Never Again
I come out of the office at nine o’clock, stumbling away from the deadline that’s been looming over me like some kind of Mordorish evil eye, casting a dank, gritty pall. I’m numb and tired, which is a little disappointing: I’d expecting elation, a seratonin spike that would just sweep away the months of stress-horde in one stroke.
But no. Just numb.
DC is DC on Thursday night – pretty young people in ties and heels walking purposefully along or sitting together over drinks in little scrums of laughter and conversation. The darkness, still in its infancy, settles comfortably over the diffuse people-light of early night. I was hoping for calm, a sense of well-being, accomplishment.
But no. Just numb.
Down the escalator, through the turnstiles, into the retreating rush of the train I’ve just missed. The platform is empty for a while, but fills slowly with officepeople clutching briefcases or blackberries or sheaves of powerpoint printouts, looking blank, defeated. Numb. The curved walls are honeycombed with square recesses lined, in turn, with spongy white somethings that absorb and dampen sound. The lighting is indirect, coming up from fixtures on the edges of the platform floor, the tracks. The effect is supposed to be calming, pleasant, but really it just feels like purgatory, a listless waiting in the gloom.
The train stops at American University on its way north. This is something to look forward to. The kids who spill in aren’t your normal blank-stare Metro-drones: they’re alive with a kind of indefinable, unmistakable vibrancy, not so much a lust for a life as an acknowledgment of its possibilities, and everything that acknowledgment brings you.
Two minutes of news in the car. Bush crowing over the transfer of 14 people he’s finished torturing, Pakistan snapping back to its pre-9/11 relationship with the Taliban, Rumsfeld calling dissenters cowards, traitors, worse. I stab at the radio until that fucking noise goes away. Gnarls Barkley instead. I must be crazy.
Taking care of your body is easy. All you need to do is put food in the machine and exercise it and keep it out of traffic and hope it doesn’t fail you too soon. The ghost life, though — the thing that attaches itself to all of that rank biology and hangs on until the machine stops ticking — that’s harder to figure. It’s more fickle than the machine, harder to please, harder to understand. It doesn’t tell you what it wants, not directly, and it doesn’t tell you when it’s dying. No hunger pangs if you don’t feed it: no parched throat: no illness. Just a slow ailing, a gentle withering, and then, quietly, when you’re not looking, gone.
Never again. Never again.
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