In the Train Station

A large public bathroom. Shiny tile floor: a slick, seminal sheen; black and white tiles in ugly symmetries. The middle urinal is covered with Caution Do Not Use sashes, bright swathes of wide yellow tape. The floor is covered with a thin skin of puddle but there is no sound of splashing as I step across the room. Sighing, I release my piss. The water boils in the bottom of the urinal. Invisible flicks of launched urinewater splash on the floor, rippling in specks on the floor. This is art, I think, thirty percent ironic, thirty percent sincere, and forty percent drunk. In particular I enjoy the caution-taped urinal, the contrast of bright yellow tape in a long, dull, empty Manichean bathroom.

Orderly arrangements all over in this train station. Long rows of chandeliers. Tiles in the floor, connect-the-dot angles of red squares in a sea of gray. Benches: human-oiled, gouged walnut, endlessly smoothed, pews with armrests.

Train stations in small metropolises are devastated and overlit. Everyone is tragic, desperate, heightened antiglamor, staring at old arcade machines, rows of pamphlets for local casinos and support-groups meeting in churches.

Ostentatious 1980s-era security cameras are perched in every corner of the room. A fat man in a large t-shirt pushes a stroller, walking in circles around the station. A woman with a massively beaten face—an exalted slew of bruises—sits beside her man, their raised cones of hair lopsiding the symmetry of the long benches. Even the prosperous-looking elderly couple who sit (relaxed in their chairs, flipping through real-estate all-ad newspapers) may be sneaking cheaters, casual in a lifetime of lies. Why not?

People move slowly down long staircases. The escalators are abandoned, blocked off with more plastic caution tape, permanently undergoing maintenance. A cheerful ticketsalesman in a uniform, telling lies about his children—a young doctor and a young professor, of course—smiling and making mild comments. What astonishes is the banality of these human people; they wear drab colors, or neon, they're fat, or skinny, they look entirely normal, hideously unfamiliar, moving into the train station, carrying bags on tiny wheels, wearing dirty white hats, thin pink plaid blouses, grey t-shirts and baggy blue jeans, utterly normal, with sharp little jutting pharonic beards and close-cropped hair.

The elderly couple engages the fat stroller-pusher in a brief dialogue about his child. They compliment its cuteness, its docility and patience. My mood is even. I'm listening to the new Electric President album, drinking rum and coke in an aluminum can, looking at the long shards of reflected chandelier light in the dented woodstain of the pew-benches. If I may be honest, it seems that the last eight years have been marked with disquiet; with an anxious inauthenticity. I'm tired of being the way I've been; I'm tired. I'm ready for what's next. I'm ready for what's next.