1

She drives through the empty midnight street again and again and again, passing the same block and the same shadows that remind her of the same digital clocks and constellations and countdowns, waiting and waiting and waiting for her turn to steer the slick pointy streamline lead grey armour car onto the oneway entrance ramp which connects to the cement pillars of the underground shuttle train "drop off" and "pick up" spots. Thousands of fishplates and sleepers and rails are in their proper prescriptive perceptive situations below the street. She can see the riddle of the structure from above through the depth of scaffolding intersecting with its many superfluous levels. They are as Relativity under the water of Three Worlds; the reflection and the surface and the Möbius beneath.

She drives like yesterday's past blown into swirls of blizzard by winter's time flowing through the womanly hourglass of spring and listens as soft certain rain pelts the sunless sunroof. She anticipates the windshield wiper thump every ten seconds or so. Beyond the glass, the distant sky encompassing her vicinity pours like an over-wrenching faucet; bursting when the tap twists counterclockwise and drips when, like all yesterdays, the valve closes.

The action of waiting for her time to enter the below is like hoarding space for the sake of a full room. The horology occupies what seems to be forever's clutter. She drives toward the lineup of vehicles parked on the descending five percent slope of a ramp. The cement descent is full of exact bulbous toaster shape iron silver vehicles which aren't moving. They are a wall of wheelish paperweight toylike boxcars; a simulacra of a train waiting for trains. And she can't get in line yet. There is no opening. A street sign like a Tartar beard gatekeeper reminds her of the antecedent credo.

Everything is empty where she is but where she wants to be is completely full. Is this necessary? Does she really want to be stuck doing this while her life slowly creeps away? The purgatory of time holds her in a seatbelt which satisfies the judgement of her inner panopticon. But she's tired of time. Tired of the wait. Tired of the weight she feels. The subjugation of the handless clock presses upon each second like meters traveling in and out of miles. She thinks about speeding up and crashing the car into a wall or oncoming traffic while negotiating her body in a JG Ballard fashion; murdering herself at the point of climax.

Instead, she watches her lifeless ornament; a black crucifix on a shoestring. The cross dangles from the rear view mirror above the catafalque dashboard. She's not a believer, her faith is settled, but most of her passengers have been and are again. It's a symbol of a shibboleth which she hangs from a tiny noose for them and not for her. The judgement is a dead religion of resurrected resurrection, at least in this city and at the very least, in her mind. She doesn't know why the God or the Christ is popular again because no one is really saved from anything. Salvation is only salvation like the sweeping dust unknowingly exists as the present countenance of the dead past.

She looks at her face in the mirror. She watches her winter eyes and is always waiting for the spring which never seems to come. Waiting. Time. Driving around the block clockwise like a slowly tightening screw.

Memory grips. Tightens. Wrenches. Slows. Her foot presses down. The car speeds up. She remembers that her mother is waiting for her to get home and so she'll try to accommodate the intention after this particular pick up. Waiting. Hopefully. Maybe. It feels like she's been driving forever tonight. Hours seem just as eternal as seconds. It's hard to tell one category from the other anymore. She can't remember if she ever really could.

'You said you were proud of me when I left the life I had. The life that began so strict and stiff and eventually became worth living. You were proud when I decided to leave and join you. Proud that I finally followed through on something. Like I finished something. Did I? What did I finish? I'm here now in this place, this job, this loneliness. You're proud of me but I regret what I gave up to be here...forgive me mother, but why would you bother? I watched you. I listened to you and in the end, you destroyed me like destiny...this isn't what I really wanted. But there was no choice after I made my choice. Oh, mother, I miss him. I was wrong to leave him. Oh, God. Why did I have to fuck everything up like that.'

She turns the black pleather steering wheel and witnesses the puddly rainy darkness of shiny sidewalks and dim misty cobra lamps and black rusty orange ironwork railings connecting to slippery stairs and front porch landings and brittle concrete apartments with orifices of thick shady glass entrances and metal casings and the unending backlog of a history that will never be written. And this isn't even her history. There's nothing left in existence of this architecture where she's from. Maybe there is now, since she's been gone. But there wasn't before. She doesn't feel cheated or jealous of such functional aesthetic. She doesn't care. This place wasn't built for her. It was dug and poured for them. For those who come on the trains. They are the whole reason for her driving along, circling the block, waiting for her turn down the ramp. It's her job. It seems like the people on the trains are her only reason for existence. The trains are always like the creeping shadows in a curtain-less room. The     feeble light's incidence upon the window of her mind is on time. In time. Out of time.

The dead moon climbs out of the mountainous clouds like a ghost and then sinks back underneath the murky mire raven feather sky like a corpse's dissipating face.

She thinks of funerals as her headlights pass a spray paint mural. The street art under and above the dim unnatural light upon the old brick clock tower building is unsettling. She thinks of hundreds of half hatched pigeons discarded upon the ground when she witnesses the eyes of a big blue dog that is attached to the throat of a giant bipedal bear. The dog's innards are dangling like the crimson tethers of a forgotten future's past. The bear's paw is inside the dog like Moses parting the Red Sea. And in front of the mural stands a shroud of a woman who watches the ground beneath her banished feet. The woman is a prostitute under the shadow of the downward focusing dead hatchling eyes of the two monsters. The woman has been hunted down and haunted by the Calvinism and the fascism in everyone's gaze. And the words at the top of the mural are high and dead, "Once a bitch, always a bitch." She drives on.

Dim light and dark and dim light and dark and dim light and dark. The tapping of rain. The smell of wet. Humidity and air conditioning and wishing to live in the moment. She loved to live in the moment. It was the only time without time. Without the grip of mortality and endless interpretations of circles. The moments with him were like that, too. The thrill of fear and love. Out of time. And then out of time.

Then a noise comes over the radio like invisible sparks trying to communicate with blind eyes. Raspy. Crackly and tinny and distorted. She focuses and grips the steering wheel like the captain of a stranger ship.

"Car ABDT6. The gate is open for you. Now is the time."

She doesn't respond to the voice. She doesn't need to. She drives around the corner of the block and arrives at the five percent ramp which is now completely empty. The train of grey toaster vehicles is all gone. There must have been a lot of arrivals in a very short bracket of time.

She clunks her automobile onto the ramp and drives down and smiles as gravity speeds the car. The wheels turn faster and faster. She presses a button and the driver side window rolls down and her hair swirls and her skin goosebumps. For a split second she exists in the moment. Butterflies. Smiling. Grinning. Laughing. Falling. Falling toward the earth and being caught in the net of him. The memory of his love. The wind then blows her tears across her temples, moist from the wind in her eyes. Moist from the moments in her mind. Then the moment is gone.

'Goddamn you, mother. Goddamn you.'

2

She waits again within the boundary of her sleeping car, window rolled down, breathing the underground air. A gigantic number like the meaning of a rood above the opening of a rood screen hangs central above both the entrance and the exit of the train tunnel. She watches the orifice and anticipates the phallus, like it's been inside all along. She's at station number four.

The rearview mirror holds no secrets. No train has arrived. She's early. Why is she early? She should have asked the radio exactly how long. She doubts the voice on the other end would've cared enough to respond.

She is situated upon a concrete platform between four square pillars. The tunnel behind and the tunnel in front and the tracks beneath are tenebrous. There is no sound to accommodate the smell of the old bowel earth. No wind. No dust. Time doesn't move. It never did and it never will. Time is just a word that she sits with to calculate her ticking breaths.

On the opposite side of the tracks walks that same prostitute who she witnessed upstairs. The woman's feet make no sound. She's barefoot, holding her sandals. The woman's veil is behind her like a kiss at a funerary wedding. She seems sad and formidable. Destiny has destroyed the prostitute, too. And she knows the woman is damned. Not because of her occupation. It's the spark-less look in the woman's eyes that claim such hopelessness. The woman walks like she has suffered injustice and heartache far too many times to care anymore.

'I bet your mother destroyed you. Maybe a brother or two? My brother...my mother.'

The woman walks into the darkness of a descending staircase. A spray paint sign above the shadowy dimly lit wall tile arch reads, "the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead."

She watches the words that the woman disappears under and thinks of truth. Eternal truth. And that truth isn't eternal and what's eternal isn't truth. But to live the same life over and over again, there's truth in that. She calls it "memory."Memory is the hindsight of the living upon what's dead and gone. Memories are as far away as a memory. An event horizon of an event horizon.

She swings her door open and climbs out of the car and walks around to the passenger side, running her hand along the wet aluminum. Then she leaves the car completely and walks toward the drop off. She stops just before falling into the six foot plummet upon the tracks and sits her ass on the cold concrete with her legs hanging over the cement edge. She dips her feet into the shadows and peers at the slope of ballast and wooden sleepers and broken welds  and structures of electricity sunken in the darkness and wonders how it all still works. A hoarding mischief move along the periphery across from her. They make no sound while climbing over and under each other like a deep current of fur and tails.

Then she hears the train like a fresh coffin upon a wrecked wagon. She listens in the way that a leg is broken. The rumble in time creates a loud snap, like a rickety bridge collapsing in the violent crashing of a storming river.

She stands up and walks back to the car and opens the driver side door. She removes her black jacket that she barely remembers wearing and throws it on the floor of the passenger side and climbs in.

The train is rectangular with no locomotive. No headlight. No order to the missing parts and half hearted attempts at fixing what's  entirely broken. It's a corpse of a snake of box cars exiting one orifice and entering another from one birth to another sex. Then it abruptly stops completely unlike how a train always slows and stops. It's like cause and effect don't exist and never did.

The door of a boxcar falls open like a drawbridge and crashes onto the cement floor making time abruptly stop and then start. The reverse hing surprises her in the moment. She was expecting it to slide open.

A confused man walks down the bridge ramp and she honks the horn. He looks at the car. She thinks he seems fiftyish with his hair of salt and pepper. He walks gingerly toward her, like he's injured or olden injured. He epistemologically looks back at the crooked worm old train and then from side to side and then back at the car. The man trips on his own feet but steadies himself. When he approaches the car, he peers in with a hand on the window to block the reflection and witnesses the vehicle's innards. He tries the passenger door but she keeps it locked. Train passengers are only allowed in the backseat. He open the passenger side back door and climbs in and looks around and seems to look past her. He doesn't see her. Maybe his sight is bad. He says nothing. She says nothing. He looks at the crucifix and smirks which forces her to smirk in agreement. She thinks that she knows that smirk.

3

She drives out of the underground and up a different five percent ramp and into the street. The rain has moved beyond the city. The humidity has not. The steady air conditioning coming out of the vents is nice.

"A self driving car. I read once that they existed in the west. It's a miracle! Truly, a fucking miracle. But did my train take a wild detour? I wonder where this miracle of transportation is taking me? Why was I on a train? I was driving..."

"It's not driving itself, you know."

"Who said that?"

"Well, I did."

She looks back at him. He doesn't seem to be in his fifties anymore. His hair is less grey. Maybe the darkness of the underground made him seem older.

He looks through her and then in the next instant makes eye contact and is startled.

"Wow! Where did you come from? You scared me. But that magic trick was amazing! There was no one and then there was someone."

"I've been here the whole time. You should get your eyes checked."

"My eyes are just fine. Hey, what's your name?"

"My name is "tired" and "wants to go home."

"Well hello miss "tired and wants to go home." I'm Mr lost. Where the hell am I? I was on my way to Chicago to visit my kids and I ended up here."

"I can't speak to that, I can only drive you to where you really want to go."

"And where do I really want to go?"

"I don't know but you'll find out soon, if not in time."

She drives through and past the downtown sky high glass and metal reflections of  phalluses and sepulchres and out of the slowly disintegrating darkness. The sky lightens and creates a grey canvas for the black swirls of clouds. The stars behind the grey fade. The moon dims and becomes a ghost in an upside down ghost sea. The city becomes suburbs and then rural with old creaky fences and a pasture with a golf course by a house with a pear tree climbing it's worn side. They drive along and past.

The sun begins to rise ahead of the car and she slows and stops in the middle of one side of the two lane highway. She doesn't pull over to the side. She turns the car off. No vehicles exist anywhere behind or in front. She gets out and begins walking away from the front of the car. He opens his door and swiftly jumps out.

"Hey!!! What are you doing?"

"Trying to get a vantage point. I don't recognize this place. It doesn't matter. I think this is where you wanted to be."

"What? The side of the road? I'm an old man, why would I want to be here?"

"You don't look old to me. In fact, Mr lost, you look like an eighteen or twenty year old in this light."

He looks at himself standing in front of the driver side mirror. He moves closer to his reflection. He touches his face. She can see him clearly with the sun behind her. He places his hand above his head and witnesses her contour at best. He looks back at his face.

"Don't I know you? I do, don't I? Is this where I really want to be?"

It's like he's talking about himself to himself and also talking to her. He watches his chin and side eyes his ears and looks down on his nose. Then he stops looking at himself and begins looking at himself.

He thinks for a brief moment and then reconnects to the memory of the greatest moment in his life. He becomes doubtless; a believer. He immediately walks away from the car and toward her and in a second is standing in front of her. He looks down into her eyes and takes her hand and places his other hand on her cheek. Then he kisses her. She whispers as her lips linger on his.

"You figured it out."

"I was lost but now I'm found."

"Me too."

They hug and then walk toward the sun holding hands. She says something. He laughs and nods and wraps his arm stiffly around her shoulders. She leans into him and places her arms around his waist. His elbow bends around her neck and his arm dangles in front of her. His other hand wrests on her overlapping wrists. As the half circle breaches the paper thin horizon, it slowly becomes a full circle. In time. And in that time, they disappear into the heating wet mirage of daylight like a doorway out of time.