＃６８

A restless crowd mutters, and mutters, until their grumblings separate like oil and water. Cynicism gels around their workboots—ostensibly, mere lamentations on the prospect of imminent physical progress, but in sum, the passage of a collective and heartburned exasperation, or so, the barely-Richter-registered rumblings of tectonic plates shifting far below a conscious surface. A specific dissatisfaction with life is a pressure cooker; a broader one merely congeals. Anything targeted, I mean to say interpersonal, in the context of the stadium tunnel-crushed confines, sits atop the stickiness like heat. Like flame soaking a fat-scarred stovetop. Why isn’t this West Indian going? Go, man! The saffa sparks, meets gas. Can’t he see—for fuck’s sake man—see I need a little more room, j’st a little, unpronate my ankle like so, scale-balance the shoulder strap, so I’m stable, man, pressed in and uncomfortable yes mate we all are but stable, small ask, fuck’s sake! Each hostility of this kind javelined forward into a cone subtending no more than sixty degrees, the periphery all eye-test-blurry, so that each man hated the man before him but stood entirely unconscious of the men to his side—and why not? They were irrelevant to one’s own forwards motion, now, equally fucked over, and so utterly blind to each others’ fortunes in the crab bucket—each man studiously avoiding any acknowledgement of his shoulder-peer, and feigning not a stepping into openings in the pulsing mass before them—for that might imply a judgement of their deservedness of the space and attract reprisal—but rather a fortuitous appearance in it, reluctant even, as though forced there by a stiff lumbar tap—that if they were to know of my hip impingement or her aching breast then forgiveness—for yes, a bit of jostle, impersonal, can’t be helped but if it can then anyway that opening’s mine not yours and—oop it’s gone already, slid into—didn’t even see you—I’m looking straight ahead, see?—would be assured. Tell a cunt to move, all’s well, but steal the man’s spot, betray the subtle traffic-zipper-etiquette of a wasted stampede, and you’re in for a shove. Some men want a fight, and others want to want a fight, but a limbic reflex insists to most that plausible deniability comes first. SECURITY, demands a tight blue textile prison for that hard kind of gristle that gets stuck in your teeth, and each man allocates it/him the minimum berth required of its authority. Some heads bobble, and small coins of light gain edges, tracing out a square to end the tunnel. There, soon. Beer again (queue, again), good match I’m sure... Yeah. Like walking into church.