Writings On The Wall

Cars hummed past and above as if their wheels were wings, sending cyclonic vibrations through the tiles that lined the walls and arches of the tunnel; and the sound of ambulance sirens, all distant, like background noise, white, soothing as static along the hemlines of sleep. In the tunnel the light was yellowing. A solitary man sat cross-legged against the opposite wall with a guitar and a harmonica brace, in silence, and he had the face of someone sickening for something. This underground passageway was not as sombre as I’d expected it to be, not even at this hour of night, not even when completely desolate, with the exception of the musician who wasn’t playing. He only had me to play to anyway, and I had begun to let my eyes follow the graffiti that looped and scrawled, indistinct shapes; I was trying to forge them into signs with some structure or meaning so I could say that I’d read what was written on the subway wall. Except it was black and maroon and bruise-coloured and dirty white, not aglow with neon. Then I noticed that there were words to be read amid the tangles of spray-painted trails, which covered the inner surface of the tunnel branching out in all directions like a huge spider web. ‘You are all sheep,’ was one almost illegible message. Another was written besides a picture that at first glance looked like pools of colour and different shapes in a scattered arrangement, but looking at it again it seemed to be a painting of what looked like an angel surrounded by exploding stars, or some celestial matter, or just illumination, or glory. The words read, ‘The Kingdom Is Coming.’ Suddenly I felt a digging sensation in my stomach- a sadness. These empty sentiments, I realised, really did carry importance for those who left them there to be read. The words I’d instinctively judged as foolish and irrelevant, nonsensical, after I’d actually figured out they were words at all, were the opposite of this to the believers. Though I had begun to preoccupy myself with this assumption, painting their portraits in my mind, picturing their psyches, trying to annotate, to wonder, I was pulled back by the rebuttal. They could just as easily be offhanded and devoid of any personal philosophy, they could be messages as cryptic as Morse code to a synaesthesiac. I was on my way out of the tunnel when I read another few lines in chalky white script, large lettering, ‘Suffering is not bad. Suffering is not the cause of suffering. Evil is the cause of suffering.’ Was it unfinished? I emptied my pockets of change into the musician’s open guitar case next to him without making eye contact and left quickly, feeling unsteady, uneasy, and still sad. The feeling followed me for two days, until finally the concrete that I felt had hardened around my feet dissolved into dust and I was no longer drowning in those drawings- profundity, prophecy or pure vandalism.