1.2

His friend told him to come to LA. Told him that she had an extra room and a pool and a view. Told him that everyone is born again in California.

He had lost his job, the store no longer economically viable, and the company gave him a severance which he blew on an Amtrak ticket because he had never ridden a train before. Well, not a proper train anyway. He once rode the train around the zoo with his mother and sister when they had come in from Iowa to visit. But it only went in circles, past the lion and elephant cages. It wasn’t the same as this train which had a destination as exotic and far away as California.

This train—silver and sleek and running on diesel fuel—was very modern indeed. But he wondered what the big deal was. It stopped often. At every small town between Chicago and LA, picking up and disgorging passengers. It also stopped in the middle of the night, in the middle of the day, shunted off to sidings so the Union Pacific hauling two-miles of coal and oil could roar past. The doors sealed shut so nobody could wander off to be left on the plains waiting. If he had booked with Southwest he would’ve been in LA three days ago. It was only a six-hour flight. He would’ve been given pretzels and Dr. Pepper. Probably there would’ve been a movie to watch.

He had spent the extra money for his own compartment. The suckers out there in general seating, it was like riding on a bus for six or seven days or how ever long it would take to reach LA. His bag held nothing but clean underwear and socks and an extra pair of pants. And six bottles of whiskey. He was happy to have the whiskey, had to admit you couldn’t carry this much whiskey onto a plane. The TSA would’ve thought him a terrorist and renditioned him to some third-world hellhole never be seen again. Not that James cared to ever be seen again.

But he had to be somewhere, had to be doing something. So he drank whiskey from the bottle and watched the sun bake New Mexico. His bare feet on the window making smudges the conductor would come by in the morning and wipe away.

He knew it was very hot outside because it was hot inside. The train when idling not providing air conditioning. He took a long swig of whiskey. Coughed. Fell asleep.

***

Sweating, he woke. The train moved slowly along the aging track. California seemed an impossible nightmare. Why was he on this train? Why wasn’t he back home looking for a job?

But he had no home. His girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, asked him to leave after he got fired. He wasn’t sad to be fired. Working ten-hour days dressed in black slacks and a white shirt trying to convince people of the efficiency of this lawn mower over that lawn mower. And then the store closed and he realized that this shitty job was the only thing that gave his life any meaning. The company gave him $500 to go away quietly and he filed for unemployment and slept until late afternoon on the couch in his underwear and fell behind on his student loans payments. He stopped shaving, stopped brushing his teeth or brushing his hair and she finally told him he had to go.

The train picked up speed, swaying gently back and forth. A soft knock on his door and he stumbled to open it.

“Dinner is served.” The conductor, an aging man with regal white hair, walked away. Knocked on the next door.

James threw some water on his face, checked his whiskey inventory. Two bottles left. Christ, when did he become such a heavy whiskey drinker? He put on his pants and a fairly clean shirt and lurched his way toward the dining car.

***

There was a line. There was always a fucking line. He waited.

Eventually, he found himself at the front.

A friendly waiter named Walter who sometimes gave him free whiskey motioned to him and sat him down across from a beautiful woman reading a magazine. James smiled and thanked Walter with a ten-dollar bill.

“Hi,” he said, sitting down. “What’s good tonight?”

She looked up from her magazine, blue eyes and brown hair tied into dreadlocks, and gave him a tight smile. The food on her plate untouched. She went back to reading.

He ordered a chicken ceaser salad and looked out the window, watched Arizona race by. The sun was setting and a full moon rising and he watched the red rocks turn pink and the stars blink on. He ate. And she left.

A man with grey hair and grey teeth sat down across from him. Asked him about his insurance.

“I don’t have insurance,” James said. “I think it’s a scam.”

The man looked hurt. “It’s no scam, young man. You need to insure the things you love.”

“There’s nothing I love.”

“What if your car gets damaged?” the old man said, cutting into a steak. “What if, God forbid, you were to die on this trip. Who will take care of your family?”

“I have no family. I have no car.” James felt lonely for his cabin, lonely for his whiskey, lonely for his loneliness. He stood up, dropped two fives for a tip, walked away.

***

James had never seen an ocean before. Only a great lake. His friend out in LA told him a lake was no ocean. Told him the ocean would change his life.

“Yeah?” he had said, over the phone. “How?”

“I can’t explain it,” she said. “It’s the salt, it’s the waves. It’s the way it seems to spread out until there’s nothing left.”

“Lake Michigan is as big as an ocean,” he said. “Water is water.”

She sighed. “Water is not water.”

1.1

In the few long hours between dusk and dawn, when there was real, complete darkness as the train shook—in turns gently and violently— and the black trees, hills, and sky spun out past my open window, and the only tangible evidence of motion was the stream of air whistling in through the ajar pane and the inertia that accompanied any physical movement—even the slightest adjustment of the arm, or turn of the head inducing the sensation of falling—I would come to believe (more sincerely with each passing night) that I would arrive at the dawn of the following day in some grossly exaggerated new wonderland. So, in hours of varying daylight, when the train would make its customary stops at stations along our route, and the abrupt stillness unleashed an unbearable nausea within me, I would alight with the off-boarding passengers, playing a game of life with the beast whose belly I’d come to rely on, like an unborn child relies on the womb, and imagining—as many others have—that I could be born backwards after seeing to my satisfaction that this particular version of living was not, in fact, the one I wanted, was disappointing, grey and cement covered, not special, not sparkling strangely with ripe promises, and I would stay outside until the last boarding call had sounded, until the train’s engine began to shoot black soot high into the air, and only when it began to move would I re-board, running against its motion to the open door of the car conductor who would lower his outstretched arm like a midwife in reverse, and lift me back into the semi-darkness of the indifferent, life-bearing machine.

The game gained urgency as I closed in on my destination, the destination for which my ticket had been sold, and as I sat watching days and nights flash by I developed a story that was parts truth and parts fiction, and would ultimately culminate in my decision to disembark at the station named in smart black ink on the small slip of paper, which I kept in my chest pocket. In this way I convinced myself—as many others have—that I was in complete control of the endless miles and minutes covered as I closed my eyes, or cleaned my teeth; that I missed nothing because there was nothing to be missed. I feigned agency over my ride like a devout believer pretends he can determine the nature of his afterlife through goodwill and kindness and faith. I imagined that no world existed outside the confines of the train’s motion, and even went so far as to assume a belief that I determined each stop, that nothing was predetermined, that no engine conductor, holding a terrestrial map spotted with red station numbers, could make decisions that superseded my own. When the train was moving, outside life had simply paused—waiting for me to emerge and choose it before it beginning again.

Everyone casts a light upon their world so that only pieces of it can be seen, and even those can only be seen the way the viewer wants to see them, and so even the most miserable wretch with the heaviest burden cannot be completely blameless for his misery, because what good is our godlike capacity for delusion if it is not embraced fully when it is most needed for survival? My father used to joke that Atlas held up the earth without burden, simply by believing it was hollow. And my mother, unaccustomed, despite their years together, to the levity with which the old man addressed things that were—to her, and to most of humanity—of the utmost seriousness, would scold him for implying that the world was a thing without substance. My mother, who believed that even the human soul was heavy, and that without it the discarded shell that was the body lost pounds of weight, who died of a loneliness and anguish that my father himself would have been hard pressed to laugh-off had his own death not been the sole cause of it. My mother, who now lies as lightly in her grave as my father always had on his bed in life.

***

I was recalling the reinvented day of my departure—vividly depicting for myself the inconsolable, mournful face of a previously unknown admirer who had gained strength of heart in the final moments and raced desperately for the station on the back of a frothing and powerful equine creature whose will was bound to his own, and who ran at unimaginable speeds to deliver my enamored and his confession of love through the early morning haze, and present him at the platform just as the train began to spin its wheels and bear me away, picturing my handsome would-be-hero, whose eyes I felt watching me through the window as I sat anticipating my journey, completely unaware of his love until the sheer power of his will had caused me to turn and see him, filled with longing and shattered dreams, just a moment too late—when the train blew a panicked horn and lurched against locked brakes. We were stopping unexpectedly and quickly, and it ripped me from my imagined reverie with a sharp crack to the head as my neck whipped forward and sideways, tossing it against the window, and throwing my feet into the air—sending me flying into a seamless unconsciousness where I was falling forward, in endless horizontal motion through rooms filled with suspended objects, animals, and trees—and just as seamlessly sucking me, siphoning me back into awareness where my body sagged, as if exhausted, against my seat, and where people were screaming off in distant rooms, and a baby—somewhere closer—wailed in fear. The train and all that surrounded it had acquired a complete stillness, as if I had awoken into a photograph, and I felt myself unable to move, the nauseating rigidity of the suddenly motionless train paralyzing everything, and most of all my ability to reconcile our location with the location of my next determined stop. My carefully crafted fantasy began to unravel instantly, and my frenzied need to maintain it was the only thing propelling me upward, onto my feet.

The car conductor heading decisively down the hall, calling out for everyone to remain calm, stopping in sleeper after sleeper to reassure the riders in his care, and ensure that none had been injured, determined for me which direction I would take. I dashed away from him stealthily—as if I were a stowaway—when his head was turned, and locked myself in the washroom hoping to avoid any forthcoming explanation while I regained my composure and reassured myself that I was in control. I told myself that in these few harried moments I had developed a desire to exit the train, a desire so deeply sublimated that it gave no warning until the sheer power of it had overwhelmed the great machine, forcing it to stop. Despite my best efforts, while I remained standing, panting, before the room’s small, face-distorting mirror, I could not deny the real fear of not knowing our location, of not knowing when and if the train would start again, and of the danger I faced of being left behind if I followed the course necessary to maintain my illusions, the course that dictated that now I must disembark.

Choices made in desperation are not necessarily easier choices, but they are often made more quickly and with less thought. And so it was with my decision to follow the path I had set out for myself, and find the nearest exit, which was close to the washroom near at the end of the car, and even as I made the decision I felt detached from it, as if the self watching me in the mirror might still be there, watching me now as I stuck my head out the washroom door and made a quick dash across the hall toward whatever lay outside.

Because I risked being seen I moved quickly, not allowing myself to pause and consider my decision any longer, and in the grips of adrenaline I swung back the heavy lever locking the door, swept it open with hardly any effort, only to be greeted by an almost blinding blackness. I hallucinated movement, and for an instant believed that the train had regained momentum. I wondered if I had dreamed it all, and in a somnambulatory daze, had come only seconds away from throwing myself off a moving train. But no, there was no movement, no wind, the air was still and filled with the putrid smell of burning coal as the engine continued to roar, growling to be unleashed. Looking lengthwise down the train I saw complete darkness at one end, and a luminous glow in the distance at the other, and I realized that we had come to a sudden halt at the very brink of exiting a long tunnel.