When he made it to Toulo Station there was coffee. Dark and brown, little bits floated around the top like an ashtray garnish. Before he sipped he used his fingers to squeeze the cup. It breathed itself back into shape because it was made of foam. He considered testing the compressive limits of the container, but the weight of his father’s blue gus-fur jacket on his shoulders stopped that.

His sup was like no other sup because he had to stick his tongue forward to catch the little floating bits before they were carried with the rest of it to his throat. He spat in the ashtray on the table before he swallowed. Before he swallowed and after he spat he rolled the coffee in his mouth like the Mississippi. Flavor came from the tongue, so his father told him. Listen close to what the tongue has to say. Finally a message came through and it read a long list to him. The only word he made out was ‘tobacco’.

There are calming sups, exciting sups, sups that raise your tension, there are historical sups: supped once, never again. Certain sups revive youth: childhood sups, sups as teen, the first sup from home. Such sups he was no stranger to. If he’d had a spare ear, he my have ran through all those sups he could recall, and there were many. He kept them packed between two lines on pages of his pocket notebook. Toulo Station offered a forgetful sup. Sometimes, he wished, he could speak to his sups like a brother to another. To his sups he would ask them, your constituents please? Or, why slosh so, you know it’s not good for your health – just be calm, you can’t build an ocean in a cup. And when in an angry knot, how, oh I wish, your liquid body could cook like you cook my tongue!

The way the blue sun set, it had alerted him to a shake in the air before he had sat down. His great-grandfather had detested ghosts, but he was a believer of ‘the shakes’. A green sun doesn’t set blue unless there is a shake afoot. He found the shake not in the sun, but in his mouth, right at the bottom of it where he had a tongue. That tongue had sent some real signals all the way to his brain. The way those signals got there was through a wet wall of neurons that tugged each other into place like a house of gum. If you send enough stuff through enough gum, things happen.

My, if his brain had been open like a tulip right now, would a neurologist look inside, with their fingers well clear, and exclaim, “There’s something real off going here, it’s wonderful but watch this.” And then because the urge was too great, with their finger maybe claw a part of it with some method and he’d shake all over and maybe cry not because there was anything to be sad about but because his tear ducts had been opened by the prods. If this happened, he told himself, he wouldn’t blame his tear ducts. No sense in making a tear duct sad.

The neurologist looked at that brain and clarified to him that they were not a neurosurgeon, nor a neuroscientist. A fool would mistake them for a neurotechnician, for they always wore black coats and whistled loudly when deep in thought. But from where they stood up here, he better buckle up for someone had put him together real strange. Under normal conditions, this wouldn’t be here and, rather, it would look better here and – ah yes – let’s dial down the knees a little but leave the eyebrows asymmetric: a certain challenge about a left-raise that gives one purpose on rougher days.

The blue sun took his gaze, so that the neurologist babble was a mere bubble and he forgot it was there. But whom was it that looked at the sun now? He saw that sun, blue as a button that pinned the two halves of the sky, but he felt double – triple? And at first he felt the wave of a childhood sup and he was in the kitchen with his mother as she poured from the press a black stream into a red plastic cup, the steam coming up and licking her face possessively. Her dark hands she then rubbed onto her red apron like she was basting two loins. Revolting goop, he was about to recall, but his hands were now in the grass where from all sides they were dealt tickles so that they shut off for a bit. His mother again, pulled from the picnic basket a thermos with stars on it, her face was old like bread and her hands were so pearly he feared the daylight might shatter them. But, not even did he have a moment to see in that thermos, when it came to him that this was all wrong and he was tucked in the fluorescence of an infirmary. A lady held the bars of his bed as if she were preparing a basket weaving of steel twine, her face was nothing but a blue mask glued all over except where her eyes hung out and observed him like two jam doughnuts that had lost their filling. In their reflection he saw in her hand a tray and a mug with a foggy ghoul dancing inside. It was too black to see the bottom but he looked anyway and could not make out anything because it was too black to see the bottom.

He fell through these scenes a hundred times and ten more, and the blue sun and him forgot about each other. His tongue, for he had taken in his mouth a sup not a sip, eventually ran aground and ran out of his mouth and he was back at the station. Where? And there was the sun, but it was violet this time – had he upset it? He used the table leg to steady his finger which shook like it was made of wrong mechanics. Then he used that leg to adjust his wrist. He brought down his head, hoping to steady his eyes which had taken to shaking too. He was completely curled under the table when he began to cry. He didn’t cry because he was sad, he didn’t have time for that in his life anymore. Toulo Station came to mind with all the undertones of back-washed smoke and tobacco. Yet he would not believe that it could be what was breaking him up right now. He even used force to push it back into his mind so he didn’t have to look at it. Yes, someone had really got their finger all in his brain and he didn’t think they knew what they were doing. He wanted to tell them that he didn’t think they knew what they were doing, but they poked that part too and his jaw locked. A thought: the blame, at least, would not be on him. Maybe they’re as lost as I am, he thought as well. And then he thought that maybe that thought someone had poked into there too. Nothing to be sad about, when, after all, it’s the brain that’s making him tear up, and not him, he thought.

The table stopped shaking.