Ten Thousand Worlds

I wrote this story just a short while ago, and am re-posting it to give this blog a sense of beginning. The story is part of a series I'm writing with no real expectations except to write. Contrary to my usual routine, I'm choosing not to edit these except to correct grammatical errors here and there. Basically, it's to help rid myself of my (substantial) inner censor...and possibly to expulse the numerous terribly bad stories I have within me.

It's worth noting that the story is entirely fiction - I have never lived in Queens, nor have I ever been accosted on the subway.

"You have the greenest eyes..."

This was completely untrue. My eyes were not, nor have they ever been, green. I glanced up from my Differential Equations and Boundary Value Problems textbook to see a disheveled-looking man staring down at me. His appearance was typical New York subway panhandler. His hair hung like strands of limp seaweed, squashed underneath an extremely dirty Mets cap. A faded denim jacket at least two sizes too large draped on his shoulders as though off a very knobbly coat rack, and his black pants were ripped in many areas; shreds of it dragged behind him, barely hiding the lace-less black sneakers that he wore. His face was unlined, and what bare patches of skin I could see made me think he was Caucasian - he was so caked in dirt that he resembled the pictures I'd seen of miners in the early 1900's.

His eyes, however, were green - so brilliantly green they almost glowed underneath the brim of his baseball cap.

I quietly cleared my throat and went back to my textbook, steadfastly ignoring the stomach-turning smell of soured alcohol and caked sweat.

"I saw the sky bleed yesterday," the homeless man continued. "I saw the sky crack open and bleed butterflies - they were red and green and purple and they streaked across the sky like a lightning rainbow, and they sparkled. I caught one, but it turned into an orange peel in my hand."

I tried to focus on how one solves a first-order differential equation and didn't look up. A woman sitting next to me, who could charitably be called fat, made a badly-disguised look of disgust and struggled to her feet. As she walked away I noted that she looked a bit like a wobbly beach ball in her red and white polka dot dress, then mentally berated myself for being unkind. I shifted down to where she had been sitting and hoped the panhandler would leave me alone.

"I once left this planet," the homeless man continued, oblivious of my discomfort. "I floated on streams of cerulean and velvet stars to the rings of Neptune, and I watched the mermaids of Triton swim underneath the violet waves and listened to them serenade the coral beasts."

I cleared my throat again and stared violently down at my differential equations. This was a little...weirder...than I was used to on the New York Subways.

"You have the greenest eyes," the man repeated, sitting next to me.

"I...ah, really don't," I responded, then silently cursed myself for responding.

"You do!" He replied vehemently, causing me to flinch back. A few of the car's other occupants, including the lady who'd fled earlier, glanced down in my direction, and I felt my neck grow hot.

"Your eyes don't look green, but they ARE green, and that's where everything matters!" The homeless man leaned in, gazing at me intently, even as I tried to lean away inconspicuously.

"Ahm...right. They don't look green, but they are green. I getcha." I glanced out the window, and saw only a rushing of black outside. To my dismay, a sudden shrieking of metal filled the air and the entire train lurched forward as it slowly shuddered to a stop.

"Attention, ladies and gentlemen," announced a bored-sounding voice over the intercom. "We are currently being held by the dispatcher. We should be moving shortly and apologize for the inconvenience."

"Terrific," I muttered under my breath. Snapping my book shut, I struggled with my backpack zipper even as the man beside me continued in a hoarse whisper, "My eyes are green too. They didn't used to be green, but then I got the gift, and everything changed colors. The sun shined for me alone and I saw the gods and the goddesses of the clouds, and the fairies that live underneath the subways in the dark hollow places of the earth. I could hear the moles digging underneath, and the restless dead shifting in their coffins as a slow leaking calcified their bones and turned them into bedrocks."

He reached a stained hand out to me, and I almost bashed my head against the far end of the car as I flung myself out of the seat. Resolutely not turning around, I started toward the other end of the subway, hoping the crazy homeless man would latch onto somebody else. Then I could go back to my differential equations which, although boring, seemed unlikely to manhandle me while total strangers watched. I glanced back once - the homeless man remained at the other end of the car, swaying almost hypnotically even though the subway still hadn't started moving yet. His oddly green eyes bored into my back. The subway car rumbled into life with a shudder and slowly began accelerating its way back up the Queens-bound tunnel.

I breathed a sigh of relief and sat down in the nearest empty seat - one that, in an odd stroke of fortune, was next to the woman in the polka-dot dress who'd sensibly walked away earlier. She threw me a smile: half sympathetic and half worried, as though I were somehow a magnet for crazy homeless people.

The assessment, it seemed, wasn't entirely incorrect.

I heard a rapid staccato of feet hitting linoleum (or whatever the hell they use to coat subway floors these days), and a sound like an Indian warcry smothered in years of smoking and god only knows how many gallons of cheap whiskey. Half the occupants of the subway stood up, me included, in a motion not unlike the flight of a startled flock of birds. I saw the homeless man dashing down the subway lane toward me, every passenger in his way instinctively retracting feet and bags and purses even as they gaped at him with goldfish eyes. I half-turned to run, but my feet tangled with the bookbag I'd left on the floor, and I only succeeded in looking vaguely silly as I crashed to the ground. My arm and right leg smashed into something hard and unyielding and promptly sent agonized protests shooting into my brain.

In spite of the pain, I twisted my head around just far enough and just soon enough to see a blur of blue denim and black jeans soaring into the air, bizarrely graceful with arms and legs outstretched like an Olympic diver. The last thing I saw was a teenager with bleached blond hair scrambling furiously for his cell phone, and then the homeless man plowed into me with all the grace of an NFL linebacker.

The breath whooshed out of me so fast I felt a momentary sympathy for punctured balloons, and I couldn't even make a noise as the homeless man grabbed me by the shoulders and started screaming into my ear.

"I saw the dawn at night and heard the whalesong of the long lost green belugas as they soared from the peaks of Mount Meru! I saw the watchmen of twilight with their silvered swords and their wings of light and their eyes as black as night, and they let me pass through the gates of ivory and bone and horn. I tasted all the colors of the sun and put them into a dish made of broken dreams, and I burned them and I scattered the ashes into the seas of maiden's tears on Mars!"

I struggled underneath the weight of the man, trying to knock him off and catch my breath, but flat on my stomach with nothing nearby for leverage I was as effective as a flopping fish. The man wrapped an arm around my wrist - his grip was hard as iron and just as cold. A wave of numbness show up my arm, as though I had suddenly been shot with a needleful of novocain.

"All these things I saw as I wandered through the ten thousand worlds, and I saw them because my eyes were green, and because I knew there was more to the world than the earth and the sky. Because I agreed when the traveler asked me if I would."

The man stood up, finally easing his weight off me, and flipped me around onto my back. He leaned down and grabbed my other wrist with his free hand before planting himself on my chest. His breath flowed in quick, putrid waves, and I gagged even as he transfixed me with his burning green eyes.

"Just want to, and I can stop wandering and pass on the fire," he whispered into my ear. "Say yes, or everything dies here, and the ten thousand worlds fall into darkness like all the other ones."

I was moved to respond with something along the lines of "I...uh...wha...?" but the best I could manage with the man sitting on my chest was a wheezing sort of gasp. Over the man's shoulder, I could see that some of the subway's occupants were finally moved, undoubtedly by my puce coloration, to help me out of my predicament.

Two very large, burly men who looked like actual football linebackers flanked the homeless man, one of them half-standing on the subway seat to do so, and lifted him up from underneath the armpits. He struggled, fruitlessly, all the while hissing at me, "Just say yes, boy! You don't understand! The withering and the dying and the cold will seep into the world, and the phoenix will go the way of the dodo and nothing will rise from the ashes ever again!"

I just coughed. The polka dot woman rushed over to me.

"Are you alright? Do you want to call the police?"

I shook my head no, and was punished by a momentary blackout punctuated with blinking stars. I wanted nothing more than to go home, take a long shower, and plump into bed. Fortune and the subway obliged me by sliding with a screech into the Astoria Blvd stop. I grabbed my backpack and hurried out of the station.

"Don't go! You don't know what you're doing!"

I spared the homeless man a momentary glance - he was still being held by the two linebackers, both of whom looked uncertain now that the crisis was over. His green eyes followed me as I ran up the subway stairs in twos and threes. I didn't stop until I reached the front steps of my apartment.

It wasn't until two days later, after I'd aced my differential equations exam, that I really stopped to think about the homeless man and what he'd said on the subway. Crazed and rambling, to be sure, but at the same time I couldn't help wondering what it meant if everything he said he'd seen was, somehow, true. If the ten thousand worlds had, indeed, crumbled into ruin by something so simple as my refusal.

I let the thought pass and went back to studying my vector calculus. I had enough trouble dealing with this world without worrying about ten thousand other ones.

End