Visitation (Billy's Blues)

“Can you become a ghost if you’re not dead? And how can you be dead when you’re kept in a coma by someone who doesn’t have the guts to either pull the plug for good or to revive you?” Amazing the kind of crap you see in print these days. The revolutionaries and illuminated minds of our times are too cool to take to the streets, they hunch over keyboards in coffee breaks, firing round upon round of poison laced with insults. Insults they are unable (or unwilling?) to let out verbally. And they stand behind their cyber-trenches, glowing with pride as they feel themselves climbing. The only problem is that it’s normally too late when they realise they’re climbing nowhere but up their own asses. How long can you hold respect for those who have none but for themselves? Should you have the insight to decipher silence and targets that are always nameless? Or simply not judge those who are so quick to judge? Then again, if you’ve been repeatedly told you’re not one of the truly blessed and genial, you shouldn’t expect much of yourself. Should you just accept and live on with the fact that in a “good day” you’ll be considered a champion, and just as soon as patience is short, you’ll again be labelled worthless? Bollocks…
The newspaper, now a crumpled paper ball, lands on the floor. I get up and stand by the window, eyes stinging. All the way up to the train station, the rails sparkle under the merciless afternoon sun. Not a soul in sight, until a closer look reveals a tiny figure wandering among the rails. Billy. His black overcoat, torn and worn and too large for him, hangs over his shoulders and all the way down to the ankles.
As usual, he is strolling across the railroad, mumbling to himself. He’s hopping on a freight train one of these days. To anywhere else, that’s what he says. And he’s gonna be big over there. Says he’s tired of this place and these people, always tying him down on his road to… something. That’s a bit odd, as I hardly see him with anyone, but it’s a question I haven’t raised. I know his restrained talent is already enough of a burden to him.
I have asked him though, once or twice, over a few compassionate beers, why he hasn’t left yet, with so many trains going by everyday. Most trains suck, he says. Diesel engines have no character, and he can’t even hear about the electric ones – completely full of shit, in his opinion. He’ll wait for a good old, healthy steam train. Slower, but with more soul than anything else around here, he says, his eyes carefully lost in the horizon.
I could tell him that the last steam train crossed this line in 1974, and that there will be no other. Just like I could point out to him that 1,1 billion people on this planet live on less than one dollar a day or that the male penguin will lose on average 40% of its weight during egg incubation period. In any case, he will simply put on his best world-weary, weather-beaten, take-no-shit look and turn his head in silence back to the old train schedule he always carries around with him. What comforts me is that he knows about the steam trains as well as I do. It’s just not in his mindset.
As to what Billy plans on doing… there, I can’t remember him ever having said anything. And the few who remember asking him haven’t come to any conclusion as well. Concerning his plans, and like many before him, Billy knows very well what they’re not about. What they are really about probably remains as much of a mystery to him as to the rest of us.
It could be worse, I think, remembering all the poor souls in this world who don’t even have a dark overcoat and a train schedule to hold on to in their times of need.
I draw the curtains and shade fills the room again. Outside, a ballet of sparkling rails, dark overcoats and electric trains proudly reinvents itself for the afternoon.
No more wasted words. No more poison. Next, please.

Into starlight.