I keep wincing just before I think I’ll knock it over, but then I don’t even move a muscle. I can see the whole affair in my head—whatever it was to go flying: glass, wrist, anything delicate— I just know I will knock it over; it doesn’t matter what it was. Maybe like a long time ago, I will look at my lap and start crying. Only I’m sure that this time there will be no parents to tell me not to cry about entropy. I will be six again, in a large green colonial four bedroom house, but all alone. I won’t have paid the electric bill in months and so the place will be still and dark for dinner.

Often when I believe this is about to happen, the colors of the strange awesome things I used to dream knock loudly on the front door of my apartment. They fill the peephole like out a submarine I’m peering and when I least expect it. That is, they always show up when I am about to knock something over, but I never know when that feeling will come over me. The colors are such a nuisance; I try to keep them from coming. But sometimes I can’t help but think about a small child alone in a large, dark house and then I think that the child will surely spill something and not know how to clean it up, or even know that it doesn’t matter.

And if you know that nothing ever spilt never matters, then why wash the bedclothes? I think. Surely all that is unkempt of the bed has come from you. Skin. Sweat. Fluid. Visions. I keep washing gray sheets and piling them on the bed. I always need more. Bloodshot eyes that don’t close stare at the dark whitewashed ceiling under the pressure of one hundred pounds—sheets so thick they soak the nightsweat up like a sponge. That is often when the toys rattle—when their toy eyes glow bright colors and blink like fireflies in the room and move all about.

I hate never sleeping and yet I can’t stand to just close my eyes.

I beg for the world to make it easy. I ask if it would be okay if I weren’t crazy, but I know that the piercing eye of the world, the Sun, sooner or later will part the blinds and firmly say, “No.” (Just between you and me, I think the Sun is a jerk—he never gives a shit about my plight–just keeps coming around to check on me and then taking off for the next appointment. Mark my words, modern men have no friend in the Sun.)

The only thing I like about the visit from the Sun is that the colors no longer barricade the door. They get bored pretty easy. Then I can leave. I wear 3 pairs of colored sunglasses that blend out all the color. Some people don’t like it, but frankly I like to see in gray. Mostly I don’t look anyway.

She leans up on his shoulder and says, “Let’s do it. You want to do it?”

“Uh… right now?” Gene has just been listening to one of his favorite sounds gifted his apartment. When storms come in from the South, they inevitably cause the oversized lid on the art deco street lamp to clunk under its own loose weight. He liked to leave the door open as the winds kicked up. Hell, he liked to leave the door open to invite the storm inside; yes—for a cup of whoop-ass. That was the pleasure: open the door to the danger, let it come in. For him, the streetlamp had become a kind of novel bell; impending storm coming. She’d probably not even noticed it, he realized, her chin straining up to rest on his spine and shoulder.

“The thing is…”—how to put it—”I don’t want to fuck you while the storm is coming in…”

This is a way-bold statement for their budding relationship and he sees the surprise she can’t hide from her face. Had he said the word “fuck” in her presence yet even? He’d no idea. But her face is not marred by shock; it is genuine uncertainty he sees. He twists his neck around and smiles—nothing menacing here—and she giggles. Then he turns away from the screen door, the clunking of the street lamp, the sky split in half between bright blue and rolling gray, and wraps his arms around her. She lets him take her in and in her way, a way she hopes he notices, she presses her face against his chest and stares thoughtfully at the front moving across their little city. She does like storms that arise, too. He squeezes her and after a nervous breakthrough says, “I want to fuck you when the storm is here—when it’s banging on the windscreen, in full effect.”

She decides to play the straight man, “Oh, I see…”

He squeezes. “You know it.” He bends his head down and quiet, “You better think the storm is me.”

She leans back from him and waves her hand Scarlet before her face. “Oh goodness.”

He won’t live up to it, so he smiles too.

Shara sees the stumble and knows she must recover lust. “I’ll wait for that, you monster.” She waits, his face is creasing in a way that’s coming around, and then she adds, “You fuck me like the front of weather.” There’s a long pause of eye-looking and she adds, “I can’t predict the weather.”

But the weather is coming.

He’d come from a place where the roads were named #46 and #124 and they went north and south and southwest and through dales and farms hilly but rolling, not too rocky; and now, looking up to the tops of the clear-cut highways of Kentucky, sheer rock walls of fifty feet, dripping with quick cold small waterfalls on dreary days—what road number was this? A man must walk down so many roads before you call him a man. They can be counted; are counted by the mad. What number was this road, this highway carrying him into a life of science and investigation? The sun slamming white on the windshield seemed as unyielding as it had in Georgia and Tennessee, just as white and bright and blinding on this clear July weekend, and yet, as usual, the world quickly changed around him; the pace so obviously rapid. Nothing at the arrival would resemble the departure, regardless of the smell of country air. Still, the smell of the air rushing in through the open window smells just the same. Just the same as always. And the color of a summer sky, perfect day, never changes.

Of course, the road had an actual number, but this was not what he wondered. He saw a map of the United States, the world, in his mind. Like any particle of gas in a chamber, his path could be tracked and shown to be different from any other. There was a line that traced the northern hemisphere illustrating his striations and bounces and chaos. Surely no other human path could match it; snowflake indeed. He was unique and as the movement and dynamics of everyone he knew washed over his mind and he saw the mess of it all, he realized too that he was unique and meaningless somehow at the same time.

It did not bother him, this meaninglessness. It was never made real for him, not the vacuum wind of air being sucked out of the cabin of the truck where through the just-rolled down window he flicked his cigarette. No, the air was not the ghost. The air, for all its flora scent and beneficence, let him go, but the ghost followed him, rode in the car in the empty passenger seat. He knew it and knew it well and though sometimes it could seem cold, more often he bathed himself in the warmth and comfort of the anonymity of its missing. He knew well the insecurity of standing in front of people and talking and seeing in their faces their disapproval. He much preferred the knowing that if unidentified to anyone, he was never someone to be taken notice of.

The racket was intense and he stepped off the pedals and the seat of the bike to straddle it, to lean on the handlebars and just watch the steel behemoth roll by; a steel segmented worm on wheels that on several passing cars carried massive steel sets of train wheels—a train carrying train wheels. What luck, Gene thought. He listened as above the rumble and bells of the railroad crossing signs, high-pitched squeaks would emanate from the wheels on the track. He wondered at those sounds; were they the sounds of the wheels pressing into the rails as the train rocked to and fro? He wondered, leaning on his bike’s handlebars, if he could get close enough to the train, lit only by the red flashing lights of the crossing and the sodium yellow of street lamps, if he could get close enough to the train to see where the high-pitched squeaks of metal-on-metal were coming from. He wondered if he could put his fingers between the wheels and the rail and what it would feel like to have them unrecoverably crushed?

He wondered, as he looked as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tipped and stamped like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he could feel a difference in the weight of cars that passed over gaps in the tracks. He could feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and slowly strobing red lights. All the sensations together felt heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would’ve looked by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to where the sound goes.