train departs from Grand Central, he is sitting in his seat reading his newspaper, feeling self-assured and calm, and everything is fine until that train hits a snag on the tracks—a broken joint in the rails, a loose bolt, who knows?—and derails, and he is thrown from his seat and killed instantly, dies with the same, smug look on his face. It was beyond his control. Something like this happens every day. Every minute. A train crashes. An airplane plummets to earth. John Miller’s baby son dies. A land mine, an earthquake, a calamity. Life is merely a numbers game, a series of odds, and eventually we all lose. To think otherwise is foolish. But if we didn’t, why would anyone ever bother getting out of bed in the morning?
Yet, I have spent the first twenty-five years of my life believing the exact opposite . . . that I was in control of my destiny, that fate is a myth, that there is no great book in the sky with my expiration date already written in it. I have fought and gouged and grabbed for control, have pushed everyone and everything aside to possess it. When I thought I had it, I vowed to never let it go, gritted my teeth and held on tightly, snapped at anyone who came close. That’s how I lost Her. How I became an afterthought. There is no such thing as control. It’s a red herring, a MacGuffin. It keeps us going, gives us false hope. Life is cruel and unfair and nothing more than a series of cosmic coincidences. We are powerless to stop it.
Right then and there, on the dirty subterranean platform, as the 11:37 off-peak departs for New Haven, I lose my mind. The water main bursts behind my eyes, and hot, salty tears come pouring down my cheeks, some of them flowing into my mouth, others landing on the filthy platform with a loud splat! Tears like I’ve never cried before. My pulse is pounding in my ears, it’s so loud that it drowns out everything else. My legs go out from underneath me, and I am suddenly aware that I am sitting on the concrete, my knees pulled tight to my chest. People are staring at me, a woman nearly trips over me, and then a police officer grabs my shoulder, shakes me, and asks if I’m all right. It sounds as if he were talking underwater. I nod and wipe the tears from my eyes, tell him that my girlfriend was on that train, that she left and is never coming back. I am probably shouting right now. The officer clearly can’t be bothered to arrest me—probably doesn’t want to do the paperwork or something—so he pulls me to my feet and tells me to go cry somewhere else. I wipe my nose on my bare arm, leaving a long, glistening trail of mucus on my tattoos.
Now I am sitting in the second-floor waiting room, which is also sort of a food court, not to mention a good place for homeless men to masturbate. My head is in my hands, my ears are ringing. I’m not crying anymore, but that’s mostly because I’m utterly, completely drained. There’s nothing left inside of me. I am so alone, and so scared—terrified, for the first time in my life—because I’ve glanced behind the curtain, I’ve seen that no one is at the wheel. Not God, not anybody. There is no one left to believe in, nowhere left to go. We are all adrift, we are all lost, with nothing to put us back on course . . . because there is no course, there is only emptiness and space, numbers and ratios. That is a terrible way to look at life, but maybe it’s also the most realistic. The most scientific. Albert Einstein did not believe in God. Neither did Carl Sagan. But they believed in numbers. Numbers are all that matter. God probably does not exist, and if he does, he’s nothing more than an angry, old white man who spends his days shooting dice with the archangels, rolling sevens and elevens and making airplanes fall out of the sky, taking babies up to heaven for no reason in particular. He would not be the beatific, cloud-inhabiting superbeing we learned about in CCD classes. You would not like God if you met him.
Then again, maybe I am wrong. Maybe God is not a superstition. So I sit there and pray