Indifferent Trains
I was reading Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” again
for the last time when I lost the timetable my travel
agent had slipped into the envelope holding my ticket.
Someone said I should ask the conductor to give
me a new one. I said, “Hell, who really cares where
we’re going or when we’ll get there?” The train itself
certainly didn’t care who I was or where I was going.
It just kept up its little mantra: Ticket-taker, ticket-taker,
ticket-taker, ticket-taker, ticket-taker . . . well, you get
my meaning, don’tcha, buddy? If pressed to say so,
I’d say that the passengers in this car are funny,
sensual, and poignant. The guy in front of me goes
so far as to amuse himself by, every ten or fifteen
minutes, plucking a single strand of hair from the back
of the head of the woman in front of him, the one who’s
been sleeping ever since we pulled out of the station
in Detroit. Still, a full bladder will often make my visit
to the lavatory at the rear of the car worthwhile and
rewarding. Wherever we’re going we must be running
along the terminator now–there’s sunshine to the right
and darkness, with looming thunderheads, off to the
left. Excitement is pitched at a level of intensity that seems
more like ecstasy than potty-mouthed travel. The miles
are repetitive, but never really mawkish. The conductor
is terrific in his well-pressed uniform, stopping to pull
out of his watch pocket a lidded, round watch just like the one
my grandfather left to my father and my father passed on
to me–superbly crafted. Tickety-tock, tickety-tock,
tickety-tock. The train, while never for a moment losing
its momentum, integrates us into landscape after landscape.
Around the time that dawn breaks on the prairie, some of my
fellow passengers wake up and begin to converse–you know,
mundane stuff with bits of confusion and banality mixed in.
A mother with two kids cuddled up on the seat next to her
says to one, “Don’t be a chatterbox, chatterbox, chatterbox.”
Across the aisle, two gentlemen in publishing are having
a little talk about how most trade house editors get their MSS
from agents now, and how, with the “whole anthrax thing”
folks are much less inclined to be reading unsolicited work.
I make a note of that, and wait to be called for breakfast.
--Halvard Johnson
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