How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Suicide Bomber
Some of the trains in this city are filled with ghosts. This isn’t as literary or literal as it sounds, but when I get on certain trains, I feel a separate energy from that of the living. I’ve never seen a ghost, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never felt or heard one trying to tell me something important, and they are definitely riding the trains here and talking up a storm.
I was a little overwhelmed yesterday. I was going to another job interview, which, by the way, makes ten interviews and no job, and I was riding uptown on the second-to-last car on the train. I never get on the very last car, probably for the same reasons that I never wanted to be last in line. There’s some inherent fear telling me that I will be left behind, that the rest of the line or the train or whatever will keep moving along without a problem, and I’ll be lost, alone in the darkness.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was overwhelmed on my commute, and I think most of the credit has to go to the ghosts of the subway. I had the feeling that I was going to die. It was no more than a whisper, but something was telling me that I was as good as dead. Actually, it was saying that I was going to die at the trembling hands of a suicide bomber. This was a very specific feeling telling me the bomber was standing behind me; I knew he was there, and I started to feel my skin melt. The slow motion feeling of being blown to bits on a cramped subway car became my personal meditation. I felt the back of my skull pushed forward and out of my eye sockets, and I felt my feet lift off the floor as the blast took me away from this world and into the land of the dead. My fingertips unraveled and my legs broke.
Of course, this didn’t actually happen. I made it to my stop in time to be rejected by yet another interviewer, and I lived the rest of the day and today without any militants blowing up beside me. But in the time I spent on that next-to-last car, I never looked back to see whether a scary bomb-strapped individual was waiting with some kind of remote or button, waiting to derail the lives of at least two hundred people. I never looked back because, as much as I can say I am not afraid of death, I don’t want to look it in the face. If I died with just that feeling of foreboding, I would have been happy. But to look back and see it with my own eyes, to know, to completely comprehend the cause and effect is too terrifying, even for the split-second of consciousness I had left. I just kept looking forward blankly.
I blame the recent media coverage of ‘possible’ terror threats in the city. I need to think about music and art. Let Homeland Security worry about terrorists. If I see something, I’ll say something.
Oh, and stop taking applications and scheduling interviews if you aren’t really going to hire anyone. I’m sick of getting on the train, peeing my pants with fear, and being turned down.
