Click.

“Everything has its core, its center, the axis ‘round which all else spins. For the Earth it’s a roiling ball of molten ore, gyrating and flexing like Elvis’s hips to the hum and pitch of gravity’s sweet, natural hymn. For the solar system it’s Sol, our sun, a pulsing sphere of white-hot chemical reaction, the most basic and beautiful metaphor of cause and effect. For certain Hindu sects it’s Vishnu, the embodiment of order, a balance between the creative powers of Brahma and the destructive forces or Shiva: Brahman in three perfectly choreographed movements. For Christians, Jews, and Muslims it’s the One True God. Regardless of name and creed, He is the source of all meaning in this world, a hell to avoid and a paradise to attain.

“Existentialists say that there is no meaning but what we ourselves create. Neo-existentialists say there is no meaning at all. Yet Buddha held up a single lotus leaf and everything changed.

“So here’s a hypothetical for all you open minds out there. Suppose, for just a moment, that nothing is random. Everything is connected, like the spokes of your childhood bicycle, lines intersecting, radiating outward, forming a whole, a divine wheel that never quite stops spinning. All that you see, from the tenement crack house on the corner, to the gutted warehouse in the back waters of the Ukrainian Village, to the chateau in the French Alps, to the summer cottage by the lake…”

The el bucked, not hard enough to dislodge the Sony tape recorder from his hand but enough to sever his line of thought. “De-railed the train” crossed his mind only to be tactfully discarded. The high pitched whistle-squeak of electromechanical motion filled his ears again, a subtle poetry all could hear but few would ever appreciate. “This is the music of progress,” he thought, “and no one is tuning in.”

It was well after rush hour and the car was sparsely populated. A black couple was holding hands and snuggling in the back behind him, their eyes blind to anything outside their bulletproof love bubble. To their left, a vagrant stared with unseeing eyes at the vibrating roof panels with curiously dilated pupils. There was a quaint aroma canvassing the air about him, like burnt urine or evaporated hope, his grizzled, graying beard decorated like a Christmas tree with bits of old food and the pieces of words he may have spoken in a better life. Toward the front of the car a family, clearly of the tourist genus (Vacationus oblivious), sat in huddled amazement. The father was deliberating over some pamphlet, face squinched up like an irritated ferret. His wife and daughter say open mouthed, marveling at this space-aged shuttle from the future.

“Look at this, honey,” Father Ferret said, his face returning to its sapien state of rest as he passed the pamphlet across the bewildered teen to her. She gave it a cursory glance, face more that of a constipated giraffe, before giving it back. He took it, face unable to keep from re-rodenting itself in further contemplation.

None of these people had taken more than a peripheral notice of the anorexic, shaggy-haired and bearded man sitting island-like in the mid-car sea of unoccupied seats, boldly pontificating into his small, silver tape recorder and until that moment it had been an equal ambivalence. Now these six set pieces had James Panderwell’s undivided attention. There was a certain unavoidable level of annoyance he felt when pulled unwillingly out of his head but it was an ignorable fungal growth, like athlete’s foot, that he could easily scratch and forget. He did this by scanning them one by one with the microscopic precision of a well-trained eye, storing anything deemed worth remembering into his mental catalogue. Having long ago decided that the world stage was his one and true muse, James wasted no time in milking its many idiosyncrasies for all they were worth. He did not record these. This was partly due to the stream he’d been working on an a latent desire to leave it uncluttered by abstract, unrelated thought. More than that, though, it was because he had conditioned himself to operate on two separate levels. The tape recorder was reserved specifically for these diatribes. He had always considered himself an idea man, existing primarily in the realm of ethereal dream-stuff theories and opinions were made of, something separate from the plane of reality in which these tangible beings and objects dwelt. For them it became a form of absorption, a mental sucking-in of information like gasoline through a pump or blood through a mosquito’s proboscis. His brain was a sponge, swelling against the tectonic plates of his skull; the blank page the bucket into which he occasionally wrung it dry.

The train pitched again, this time with the loop-leaving timidity he had been subconsciously waiting for before continuing.

Click.

“The freshly budded leaf in a spring you didn’t see coming, the stray rain drop that streaks across the lens of your glasses, the waste-land arctic tundra of the Yukon, and the scorched, cracked earth of the Sahara, all of it, even if only in some minute, seemingly insignificant way, is but a cog in the great-spinning wheel of life. There is no such thing as coincidence. Everything that happens happens for a reason. All is purpose. All is ciphered lines of organic, spiritual code for which it is our duty as sentient, rational beings to decipher line by tedious line.

“Isn’t that what religion is for? To give us a kind of ‘how to’ approach to self discovery? Universal awareness? The answers are out there. Every religion says that, to some degree or another. The answers ARE THERE! And we MUST seek them out! We do this by applying doctrine, by living within the white-lined boundaries of one dogma or another, by being moral, virtuous, and true. It’s all there for a reason and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is the meat I’ve been sautéing here for you today. THAT is the proverbial ‘heart o’ the matter.’ If everything has its core (and it most certainly does), then the core of man, HUman BEings, is the life-long search for the almighty ‘why.’”

Click.

A smile marionetted the corner of his mouth as the train broke through from subterranean darkness to the dying amber glow of evening, the light turning his drawn cheeks into miniature models of Arizona’s Painted Desert mesas. The echoing electric shrieks had changed as well, the car wobbling with the thick, heavy clacks and clunks he’d been taught trains were supposed to make. It occurred to him that the el had made two stops during his monologue and he hadn’t noticed. Another rift in the assimilation diagram.

Click.

“The world is in a constant state of flux, seasons of perpetual change. Nothing is permanent save the certainty that today has no real relationship to yesterday and tomorrow’s a whole ‘nother ball game. Man-made constructs such as time do not hold sway against the prevailing winds of the natural order. Objects exist when stripped of their names and concepts never exist at all. A blue-print and the resulting building are as different as paper and stone.”

It was an entirely new thought but continuity had never really bothered him all that much. As long as each idea was completed before the next began the order was more or less irrelevant, just like the passage of days, form Sunday to Sunday, midnight to midnight. Maybe he should record that too. He did and the smile-puppeteer pulled the strings a little more.

The train ground to a halt at Damen Avenue. As rodent-man and family stood to de-board James gave them a grinning wave of thanks they would never understand. But they didn’t have to. Like a passing billboard with a clever tag-line in a foreign land only the line itself, the one that made you chuckle for an instant, that you wrote down to tell your friends, remains.

The doors hissed shut and they lurched into the future.

He glanced back at lover’s row and the never-ending bum. There was something here, he could taste it, alkaline on the back of his tongue. It happened from time to time. Not clairvoyance, a parting of the veil, but a gut feeling that more often than not paid off. Careful of his footing, James switched to the other side of the car where the seats faced the remaining three. If there was a moment on the prowl he didn’t want his back to be the only witness. The couple noticed this, his grape picking eyes, and grew self-conscious. The bum had no idea. James took in every detail systematically, as if he would be quizzed on them later, his life on the line. The lovers became more uncomfortable, shifting and turning, trickling gin and out of half-hearted gossip but unable to stop their eyes, on a piece, from gravitating toward him every few seconds.

Click.

“I developed a bad habit of sorts as a child. Actually, I developed quite a few but on in particular strikes me now. I grew accustomed to the idea of patience. It seems like an admirable trait but don’t be deceived by appearances. Maybe it is, when used in moderation but that wasn’t the case with me. I did nothing. Ever. To ensure that I got the things I wanted out of life. It’s more arrogance than anything. Not fate. Not destiny. Rather a sense of entitlement, that I was owed certain things and it was only a matter of time…”

As if on cue, the bum’s eyes shot wide. Perhaps a demon had waltzed across his booze-battered psyche or there had been a synaptic misfire in the relaying of some epiphany. Whatever the reason, a second later both of his arms sprung upward to embrace some camouflaged divine truth in tandem with a quick, ear-splitting shriek that forced the couple to mold into a single being in a tight-armed grasp and James to jump back in his seat.

“…until everything worked itself out.”

Click.

The bum drew back into his previous silent mode of contemplation and the train chugged on through the Western stop in a tainted state of normalcy.

A part of him wanted to know why. Of course it did. That was the end-all be-all. Why had the bum exploded like that? What had gone on in that shattered brain of his? For all James knew the cure for cancer was in there, a workable plan for world peace. Yet this desire was quickly quelled. IT was the mystery more than anything that lit the fire under his engine. Such an outburst, when left unexplained, gave rise to a panorama of if’s that made him giddy. Answers were usually best left unfound. It was always better to not know for sure.

Maybe that’s why no human had ever found the ‘why.’

A robotic voice, droll and uninflected, cut through the clack-hum.

“This. Is. California. Doors open. On. The right. At. California.”

James stood to de-board but didn’t waste a wave of gratitude on them. The train came to a stop and the doors parted. He hopped off onto the platform, floorboards reassuring solid and immobile beneath his booted feet. He skipped his way down the rusted stairwell and once on the street put a kick in his step and whistled his way south.