Stories I Wrote While the City of London Devoured Me
Expiring
Like dogs who drag themselves out of the house and crawl to a corner of the garden to die, there are people in this city who, sensing their vitality is at its end, descend to the underground rail network, take a seat on a 24-hour train, and ride through the tunnels until they expire. They board the carriage alive. Their body alights when they have died. What happens to their spirit down in the tunnels is anyone’s guess. Sometimes I wonder if the trains’ howls are the sound of their souls being ground into the dust that blackens our nostrils. Other times I don’t wonder anything at all.
Some of those who take to the trains for their final moments wish to prolong the experience. Food and water sustains them for days or weeks as they ride softly toward their fate. Others prefer to meet their end like the trains hurtling down these tunnels—rapidly, brutally, and without comfort. In either case, their bodies often ride the trains for days after they die. Especially in winter, it takes time for others to notice the absence of life in their fellow passenger. Most people don’t look closely enough. Their time on the train is usually too brief. The mind can’t register humanity or its lack so quickly.
It isn’t against the law to die the way one wishes. Yet why people do this is surely a question they alone can answer. Perhaps the ritual significance of the rail networks—the daily and pained journeys we all take with eyes lowered, our postures stooped, and in total silence—draws them there. They might simply hope to die among those bodies bent in meaningful humiliation. Or maybe they know their death will go unnoticed on the train. That they will slip secretly into oblivion as the train rages along the tracks, that the discovery of their dead vessel will become a strange and empty memory for those affected, who will ride the escalators up into the daylight and quickly forget the deceased’s face but not how it felt to know a stranger had died.
I had a friend who died this way. All seemed well in his life. Yet the note the commuters found in his coat pocket said he had lost the will to live. Visions plagued him at work, he wrote. In these imagined scenes he saw himself walking among office cubicles as strength drained from his body. He first fell to his knees and crawled like a dog before he slumped to the ground. Colleagues stepped over him in his state of profound weakness. Drool ran down his chain, and with it the final trace of velleity drained from within. These visions told him his time was over. And so one day, he took the train to go to work and never got off. They found him twelve days later, his wallet and briefcase missing, a commuter’s dog licking his ankle after the train screeched to a halt and threw his body to the floor.
On some mornings among the crush of bodies, I feel that I understand his choice. It is a recognition that terrifies me.
Dreams
After those hard and barren decades spent chasing my “dreams,” I was forced to admit—I was no better off than when I began.
My life in ruins, I finally conceded that my dreams had not only failed to materialise. Nor was I merely “disappointed” by what I had. My dreams had instead made every effort to escape my pursuit, receding from me at an ever-higher speed as I ran faster toward them. With each step I took, every increase in vigour and determination, the distance between them and I only increased. My dreams were now farther from me than ever before; I, stranded in the deep reaches of human futility.
In this moment of clarity and despair, I realised I had two choices. Either I could run faster still so that I would one day drive my dreams over the horizon and be free of them forever. Or I could try a different strategy.
Knowing I would be nothing without my pursuit, I changed my tactics.
Where I once hounded my dreams, I now chose silence, patience and cunning. I tried to live as both seductress and hunter. It hurt knowing I might catch my dreams only by killing them or letting them fuck me. But I was determined. So I raised my allure, hoping to sing them like a siren to their capture and ruin. I set traps, too, laid with great care in the places where my dreams, wild, free, and unsuspecting, might by chance appear. I crouched in dark corners with my knife and pistol. I moved through in open spaces where others’ eyes fell upon me. I was prepared to break my dreams’ legs, carve up their flesh, and eat them. I would let them ravish me had they tried. But I had no luck. Though I waited, they never appeared.
My failure drove me to melancholy. Sometimes I thought I might simply choose another dream—a more humble hope, or a future that was simply wandering around, forgotten or abandoned by some other dispirited person. Inertia I considered, too. Lying absolutely still, my dreams would hover at a constant distance. They would remain in sight while I lay supine, yearning until I died.
Eventually, I thought it best that my dreams and I go our own ways. One day we might forget one another, I told myself. We could live unburdened by the knowledge that the other exists. And so we separated and I tried to abandon all forms of desire. But in these listless years, this era of genuine depression, I quietly harboured a secret hope that we might one day chance on one another before I died, in a train station, airport, or hotel lobby, and, in that instant of opportunity and recognition, I would take my dreams before they had the chance to creep up behind me and snap my neck.
Dreams surely believe we are vicious, pathetic creatures.
Ugliness
My soul is a crushed bug. A cow, howling but unheard in the back of a truck driving to the abattoir. These self-images, which appeared to me fully formed in childhood, were obscure to me until recently. Last year a dream clarified their meaning: I am a hideous person.
My essential repulsiveness is not something one can see. For when I look today in the mirror, I must admit: I am not a conventionally ugly person. My body and face feature no dramatic asymmetries. My eyes are neither beady nor bulging; my nose is not swinelike, bulbous, aquiline, or crooked. My figure is not obese or skeletal, flabby or gaunt. I have hair—good hair, even—that has not receded significantly. My sartorial approach is not modish or provocative, but stylish in an unadventurous way. I wear jackets and shirts, ties and shoes that are, for lack of a better word, professional. My manners, habits, opinions and tastes are refined. My vocabulary and vernacular, appropriate for my education. I have always been of fine physical health. My complexion is good. I am not neurotic and allow myself few delusions. Overall, I see I am a man of unremarkable appearance and demeanour.
Which is to say—my ugliness comes from somewhere intangible.
My hideousness is suprasensory. Invisible. Metaphysical. I am disgusting, not at the level of my existence, but my being. This I should have known sooner. For I have never entered a room—a party, a business meeting, even a therapy session—where, in the distant and silent reaches of my mind, I did not sense a subtle increase in tension. People become cautious whenever I appear. Their eyes harden marginally. Warmth ebbs from their voices as they greet me, awkwardly stymying the leakage of heat with politeness. My presence itself causes discomfort. Everyone, my “friends” included, would no doubt feel relief if I left and never returned.
From the very moment I entered the field of human relations I have unconsciously felt like an intruder, a fugitive who must be banished for the greater good. My “character” has congealed around my need to reassure others I am no threat. I have tried to become acceptable and desirable, to assure them I harbour no urges that might surface and invite disgust or embarrassment. But no longer can I refute that I am an aesthetic flaw. A blight on life people want to eliminate but, for the sake of politeness, must acknowledge and tolerate when they would rather forget I ever existed.
All this, I admit, I barely understood until my dream last year. In my sleep I was back studying the law. Walking along a train platform near my university, I knew I must keep my eyes fixed to the ground. Great terror filled me at the thought of meeting another’s gaze. Inevitably, I glanced at a passing individual. She stopped in her tracks. Frozen and wordless, she stared at me, her face expressing neither terror nor horror but a growing knowledge that she needed to eradicate me. Panic rose within me as her affect became contagious, and more people stopped to gaze at me. The crowd soon converged on me, violently, and pulled at my limbs, squashed my face, pried open my mouth, and pushed me to the ground. Unified in their spontaneous need to eliminate me, I watched helplessly as they bound my body and cracked my bones, wrenched my jaw from its sockets, plunged knives into my flesh, and dumped my expiring body on the train tracks. As I died they dispersed, and I found myself dislocated, hovering next to the bystanders who watched my destruction with neither passion nor hate but the indifference of those who, on a sunny day, note that it is not in fact raining.
This dream has colonised my waking hours. Others, I understand, will be silent before my death. My life will end without the slightest disquiet. Finally I realise I do not belong in this world among women and men.