The subway’s starts and stops have been eroding my spine lately; still, that’s no excuse for staring, and I’ve just caught myself doing that. Fortunately, a complicit passenger beside me leans into the overhead bar and whispers, “Life insurance salesman.” So, he’s been staring too.

We both stare at the seated man with translucent skin trapped inside a peculiarly glowing black suit that reveals not a hint of wrinkling, not one aberrant crease. Some anti-new-wave design fabricated from a solidified oil product—or conversely from liquefied coal, since it’s so shiny and smooth? “Dinosaurial,” I whisper, partly to myself, partly to the leaning passenger, and partly to the overhead advertising, which features a Coppertone baby decorated with a lagniappe graffiti doot dangling from its nether.

On reconsideration of the seated man’s attire, the word “get-up” seems more descriptive than “suit.” I turn to the standing passenger, who’s still leaning toward me, and I nod wryly at his no-doubt correct appraisal: insurance salesman. Why else would a person dress in so . . . funereal a manner? And this is up north, so a Pentecostal preacher of doom worrying Christ’s dead bones while gnawing fried chicken and ogling teenaged boobs—that lies in another region altogether. On reconsider, I suppose a person might call what this man’s wearing a “costume,” as in All Hallow’s Eve. The passenger who’s been leaning and staring with me, on the other hand, is wearing a statement, a vigorously flamboyant tie with orange, blue, green, and yellow butterflies, compacted of varying wing spans. What might be his occupation? Scriptwriter? Public Relations? Advertising?

“Whatever he does, whatever he is, he gives me the creeps.” This comes from a thirtyish African American executive wearing a golden tie that complements his butterscotch eyes. He glances to the screen of his iPhone as if it might convey more pertinent information, then adds, “Maybe he’s a mortician.” This is spoken loudly, but the man being discussed, the seated, oily, funereal character, shows no sign of having heard. Perhaps he’s a deaf-mute hired by the city through its new open-access incentive, and his job is to—

None of us have time to speculate further on his occupation, for a young woman across the aisle shakes her head and says, “She’s a model. I know; I’ve seen her on the covers of Elle and Cosmopolitan. That milky skin of hers was all the craze last season.”

She? As the train slows, I lean into my strap and look back at the seated . . . yes, I suppose it could be female. And since the woman who spoke wears a yellow and red dress bulging with Georgia O’Keeffe green foliage—unusual for female subway commuters whose proclivity lies toward protective camouflage—since she dresses so in tune with the outside world blooming in lusty summertime and since she has seen the seated creature on magazine covers with her own eyes . . .

No sooner do we all settle into her judgment than a huge black mastiff, easily weighing two hundred pounds, appears beside the right knee of the person we all now presume to be an anorexic female model. Only service dogs are allowed on . . . where could this seeing-eye dog have possibly been that I didn’t spot it? Certainly not behind any of the model’s body parts, for they’re as non-existent as wrinkles on her liquid coal suit. And sure, this particular coach is crowded, but a dog that size . . . then I realize that the dog’s coat isn’t really black but blends with the floor in a spit-dirt-mucus-scuff interlace. Its eyes, however, radiate an eerie bloodshot hue, as if housed in the skull of a mislaid bum heavy on wine or crack. Its eyes?! They must have been closed, for there’s no hiding them now; they return my gaze in a most unsettling manner. Well, that tops it—even if she is a she, she’s not a model. Blind deaf-mutes can’t be models, can they? I mean, not real models. I mean . . . hell, maybe they can. Why not? After all, they’d be hired on as the look-ees, not the look-ers.

Somehow, I feel that ee/er distinction blurring as I sway with the subway car. Blurring everywhere—except with the damned dog. It’s not blind. And it’s staring at . . . me. The woman in the yellow, red, and green O’Keeffe foliage comments, “Brr, poochie seems to have formed an attachment to you. I . . .” But she doesn’t finish; she simply moves her volatile hips off to the middle of the coach, near two Goth teenagers dressed in black, who grin at her initially—then they too notice the dog and become white-eyed. The simple contrast of white and black unnerve me as I glance to the mastiff’s confusing red-, clay-, and spittle-brindle. My lower spine jolts with a pain that arcs into my shoulders. Referred pain, that’s called. (I once dated a nurse.) And now my heart is clumping with more . . . referred pain, which conglomerates into the most excruciating spasm I’ve ever felt, on the subway or off. I broke my arm once, but that was Hostess Twinkies in comparison this. Nauseated and dizzy, I wince.

An undercover cop—at least that’s what I hope he is—has been eyeing the two teens with a cop’s pre-judgment, but his attention shifts to me, then to the dog and its master, as the latter lifts a . . . milk-blue hand—a prosthesis?—to light a cigarette. Hey, blind or not, that’s not allowed! And I’m already spinning from pain, and the smoke . . . a haze is forming, for everyone’s smoking now, even the undercover cop, even the old woman who’s been nodding off, her head dipping into her Saks shopping bag. Somewhere, one last lighter clicks. I wouldn’t be surprised if the mastiff has lit up. What in the world is going on?

“Seven minutes,” the man who initially spoke to me says. He’s still leaning into his strap, but his lean is no longer complicit: it’s haughtily closing on my personal space. “You have just seven minutes to draw a moral.” He blows a steady stream of smoke upward toward the Coppertone doot, where it fans out with a magical white puff. The butterflies on his tie take flight and skitter over the Black executive’s head, to disappear into a thick smoke ring someone has created in a fit of artistry.

“A moral or a puff,” the guy I’ve mistaken for an undercover cop quips three seats away. His hand rises, and a huge blue ring on his index finger sends shafts of cold through me. The blue ring looks like the eye of judgment that King Aloysius used on his sons when they . . . what did those rascals do?

“Or a breath,” a college student who’s been intent upon his book says, returning instantly to prepare for an exam, even as cigarette ashes fall on his text.

“Come on, give us a moral,” the African American executive cajoles, tugging his golden tie as if the smoke’s choking him too. “It’d do us all some good. Camaraderie, I mean.”

“Moral! Moral!” The two Goth teens chant. I look back to them. The woman in the foliage dress stands to their right; she smiles sweetly, sadly, resignedly, and nods in agreement. “Mo-ral,” she mouths through those lovely maroon lips. Then she inhales a deep draught from her cigarette.

With my body I cough, but with my mind I sing, somewhat off-key, this moral: Pay your bills on ti-ime, keep your thoughts in li-ine—then ever’t’ing will be fi-ine. The mastiff and its owner shift. For a fleeting instant I think they’ve read my mind, but truly, I don’t believe they’re interested in any jingle, ditty, or moral I might come up with. So other than coughing out a pressure-building bulge, I keep quiet.

A moral, I think, stunned by the possibility. Cigarette smoke pricks my nostrils with its burnt paper. A moral. It’s hard to formulate morals with this gagging smoke. Hell, it’s hard to formulate them in air-conditioned comfort working forty hours a week. When I get home—I’m divorced, who isn’t?—when I get home I open an imported beer and turn on the TV and let it devise all the morals . . . You know, Moslems, Jews, Christians, Hindis, and Buddhists are okay. Homosexuals, African Americans, and Hispanics are okay; White capitalists are okay; the ozone layer is okay; I’m okay; you’re okay; married moms are okay; sisters are okay; single moms are okay, half-sisters are okay. Democrats are okay; Republicans are okay; marriage is okay; divorce is okay; we’re all okay. Even single White males are okay provided they laugh histrionically at jokes about their tiny reproductive organs. Only smoking’s not okay. At least those are the only capital B, capital M, Big Morals I encounter whenever the sitcoms come on. BM = bowel movement, my ex-girlfriend nurse told me. Before those sitcoms arrive though, I can’t say any Big Moral or BM seems hopeful. During newscasts Off you! Off you too! rings loud and clear, like the tolling of a medieval cathedral bell. Off you! Off you too! Bam! Bam! That’s when I usually down my second beer. That’s why I subsequently lounge through three or four sitcoms. But here and now, a moral? A Big Moral? On a subway? Can this be serious?

If you live in a glass house, don’t cast stones. That moral comes to mind as I peer into the fluorescent dark whizzing outside our coach. Santa Maria, Niña, and Pinto, comes to mind. But that’s hardly a moral—more like a bean soup commercial.

Cigarette ash falls into the Saks sack because the old lady’s nodding. I can’t count on the undercover cop who isn’t a cop to do anything about this fire hazard, so I raise a finger, but the mastiff, ultra-sensitive to my movements, pricks his ears. Does he think I’m searching for an escape hatch on the coach’s ceiling? When I lower my finger like a submissive worm, his ears relax. Likely, the old broad’s ash will burn itself out, anyway. That’s a moral, isn’t it? Oh no, I remember: it’s a children’s song. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Now the mastiff’s owner looks at me. Her/his eyes . . . well, they aren’t sockets, more a bottomless dustbin. And her/his lips stretch in two thin mauve lines as if to display that silly Euclidean axiom we learned in high school geometry, the one about parallel lines never meeting. Except these thinly stretching, twitching lips always meet, they always endure fleshly contact—whenever they don’t encircle a cigarette like they are now, that is. So maybe they’re disproving Euclid’s axiom? Could that be a moral? Distrust Euclidean geometry? But Einstein already told us that. Besides, I must confess that in the here and now of this subway car, time and space strike me as absolute, despite Einstein. I mean, that brainy guy’s absolute now, isn’t he? Evaporated, vaporized—that scary, sad, post-World Trade Center word.

Something I should mention apropos of absolute and non-absolute: At one point, I thought poochie’s owner, the anorexic model, was a kid dressing as a Day-Glo S & M leather freak. I mean, we’re talking a black outfit drawn tighter than a Wyoming taxidermist could dry it. Even now, cigarette ashes scamper off its oily outfit like water beading on wax. It, I think—yes, I can be content with “it” for this character’s sex. This caricature’s sex. Anyway, it better be careful even though those ashes dissipate off its costume. Of course, poochie isn’t smoking, though his jowls ooze what may be chewing tobacco. Blood? I think of the woman dressed in foliage proclaiming that poochie liked me, and I glance to see her staring with a most wonderful set of hazel eyes. I’ve always loved hazel eyes and their ability to be brown or green or gray upon command. There! Isn’t that a moral? Mutability, the ability to change, the ability of parallel lines to meet, however briefly, in the real universe that Einstein revealed. Change, go for it; it’s better than the alternative.

You know, I’ve seen this hazel-eyed woman dressed in foliage before . . . Of course! She works near me. When we get off I’ll have to—oh hell, that dating game weighs so heavy. What did it get me last time? So that’s it for parallel lines, eh? Let them eat cake; let them remain non-intersecting. Could that be a moral? Two lines, forever passing untouched in a subway car?

Hot ash falls on my hand and I start. It’s drifted down from an incredibly tall man—a basketball coach no doubt—too old to be a player. And too thin. He must have gotten on at the last stop. This coach’s face looms familiar also, though I’m certain he doesn’t work in my building and he’s not exactly the type of person you want to approach on the subway. Poison, his cloud-brushing brows say. So, I won’t be asking where I’ve seen him before, even if he hovers until our noses touch.

Something nudges my leg. The mastiff. A rank smell rises from its coat. Soured cheese? Two-day roadkill? His paw steps on my foot, and I’ll be damned, but I can’t pull from under. I mean, I absolutely cannot budge. The weight doesn’t feel that heavy, but it’s as if electromagnetism runs through the paw to the floor, passing through my numbed foot.

“I’m sorry.”

Stupidly, at first, I think the dog is speaking. Then I see that the woman in the foliage dress has moved forward again. “I am so sorry. It really is you that poochie wants.” Her lips form a kiss when she says poochie, and again I think of my parallel lines meeting hers. She turns to the two Goth kids. “He worked in the office next to mine. I heard him cough sometimes,” she says.

He? Worked? Heard? I still work there, don’t I? I cough desperately now, from the cigarette smoke, I guess. Isn’t there a no-smoking sign? Of course, there is. Two of them. Then why is everyone . . .

The would-be cop looks up . . . no, down . . . at me. “Four minutes, bud. You got a moral yet?”

I nod, or think I do. “Pe—people in public places shouldn’t . . .” I plan to end with smoke, but then everyone on the car, and I mean everyone, even the bespectacled, pimply dropout who’s been drooling over a Cavalier, looks so interested in what I’m about to say that I don’t want to waste my wisdom on the trivial.

Moral. The word owns two syllables, but there’s only one of me. This stupid fact sears my chest, leaving me uncertain whether I can handle the concept of morality. After all, I and me each possess but one syllable, and I need three or four imported beers to push either of those single syllables into focus inside my apartment. So, the math isn’t working. Two syllables? I retreat to my old high school chum Euclid: The shortest distance between two points is . . . a leap of faith? A lunge of love? Moral.

“You know,” the woman continues, “I’d thought about stopping over for coffee someday. At his office, I mean. He looked—I don’t know—he looked like he needed company.” As she glances around, I follow her hazel eyes. It occurs to me that I don’t see the she/he/it creature anymore, though its mastiff still keeps an electromagnetic paw on my foot, which seems an eternity away. My foot, not the paw. That seems an eternity close.

Moral: You should always remain alert at work, in case a compassionate possibility moves into the office adjoining yours. Or how about: Love lunges just left around la corner.

“Two minutes.” It’s not the cop, but the woman with the Saks sack. Hey! Wait! Where’d minute number three go? And just how would she know anything about time, with her nose stuck in that bag? What’s her name, Edna Einstein?

“It’s easy enough to measure when it’s someone else,” the kid with the textbook says, as if answering my unspoken question about the lost minute. The damned snooty college brat—Euclid should deflate him with a pointy isosceles triangle. “Look here.” The brat starts to show me something in his textbook, a photograph, but my erstwhile next-door officemate stops him, saying,

“That wouldn’t be in good taste now.”

“Good taste?” The student laughs as only students can, with a carefree frolic concerned only with the next slice of pizza, the next mug of beer. “What’s good taste got to do with it?” Drums and three twangy guitars float as if he’s onstage grinding hips with Lady Gaga. His words take on supersonic, echo chamber importance. But not, I guess, a moral. He’s still laughing when the businessman and the would-be cop insinuate body-movements to show that they not only agree with what the woman dressed in foliage has said but will back her opinion with force. Good taste, propriety. Confucius, could he come up with a moral?

“Serious. Right. Everything’s got to be so damned seer-ee-us!” The student slaps his textbook shut and moves past me with a shoulder twitch to join the two Goth teens, who look at him and laugh. I suppose in agreement. Or maybe disdain. I’m surprised that the only way I know he’s moved past me is the smell of his sneakers so close to my face. Or, or, or is that the smell of my lungs?

Moral: Don’t take life too see-ree-us. ’Cause it ain’t, man, it ain’t. Boom, bang, twang! Bam! Bam! Bam!

“One minute,” someone says.

All the cigarettes are glowing stubs now, like the dog’s eyes. And those, well they’re glaring as if I’m a chunk of hamburger.

Moral: In the end, we’re all hamburger.

Moral: Ask your neighbor out before it’s too late. No, how about just Love thy neighbor? No, that sounds too cornball.

“I’m try . . . ing!” I shout. All the cigarette tips glow brighter.

The woman in foliage—my officemate, my cavemate, my neighbor, my . . . moves. Her high heels are green, like her foliage dress. In the window on the other side of the car I see my reflection. An anesthetic chill grabs my spine. Or is it aesthetic? Chill? Am I standing under a duct? Behind me—I don’t know how since I seem to be on the subway’s floor—behind me stands the mastiff’s owner, with those mauve, parallel lips. She/he/it is leaning as if to judge my bald spot. Too much worry over nothing brought that baldness on. Why weren’t you courting the love of your life or drinking wine with friends instead? It’s like he’s asking me this. He? Yes, I can say he with confidence because he opens garishly slender arms to envelop me. His face is my face; his lips are my lips, which part in two very unparallel lines. So it’s all true, both Euclid and Einstein: they meet and they don’t meet.

Are you pretending to wisdom or Buddhahood? The mastiff’s owner asks this with cheeks drawn taxidermically to reveal . . . fangs? No, too Disney, too Stephen King. Molars. Rows and rows of tired molars grinding ever so patiently to render maize, tendons, neurons, axons, gristle, bones, mortals and morals into pabulum.

I’m rocking side to side with the car, but the pain is gone. Everyone bends curiously, still expecting, I suppose, a moral. Their cigarette stubs give off one last glow. Soon they’ll toss them to the floor, which is where I’m looking up from, coughing an iron-tasting rasp as blood circulates through my head on a dizzying merry-go-round.

Mor-uhl.

The creep with the Cavalier, the three young men, the two executives, the semi-cop, the Saks lady, the basketball coach, and my newfound long-lost love in her pastoral dress all bend to stare. Mor-uhl. Mor-uhl. A chant? A cheer? Two syllables. That’s all they’re asking for. Just two syllables. Mor-uhl. Mor-uhl. They’re so anxious that I suppose I’ll try. I smile. Go on, connect the dots, give them just two, I encourage my mouth. My charitable mouth twists, but only drool emits. Two, just two, you can do it. Mor-uhl. Mor-uhl. Two, just two.

I lose focus and rasp. So, I guess . . . I guess I don’t even have one.