Potting III

Shoo, shoo, shoo went the outside lamplights through the car-cabin, an imaginary whoosh passing between my ears with each momentary flash of illumination. I had come to, I supposed--I was unsure if I had actually been out--somewhere outside the city, for the only light I could perceive aside from the thin aisleway indicators spaced along the floor came now in rhythmic waves from the blackness beyond the car. I could have been the only passenger on a doomed spacecraft heading out past the heliopause for all I could see. The window glass calmly reflected what little there was to see inside the car, just the motionless rows of high-backed, dark cloth seats and the wan shadow of my sack blipping furtively on the opposite wall. Even the train itself seemed still; we moved, I tell you, and fast too if the rate at which the lights passed through was any indication, but only in some strange suspense. A less pleasant iteration of the stomach sadness passed through and beyond my gut, recognizing and deferring to the weary brittleness it saw there. I closed my eyes, not really by choice, and the whooshes quieted once more. We'd pick it up at the airport, I thought, not without resignation. It was late. It was groggy outside, inside, everywhere. I sprawled. And thank goodness no one had yet seen me in my pathetic droopiness and likely no one would. This was good. I already couldn't be sure if I'd be awake enough to notice.
Drag, drag, drag went my soul down the moving walkway that was the only modern-ish thing at this drabby little regional airport out at the edge of the commuter belt, the terminus of the city's longest, windiest rail line. The big airport was maybe fifty miles away, away on the other side of the province; the only walkers here were budget-conscious young travelers and drunks looking to sleep off their sins on a fifty-minute ride out to the sticks. The place was small and close, more like a neighborhood YMCA circa 1950 than a major metropolitan airport. Its cheaply marbled floors looked more like polished cork than precious stone, the beige ambient light they threw off coloring the eggy unadorned walls in what had to be a deliberate effort to turn the stomach. This was a nursing home, a third-tier hospital, a Boys & Girls Club, a middle school, a whatever--not an airport, a beacon, an ambassador to the world!
The stomach...the stomach. It was true that I didn't feel one hundred percent great. It was sour still, as it had been before, but now it was more, and deeper--a pressure, a weakness in the bowels that triggered unpleasant memories of sick days and couch lays and sudden losses of will, control and dignity. It was ungood, poor, a bad situation. Walking was not yet dangerous but with every step I could feel the content-shiftings which years of experience had taught me to beware. To conserve movement I leaned against the railing of the mover, hopping over the breaks with clenched precision. It didn't hurt, exactly, but there was an eerie feeling of simultaneous volume and not-volume that threatened to derail the fragile equilibrium I'd managed to zero in on since finding myself alone and awake, somehow, on a motionless stationed train below a second-rate single-terminal aviation center. I'll admit it: I was afraid. And I wasn't sure how to proceed. The line in front of me stretched almost to the vanishing point, which in this world of low ceilings and monochrome scheming wasn't as far as it could have been but certainly it wasn't anything to sneeze at either. I pawed at the ground, bit my lip. I shifted. It shifted. There was nothing more of the ambiguous sour feeling, only the knowledge of what had become. This line (I settled in, wondering whence everyone came--certainly not my train), this building, this nation-state...I was small & getting smaller.