The pattering sound of roaming footsteps paled into a welcoming silence and the world
seemed to breath a jovial sigh of relief. JeanLuca Cicero was particularly overjoyed at this
tumultuous tranquillity. Right at this moment, peace and quiet would have been two of his three
wishes should he be offered his fair share by a passing nomadic genie. The third? His wriggling
fingers jolted instinctively upwards towards a weeping drainpipe which leant a helping tentacle
down towards him as if the meek palm of the savior outstretched to offer him undeserved
forgiveness for his many sins and pay the penance for them in his place. He grappled with this
plastic messiah like an arthritic old angler with a king sized bass, scrambled onto a rickety pair
of legs and struggled to prevent himself collapsing all over again like a fully wound spinning
top about to run out of steam. He gingerly attempted to move then reconsidered as a red hot
blush ran up his legs and juddered through his body like a venomous cancer. His third wish was
that this lurid internal; geyser of pain would subside to allow him to recover his jumbled dignity,
and with a little more luck than he had been granted thus far tonight, to cast these immediate
scars out of his thankfully unreliable short term memory. Modest wishes for a man so full of
spite and dissatisfaction that greed and violence had become passionate bedfellows. But for the
moment at least he would rather be home and dry than out here making his foul fortune. Fear
bubbled agonizingly in his head as if a defensive porcupine fish was swimming around in his
skull. He envisaged himself wobbling on the edge of an invisible cliff; leaning hazardously this
way and that like a tree at Tunguska with nothing to cling onto but the recalcitrant glimmer of
hope itself. He took a moment to glance with interest rather than concern at his fallen comrade,
who remained slumped against the tenement stairway thankful of the cool blankness which
enveloped him as if a sea of limitless space gushing over his exhausted and neglected body for
all eternity. Cicero managed to find enough time and energy to laugh at his friend's misfortune,
then; realizing laughing hurt; proceeded to drag his wavering legs towards the shattered VCR.
There was always the vain hope that he could cheat some unsuspecting consumer into parting
with perfectly good legal tender in exchange for a perfectly useless piece of hardware despite
the dwarfish voice inside him that questioned both the morality and wisdom of such an action in
light of his recent encounter. He shook the skepticism aside; the possibility of another
psychopath wandering by was so unthinkably remote that it was not worth worrying about. But
as if to condemn his felonious supposition, a second set of threatening footsteps uttered their
entrance onto the variegated stage like the shadows of wall hanging insects lit up by an urbane
lamp; looming towards him from the same direction as the original assassin. With straining
bloodshot eyes bulging to the extent that they threatened to explode, he stared with virulent
trepidation into the gaping, puffing mushroom of leaden smog which puked pneumatically as an
anonymous shape glided past gracefully leaving him to ponder on his ethical opinions and sink
backwards into the relieving easiness of the frozen concrete below.
Sarah Lincoln brushed the veil of cloudy manhole surge aside like wading through a
primordial bog and crossed a deserted street in a nimble near choreography eccentric in its
unnecessarily artistic exuberance. She frowned disconcertedly like a pet whose owners had
forgotten to serve up the usual congealed tinned banquet which she was expected to eat; not
unlike drinking from a poisoned chalice; as she realized that what little adversity she would
normally have expected to encounter had inexplicably dispersed as if some panic stricken
famine had scoured across the entire city block depriving all it met of the superficial existences
human beings tended to cling onto with tenacious and possessive fastidiousness like pieces of
rotting fruit which they really should for the good of humanity and themselves have cast into the
recycling bin. "Has god passed his judgment at long last?" she shrugged at the apparent
apocalypse and breezed down a set of subway steps as if they were a snow clad slope. "It would
be a vicious solipsism for me to concur with the brutal judication of a wanton and murderous
god just because his grampus genocide leaves me tantalizingly idle" she thought to herself;
placing one hand on the derelict turnstile as she leapt over it like a prize show jumper. Lincoln
had developed both the poise and vocabulary of a tortured poet during her time in the
sanitarium, and her critical yet at once game appreciation of her noisome environment made her
fit the part of the fated artist like a rubber glove. "One day the almighty will hear my prayers
and I'll be sorry to embrace destiny." She negotiated the winding, obsolete staircases with a
seasoned familiarity and eventually emerged on the C train platform; a cold, gray place with
peeling advertisements and costume colored red seats quilted ineloquently with litter which
corresponded to the surrounding scene only in that both foreground and background could only
have been made a reality by a planner of severe color blindness or witless sarcasm. "It amazes
me how they still manage to run trains around despite the fact that none of their prize citizens
would ever dream of using such prehistoric transportation. Regardless of the fact that they close
hospitals, police stations, jails, schools and the like, you'd have thought it impossible for a
government with no standards to come up with such double standards. I could run this city with
my eyes closed; it really can't be that difficult. But putting people in positions of power who
actually want to clean the place up isn't the policy, is it? You have to be a cheat; you have to be
devious. You have to trick the general public into thinking you're doing everything for them
when in actual fact you're just doing it for yourself. You have to cut benefits and raise taxes.
You have to close the schools and the hospitals and the churches and put grotesque business
complexes and dour office blocks in their place. You have to bulldoze heaven to raise hell. You
have to adopt an insolate stratagem; abolish services every human being needs; health and
education and the like, and maintain everything we don't. Its scare tactics; making people so
terrified to live in their own homes that they pack up and leave." The motivation for maintaining
a disregarded train service could not have been the profit margin; the general consensus
surrounding this issue was that since this particular mode of transport became fully automated
the need for employees had hastily disappeared like a flack jacketed skin head caught up in an
Anti Nazi League demo, and consequently nobody had bothered pulling the plug. But in actual
fact the government needed an efficient subway system to serve their own needs and operations;
movement of technologies, troop deployment and so on and so forth. Standing at the bare and
unaccommodating platform edge like a multifarious militant in the gumptuous glare of the
guillotine, Lincoln watched an express train career past with observant, almost child like
interest; each bolting carriage and each twinkling window casting a blazing light into her mind;
each rekindling an old, hallucinative image from her patchwork memory.
Though born in Albany, Lincoln had quickly grown accustomed to life in Manhattan
through necessity rather than choice. When she was eight, her parents; both democracy
workers; were assassinated before her eyes on the orders of the power hungry corporation
NYCN, which would later venture to obtain a tawdry technocracy. Ever a home loving child,
her world had fallen apart like a human being having its skeletal structure magically removed
by a dastardly demon. Cold, brittle and alone, she wandered the streets of a city at passive civil
war for mere weeks which felt a monolithic millennia; her head a tumultuous spin as her
rational mind despaired at the abominable loss while her heart refused point blank to accept the
misery and instead posited the most far fetched future scenarios which if true would allow those
she had lost to return at a later date like some sentimental soap opera writer leaving the door
open for long 'dead' fan's favorites should the ratings plummet. Heavily traumatized but seldom
the recipient of sympathy, she was eventually picked up by the now defunct mental institute on
Long Island. But the moment her family had been obliterated before her eyes like an
unannounced Hiroshima was forever etched into her mind. She was mentally branded with that
image. She was never afraid of hell because whereas most people saw hell as a threat to be
carried out in the future if the living of your life had been that bad, to her hell was in the past. It
seemed to drag on and on; that moment repeating itself again and again for all eternity like a
piece of film in a loop in the back of her head. She had been glued to the spot like an otherwise
intelligent robot denied its vital connection to the program that contained the code to let it
move, react and even think. The ultimate realization; the presence of death and destruction; a
piece of information her programming, her experience, had never prepared her for. A reality she
could not compute. All she remembered was running away from that murderous scene as if
perhaps if she ran fast enough and far enough she'd end up at the same place before it had
happened. It all felt like a dream; a dream with no end. An inescapable nightmare she had
become trapped in and that she'd been a part of so long that she'd just forgotten how to wake
up. A dream part of her, for some unimaginable reason, remained attached to. In fact at the
time the combined shock and stress had done such psychological damage that she was awarded
with her own personal minder just in case she carried out one of her many suicidal promises.
Occasionally, her memory flooded back like the Suez deprived of its dam, but for the most part
she was aware only of the present moment; the rest a distant muddle. In some sense, that was
useful. It gave her the invaluable ability to concentrate without obstruction but the unwanted
side effect was that she often felt alone; lacking a real identity. Total amnesia would perhaps be
preferable, but whatever memories she may or may not have possessed, the mental scars
remained. She felt as if some schizophrenic butcher had taken a cleaver to her brain; leaving
obscure canyon like dents and vital nerves hanging derailed and displaced like the wreckage of a
steamrollered computer system. She had made it her business to fight the so called government
fire with fire. Afterall, there was no police force left to extinguish the writhing ashes of this
tempestual excuse for a society. "Solitary confinement does that to a person;" she kicked a
pebble across the track and into the darkness beyond, "where's care in the community when you
need it?" Lincoln, above her attentive, reflective interior appeared quite fortuitously as a
typically irregular New York citizen. Accustomed to 'working' in the all encompassing shadow
of night, she generally had to wear dark colors as if a marine on a constant sniping mission
which, in a manner of speaking, she was. This dress sense attended to the uniform camouflage
along with matching petrified deep black hair, while her bright idea to dye it blood red at the
roots served to signify that she was a native New Yorker after all rather than some somber,
naive tourist. She sighed and whacked another pebble across the corridor of air which separated
the bland concrete platform from the pitch darkness of the tunnel with a swipe of a black
military boot in which her petite feet seemed to swim like a lost duckling in a rabblous pond. It
was times like this she didn't like; stuck in the middle of everywhere with nothing to do. Now, if
she had been nowhere, there wouldn't have been a problem. In fact, when you're nowhere, you
can't help but become caught up in the momentous nothingness of it all, but when somewhere so
easily definable you're forced to contemplate. Now, contemplation wasn't good for Lincoln;
whenever she did it she found that everything was negative rather than positive or neither and
began to worry. And though worrying was a condition attributable to either the perfectly mad or
wholly normal, she would quite willingly sacrifice whatever sprig of sanity remained in order to
stop herself feeling such hideous emotions. "It's all right for the sane;" she protested to herself
with the faintest trace of bias; "they have some protection against such unbearable things. I
don't; I'm vulnerable; incarcerated. Logic.... reason, they call it. Nah; on second thought, I don't
want logic; look where it got them." Watching the next train drift in, she wondered if every day
like every train was to be the same. If so it was a dismal life with purpose but scant reward. An
endless and indecipherable treasure map of traps and foils that hammer you down into the
dreary dirt of mental destitution like a Nordic battering ram; a gritty and abortive existence
which led nowhere but back to where it all began and will again like a CD player on perpetual
repeat. She had that thought every day; perhaps they all were all the same, in retrospect. A
continuous repetition of the same fateful day over and over, the reality of which a deep paranoid
deja vu reminded her intermittently despite the fact that she really couldn’t do much but bear
with it. The main problem was that she had given all her life and never received. She had been
dealt an existence which attracted suffering; a full hand of jokers in a game where they were
considered void. But when you accept such a reality, you accept defeat. To fight the unwinable
battle is a victory in itself. "When someone contracts the habit of losing things," she pondered,
"they end up drained; need something to fill them up again or they slowly run down." Aside
from her emotional disabilities, Lincoln could undoubtedly look after herself. Spending a decade
of your life alone in a padded cell often makes teaching yourself the best way to hit those
confining walls the only thing that exhausts you enough to keep you from applying those
destructive tendencies to your own wrists and throat. If the pronouncement had been directed at
a different predicament, it would have been safe to say it was the only way she could have kept
herself sane. Time after time she'd beaten her fists black and blue pummeling those cheap
protective walls, and somehow every time she injured herself it had been a triumph; it was a
victory to achieve what she wasn't meant to achieve; who cares if it had been at the expense of
her own health? She had always been too confident and forthright with her opinions for her own
good, which sharpened her competitive edge, but all that accounts for nothing when your mind
just plods on like a trundling cart horse with a packed carriage, a fatal virus and minutes to live.
With such pessimism, she often felt that dying was a better option. She wasn't a depressed
person but one without status or hope; an alien in a typically tragic human world. But she had
the strength of character to dispel such thoughts. If she couldn't, she'd be dead by now. She
shook away the curtailing cobwebs which continually corroded her consciousness and stepped
onto the train. There was no point in thinking like that. Only if you believed in some inner peace
could you ever have a chance of attaining it, and Lincoln wasn't really sure that she did. At the
very least she wanted to believe. Maybe some measure of relative peace would have to do. "It's
all about perspective; perspective, direction, and a little luck."
On to next chapter
Back to Main Page
Mail me
All material on this and connected pages are protected by general copyright. Please do not thieve anything from these pages without my consent
