Things Bloom and Die

The train whips left and right through the window as strange heads bob in sync to its music. The people in the car ahead of him seem like a world away. They are in some ways. The air filling their lungs he does not share - a different atmosphere completely. He does not hear the Biggie song playing from a man’s phone at maximum speaker volume nor the tapping foot of his neighbor. He cannot know that the man playing the song does indeed own headphones which lie around his neck. He would have smiled to witness this gift of 90s American avant-garde to his fellow riders. Perhaps he would have thought to himself, good music needs no permission. But he is not on that train. He is on this one, which by the looks of it, is the same as that one. Except that it’s actually a world away. The world inside those doors, which lives and breathes only from Barclay’s Avenue Station until 36 Street Station in this exact moment in time, is not his world. He knows this because no one is playing Biggie. No one is playing any music. Instead, the grumbled hum of metal tires against the track performs an encore, again. He also knows this (that the world of the car ahead of him is not his world) because the three shades of orange and singular yellow of the seats in that parallel universe glow differently than those in his. Although their colors surely came from the same batch of pigment, the light streaming in from the world outside hits them in different shapes and intensities than they hit the seats around him, the red-orange under him. The car ahead looks brighter, deeper, more full of color. They are not the same colors as the colors of his world. Not exactly.

I hated the color orange as a kid. To me, orange was the most heinously hideous color out of all of the ten colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, brown, pink, and white). It reminded me of orange juice, which I thought tasted disgusting and that anyone who claimed to enjoy it was a liar or simply weird. Grandma loved orange juice (Grandma was weird). She drank it every morning with her breakfast of soft-scrambled eggs, which she made me too, along with buttered toast. I opted for milk because it was either that or water, which was boring and tasteless and sad. I liked that milk was thick and opaque and white, like a cup of cloud. It didn’t taste like much, but it did have more of a taste than water, which didn’t even have a color. No color. No taste. If given true freedom (the kind that all adults enjoy and which is kept locked away from kids until they get married or start driving or have their first kiss or something like that), I would have chosen a steaming cup of hot coffee, the kind Grandma made for Grandpa every morning. She would bring it to him in his favorite olive mug while he sat watching the news in his striped, faded chocolate armchair. “Thank you, dear,” he’d say every time, and they’d give each other the tiniest pickety peck on the lips before Grandma would make her way back around the counter into the kitchen.

The coffee was dark, mysteriously so, for it was neither transparent or opaque. It’s rich brown was almost a black, almost a red, depending on how the light hit it. When it started to brew and the first few drops hit the bottom of the glass pot, its brown was like watery mud-clay. It was like the wood paneling that ran throughout the interior of my grandparents’ home, covering every wall save the white popcorn ceiling. When the pot became close to half full, the color grew deep like the fresh soil of Grandma’s rose garden in the backyard that she tended to on weekends. I wanted to taste it so badly. I imagined it tasted like dirt, but tasty, maybe chocolatey dirt. Warm, yummy dirt that made you feel fuzzy and loved inside. Grandma refused to let me try it.

“It’ll stunt your growth,” she’d say. “Keep you short.”

“But I’m one of the tallest in my class!” I’d retort, offended.

Okay, so I lied about something. I do that sometimes - sorry. Grandpa didn’t always thank Grandma for his cup of coffee. Sometimes he didn’t say a word, just accepted what was handed to him. He would furrow his brow blankly, look up at her sometimes, other times look down, or straight ahead. He’d grasp the warm mug tightly with both hands, a familiar friend — one remaining talisman of a bygone reality. He’d sip it briskly. Grandma didn’t always lean down to kiss him.

“Careful, it’s hot,” she would warn each time. Her tone mechanic, motherly, a tad melancholic still.

Grandpa would sip his coffee and stare into the television. Or just to the side of it. These were his bad days. But on his good days, when Grandpa would stop smiling after planting a wet one on his beloved, he couldn’t wipe the stupid smirk off his face entirely. It would stay pulled taut on his lips, his eyes, his cheeks for hours. Until the blankness slowly crept its way back, contorting his brow once more.

The train swerves sharply. Right. He grips the pole harder and digs each toe into the floor to stay upright. With each rock, his neck sways to one side while his hips shoot to the other. He sways like an inflatable tube man outside a car dealership beckoning to unsuspecting customers with his absurd gesticulations. He chuckles at this image. The train seems to pick up speed, hurtling through the dark in an air-tight sound tube of high screeching and low mumbling. In his sea of orange-yellow, he sinks — deeper and deeper into himself, into some isolated corner far within his own depths. His eyes close, his lungs heave in and out with a dreadful laboriousness. He lets the time evaporate. The train slows and slows like a coffee pot running out of water until it screeches to a halt at 36 Street Station. Beeeeeep. It’s ready. The doors open. The bubble pops. People stand up and exit the car’s doors, and with them, the world inside dies. Exhales. He keeps his eyes shut. He hears the doors close once more, and the train takes off with a heavy crack — a stream of steam. Timidly, heavily, the world materializes before him once more.

The few people left on the train sway in lifeless slumber, lulled to sleep by its violent hum. Or in spite of it. I sit down in the now vacant seat beside me. “4 people died in 2019 walking between moving subway cars,” reads the sign plastered on the wall ahead of me. “Don’t take the risk,” cautions the largest characters on the poster. The final word jumps out in red amongst the pleading white letters. Six translations follow beneath, each with the same color scheme. “Pa pran risk la.” “No se arriesgue.” Others in non-latin script. The meticulously designed MTA logo sits in the bottom corner, watching.

I am trapped on this train. They say it’s freezing outside but I am inside and it’s boiling hot. The puffy fabric of my winter coat pushes inward against my ribs, my neck, my elbows. I didn’t eat breakfast this morning. My stomach is so hollow it echoes with pangs of discomfort, expanding and contracting in every direction, nauseous from the absent fullness. The molten saliva breaching the back of my throat is a warning. I wish I could jump out of my skin. Metal screeches like a high-pitched murder. I can’t feel my hands; they’re tight like my throat. A thought appears to him and perches softly in the center of his mind. What if the doors of the train suddenly shot open and my body was hurled onto the tracks?

Across from me, the thin man in ripped jeans stirs and shifts in his seat. I wonder if his lungs too are gripping for relief. Or if it’s him swallowing up all of the air. I wonder what difference it makes. We plunge into darkness again and I swear I could puke. I am amazed that I haven’t. An itch sparks in his palm, and in an instant too quick to scratch, it’s spreading up the hairs on his forearm, his bicep, his shoulders, his neck. As it crawls up his chin and over the apples of his cheeks, it shoots down his sides and into each thigh, and as it travels, it heats up. It’s settling at the center of his scalp and oozing inward into the deepest parts of him while racing upward from the arches of his feet. In a sour feat of revenge, they meet in his gut and combust. And as the pain swells and screams and bursts and the bubbling bile climbs further up the walls of his esophagus, I sit on the train motionless. My legs crossed. My foot tapping lightly to the music somewhere. And for the life of me, I can’t bear to abandon the question — that if my body were to slam hard against the cold tracks — would I hear a crack? Would I see red?

Doors open and close.

If you looking for the answers then you gotta ask the questions.

In her signature teal, Grandma waters the flowers. Through the screen doors I watch her and the bees softly jumping from one rose to the next, over the marigolds Grandma still swears she never planted. The bees do not pay much attention to her, floating around her like a frenzied halo of low-pitched bumbling and grumbling. Their buzzing almost drowned out by the cumbia music blasting from the neighbor’s carne asada, but not entirely. The buzzing marches harmoniously alongside the accordion as they bid adieu to the sun languidly retreating out of sight behind roofs and trees. The sky around Grandma is orange. Red-orange to pink-orange to yellow-orange. She glows like a soft blaze.

Wolves in sheep coats who pretend to be lovers.

I grab the television remote from the arm of Grandpa’s chair. He’s fast asleep. His neck cocked in a twisted position so his head rests on his shoulder. His chest heaves up and down. uuuuuuUUUP…... AND DOOOoooown…... A soft whisper escapes from his nose with each exhale; the coarse hairs poking out from his nostrils sway like inflatable tube men. Or spaghetti. I don’t like spaghetti. I start to scan the channels.

“It’s gonna be a tricky swing to make but he needs to hit par if he wants to keep tha—”

“And you can really see here how the rotating barrel just smoooooothes the hair and just really holds that curl. Look at that! Look at that! Just gorgeous! Ladies, I’m tellin’ you, you really are not gonna find another iron on the market out there like this one, I mean, the ceramic plate is truly just so uni—”

“...to leave Iraq, that US war ships and planes, there were Eff-One-Seven-Teen stealth bombers involved, launched the opening salvo of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

The words ‘America at War’ emblazoned the screens of the newsroom behind the gaunt-looking, grey-haired man at the desk with a red tie. The font looked like that used during Fourth of July fireworks broadcasts from the National Mall — patriotically cheerful and threatening, every letter capitalized, red-white-and-blue. The picture flitted to scenes of large ships flinging balls of white fire into the night clouds, illuminating the heavens for a few seconds each. If they shot just a bit higher, I feared they’d knock god straight out of the sky.

“Now, this is what it looked and sounded like in Baghdad. It was this short and this is what happened.”

Behind a serene landscape of palm trees lining a deserted road in front of a domed religious-looking building, teeny tiny flashes of yellow-orange-white flickered over the horizon of a city before dawn. For maybe 30 seconds, the sky and my grandparents’ living room erupted with the sounds of soda cans fizzing and fireworks popping on the Fourth of July.

“What we’ve been told by t—”

Forgive them Father, for they know

Not what

They do

“Things could be worse. I mean, you could get caught between the moon and New York Ci—”

The screen door slammed shut.

“Jess, you’re gonna fry your brain with all that TV you watch,” Grandma chided, laughing.

My name is Jesse, by the way. People call me Jess, for short, even though it’s only one letter shorter. At least, everyone used to call me Jess. I think people believe it’s a more suitable name for a child. “Jesse” seems to unrelentingly conjure the ghost of a sexy Uncle Jesse from Full House, an incompatible image with innocence (and I was an angel). My parents named me after my father’s best friend. The Original Jesse. He died before I got a chance to meet him. Now he lives in our photograph albums, officiating my parents’ wedding, cheersing beers with my father and their friends in paint-stained overalls, holding me close to his chest in the hospital waiting room. He lives when my father says my name.

The sound of chopping. Fresh basil and oregano wafting through the air. Sizzling oil - olive. Laugh tracks and fireworks and soda cans fizzing. Cold, matter-of-fact, drumming voices naming types of planes. Grandpa’s snoring. Planes whistle, too. Jess hoped she wasn’t cooking spaghetti.

Flashes of tunnel lamps flicker as they pass, one by one, through the dark window across from me. I close my eyes and listen to the music. It grows louder in my left ear. Closer. Footsteps sound with each beat. A moderate tempo, steady and controlled. The bubble swallows me as it passes. Dem duh know what dem do. It pops. Grows fainter in my right ear. A door slides open. The world screams as it dies. It slams shut with a ring and time stops. Just long enough for the new world to emerge. I watch his back as he makes his way through the car just behind me, shrinking. My foot still taps to the music. It’s gone now, but I swear it was there. The train swerves sharply. Left.