Dousing the Phoenix

Pounding the doors open, Thomas left the museum. Lions, stony, lay couchant at the gates, suffering none to pass unheeded under their granite stare. Immutable rock: dull, rough, and eternal. Thomas cringed under their gaze, the shaking and broken painting-frame forgotten; he was obediently afraid. The sun blazed out from behind a cloud, golden-dancing on his shoulders, and a hollow anger woke in him—yawning, vacuous—unmitigated rage pulling and twisting his organs together and apart. The saliva turned to bitter acid on his palate, and his stomach bubbled and churned and lunged in on itself, slowsucked into the surrounding vacuum of loathing. There it was, laughing in the sky: the greater orb by day, brighter even than the Venusian body, heavenly sign of the museum world. Sun, moon, stars—false idols and fabrications. He hated their pompous existence. He would escape it. Yes. There, the entrance to the subway.

Thomas descended the stairs to the station, wisps of stale scent dissipating up out of the opening in smoky-whispered silence, mildew-reeking incense of the underground. The subway spoke. With groaning, droning formula, monotonations rumbled. A formless, grey-suited sea of faceless, colorless men and women flowed and ebbed with the train schedule, and Thomas sank into the currents, dissolving. Awash in grey tides, he drifted. Waited.

On a bench by a pillar, an old woman sat crying into her hands, black garbed, the sides of her veiled face contorted in lugubrious misery. Weep on, frailty. The sliver of his wondering spurred on by imagination, Thomas watched her, that tiny fragment of another life observed through a fogged, foreign lens, fleshflashed and forgotten. Why would she cry?

Thomas studied her still: wondered, imagined, decided, knew. Her sons had abandoned her. No. Never. Husband? Closer…. Another man. Well! Not old, actually—probably no more than forty. Another man. Used her. Left her pregnant, alone, afraid. So long ago. Just like Vanessa. Another man. Used, seduced, left to womb-rotting loneliness. False smiles and liewhitened teeth mollify the weaker sex: mollify and mollify. Cycling rock-tumbler. Thomas hated her fragile nature.

Trainscreech. A tram entered the station. Begin the flow. The grey sea oozed and wavered, quivering as the cars emptied—trickled—a funnel effect slowing the osmotes at the doors. One last droplet, and then. And then. The torrent, the flood, Thomas lost himself in it, scrambling to stay with the tumult of the tide. Bodies pressed against him, crushing the air from him, and yet he was alone. So many people. A mass. A furious swarm of locusts. Greengrey now, the sea erupted in a cloud of buzzing, gnawing, hunger-maddened plague-bugs. Greengreylocustplague humhowling around him: peaking, crashing, tornadoswirling: particulate updownaroundeverywhere, Thomas staggered, panicblinded. Humhowling still, the swarm carried him toward the gaping, deepinhaling mouth of the train. Swallowed. To be swallowed alive! Oh, Jesus. And then if it consumes me? And then if it digests me?

No! Not locusts. People. Just people. Slowly, tediously slowly, the swarm disintegrated; the greengrey air, once thick with beating locust-wings, fled on phantom winds. The sweat beaded on Thomas’s forehead as he shook in spasmodic shivers of post-panic, adrenaline icing all but alertness. Just people. Grey amblers traveled un-swarm toward the doors—the metal, inanimate doors. Thomas, again lucid, walked with the crowd into the car and stood, gripping a pole for support, watching the tide fill the space around him. And waited.

Trainscreech. The subway tram jolted forward, slowed, then another jolt—shakystarting to again cycle the stops of the circling tracks. Thomas stood as still as he could manage, watching the lighted tunnel stream by outside the car windows. Stillmoving, Thomas waited for his stop, idly watching the other passengers, seeing little out of the ordinary, numbed by comfortable normality. Until. There, at the other end of the car. A legless beggar. Toothless, drooling, blackgaping hole wetting his beard. Incoherent babble-moaning sirened from his mouth, the halfworded sputterings of an age-made mute. Long, knotted, grey hair fell about the man’s misshapen face, his head wobbling from side to side as he made his horrible, drycracking gurgle. He was vileness made flesh, patron anti-saint of the subway.

Waking once again from its fitful sleep, the vacuous anger returned—raw; a sour taste stung Thomas’s mouth as he shakily ingested the image, like beggar like sun. Disgust and horror lumped cancerous in his throat—malignant—and his intestines shriveled into nausea. Legless, rolling himself around on a four-wheeled, plywood board, the beggar made his way up the car. Made his way toward Thomas, who, wishing beyond wanting, beyond even needing, to escape before the filth-ridden man could reach him, glanced in desperation at the route map. Here’s the stop before mine. Tell the next by the last. Still-looking back towards the beggar, Thomas began sweating again, gripping the pole in knuckle-whitening terror.

Perhaps that beggar managed to reach him. Perhaps they even spoke. No matter. There’s no sense in a dialogue, it slows the motion, and one does not wish to go in reverse. Yes, seeing him crucified by his infirmity will suffice. No. Thomas saw the man mock-crucified—a sacrilege. That which is unholy could not be made whole, and, like the beggar, Thomas knew himself wholly unholy. Knew. A crumbling, grey steeple, festering with maggotmold. Holy. He spat.

Trainscreech. Sideways scuffleshuffling, Thomas shoved against the faceless grey out into the station, still spitting the sour sting from his mouth. Pressing, crushing, the beggar! Out! He shot from the train, fighting his way through the crowd. Staggering, blinded by disgust, Thomas clawed through the crowd, choking and desperate for air. Suffocating! His body lashed forward with a violent shudder; the acid on his palate conquering all other senses, he doubled over and vomited. Again. His body seized and shook as he regurgitated everything within him, and a crowd gathered greymass around him, keeping their distance—amazed, concerned, horrified, enthralled. Again. Again.

At last a retch whipcracked his body so violently that he dropped to the ground, dry-heaving. Blood oozed from the corners of his twisting mouth as he lay convulsing in puddled putrescence. Purgation. The beggar was gone from Thomas’s mind, though hunger had taken his place. Ravenous and violent, it tore at him. So it is. Expulsion, replacement. Statue of David. Defecation or regurgitation, whichever: whole. Ingestions and digestions to be released on the world—idiomatic.

With the mark of his digestions scrawled on the subway station floor, Thomas stood, his head bowed and tiredsagging. Exhaustion now coupled with his hunger, and together they writhed and copulated. Better than nausea. Thomas, sweatshaking but satisfied, dragged his feet to the stairs.

He ascended, leaving the city’s subterranean, circular frame behind him. It was time to go home, time to go back to Mother, time to be Thomas. Tears welled in his eyes as he thought of how long he had been away. All day! What a journey—through Heaven and Hell—Old Réné looking on, like beggar like sun. Soon, he knew, he would be able to speak freely—clearly. His mother's house awaited him. As it began, so would it end: dust to dust, stairs to stairs, home to museum to home.