The End of Things

I dream about the apocalypse. This time when it happens, I’m in a subway station. Everyone is rushing to catch the next train. I suppose it’s only natural to want to go home and check in on people and possessions, to find the ones that you absolutely must take with you.

In my dream, people are jam packing into a subway car. I see my grandmother. She’s been dead for many years now and she’s glaring at me, triumphant because she’s in the subway car, pressed near to the door, and I am not. I ask her to take care of my dog. I have dim hopes because she is, she was, a mean woman, given to acts of spite. I think of my dog, with his golden and disturbed thoughts. He was a rescue from a shelter, abused and kicked before he met me. I wasn’t the best person for him, not the most together or the wisest one to help him over his past. Still, I want, no I need, my grandmother not to abandon him. Not to leave him lonely and questioning in my one room apartment, thinking I've abandoned him.

He’s also dead now and I know this in my dream. Even so, I ask my dead grandmother to care for my dead dog and the doors of the subway car close and the subway moves, skitters, glides down the track from dark to deeper dark. I see my grandmother glaring at me through the window that looks like a porthole in the subway car, until all that remains of her is her stare, like a Cheshire cat’s smile.

Somehow I know that rescue is not for me. I’m to remain there. I’m a soldier and this is also part of the dream. I’m no athlete and have no respect for authority, but then, if it’s truly the end, I suppose no one cares much about such things. We are all bodies heaped upon despair, like pieces of gum being stuck on the walls of an exploding dike. 

Staring over the platform into the tracks where mice are skittering as they always do, oblivious to the larger futility of all their actions, I see water rushing down the dark corridor. The tracks won’t work now I think, but I also stop to wonder at the way an artifice of man can become coopted by nature. The subway platform is nearly empty now, the shore of a new river. There’s nothing left to defend.

I make for the stairs without a clear sense of mission (so close to my natural state that I can feel myself waking up). The stairs lead me to another platform. There’s a small empty booth to my left and slatted revolving bars to my right. If you push the bars and keep walking, you’ll find yourself outside. I know this, but I stay where I am, lingering on the wrong side of the bars. I wake up of course, before I ever find my way out. Or maybe this is the way out, even though I still feel as if I’m living at the end of things. 

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