Transit

A short story

The gentle humans, huddled around the doors, waited patiently, dutifully, dully, then one by one they climbed aboard. The poor things, their heads hanging low, reminded me terribly of prisoners, I mean the kind who don’t even dream of escape, but who privately curse everything lofty and cherish a secret, sacrosanct vanity. One, a smartly dressed lady with glossy hair, read an email on her phone; another, a young acne-scarred man in a hoodie, gazed haughtily around; another poor passenger, her face hidden in a cherubic bush of curly red hair, moved her jaw listlessly, as if chewing away at a fatty morsel. How I pitied them, one more than the next! They just don’t know how deep and vast my feeling really is, beneath and beyond my cold metal exterior. But I don’t begrudge them, they just don’t know; and it would be unbecoming of a train to hold such sad beings, such impoverished people, in contempt.

It is neither hard nor easy being a train; and on the finer details I could spin a long yarn. A “train,” you see, is nothing more than what they call me, and being anything is neither hard nor easy anyway. Let that be the briefest of my confessions. But in fact I see myself as a little more than a train. A train, you could say, is only what I’m doing lately, but in my true breadth I go beyond the horizon, as far as Trenton, New Jersey in one direction and New York, New York in another. How far do you go? How long are you really, and can you look back and see part of yourself still far behind? I’m everywhere, but not all at once. You might find this inconceivable, even insincere, but I will prove it, for a train cannot give an account of itself without dwelling on the peculiar care that it arrogates to time. Then you would understand why I cry for humanity, for time is the yoke that binds man to steel, and threatens to make of them one. Time is the yoke, the steel, the threat.

Love and time, you see, are always at odds—at least for us trains. One is never not trying to get the better of the other. Just now I’m approaching Edison, New Jersey, reasonably on time, and I know that just forty-four seconds after 5:14 post meridian an Amtrak Acela will barrel down the express track, within a mere meter of me, and will pass with such forceful momentum, cutting so confidently through the air, that a ripple of its buoyant, speedy mass will push me away, and the vacuum left in its comet-like course will suck me back in, registering as a momentary quiver through the length of my body.

Love and time; yes, you may doubt that a train can love, but you humans doubt all the wrong things; for in fact my existence is perfectly bound to the regular appearance of this Amtrak Acela, moving from one side of the northeast corridor to the other, like the tail of a grandfather clock, swinging ruefully in the dark; and I can only guess at its interior life, I can only imagine that, after all, it may be comparable to my own, so that I can imagine that the sort of humans that climb aboard the Acela may resemble those with whom I myself have become familiar. But it isn’t so: the Acela passengers have faraway places to be, and I’m only a local train, my world is smaller, slower, I feel the speed of the Acela only in comparison to my own meager greatness.

But I contain multitudes, and I know them by their peculiar rhythms, their habits. I carry these fragile people across space and time; I submit them to my exacting schedule, and in return they need only the harmless illusion that I am submitting to theirs. If I’ve envied the free movement of humans, I know too they will run desperately after me. How freedom is wasted on them! They will leap through my doors as if into the arms of a protector, to remain perfectly in time with the rhythm my movement dictates.

Just now, the red-haired girl has arrested the steady movement of her jaw, she has a book in her lap but she is looking out the window. She sees familiar places, but how strange they look to her today, because she has been reading a strange book, and as much as she likes reading, she really struggles to cross back over from the world of reading to that of the train; she is always a little surprised to find herself, after her reading, on the train. She is happiest, I like to think, following the words across the page, as I follow the tracks to and fro, from Trenton to New York and back again.

There is love, and there is time. I confess: I have a fantasy that one day, I collide with the Amtrak Acela at full speed; I fantasize that our tracks cross and we annihilate one another in a great catastrophe. Isn’t it only a switch, a swerve, that bends us toward a catastrophe? Or is it hesitation? How often are we mere seconds away from tragedy? Is not the difference of life and death a lingering, a lunging, a stopping? But that is the burden, responsibility of the train: yes, we are thought to be ruled by time, but time is ruled by us.