Trolley No. 1852 Read Free Page B

and during my scouring of the
stolid, grey Brooklyn borough, even traveled in the impossible
underground trains that had commenced in 1904, in particular this
BRT Line; and then the reeking, flesh-packed 9 th Avenue Line—these
being deafening, subterrene contraptions they now called the
Subway.
    It was all I lived for,
for I had nothing else: my indefatigable certainty that somewhere,
out thither in this once fecund and beauteous Ilse of Manna-hata
that the White Man had paved over with modern horrors called
Progress, below the once-resplendent pristine-blue sky now soiled
by hostile chatter and coal-smoke; somewhere amid all of this, Selina
still lived and breathed.
    Somewhere.
    And though we’re taught in
our youth of the virtue of tenaciousness and faith (indeed, the
very Godliness of
it) I found instead of solace a soul-poisoning and ever-cresting
cynicism that more and more graduated to outright nihilism. I
became convinced that Nietzsche’s chief tenet seethed in
undeniablity; that there was no objective basis for truth. Here I
was, standing in the middle of that pestilent, dirty-handed verity;
the summation of all that mankind has risen to in
multiple-millennia of evolvement; yes, yes, this: human feces in the open
street; the vomit of vagabonds filling gutters like abscessed
putrid evil rainwater; women so bereft of morality (and men too)
that they’d sell their sex for a half-dollar, a dime, even a
nickel; blood turning brown on unending concrete walls; thugs
beating the maimed and the elderly for pittances in raging
daylight; police turning quickly away from those most in need; one
alley after the next, urine-imbued and clogged like demon-dens with
cadaverously thin addicts puffing blank-eyed on opium or even
injecting narcotics into their bodies through their veins; rats,
rats, droves of
them; and the lines and the lines and the lines of the dirty and
the wretched and the sin-stained. Indeed, the pinnacle of mankind’s
knowledge and endeavor for ten-thousand years; this ghastly,
irrevocable horror.
    Too often I mused that if the stone-faced
sergeant were abstractly correct, and that my faultless sister had
reached the psychic saturation-point and succumbed to
self-annihilation, I too might well soon follow.
    Days of useless searches
bled into smoke-sullied gloaming, for another night of monotonous
labor which after interminable hours would then bleed back into
days of more useless searches. I’d ride grim trolleys and
wretch-piloted coaches, scouring every passing flinty face and
scowling countenance in the dead hope that one would be Selina;
walked soles off my very shoes searching still more, only to be
rewarded by slipping on a bum’s blood-marbled sputum or being
bumped, shoved, and cursed at in a dozen hateful dialects by scores
of hateful faces. Even the churches closed their doors to the
uncontainable throng… God, indeed. What true god could turn his back on a woman
as goodly as my sister and allow her to be sucked up, swallowed,
and digested into this irredeemable abyss of stench, cacophony, and
illicitness? How could any “Supreme Being” exist so coldly and
unconscionably as to relinquish kind and life-praising souls as
Selina to this metropolic spittoon of human wretchedness? Where
eyes in my beloved and stately Providence shined in hope and
kindredship, hither they only glimmered dully in turpitude and
greed.
    After two long years, then, my spirit was
all but done. Evening time closed over me like a casket’s lid,
where then I labored in my cubby till my fingers raged in pain,
only to know that the coming dawn would bring no surcease. Day
after day, the clocks ticked in a semblance to dripping blood, and
I felt as though my soul had metamorphosed to the blackest sand,
spilling ever away through some morbid existential hourglass that
had no bottom.
    When I slept I dreamt of the hangman’s
noose.
    At my place of employ, I
took care to befriend no one but instead oversaw the nightly duties
of