days at school, the oldest child looking on from the doorframe, sobbing softly as the girl held the child in her arms.

(beep beep)

The man not just sobbed as before, but wept, openly wept at the future that was left for the boy. For the first time, the man spoke aloud.

“Why! Why do this to him? Let him live! Please let him live!” said the man, his voice shaking and cracking with every syllable.

“Don’t let the boy live because of his own life, but let him live for his children, let him live for everything that he has built!” said the man, but it was of no use, the boy’s fate had already been decided, the subway was moving too fast to be stopped.

The man saw a final image flash before his presence in the moment ended for good. The boy in his hospital bed, the girl sitting on a chair next to him, and the children sitting in chairs adjacent to the girl. They were all not watching the boy, no, his eyes were closed. They were watching the heart monitor to which the boy was attached. The girl held the boy’s hand in her own, and with tears streaming down her face, as well as the faces of the children, while they continued to watch the heart monitor. The heart monitor now produced a constant high pitched repeating beeping noise that had slowed down to a crawl, a weak beep beep sounded from the machine.

The man, shocked by the beeping sound not coming from his mind but from the moment he was in, fell out of the moment, back onto the subway car that was now hurtling towards a large black void where there was no color, no pattern, and no movement.

The man spoke aloud once more, “I see now. I don’t understand, but I see.”

(beep)

The man watched as the front of the subway car he was standing on continued with ferocious speed towards the void that waited for him up ahead. The subway train did not stop, it moved too fast to be stopped.

The man looked at what he knew would be his final destination in this life or any other. The man inhaled, blinked, and finally exhaled, staring at the void.

The man spoke for the final time, saying not to the colors, or the void, but to himself and the boy, “I accept this, my time has come to an end, what I have built will not fall, but rise, they will savor their moments, their slices of life, as I have savored my own.”

With the words he spoke the man smiled, vanishing with the subway into the darkness, as the subway, even in darkness, moved too fast to be stopped.

All grew silent, and somewhere, at someplace, at some point in time, the boy stilled. The girl and her children wept, as the heart monitor had stopped ticking.