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The Hopeful Glory of Morning’s Fire

By Dan McCarthy

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The sun rising after a single night’s work can be a strange sight to behold. You feel thrust into some netherworld known only to those who walk its dim streets stone sober and reeling from either the long shift just past or one soon to be faced. Most saunter with seemingly minimal direction, overlooking the artwork of the gods. It causes a complacent, saturated sense of serenity; making all that seems wrong right for a brief second. To the inexperienced, city life is a bustling community of the human experience; a visceral embracing of all that rides on history’s achievements and man’s great accomplishment. But here, during the inter-world of colliding existences, city life swallows you whole and you submerge deep into the concrete ocean of the subway system, held captive until you are ready and willing to see morning’s fire once again. It generally takes a weighty issue to overshadow the summit of the final stroll home as you wander amongst the dead; drawn to the morning’s ephemeral mood both leaving and arriving at the same time.

Dawn-soldiers pass each other with innocuous glances. The street lamps are flickering to black. Joggers pass, but not the usual kind. A dedicated few, who rise for the singular purpose of running at this early hour, seem almost furious with the street and claim these inter-hours as their own. They whiz by you in synergistic orbs of momentary displacement and aural flash-cuts. We dead or newly rising are mere cones, obstacles to be avoided as they take to the streets and chalk one more day to the ‘in-a-row’ mental tapestry.

The train feels long and hollow. Should those bodies being carried to work be awake, their blank stare suggests a breed too edgy for the normal morning rush, too hostile to even sustain eye contact. Their kind are exiled and banished to the frozen floor of the 5:00 a.m. work time. This is no mere train, but a steel chariot beached at every stop, allowing the dead to go about their business the way Kharon ferried bodies across the river Styx to the grim land of Haides. Going-to or coming-from, the early morning iron worm carries humanity at its most morbid.

A death mass for the all-occasion, I turn the volume up and pretend to sustain a thought. As we emerge from the darkness, morning’s flame grows in intensity. Over midtown, a distant sun yawns and breathes a baptism of fire into a seemingly riparian pastel blue beyond. A darkened metropolis still sleeps. You feel it coming. You’ve gotten your first peek. The solar flares spill over the stratosphere like a bucket of paint dropped over the globe from the heavens, smearing when met by thin, vapor-like clouds. The walls grow, and the train submerges once again.

Normally, you won’t even feel your eyes seal. They just seem to tire of the display before them and shrink away into the back of your head to find a better place. At a certain point, train dreams emerge. The visions are jarring and nonsensical; simple, colorful vignettes that do nothing but fill time between each random thought. At times they wake you, fooling you into believing they’re real. A woman in your dream asking you for change and a new pair of socks finds you with one eye open reaching for your shoe and about to rummage through your pockets. Occasionally, a passenger shoots a curious but empty glance at your actions before returning to the nothingness of their own thoughts.

Your eyes open with the doors. Exhaustion and battle fatigue is no match for the piercing sound of an arriving local. The stairs are heavy, and feel as though you carry each one past with each one met. A desert of tile separates you from the steel cage and then the exit. A heavier turnstile has never existed. Four more levels until birth. If you stare downward while ascending, the repetition of stair after stair can enter you into a visual dementia – one that is broken only by the muffled sounds on concrete and the changing of a walk signal. The burst of morning breeze is gentle and just cool enough to carry the scent of a tree-lined street. The street seems to carry you this time, and familiar surroundings tell you that rest is near. Above the rows of houses, the blueness brings hope. Minutes pass and the difference is evident. It’s creeping. You don’t even have to see it. Its signs are everywhere – dogs walking their owners, the speckled light and dark of a growing Oak’s shadow, the less dedicated jogger, rising symphonies of wind currents and bird-talk, far off commotion too vague to be cared about but too distant to ignore.

It’s all working harmoniously into a coda to be finished at the last step of the brownstone, as the key found under the mat will open the door and finally allow for rest. You climb; reach for the mat - and pull. What lies is an emptiness that deafens you. You look up at your reflection in the glass. Defeated, you slump on the stairs as the early world seems to fall to silence.

It’s 5:30am and the roommate forgot to leave the key in its usual place. Morning’s fire is replaced by a sudden surge of hellfire, which builds into dawning comprehension, resting at complete and utter exhaustion. Nothing left to do but sit and wait for a better look at the sun.

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Dan McCarthy is a writer living in New York City.  He can be contacted here.

© 2004 Me Three