the infernal hole, or a response to an entire month of car repairs (11/5/25)
At one point, I imagined it prudent to examine why some thought so simple as: “there is nowhere good here for me to sit down” — might prompt me to suicide, as it had. Of course, treating this thought as the sole inciting event was merely my dressing-up the truth of it, I would later conclude; my self-obliteration was an act which I had only attempted carrying out while stupidly drunk. So I recall a friend of mine, who, while drinking for the first time, swore that alcohol must be some elixir of the Devil, him donning the drag of God, deceiving us (His children) to the belief that through drinking we approach an exegesis — yet wine is the blood of Christ! she shouted, quivering at the apparent contradiction therein. I was then stunned, as she was not even that drunk. Where was this raving coming from? Her revelation did feel to me, even at the time, to be simply incorrect; my thoughts instead flitted over to the old Latin truism, in vino veritas, the principle that alcohol might cause one to splay out their truest desires and longings — could it be? that my truest desire was for death? I shuddered in fear at such a pronging thought, it could not be true, but I could not dismiss it; certainly, I was weary of myself as standing upon such impossible foundations, such often ritual reawakening of litany past dooms, though could the vertices of my life all turn so resolutely toward its own self-refusal? No well person could indulge such a narcissistic act as suicide, and no matter how much bile one reserves for oneself, they do still want to believe the simple correctness in all their actions —
Clattering of circumstance, the woesome and gnashing teeth of reality, they had all provided me with both ample instigation and ample time for asking myself these very questions, however. So I alone rode the slow train to class, my eyes just as unnotably glassy and fearful as anyone’s. They were once so fondly remarked upon, I despaired, and now they were only self-regarded pits. Historical placards about, dedicated intermittently within stations, prompted my recollection of a past-times newspaper vignette: when Boston’s subterranean rail had first been embarked upon as a concrete political project, an idiot brigade of paranoids, politicians, and local religious figures had coalesced to desperately oppose it, that which they had then-termed the conception of an “infernal hole” — the underground was sanctified, so it seemed, and the disruption of it was thought to be raison d’être for a plague of locusts, a foul and disease-ridden air soon to befall the city after opening its maw. This, they cried, was a punishment certain to justly come for the offense of man crossing firmaments which he ought not to cross; a message sufficiently compelling to the popular ear that their coalition, organized by name into the Anti-Subway League, quickly built in tempo and came to only a scarce defeat in the ballot measure (by some paltry one-thousand votes). And, as the tearing construction of modernity did still begin in the city at their behest, an equal reaction to their insolence became: a gas explosion killed scores, and a ruptured water main ejected a torrent of underground refuse onto the flooded Park Street Church — a simple sort of irony, wherein the meek did, in fact, inherit the earth as it was turned inverted from beneath; but this humor was sullenly lost on its pastor, so incensed as to decry the “un-Christian outrage” — “who is the boss in charge of the work? Is it the Devil?” Though their idiot alliance might march ever-onward above the corridors, alighting the surface streets with their cars and their holy merchandise — one can hardly even feel the dead of the downtown cemeteries which the subway project displaced, which had once caused so much strife. Hundreds of thousands of the living traverse these tunnels daily, quietly beggaring a refusal — the air is only the same as anywhere else. Still, all around: flags hopelessly at half-mast for obscurantist tragedies nobody will care to research; trudging highways built three stories into the sky with a million, yes one million, great automobiles astriding in a direction nobody will ever regard; classrooms and water fountains dedicated to passed-on professors left otherwise unremembered; us all so dumbly paying three dollars at the vending machine for only a bottle of water, always on watch for our dearly-clutched totems and omens of personal suffering — and that characteristic, loitering feeling, of a great and renewed civil war bloodbath which must be inevitable. One could always feel the seductive temptation to become a little lost in all this totalizing collision. Woe! we shout in chorus. Myself, and all the other glassy eyes. I turned my blackened gaze to the window, my post-crisis cleanliness somehow offended.
A group of proselytizing Mormons by the street-running tram approach me, their black name tags engraved in both English and Simplified Chinese, as a saccharine voice belonging to one of this smattering intones, rehearsed: “would you like to come to church on Sunday?” And I do not hesitate for even one second, despite all that weight of my past life with this very same institution, and my own compulsive habit to receive its people — historically always engaging, giving my name, promising to attend and then pretending I might truly be there, be so holy, be so redeemed, be so innocent of all things — it is revealed to not be a weight at all, not anymore, and I only answer with a subterranean “oh, no thank you. Have a nice day!” I blink — I have never rebuffed them as such before, and certainly never without so much thought. Should this not be the time in which I am most vulnerable to their message; to any redirection of my outward-inward castigation, a celebration of my plain internal defects (which certainly build my case toward Heaven)? — at this outermost wake of my own abortive suicide? This is the very same principle by which the Protestants prey upon the alcoholic, the recovering narcotic, after all. But, no, I suppose it is not the time. Some dynamic aspect of myself must have gone over. I step away with all my inertia, through a pool of pigeons which has formed around me (as is characteristic to the intersection of Harvard and Commonwealth Avenues), they disperse about my feet and go on picking at the sidewalk scraps while I walk to idle for the next train. I blink once more: the representatives for the Church of the Latter-Day Saints are now gone, themselves and their plastic folding table and their lawn chairs perhaps having vanished entirely into the air. A white van discretely pulls away. I reserve my conversation, then, for the strangers who will later request to bum a cigarette, as I remember fondly another friend who once called this ceremony a hallmark of realized adulthood. I hand one over, feeling the generosity which an apocalypse asks of its aware — “But do you need a light?” I ask.