Nathaniel Kerr

Lacquer


The girl stumbled down the stairs, breaking the heel on her left shoe halfway down. Her hair dripped to cover her features in brutal blue. With uneven clackings, she weaved her way through the deserted, echoing station until she reached the turnstiles. She jolted to a stop, and steadied herself with one hand clenched around the bar of the gate. Hugged by her wet sweatshirt, she fumbled through her purse, exhaling heavily in vodka- scented breaths. Her hand finally reappeared with a mass of coins which she roughly shoved at the tired man in the booth. From behind the thick, scratched and vandalized glass, the man looked at her. She met his gaze of perplexity with an unfocused belligerent one of her own.

“Is that enough?”

The man shook himself free of her, brought back by her query.

“I said, is that enough?” She was annoyed.

“Yeah,” the man replied quickly. He awkwardly gathered up the pennies, nickels and dimes, avoiding her glare, and slid a token out to her on the tray.

She stared down at the coin, not moving. She reached for it, and managed to pick it up, with some difficulty, between numb fingers. She looked back up at the man behind the glass. Hidden in the darkness of the three o’clock shadows, he looked back. They were still. His mouth went dry. She was beautiful, spiteful.

She cocked her head, still unable to see him through her intoxicated eyes, and sneered. She sneered at this pathetic man in his booth, at his government issued suit, at his pale face, its age and stubble, at the fantasies he had each day, watching countless people come and go. The smell of his life, decaying and unused, was overpowering. The air in the booth simmered with stagnation, with fear of loss, and lack of risk. It wasn’t the alcohol; No, it was this man, condemned without needing to speak. She sneered because, (though her eyes made the world seem coated in amber, dulled the faces and colors), she could see him. Sad, this man, his dreams occupied only by the thoughts of girls like her, women like her. Useless, empty fantasies; useless, empty man. She sneered.

She turned on her heels, and nearly fell, tripping, her arms thrown out to either side of her for balance. For just a moment, she was vulnerable, awkward.

He could see her. This woman - no, this girl (she couldn’t have been more than 17) who came home drunk at three in the morning, hair disheveled and reeking of a loving stranger. He took in the dyed blue that concealed her, the wad of money that poked out of her purse. There was nothing to her that anyone should like, this mean, sharp thing. All the past aggression, the times she had screamed and yelled and judged and carried on without a conscience, all this he could see. He detailed every conversation in this second, heard all the scathing things she threw at people, and heard every word that hurt her. In this second, he saw her as vicious, but fragile. Yet he saw a beauty in this, this frailty. She was a pariah, he thought, someone in need of pity.  Her sneer was a delicate thing, etching a line in his memory; smooth and vaguely sensual. The girl kicked off her shoes and picked them up in her right hand. Her stockings were torn. With stone-heavy fingers, she forced the token towards the slot. Missing, her force sent it rolling away playfully, with a prolonged, metallic resonance.  She stood there, and turned her head to the nervous man in the booth. He could see the piercing green of her eyes. Behind a veil of alcohol, they were tired. He hastily hit a button, unlocking the gate nearest him.

She looked at the gate as it swung open onto the platform, its worn stickers, graffiti, the rates posted on it, then at him. In the darkness, he was silent, staring back. She went to the gate then, and walked through without hesitation, without a second glance. She walked onto the empty platform and around the corner. <>She dropped down onto a wooden bench attached to the wall, with its red border and vintage photos of the city, photos that showed somewhere without poverty, somewhere without cracks and scars, a place where everything took place on the surface. The emptiness behind those antique edifices was undeniable. There were no back doors, no interiors. There was no depth to it. Just the way people really want life. Meaningless, but endlessly involved. Easy. The black and white of the murals didn’t show trash, or hunger, or want, or anything but their surface. Just this place, which now seemed so inaccessible.

She leaned against the wall, and tried to make the world stop moving. It hurt to see it spin. She brought her hands to her head, closed her eyes, and the overhead lights, though dim, burned brightly through her eyelids. She tried to make some of the goodness of the photos seep into her (all that perfection must be excessive, must run off somewhere) until she remembered they were voyeuristic memories, and stopped trying.

Silence submerged the station, the thick silence that forces its way into you, cuts you off from yourself. But the isolation seemed to bolster her, heal her, wrapping her in folds of pensiveness. It was fleeting though, for even as she realized it had covered her, it was stripped away painfully, peeling off in lacquer-chips that fell to the floor like invisible debris, by the low grunts and moans of a train.

The girl stood up, and hobbled, head throbbing, to the yellow line on the platform. Groggily, she glanced down either side of the tunnel. The gaping pores pulsed with the gray sound, the sound that smelled like popcorn, urine, cigarettes; the city. She could feel the slight draft that sucked the air from the room, then returned it. This abstract, threatening presence. It was limitless, this tunnel, and both pieces of it somehow met in her, somewhere in her chest.

This coursing cord was woven of infinite fibers of life, of those that collided with the train. Commuters, bums, business men, teenagers with their headphones blaring out the harsh reality of trains’ screeching, those who fell in its path... Those who drove it, rode it. Even the mice that scurried into their hidden dens in the tracks when the train appeared where somehow inside this massive thing she now felt within her.

All the flaws, the scratches, the burns, all of that was omnipotent, meeting her eyes in each life inside her, even the one she had unknowingly created tonight. Enveloped in the endless imperfections, she felt an odd contentment. Each individual moment in the pattern could be seen, but it was impossible to take them away from one another, to analyze them. They were only like this, powerful, meaningful, when they were intertwined.  

She stood there for a time as the man remained in his booth, the darkness comforting him. They stayed where they were, what they were; seeing the things on the surface; the tokens, the train. But anything deeper became fogged, fabricated.

The train came then, blaring out its warning to the blue haired girl leaning across the yellow line. It rang once. Twice.

And she moved back, the train cars flowing forward in front of her nose, flinging her hair backwards. She stepped back and put on her heels as the train slowed to a stopped, then opened in a sigh.

She stepped over the gap in her broken shoes, and took a seat in the car on a wounded seat bandaged in black tape.

He didn’t look back, for fear of meeting her eyes once more. The train doors shut, and it rattled off.

She in her heels, he in his booth.



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Copyright © 2002-2006 Student Publishing Program (SPP). Poetry and prose © 2002-2006 by individual authors. Reprinted with permission. Contents photo from LHS Yearbook Staff. SPP developed and designed by Strong Bat Productions.