Fiction, Cobi Chiodo Powell
When I first moved to this country and didn’t know anyone, I passed the time by getting on the subway and riding it for hours.
Eventually, I learned how to optimize the experience. I’d take two or three Seroquel (I was overprescribed) and an Adderall (buying drugs online is deleteriously easy compared to how it was down south in the States) and then head to the state-owned liquor store to pick up some random, obscure beer, a piss-tasting high-ABV genre of microbrew you’d never heard of until you’d seen it written it on a can next to some stupid logo. “Psychedelic Weizen,” next to a graphic of a teddy bear with eyes all swirly like it was on two tabs of LSD at the high school homecoming game; “PopeyePA” in bright yellow bubble-letters next to a free-use, public-domain Popeye with bloodshot eyes, woozy after just one and a half of these suckers, bulging forearms and blue veins grasping a can that foamed over the top; even a “Sakhalin Penal Mash,” aged in “vodka barrels” and boasting a graphic of a bespectacled, shirtless Chekhov, thin and covered in the types of tattoos bedecking Viggo in Eastern Promises. I’d pour one of these beers into a thermos, filling up the remaining four or five ounces with cheap gin. Then I’d stir it together with a spoon and cap it and, once I felt the oppositional effects of the pills start to really duel from the base of my spine up to my brainstem, I’d smoke a dirt-tasting cigarette and then bring it with me onto the train.
At first there was a purpose to this, to getting on the train. Before I started taking all the drugs, I took with me whatever book I was reading. Or, if I was working on a short story or a poem or an essay, I took a notebook. The subway was an easy way to remove myself from that which was excessive and sensorial about my street: especially in the winter when the sun was never out and all light outside was dimmed and bleeding, and the traffic was insistent and the air tasted dry and briney, and the old, raw wind whipped a harsh enfilade through the streets and alleys.
The subway tunnels were dark and familiar, and though they weren’t exactly quiet, one was never surprised by the sounds one heard, which were repetitive—rhythmic, even. And then when you passed out of the tunnel through one of the brief above-ground passages, you didn’t even mind the gray of the outside (which I normally did mind––very much, in fact, as it looked like lurch and coil, the outside did, that is, the outside looked like lurch and coil; and I often, in my small apartment (the bleached, briney street coiled and lurking just outside my window), listened to the old country songs we used to play on front porches in Indianapolis during the summertime before we went back inside to keep writing thirty-second power-violence tunes) because it was a pleasant change of scenery: a respite from the dark warm thrum already enveloping you in safety: a respite from respite.
It was easy to read down there. Easy to write. I felt cocooned. When not in the subway I knew that everything outside, all of that Not-The-Subway outside my window there, it all secreted a fine, organic shrapnel, these parasitic spores that wiggled down my ear canals and calcified my brain. (I would have loved to have sent my rock-calcified brain to a friend back home through the mail, accompanied by a note that said something like: Carry this around in your pocket. Whenever it tingles it means there’s a woman nearby.) But the brainless rhythm of the subway soothed me back into a spongy flow, into a simple mush of self.
However, at a certain point, when the brain-dead loneliness of my days became too much, I remembered that drugs existed, and that things were a little bit funnier if you were on them all the time, and that my initial reasoning for chilling out on taking so many drugs—moving to a different country (my birth country: a place with which I thought I was supposed to feel some deep kinship) for a PhD, which required I clean up my act a little bit—now felt flimsy, insofar I hated both the different country and the types of people who pursued graduate work in the humanities. So I re-upped on the Seroquel and downloaded the necessary clients and then rewrote those to make them configurable via a USB stick to buy the Adderall (and Vyvanse, too, if that’s all that was available; I would have bought coke [my favorite], but that to me is better when done with other people) and then hit the state-owned liquor store, etc.
Pretty quickly I had a nice little supply and was regularly spending all day smoking cigarettes inside, reading the assigned texts though not interacting with them very honestly, watching Seinfeld as if it were a campfire (because he’s my butler! I don’t wanna be a pirate!), and riding around fucked up on the subway, with the latter the highlight of my day.
In such a state I would neither read nor write—could neither read nor write—though I brought with me on the subway whatever novel I had been ostensibly reading for the last several weeks. I’d been drunk and high and all in all too shellacked to really focus on doing anything aside from the bare minimum I’d needed to do for school (which itself wasn’t enough anyways, as sometime in early February an anonymous admin sent me an ominous email [with lots of! friendly! exclamation marks!!] inviting me to a Zoom meeting and then, with gentle eyebrows sloping upwards from the circumference of the face to meet at that keystone point marking the forehead’s third-eye, said: “You are likely going to lose your funding,” and: “You will likely be asked to leave the program,” and: “Is everything fine at home?” and did not inquire further when I barked some harsh chuckle and did not ask about the bags under my eyes nor about the waxy skin pulled taut atop my brittle cheekbones). I also brought the notebook in which I had stopped writing coherent fiction or criticism and instead had begun creating nonsense permutations of words or drawing spirals or typographically preparing spirals out of nonsense permutations of words.
Sometimes I listened to the hardcore tapes my friends in the Midwest were still making, but mostly I gazed ahead, sipping from the thermos, switching tracks when the two got to the end of the line, nodding off from the Seroquel but kept spidey-sense aware by the Adderall, and if someone said something stupid or corny within earshot of me then I’d smile and soundlessly repeat it to myself, mouthing the words in hollow reproduction, thinking I should write that down, knowing if I allowed the slightest sliver of voice to escape my mouth then its slurred and schwanic quality would reveal me as the wasted American freak I knew myself to be. I found comfort (or, at least, what comfort I could back then) in documenting cliché, taking note of those platitudes one only says as a response and most often to strife, thereby acting as a sort of automatic conciliatory gesture, a denouement to sustained tragedy––no one ever said One day a time to a friend on a streak of good fortune. On the train I sat and listened to all I heard and hated: hated for its insincerity, its four-chord opposition to the noise music we forced out of feedback back home, and for how it exposed a specious relationship to language––as a compromise, a concatenation of heuristic intended to only ever almost get the point across.
I was still giggling to myself with half-closed eyes over something some Toronto hipsters had said (one walked onto the train wearing a shirt with a John Brown etching on it and another guy on the train with shitty tattoos you knew he’d spent too much on [I got all of mine back home in exchange for, like, a six-pack of Miller High Life; meanwhile all the single-line blackwork up here was going for hundreds of dollars] saw the shirt and went: “Whoa—you like John Brown?” and then the other guy went: “Hell yeah!” and then they dapped each other up and talked about whatever boring bands the bourgeois Toronto hardcore scene had produced lately) when on walked this very small person who was being towed by his angry and enormous German shepherd.
I usually find it a little comical when people admit to being afraid of specific dog breeds. Up here pit bulls are even banned, which is silly, as I grew up around pits and really found them almost universally sweet dogs, all skull and jaws, admittedly, those bulbous skulls housing a thoughtless pressurized lever mechanism, yes, and with beady eyes like beans, but sweet, their domineering and sauroid appearance belying a core decency, and very dumb. I’ve never had any problem with Rottweilers, or Cane Corsos, or Dobermans or Perro de Presa Canario or Dogos Argentinos, and have even played with a wolf-hybrid or two back home. But when I was young, someone on our street had a German shepherd that scared the shit out of me, lunging at the chain-link fence whenever I’d scooter by, bullying me into rolling over a pebble and skinning my knee. I didn’t like them then, and as I grew older and older I could not find a way to abandon that prejudice as both myself and my friends tallied up between the all of us more and more negative experiences with these dogs. One time in particular, a group of us in all-black sprinting as fast as we could after having been caught spray-painting a big ACAB—the As both anarchist As, the kind enveloped within a circle—down over by the SoHud Rally’s, which was luckily also by the Laundromat, where aging punk-kids tended bar and held the worst all-ages shows in the city and through which backdoor we were able to slip and behind which bar we were allowed to crouch for twenty or so minutes, reaching up into the well to faux-covertly steal the bottle of Old Crow.
All this to say that the presence of the dog pierced through the sheer unarticulated noise in which I wallowed, as if I were a scrambled cipher and the dog a decoding device, as if I were a sweaty finger exerting pressure on a bare quarter inch cable and the dog the thrift-shop guitar into which it wound up being plugged.
I picked my head up from its floor gazing position and raised it so as to be more aware of the very large dog towing the very small person holding its leash. In doing so I underestimated the weight of my skull: it pivoted all the way on my spine and now gazed upwards at the ceiling. I readjusted in my seat, sliding down so that my lolling head was propped on the seat-back. My legs stuck out into the aisle. The harsh fluorescent overhead lights—so endemic to the two lines—engendered nausea from deep within. My body made an absurd obtuse angle. I looked down my nose through half-lidded eyes, catatonic, too paralyzed to move my overextended legs out of the aisle.
The person was thin and small; after the doors closed with an electric ding-dang-dong and the train continued on its trajectory, the dog started pulling its owner around, examining the underneath of every seat, growling and bare-toothed, the owner’s arms bulging with the strain of holding onto its leash and harness. I imagined the dog ripping itself out of its harness. It tasked and heaved, sniffing everyone’s feet (though passing mine by), growling at those it deemed suspicious, and then stood in the center of the corridor. Its head swiveled and gazed around at us; its sniff became a snarl and then an automatic and loud admonishing bark.
The owner held him tighter.
“Easy there buddy.”
Someone sitting somewhere behind me yelled, “Get that off.”
The owner replied with a series of rapid small nods, “He’s good.”
Someone else now, though again I could not see who: “I don’t give a fuck. Next stop.”
“I can’t.”
The dog barked again.
A third person: “What?”
“I can’t. Not next stop.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to get where I’m going.”
“And we don’t?” This was yet another person, likewise seated somewhere behind me.
The dog barked several times now and then didn’t stop, a metronome to the accusatory back-and-forth.
The owner: “What?”
“And we don’t?”
“What does that mean?”
Another: “In one piece. We need to get to where we’re going in one piece. And you and the animal are acting as if we don’t.”
At this the dog’s bark amplified, echoing around the interior of the car. The aural effect was like watching a slinky return to static equilibrium. He pulled on the leash, away from his owner; his muscles pulped forward through his fur, his thick veins straining with wordless hate.
“Stop. You’re bothering him.”
One of the people from before: “He walked on bothered! That’s why I told you to fuck off!”
Now two or three people in unison: “That’s why we told you to fuck off.”
Then just one, firmer, tight-mouthed: “Off. Next stop.”
“I’m going to see my friends.”
(I was not aware the train was this crowded and that there were so many people seated at my back for there were already several seated in front of me [in my head each person looks different based off their voices—for example the someone with the voice which is a little higher—I cannot distinguish gender at the moment—is wearing a big fuzzy green sweater lazily tucked into the front of a pair of light wash, thrifted blue jeans; and for instance too the someone with a voice that sounds double-tracked, like I could hear two separate tracks of it at the same time, and one was going through one ear and the other through the other, is wearing black cargo pants and a blue knitted top underneath a buttoned-to-the-chin parka and a burnt ochre Carhartt toque] and then how stupid I probably looked, splayed out, taking up two seats directly and then obliquely another few insofar as my legs stretched out like this precluded people from sitting down) Another person now: “You have no friends.”
The dog continued to bark, the owner threw his hands in the air and shook his head in confusion: “. . . What!?”
“You have no friends!”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s why you’ve got that thing.”
“The only thing to give you any company.”
“To provide you with any time of day.”
“A breathing mute warm body just to fill out the space in your day.”
“A beast born in a cage born of beasts born in a cage.”
“And angry all the time.”
“Incensed.”
“A clear expression of what you carry around within yourself all day.”
Another, interrupting:“And every day, too!”
Another, confirming: “Yeah! All day, every day!”
The person, defiant now, chin slightly elevated, nostrils half flared, chapped lips pursed, brow steeled: “I’m going to see my friends.”
“We all know you have none! Hence the aggressive animal!”
The person drew breath, about to stutter out a retort, until—
“Yup.” This last confirmation pierced the air. From whence had it come?
The man who confirmed this had been hitherto sitting silently, staring down at the floor. He was positioned in front of me at a stretch of seats which ran parallel to the train’s length, facing inwards to the middle of the car, the only one who had spoken thus far whom I was able to see. He was in a black tee despite the cold outside. His head was shaved. Spiderweb tattoos burst like capillaries from his elbows. His interruption silenced the rest of the car. No one expected him to have an opinion. The person with the dog had in all likelihood expected him to be on his side. I had expected the same. The owner whipped his head over, as if a surprise witness, a Michael Ironside–type, had just walked into the courtroom in an airport thriller. The witness raised his head and stared straight ahead. The owner staggered over to the sitting witness, the dog’s barking now a bassy low growl. He knelt down and situated himself in front of the witness’s eyesight.
The witness sighed.
“Never been anything more clearly emblematic of friendlessness, man.”
The owner looked at him in desperation, eyes enervated of hope, as if behind these eyes a mournfully traitorous watchman was in the process of deserting his post after descrying enemy legions in the near distance: burning torches and grimly marching and reeking of hair and fat.
“I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, dog. But. Yeah. When I see someone like you on the train, I think to myself, ‘There goes someone without any friends.’”
There was a second of silence. The train continued underground, deeper and deeper into the underground, and you could feel the car gradually pressurize, your ears taking on excess weight, the hot blood pulsing through your temple, a sudden cognizance of the way the back of your throat tasted. Then the dog’s low growl abruptly jumped registers into a sort of snap which popped from the back of its throat as it lunged forward and took the man’s throat between its teeth. In the next second it had ripped his throat out. Blood spurted, drenching the dog-owner’s shocked face. The man put his hands up to the gaping hole in his throat and gasped and choked for a few moments. Then he fell forward out of his seat and onto the floor, his weakening eyes slowly canceling themselves out, as if in some other dimension they were becoming all pupil. He gagged a little while longer, black oozing out of his throat, pooling onto the ground so that from above it looked like a large speech-bubble from an underground comic book, filled with ellipses and dirty words, unprintable elsewhere. The dog then immediately resumed a hackle-raised pose, its ears back, eyes blind and swarming, its head on a swivel, surveying, keeping everyone in front of and behind me in its ken. Another second of silence. Then everyone in front of me hollered and gasped and ran to the front of the car, bunching up in a protective grouping against the door through which you change cars; someone tried this door only to find it jammed; the large man on the outside of the group had his arms spread out wide, shielding everyone from the dog (but the dog was not nearly as tall as his arms were, I remember thinking, so why spread them out so wide, unless he was anticipating the dog to leap up, but it could always just go for the ankles, and this big man would look so silly bending down so low just to slapbox a dog), and I imagined this collective behavior mirrored by the chorus of people seated behind me. The dog growled at this collective heaping and then turned around, knowing its real enemies were the admonishing crowd behind me. I continued to loll and mustered up the requisite strength to at least sit up straight, gripping the sides of the seat-bottom as an anchorpoint to the real. Though my eyes felt wide, my sight was out-of-focus and crossed. I must not have been a real threat to the dog’s sovereignty, as its glance only barely skated across the surface of myself. After a few seconds of deliberation, it began moving, towing its speechless, open-mouthed owner to the back of the car. The mess of panicked life behind me began hollering and cursing even louder, echoing, a polyphonic Gregorian chant broadcast from another world. The dog and the owner stepped out of the pool of blood, leaving foot and pawprints on the scuffed gray rubber flooring, the kind striated through with streaks of white and black as if TV static and smeared over now with scarlet. After a few easy steps the owner came to consciousness and began to fight back. No! he yelled. Stop! and then planted his feet, yanking on the dog’s harness while it thrashed ever so slightly forward. Bemused by the sudden resistance, the dog planted and looked back at the owner and began growling low, the same sort of rattle that preceded the ripping-out of the witness’s throat. The owner either did not clock this or did not care. Hey! he said sternly. Bad dog. The growl continued, low and throaty. Then the same sudden jump in registers, the same sort of snap popping from the back of its throat; the taut leash went slack and fell completely to the ground; then a similar sort of oozing pattern, albeit this time from the wrist and not the throat. (I could not be sure (and still cannot) but was almost certain I heard someone behind me yell: Well wouldja look’it that!) The dog, newly unfettered, turned and eyed the chorus behind me. It resumed its taunting procession towards them, two incapacitated bodies—one certainly dead, the other hopefully just highly maimed—left splayed in its wake. I anchored my feet and propelled myself against the car’s wall, positioning myself so my back was against it, and curled my legs up into the seat, moving out of the dog’s way and also securing for myself a vantage point in which I could be aware of it from my periphery. It walked down the center of the corridor, passed me, and then muddled into the corner of my eye.
The people at the back of the train were shapes and blurs, a massed pouring-away of meaning, an evacuation of content, little more than latent heuristics half-molded into awkward humanoid silhouettings. The dog walked to the back of the train, barking its piercing imprecatory bark whenever anyone shifted. When the dog was about five feet away from the crowd of blurs at the back of the train (I suddenly was reminded of a time in high school when I smoked salvia from a bong at a house show and everything was triangles for hours and then my dad came to pick me up and he was triangles too) it posed for attack that way dogs do: mouth puckered in a bare-tooth rictus, gelded eyes hard like petrified yolk, haunches jammed up in the air as if antennae, head low to the ground and front legs braced with an unbearable tension of potential energy. Then we passed out of the tunnel into the viaduct. The car was outside now. Natural light streamed in but I don’t remember taking immediate notice of it. The sun shone through the bridge’s tresses, keeping time, clicking on and off in a hectic rhythm. In this suddenly lit zone of track the dog abandoned its poise, leaping bare-toothed to the blurred crowd. Halfway through its arc one of the shapes detached itself from the rest of the crowd. It enveloped the dog in a sort of hug, bringing it to the ground. The two shadows muddled even further into inarticulability as a struggling heap on the ground and then I heard a sound like dead things in a butcher shop and the dog yelped a high-pitched pathetic yelp once and then again and then there was little more than the panting from the human shape on top of the dog as it steadied itself and braced its hands on the ground and then stood up groaning with strain as if arthritic. The car was silent.
When it pulled into the station I fought my body’s impulse to inertness and abruptly stood up and staggered off. I imagined my head lolling crazily. I could not be sure if it was or not, if I was walking or shuffling, if I was breathing or merely flailing air into my lungs. I looked to my right before exiting and saw the dead dog on the ground and a large shape standing over it in a heavy shapeless black coat and an unmistakable gleam in its right hand.
To my left lay the owner, breathing weakly.
They would probably close at least a few stations on either side of this one. To return home I would need to walk maybe a mile to a station that wasn’t closed and then take the subway from there. But then I thought that I could just walk the rest of the way, bypassing the easy westward transit entirely, and in a chemically addled state that would surely worsen before it got better.
I thought that I would do this. That I needed to pay some sort of penance. That some form of restitution was demanded of me, though I did not know why nor to whom. That the moronic decrepitude into which I further and further sank was blasphemous to something somewhere. I steeled myself and walked up the compulsory steps, fighting against the entering crowd of people: concerned samaritans, cops, bored onlookers curious what the big fuss was all about anyway.
When I walked out of the station and into the day, I was surprised to find that the clouds had parted and that the sun was out and that it looked larval, and I hadn’t seen it in so long, and it looked larval to me, like a leather sac popping full of aborted yolk. Then I thought that this was the last time I’d get this high. Either that or it would be the first day of the rest of my life.
Cobi Chiodo Powell is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is currently based in New York. Film and literary criticism have previously appeared or are forthcoming in The Culture We Deserve and the Cleveland Review of Books. Fiction has appeared in Expat, Apocalypse Confidential, surfaces.cx, and others.
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