We are somehow on the topic of Shakespeare in this dinged-up Marta shuttle with its tires perpetually kissing the potholes, and the driver, whose name I’ve been too afraid to ask, though he’s ferried me daily like a blue-eyed Charon down the blacktop rivers of Dekalb and Moreland says now lemme ask you something: to be or not to be, the hell does that really mean? This all started with a phone call: the young girl in front of me discussing with her mom her upcoming role in Hamlet, the driver, overhearing, asking about Elizabethan English, his hands dropping the turn signal as if loading a bolt-action rifle. To be or not to be the girl repeats, letting the words rattle in her upper rafters like a possum scratching through an attic: I think it has something to do with existence she says, and I want to stay silent, I really do, but I blurt suicide, he’s contemplating suicide, to which the driver responds now that’s some dark shit, and I nod and stare into the rear-view mirror and connect with the driver’s spark-metal blue eyes as if in that moment we’ve shared the train stations with their long black tunnels, shared the work shirts crumpled on bedroom floors, their polyester skins the human skins of mindless work on these March mornings gray and splotchy as the sidewalks littered with forties. It’s a shame he says that suicide is so prevalent, and I nod and say yeah, some dark shit and the girl in front nods though she can’t be more than sixteen, her backpack a shrine to The Jonas Brothers, their smooth faces smiling across her pink Jansport, her purple lipstick light as a starling, and I want to say something philosophic but instead look out the window at a homeless man wearing a green wig and a pigeon gnawing a chicken bone and the orb of the still-mute sun rising slowly the way my father did each morning to rock by the sliding glass door, his left-brain paralyzed by grief, though his right-brain understood to be or not to be better than anyone, and he paused every now and then to look into the dark ocular pines of Mississippi, a cup of coffee cooling in his palm like his wife splayed on that dirty street outside of Memphis, and that most human question rising like the last ghosts of steam from his mug, his body inhaling those six words as he waited each morning for his two young sons to stumble with his answer down the stairs.