Skyscrappers, Small Rooms, Spacetime

On the train. The train is imperfect, like everything, but a particular flaw here is the breaks. When the train stops and opens its doors, it coasts back on the track until the train begins moving again. On the train looking out of the window, Chicagoland leading to Chicago. Looking down out of the window, the railroad (I do not notice it is the railroad; I think it is the ground) is slightly dirty, but pretty, and I’m thinking right now about semiosis, I don’t know why I’m thinking about this but I am, and I see a lone white flower there with grass about. It’s very; and then, the railroad drops out, and I see asphalt, stop light turning green, cars, people, neon, then the railroad’s back, but it’s all strange broken pavement on this side. I look up and there’s a big blimp. It’s very nice in the sky and I think about what that must feel like, being in the basket, firing fuel into it and rising from the ground, vertigoesque fainting beauty, and watching the ground and people go down. I think about space. In space, in a spaceship. What’s it like coming back into the planet? What’s it like looking at the sun from up there? What’s it like coming back into the planet, being consumed into the atmosphere? I want to do it. I want us all to do it.

Heather’s over there, adjacent seating. I want to kiss her, and I wonder if she knows it. She’s in another man’s arms. Around us three are seven more close in the train, ready for the night. I look at the other people. Ana, a friend, she’s in another man’s arms. And another girl none of us know is bored between two men. Some of them are still drunk from the bar. I hadn’t much to drink there. But there will be a change, I warn, soon tonight, in that lacking.

The train is done and in the station. We get out, joking about things. There’re so many of us, ten, and with that many, I notice, there’s a problem with walking. You can’t walk with them all. You can only walk with one or two, and the spaces between get confusing. You wish you could pick who’s walking with you. If I could be the director I would do it nicely. I’d try to be fair. You. Very pretty you. Walk with me? And you? Ok.

Outside of the train station. We’re getting a taxi. While in the time it takes for this, let me start with you again. I want to explain something. We’re getting a taxi in Chicago. Chicago is a strange place, and in a plane above the city in a cold February night I could tell you everything about, I sat next to a pleasant middle aged woman and she told me about this city, her favorite, and it’s very classy, and windy, and it’s full of modern art, and from the sky it’s the most beautiful display of a three dimensional grid of life I may ever see, and I hope that when I leave this place, my new plane will circle out and away in a similar fashion to my arrival, and I can see the piers, and the city heights, and then the clouds coming down from above. Now I look up and to my left, and there are two incredible sky scrappers. Reader, I am not alien to skyscrapers, for before I was living in Philadelphia, but these ones are special. It is nearing midnight and many of their lights are still on. The streets are still moving. This is the nightlife of a giant sprawl. Down on the ground to my left, under the glow and cast of the skyscrapers, there’s four people, kids almost, smoking something, drinking something, on a rug, there on the pavement, laughing about things, and greeting us.

Our group of ten adds one more, a pretty tall girl, and the taxis are ready and two. But we can’t all fit. I’m outside, looking at the back seat. The pretty tall girl urges me to climb over and lay atop four of them. I step up to do so, and then something happens. The taxi driver begins to move the car without me. My foot is under the tire, the tire rolls over it. Fuck, I yell at him. They yell at him. Oh sorry sorry.

I get in. Thinking about my foot. I’m looking out of the window. There’re horse carriages and cars and twenty city signs on each side of the street. Our taxi goes over a wooden bridge, follows a boulevard, cuts off and turns, a couple more streets. It would be very dark if not for the neon. It would be very dark if not for the window lights and street lights. But you can still feel the dark, feel it like gravity. The ride ends.

When we get out my foot is ok. And I soon notice we’re in a strange miasma. There’re hotels on every cross of the street to make, and many factories with their windows blackened. Those factories, we know, are night clubs. Some of the eleven want to go. Some of us, along with I, want that motel over there, want to get the alcohol now, want to start drinking.

Talking to the man at the counter. His accent and dress choice is foreign. He speaks about our money. It is already past midnight, and we’ll have occupation of a room for less than twelve hours. It’s not quite fine with everyone, but it is with me.

And the room is small. The window points to an abandoned factory. When we get in we get out. We split: Heather and the them are going to get the alcohol; I’m going with others to eat; the tall pretty girl leaves us for good, and stays a room over, with other people that know us, and will through the night and the next day stop by and talk occasionally.

The place we choose to eat is two stories, has an escalator and aesthetic giant windows for walls held in place with bolting modernist metal. When we finish, we start talking towards a factory. Three of them go in, but I do not, and another, who is too young. We walk back to the motel. Inside is the other of the ten, which makes seven.

Drinking, looking at everyone. Thinking. While this is going on, in this room, outside on this street, among the skyscrapers, the coyotes of Chicagoland, the birds stealth in the night, the atmosphere and magnetosphere, the satellites and astronauts — move. Drinking, looking at everything, thinking about the blimp. It is not just space and time, it is cause and effect. We are distance and speed and complicated and I am getting drunk, drinking more, inducing chemical reactions upon chemical reactions: moving, changing, elegant and real-time in spacetime, witness to changes in my brain and channel changes and conversations. I get up for more. I sit down and look at the girls, at Heather and Ana. I don’t know what I want from them, why I look; why no effort, why only look, I stare for split seconds, I think about them vaguely, about what I want them to be; there’s no choice but this, as my thoughts drift again to the coyote, then to being lonely. We are all lonely. We are all complicated. We are all in a small room. And we all want to be simple. And you are reading this and knowing it. And I get up for more. Then I think about other things, other times before this, in memory; they are incomplete, changing in me, like small rooms, like now, and interpenetrated. I lay down on the bed, keep drinking. Then in bed with Ana. She lets me touch her hair. It’s short and dark and brushes her eyelids as she smiles and talks. Getting out of bed in the morning, other’s are moving around, sober while I remain drunk, it seems. Four of us leave for breakfast, and the sun is out, or Earth has turned enough and there it is, and we walk. Getting across streets under giant buildings, we make it to a breakfast place, get eggs and toast; Ana’s got chicken; doesn’t like breakfast food. Heather’s there and so is another, but they finish and leave the restaurant, leaving Ana with me. Last night I did not just touch her hair, and now I feel strange.

Ana, what did I do? I want to ask. She would not tell me. Instead, something else, she tells me in a way, it’s fine, that there was a complication. Ok. Walking in time to the foreigner with the foreign clothes for ice in the night I ask him, where are you from? Do not worry about it he says. Heather walking in time to me in the bar, I tell her about Kerouac, the Six gallery. Another lush and homonymously agreed. Talking in time I said to Erin, about causality: it had to happen. Running in time, on a treadmill, or in a car, still lonely, eating and thinking, like math and pottery, the brain like a glass sphere on fire, and your car eats gas and your CD spins and your hand holds and your life changes and your stomach turns and your knees crack and your eyes blink at the wall, and the wall is moving (small changes, small…) and there are things behind that wall, and far or close we live, our thoughts move out and in, and I get back on the train, and your stomach digests earth and animals and your knees crack and your hair grows and the grass grows and the atmosphere swims and the fish breathe and fingers feel hearts beat blood moves in out minds think birds dive seconds tick people move space plays with time, and the earth spins, the moon spins, and they rotate, as the sun rotates, as the galaxy spins out, as things that are big pay attention to the small, as we watch a fly upon the wall, as we think ourselves away, I ride on the train back, imperfect, content upon this, the ultimate physicality of it, unabashedly inside myself, with all my mistakes, grounded to this world by a spinning gravity, and I think to choose what to do; I think I have no choice. I look out at the window, at the skyscrapers during the day. Heather’s gone. No way to stop. Can’t control the breaks. Whatever happens will happen. Ok.