III

[Scrap that last post. That sucked. Here: a preliminary sketch]

The part of the downtown-bound train route where at 57th the tracks suddenly descended, dropping from the third floor tenements down through a set of concrete embankments squared off like some midtown sarcophagus, submerging into the dank rat warrens beneath the asphalt and elemental sod, it always made him think of tunneling to hell, not that hell was part of his belief system. It was just a fanciful vision, a recurring dream on the morning commute. A life long empiricist, he cherished the intransubstantiability of ashes and dirt, the machinations of good and evil rendered indistinguishable in the universal ploy of chaos and entropy. The world will end in ice, Mr. Frost, a slow irreversible heat death through the ages. Autumn always made him morose, or maybe not morose but thematically dower, or maybe it was the public sentiment of the era, wartime and it’s psychic ravages on the home front.