Sitting beneath the overpass, they watched in silence the cars passing by. They had with them each a flask of gin. The night was quiet, being too late for most to venture out; perhaps they had the entire city to themselves. The underpass was covered in graffiti and posters, each peeling and chipped and showing the wear that everything in the city eventually develops due to mis-care, misuse, and misunderstanding. The city was old even before the settlers had come and the spirits of ancient times still lingered in alleys and under trees unsuspected by most to hold any relevance at all. Millions of people walked these streets everyday looking for salvation -- millions of people wandered around like they were still asleep looking for meaning where perhaps there was none. on this particular night they were feeding on the silence -- on the meshing together of sounds that even whilst being disharmonious still blended together into that hum that was certainly sent off to space: the static of society free-floating on a wavelength of technology, a million voices to meld into one outcry into the universe -- what is the meaning of this all.
"I had that dream again last night." she cut into the silence like a knife with her words.
He raised his eyebrows at her. "Which one?"
"The one about being on the subway while it derailed."
"Again?" he looked puzzled. "Haven’t you been having that same dream for quite a few months now?"
She nodded. "It’s kind of odd. It’s like it's trying to tell me something. Last night it seemed to carry on where it normally leaves off every night. Like it expanded into another chapter."
"I see."
"Do you?"
"Metaphorically speaking, yes."
"It started off in the same way as always -- riding the train between St. Clarence and Springville stations, which for some odd reason was on a steep decline and then the train was airborne. We were riding in the air. There were several other people on the train and they looked terrified, but we calmly looked out of the window watching the tracks fade out of vision and landed on top of the Springville station building. The train was just lodged there on top of this roof and the car behind us was dangling down and there was much commotion but we just sat and watched in silence."
"Sounds pretty much the same as before."
"This is just the beginning, I was building up into the next scene." she stopped to take a shot of gin. "We were taken to another train which was ready and waiting in the station. The odd part was that the exactly same people who were on our car before got on with us. They had gotten over the shock of the whole situation by this point and proceeded quietly into the train. But the train we got on consisted only of a single car."
"So it's not a train then?"
"Technically not I suppose. But that's beside the point. We were told through the loud speaker that this was the express train that would take us directly to where we're going. So all of us got on the train, but this time we all sat closer together instead of spreading about in the car. We stared at each other in silence. Don’t you find it odd when you witness a strange event with strangers that you are all drawn together but rarely move beyond the actual experience into words?"
"What do you mean?"
"you know when you're somewhere, let's take on the subway for example, and you're on the train with complete strangers and then something happens like some weirdo gets on the train and starts to make an ass of himself, and you know everybody else on the train is thinking the same thing as you because when you look around and meet with other people's eyes, you can just tell. But no one speaks a word. It is more of a silent understanding than anything." she paused to make sure that he was getting the idea with an elaborate gesture of her hands.
"I know exactly what you're talking about now. Happens quite often." he put his hand under his chin in a thoughtful manner. "I can think of a few times in particular, not only on the train but on the street. That eye contact with a complete stranger that reveals more than mere words ever would."
"Well, that's how in my dream these people were. Maybe there were about ten of us waiting for this train to take us where we needed to go. Finally after several minutes that familiar whir and din of the electricity which pushes the cars and we're off -- but not in the usual direction. The car took a small track that led through a forest and then we emerged into open country. There were rolling hills as far as the eye could see and farms dotted the landscape occasionally but it was desolate aside from the plant life. By this point we had all started to wonder what was going on. How do you go from being in the heart of the city to being in the middle of nowhere in just a few minutes? The train rolled on without a single bump or turn, but no matter how fast and smooth we rode the hills in the distance became no closer than they originally were. A lady who was sitting nearby fell to her knees and began to pray and cry. Soon others began to fall down on their knees and prayed and held hands in a circle. We just sat and watched in silence. They looked at us and wondered why we weren't joining them. They held out their hands so that we would come and join them." she stopped for a moment to have some more gin.
"Did we join them? Don’t leave me in suspense."
She made a sour face in his direction and stuck out her tongue. "They had such a look of pleading in their eyes that I did decide to join them and made you as well. So there we are on this train car in the middle of nowhere with these strangers, on our knees, holding hands in a circle, all trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It was a beautiful bright sunny day in the country and outside you could almost hear the birds chirping. My knees started to hurt so I got up and went back to take my seat, as did most other people at that point. It appeared now that the train was going backwards. Soon the darkness of trees enfolded us again and we were back at the station as though nothing had even happened. We were standing on an empty platform with these same strangers and the normal train pulled up, full of people as always and we dispersed ourselves throughout the cars and that was that."
"That’s it?"
"That’s it."
"I feel almost disappointed by the ending."
She looked up as a train began to rumble by overhead. "That’s just the way dreams are sometimes -- you should know that. Sometimes the ends don't justify the means..."
"What about the people? Did you have any idea who the other people in the car were?"
"I don't know." she flipped through the catalogue of faces in her mind. "Probably just my subconscious using people that perchance I have run across before on the subway. Maybe they were people who I had once known and then forgotten. The only thing that struck me about all of them was that amongst them, we were definitely the youngest."
He was silent for a moment. "It’s rare when I can recount my dreams as you do."
"They just stick with me. It’s like I have a television in my head or something. Sometimes the programming even repeats."
He laughed. "Mental reruns... what's the world coming to?"
They noise of the train overhead was deafening so they decided to abandon their spot in search of a quieter place. They walked and watched the sidewalk pass beneath their feet like strips of aged film. Cars roared by in blurs every once and awhile, but the night was dead -- perhaps they were the only two people out in the whole city. In the distance they heard the shrill pitch of sirens racing somewhere or other; in the distance they heard something that might have been the screaming of someone getting murdered, perhaps it was the whistle at a factory telling the workers that their shift was over. The moon was hanging over the tops of the buildings like a crown: the skyscrapers seemed to reach so high that they wanted to leap forth and touch the stars which were barely visible in the eternal glow that the city threw up into the atmosphere like the glass dome of a snow globe. hands could reach down and pick up the world and shake it and everything would fall and tumble about and give the illusion of a continuous world, when in reality the whole world flat as paper and every living thing was merely a character or a piece of background to a much greater plot taking shape in the mind of some author out there. The world was constructed out of ink and paper that night.
She was looking at the tops of the buildings. "When I stand at this angle, the building looks like it's just a cardboard cut-out."
He stood beside her and tried to view things from her angle. "It does. at any moment a giant monster, who is just really a giant man in a rubber suit, will come out of nowhere, screaming an uncanny scream and smash everything we see as this false landscape into bits."
She laughed. "You and your giant monsters..."
"You laugh now." he joked. "Just wait until that 200 foot starfish pulls itself from the depths of the lake and stomps us all into smithereens. I bet that you won't be laughing then."
She shook her head. "Where are we going?"
He shrugged. "I thought that maybe you had some place in mind."
"Not in particular."
"We should stop and sit and have a cigarette and some gin and just chill out."
She pointed across the street to a parkette with a bench beside a small fountain. "How’s that look?"
"Groovy."
They strolled across the street at leisure: if it were throughout the day this road in particular would have been so busy that they would have had to wait forever for a break in traffic to get across. A strong breeze ripped down the street like a ghost train with disembodied tracks and blew their hair around. She stopped and held out her arms and balanced on one foot on the yellow line in the centre of the road.
"I am at the centre of the city. I am in the heart of the world. Stop and listen for a moment--because if you don't hear anything at all, that is the city talking to you. It is in repose--even it must rest sometimes. Throughout the daylight hours, it is aflame with life: perhaps more accurately put, still life. All these people come and go on its streets but leave no lasting impression. They are like mannequins that stare off absently yet choose to make no gestures that would distinguish the living from the plastic dead."
"They walk like zombies through the shopping malls--buy, buy, buy." he put out his arms and began to walk like the dead. "Brains, brains, brains..." he uttered with undead charm. He stopped for a moment and smiled. "But the dead that walk the streets by day here aren't concerned with brains... better yet--boobs, boobs, boobs."
She laughed and lost her balance. They proceeded to the ill-lit bench beside the bubbling fountain. He was still wandering around the fountain as a zombie might, dipping his hands in the water like it was a first experience, and looking in awe at the monolithic towers that shot up all over the city like fungus. She was sitting on the bench laughing, drinking, trying to find the joint that was buried somewhere in her bag. She pulled it out and held it up in the light. Somewhere in the distance a clock chimed four. Four AM. The city was sleeping, but they were just about the wake up. She sparked up the joint and sat in the self-imposed cloud that fanned about her head and drifted off in streamers to the sky. He sat down on the bench next to her in anticipation. She handed the joint to him and leaned back with a lung-full of smoke still swirling around in her head. She was watching the shifting glances of a couple of spotlights playing in the sky: perhaps somebody had forgotten to turn them off before closing a club. Perhaps it was a cry of help, looking for some fabled superhero to come. The brassy exterior of the skyscrapers glinted and sparkled in the glow of the street lights. She exhaled a cloud of smoke to the stars and watched it rise and disappear--just another bit of pollution to add to the already monstrous one brewing and writhing overtop of the city. The great cloud of pollution that hovered over head and watched and waited in silence, waiting to strangle the life out of all the citizens below as they slept. a silent poisoning of not only all the toxins they had all initially put there, but like a blanket to reflect back any further damage that might be done.
She closed her eyes and an array of colours and disembodied thoughts swept through her mind. "Walking backwards is the only way to find what we're looking for."
He exhaled and looked at her. "But what are we looking for?"
"I don't know exactly," she said, taking the joint from him. "I’m sure we'll stumble across it quite by accident though. I don't think we're looking for it quite as much as it's looking for us."
He sat back and closed his eyes as well. "The city sighs and longs for an end. A state of absolute and utter silence that would shroud all the corruption and pollution in a blanket of solitude. What was this all before it was something? Something being the state of how things are today."
"Before there was something, there was always inevitably nothing. Out of nothing is where we came and to nothing is where we shall again return someday." she watched the burning embers of the joint flake and fall to the ground between her shoes. "We are spinning through an inestimably huge universe, like we are in a centrifuge, distilling life out of atoms and particles that perhaps weren't meant to take the shapes that they've become."
"We are spinning down into a black hole of confusion. One little rock from the depths of space and we would all return to nothing. It would be as though we had never existed. If there are others in the universe, they would never even know that we existed."
"Even if we disappeared, I don't think that we would be that easily forgotten. Look at all this garbage we've sent floating out into space. Not only have we polluted the planet that we live beyond any hope of repair, we have begun to spread our aura of filth out into the universe as well. Think of all of those signals that we send out into space -- cellphones, television, radio. Fragments of society that perhaps someday, somebody on a distant planet will piece together like a collage and come to all kinds of odd conclusions about this race that walked a forgotten planet and then destroyed themselves out of their own greed and lust."
He took the joint from her and took a long haul. She could see the thoughts and ideas forming behind his eyes. He looked about ready to boil over with words. "I wonder what kind of conclusions they'll come to. Will we appear to them as monsters? Will they look at us and shudder and learn from our mistakes? Do you think that not only our environmental pollution but our cultural pollution could corrupt a completely alien society, without us even reaching them in the flesh?"
She sat in thoughtful silence for a moment. "Probably. You never know though. Our entire world is built upon the idea of achieving perfection -- finding solutions to problems that aren't necessarily problems to begin with; they're just perceived as being such. The world is built up around an image of what we want it to be, not what it actually is. Our vision as humans is limited. We can only see certain spectrums. I wonder what marvels we're missing out on..."
"It’s not only that we are physically limited as human beings, but we have also mentally limited ourselves to see what we want to see." he offered the joint to her. She refused because it was getting small, so he crushed the embers between his fingers and put it in his smoke pack upon drawing one out. "We absorb so much information that is supposed to be informative but instead is just misinformation. We try to justify our selfish ways by creating the illusion that we are progressing, when the whole lot of humanity is regressing. Regressing where? Back to monkeys, perhaps. Back to nothing from where we originally came. Every day that we live, we are really just one day closer to dying."
"But even then, most don't think that death is the end. They are deluded by the fact that something better is waiting after death for them. A god fashioned in their own image to make the plight of living worthwhile." she laughed softly. "Just rewards for a life well lived."
"But how have most lived their life well? In service of society -- building the very machines and mentalities that are eventually going to lead to our downfall? We forget that we are not alone on this planet. What of all the animals and plants and insects? What happens to them once we not only annihilate ourselves but take the whole planet down with us?"
"Such is the price of progress."
He was looking at the ground. His voice was soft. "Indeed."
They sat in the park and watched the glimmer of sunrise cast tints into the sky. It was blood red. The moon and stars had long disappeared into the city lights. The colour of the imminent sunrise began to bleed onto the skyscrapers as the clock in the distance now chimed five. Five AM. The city began to spring to life again. A few hours of repose before the presses had screeched to a halt and now the vans went from paper box to paper box, filling each with the city's daily fix of propaganda. The air smelt like ink and paper. Ink and paper. They drained their flasks dry and started to walk to the main street where they could catch the bus home. The city was just coming to life, but they were now ready for sleep.

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