Inside the cheerful egg-yolk yellow of the Muni car, with its two-toned rising and falling whine, the man was eased confident through its narrow grooves, past hanging laundry, swashbuckling in traverse across the street-scored sides of house-choked hills, creeping patiently down the shady lanes designated for the Muni's exclusive use, then bursting back out onto the sunsetty hillside, crooning to a stop in the park where Latino children got off. Suddenly the car reeked of leather jackets like the smell of cunnilingus; fashionable people had boarded. Keeping power wires company beneath the deep blue sky, the Muni bore the man toward the vortex which would determine his next state. He knew this but did not want to bear it. An Asian mother tenderly helped her little child negotiate the aisle, the child grasping her finger in a needing hand, and he wondered whether he had been or would be her. A little black boy in an orange jacket ran down the sidewalk, and then the Muni turned onto Market Street so that the boy was gone forever, and the man felt lost. An Asian girl boarded and stood beside him for a moment, gripping her two quarters fiercely; they did not have holes in them. Did that mean that she had but one life, or that she had already lived? The girl saw a vacant seat and went away. Now the Muni car hummed at the corner by the Chinese restaurant. It drummed secret hooves, twisted along the metalled furrows that it needed, stopped, and buzzed while a pony-tailed man got on. Swooping like nuns to a steeple, the Muni turned the last aboveground corner where so many metal rails from other Muni routes joined this nexus, shining like ice. It rang its bell like a submarine about to dive, entered the long narrow cage, and sank into its cement foundations so that the evening seemed to get later and later, the afternoon shadows on the walls becoming twilight gray, then midnight black as the Muni shot into the tunnel. Believing himself now to be safely southeast of the street of souls, he permitted his anxiety to go just as beer foam slowly narrows, collapsing in the middle as the bottom eats itself away. Then at Civic Center two girls got on with barely healed wounds in their breasts. They approached him in silence, each with her left hand behind her back. They looked into his eyes. He tried to look away. They bent over him and began breathing slowly and calmly into his face. Closing his eyes in despair, he struck out and his fist encountered a girl's fist which stopped him while three other girl-hands prized his fingers open and placed a token with a hole in it onto his palm; instantly a reflex of greed and longing for life overtook him, so he closed his fingers over the token just as the Asian girl had done with her two quarters, and he felt himself becoming something but when he opened his eyes he was still on a subway.
They had left the extremely wide, yellow and subterranean Aero-puerto terminal where he was born. When he was a youth they reached Oceana in the middle of the street of time, mesh fences on either side, the people elegantly serious, quiet. A vendor came along dumping candied eggs on everyone's lap. Though eating one of these would doubtless have carried him to new possibilities, he was not tempted. He feared to taste blood. The vendor returned and collected the eggs. No one had opened a single one, although two girls read the label. He was still holding his egg as the vendor neared him. Suddenly he felt a bird-heart beating inside its thinness and his fingers began to curl to clench the life out of it, but he bit his lip to save himself and swallowed his own blood, shutting his eyes and waiting until he felt the vendor remove the egg from his palm. Then he allowed himself to gaze upon his life again. The two girls stood, one wearing black shoes, one wearing white, their knees bent, holding the stanchions, swaying, almost dancing, blackhaired (one braided, one waterfalled), looking subtly down at his feet, in an obviously coordinated awareness, and he peered into their lovely broad faces and they smiled and touched him and then got off at Misterios. He was old by then. He swayed and fell down dead.
