A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  Dad: Doesn’t matter how he lived. If he died, it’s a tragedy. Everybody’s forgiven in death.

  Me: But that doesn’t make any sense.

  Dad: Well, neither did your grandfather.

  My father was the only one who did a good job of speaking. He told a story that his grandmother had told him, about how when my grandfather was writing, he used to take a piece of paper and start ripping it up into little shreds, like a nervous habit. He said that my grandfather’s life was like that, and now we all get to have a little shred of his paper to carry with us.

  Except my dad and me never got any shreds of paper. Because he stopped doing that before we were born. So we didn’t have much to keep with us.

  All I could think about was the last conversation I ever had with my grandfather. In my head, I played it over and over again. I wish we could have talked about anything else.

  Grandfather: No mortal has ever seen God, but millions of people believe in him. Do you know why that is?

  He answered his own question, but I don’t remember what it was. I was preparing my comeback.

  Me: Doesn’t it seem cocky that we have to always refer to him as “Lord, our God, Ruler of the Universe”?

  Grandfather: It’s good for people to remember that someone is in charge.

  Me: He’s not doing a very good job. What about all the violence in the world? Natural disaster? Disease?

  Grandfather: He loved us enough to allow us mistakes.

  Me: What about the earthquake in Haiti? Was that a mistake? Because thousands of people died—

  Grandfather: If it was easy to believe in him, it wouldn’t be faith.

  Me: You can believe in giant rat overlords, that doesn’t—

  Grandfather: Enough, Jeffery. I’m finished with this.

  Me: Arthur. You’re talking to Arthur.

  Grandfather: That’s enough.

  Me: Whatever you say, Grandpa.

  After that, his face went blank again, and he asked where to find his own bathroom.

  I get that people that love God like to walk by faith, not by sight, but sometimes I wish they would just keep their eyes open.

  I think I’m going to stop writing in you for a while. I don’t feel very many emotions, and I’ve been seeing Kaitlin a lot, so I don’t think I’m going to have much time for it.

  I hope you’re not upset, but honestly, I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be writing to in this thing anyway.

  No more later,

  Arthur Louis Pullman the Third

  10.

  I SAT FROZEN, watching the sun come up.

  The clue was placed exactly where he knew I’d find it. The address was inked to the back with just enough information. Elko, Nevada, matched the city line perfectly. The train, his Zephyr, was exactly how my grandfather would have gotten there. And the next one left from the Truckee Amtrak station in just over an hour.

  I couldn’t imagine what he’d want me to find, but I didn’t hesitate. I threw everything into my backpack as quickly as I could. My clothes—black T-shirts and a gray Oakland A’s hoodie. My cell phone charger. My wallet. My grandfather’s clue. I slid the photo from its frame and folded it into my pocket. I pulled the church activities bulletin from the trash.

  My whole body surged with excitement. If my grandfather had spent the last week of his life with someone, then maybe they’d know why his body ended up in Ohio. Maybe they could explain what all this writing meant. Maybe they could explain why people made up so many rumors about him.

  Breathlessly, I backed down the ladder and into the living room.

  For five years, I’d wanted answers. The week of my grandfather’s disappearance had haunted me since I was thirteen. Back then, I’d blamed myself for not finding him when he left, but as I got older and understood the situation more, I realized it wasn’t my fault; it was my dad’s.

  I paused for a moment and stared out over the deck.

  Might have to let that one go, his voice echoed. Just like he let my mom go. Just like he let his own life go. Just like he let my grandfather go.

  This was my dad’s problem. He’d never even entertained the idea that there might be something he was missing, or something more to the story, or some piece of the world that wasn’t in his immediate line of vision. But my grandfather wouldn’t have let it go. This was my chance to go where his son couldn’t, and succeed where he had failed.

  I slipped past the door, and out into the early morning fog. The air was thick. I knew the road back to the train station; it was one of the only roads in Truckee. I jogged alongside it, ducking into the tall grass ditch every time I saw headlights.

  There was nothing keeping me in Truckee. As it stood, my life story read like a miserable, failed attempt, no different from my uncle’s or my father’s or anyone else’s in my family. In the fog in front of me, I watched it play out like a slide show, all the hallmarks of that failure: the letter from UCLA telling me I’d failed my scholarship, my teachers telling me I’d failed high school, the yellow cast around my failed hand, Kaitlin’s face telling me I’d failed our relationship, and the judge telling me I’d failed my one chance to be able to see her again.

  But my grandfather had been extraordinary, and I could be a part of that. And people would notice. Kaitlin would notice. Of course she would notice. She’d always told me to do something, and now I was.

  My jog became a run, and it didn’t stop until I reached the window of the station.

  “Just you today, buddy?” the attendant asked as I approached, and I nodded.

  I surveyed the area while she ran the emergency credit card my father had given me.

  “Arthur Louis Pullman?” The attendant’s face was frozen white in the morning fog.

  “Yeah?”

  She smiled. “Popular name around here, pal.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.” She stood up. “You look like you’re running away from something.”

  “What . . .” I hadn’t considered the word yet, but I wasn’t a runaway. I was eighteen, I was allowed to be wherever I wanted to be. “No, I, uh. I’m not.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not telling anybody. We get a lot of runaways.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure; only real way to get away anymore. Everybody here’s running from something.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I imagine the hardest part of running away is staying gone, but that’s not so hard here.” She handed my ticket back. “The train can’t turn around.”

  Part Two.

  Elko.

  1.

  april 28, the 2010.

  some days

  i wake up in a place i have ban a thausand times

  & have naver seen before

  cold plane cold nothing fence line

  giant machine

  warped speed into blackness

  & i am standing in the nathing of it all

  some days

  are too familiar to understand why

  some days

  my life is a story i’ve told a thausand times

  & some days

  the story moves backwards

  cold cemant in forgotten town,

  broken man to broken sign

  arthur some days streets lites men woman man

  some days i

  ask myself who i am

  & i wonder if anyone around me

  could answer that quastion

  lights color breath golden

  streets shining

  & i am sitting in the nathing of it all

  some days i am nathing but reflex,

  a trampoline soul sending right back

  unburdened by my influence

  some days i am without

  my humanness

  becoming the shirt on my back

  worn shoes on my feet

  but even those days

  i feel you

  every day

  i know you’re there

>   —arthur louis pullman

  2.

  SMALL DROPLETS OF rain started to pelt the windows as I felt my way to the back of the Zephyr. The sky was dark with heavy clouds; the lights of the cabin flickered.

  It didn’t surprise me that my grandfather chose the train for his escape. When he turned up in Ohio, that was the one speculation we all agreed on. The train was as much a part of my family’s DNA as he was—my great-grandfather helped build it, my grandfather helped maintain it, and now my dad and I were among the last people still using it. Every school trip, every family vacation when I was a kid, every summer to tennis camp with Mason—every time, we used the Amtrak, even though every trip took two or three or ten times as long as the world’s slowest airplane.

  But really, I didn’t mind it. For all the traditions I hated—the Christmas photos in matching button-ups, the cabin, the ham loaf and mandarin orange Jell-O—the train I could tolerate. Something about it did feel nostalgic, and valuable, and possible. The train can’t turn around, she’d said.

  I could understand my grandfather’s awe. There was a time in his life when the possibility of the train had to feel otherworldly, like a magic carpet ride to a far-off kingdom called Cincinnati. The Amtrak was the blood in the veins of an adolescent and growing country. But now, it looked more like an abandoned amusement park. The exterior was cold, gray, bulky, and uninviting. The chairs were ripped, logo paint chipped, and the rough, Braille-like plastic on the walls had been smoothed down from years and years of children sliding their hands along it for balance.

  It wasn’t a ghost town today. For whatever reason, the train headed east from Truckee was packed. Old couples read newspapers, families watched Kung Fu Panda on first-generation iPads, and Amish people stared at the backs of the seats in front of them. The only empty seats—one of which belonged to me—had become beds, or terrains for children’s action figures. When I reached the back of the train, I turned around and began to feel my way forward, holding tightly to the plastic seats on both sides and stumbling as the train banked around the bends of the mountains.

  “You’re not even going to tell anyone where you’re going?”

  The voice came from nowhere, light and airy and inviting and seductive and dangerous, cutting through the low rumble of the tracks. I took a measured breath to balance myself against it.

  “You’re just going to go?” Kaitlin walked in front of me, beckoning me forward, like always.

  “I’ll tell them once I get there.”

  “Arthur, don’t do this. You don’t even realize—”

  “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “Why would I be happy for you?”

  “Because I’m doing something.”

  “The only thing you’re doing is manipulating people.”

  “No, I’m proving that—”

  “Proving that you’re not getting better. Arthur, you can’t be out here by yourself.”

  “Well, that’s weird, because I am.”

  “You’re not hearing me.” She waved her hand, her ring, in front of my face. “This is what you do. You don’t even realize that you’re out of control.”

  “Well, you’re not even—”

  My voice caught in my throat as the door slid open to the observation car, and Kaitlin disappeared with it. There was only one other person reading in a booth at the opposite end—a girl.

  She had short brown hair, carelessly layered all around her head, bobbing and curling at the bottom. Her skin was light brown but looked almost gold in the yellow light of the observation car. A black beanie was propped up on the top of her head, and she had small holes in her earlobes, the gauges Kaitlin had always wanted but never gotten.

  Without intending it, I’d stopped my progress toward the snack area, too busy noticing her to move. She looked sad, like she was disappointed in the book, or so busy considering what she was reading she couldn’t be bothered to think about what her face was doing. One of her fingers bounced on the page, keeping time as she read. I had to know what she was reading, or why she was sitting there alone this early in the morning, but I couldn’t ask. She was too confident and cool for the train, and definitely too confident and cool to talk to—

  She looked up from her book. It was too abrupt, I couldn’t look away in time, and our eyes locked. The harder I tried to break it, the worse it got, and instead of avoiding her gaze, I doubled down and stared straight back into it. She raised her eyebrows, so I raised mine. She squinted, so I squinted. She must have decided I was tweaking, or looking past her, because she lowered her head back into the book, and I ducked down the stairs, away from her, squeezing my finger for letting myself think about another girl.

  My ring always helped me remember. “Promise rings,” Kaitlin told me when she gave them to me, lying backward, her body curling perfectly into mine, her ass pushing intentionally against my upper thigh, staring out the window above the headboard. “Kaitlin,” I tried to correct her. “We’ve had sex. You can’t promise your virginity to someone after you’ve already had sex with them, it doesn’t work like that,” but that wasn’t what she meant. “No, idiot, I know,” and I remember distinctly that she’d smiled down at her hands, because the image is burned into my brain. “Promising everything else, though. Promising . . . each other.” I had smiled, too, and I slid the ring onto my finger. It hadn’t come off for four years. But recent events had forced it to switch hands.

  There were only a few bodies around the snack car: a twentysomething man in the corner, an attendant perched on a stool, and a mess of hair and dirty cloth curled over itself and slumped against the back of the only booth. I took my seat across from the homeless man. He smelled faintly of dog.

  I couldn’t sleep through the smell, so I sat awake, alternating between studying the rain-soaked Northern California mountains and studying the patrons of the train as they came down to buy their Snickers bars and cans of Coke and tiny plastic bottles of cheap wine.

  I pulled my grandfather’s clue from my pocket and read it again several times.

  Homes in foreclosed jungles, saints in slums of missions, sinners in sanctuaries of church street, hope in forests of elko, safety in mecca, chaos in cold, wet veins of ch, lou & sal’s tribute, a true, Great purpose.

  It felt like an evolution of places and things, like reading a map in text. If I was right, and there was something “in sanctuaries of Church Street,” and that was “in the forests of Elko,” then I’d decoded two of the pieces, but now the puzzle stretched out in both directions. Did I miss something in the “slums of missions”? Should I be looking for something in Mecca?

  I approached the snack counter, placing a Snickers bar in front of the balding attendant. “Three fifty,” he instructed, his eyes fixed on the journal in my hand. I gave him my card and he turned around to swipe it.

  “Hey,” I asked casually. “You don’t happen to know if there’s a city called Mecca in the United States, do you?”

  The man in the corner looked up.

  “I’m sure there is,” the attendant said. “S E K-O-P-E-K . . .” He read from the back of the journal. “That’s gotta be Sue, then, right? Sue Cow-pek?”

  “That’s nothing,” I said too quickly, crumpling the page into my pocket.

  He raised an eyebrow. “You know we don’t know each other, right?”

  “What? I mean, yeah, I know.”

  “Okay.” The bottom of the attendant’s stool scraped the floor as he leaned forward. “So why lie to me?”

  “No, it’s just—it’s just kind of private. Something my grandfather gave me. It doesn’t matter.”

  The attendant wasn’t convinced. “And that’s why you’re going to Elko? Gramps gave you an address?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, you wanna know what I think?”

  I didn’t.

  “I don’t think he wrote that address.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lemme see it.” He motioned to the counte
r.

  My better judgment told me to return to my seat, but he looked harmless. I smoothed it on the counter in front of him, holding the edges in place with my hands.

  “Can I hold it?”

  Slowly, I removed my hands. He held it up to the light, turning it over several times before landing on the address.

  “Yep.” He pointed. “He didn’t write that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The man in the corner leaned forward from his booth. “Yeah, man, that’s inverted. Must have bled through from another page, probably an envelope. Look, you can kinda see the postmark.”

  “There you go,” the attendant said, beaming. “Mystery solved. Won’t even charge you for it.”

  I stared at the inverted address. It took them no time at all to notice, but they must have been right. Why else would the address be positioned so strangely on the page? Why else would there be curved lines above it? Why would the handwriting be different? Because it wasn’t his. He hadn’t written the address for himself. Sue Kopek had written to him.

  “So who’s the woman?”

  “I’m sorry?” I looked up.

  “Sue Cow-pek?”

  I paused. “I—I don’t know.”

  Hearing someone else ask it, the way his tongue dove when he said the word woman, the image of my grandfather blurred. I hadn’t thought to make guesses about why he might have spent the last week of his life with a woman. “I don’t know,” I repeated to myself, but my imagination filled in the obvious possibilities. A bitter taste tickled underneath my tongue as I saw my grandfather rushing to Elko, away from me, away from the memory of my grandmother, into the arms of a woman. I wondered how they’d met, how long they’d been sending letters.

  “Seems important,” he said casually. “If he had a little lady in Elko—”

  “I don’t think my grandfather would do that.”

  “Same goes for everyone. Don’t mean they don’t do it.”

  “Well, I actually mean it. My grandfather wouldn’t—couldn’t.”

  “Just saying, that’s what everybody—”

  “Stop.” I pulled the journal off the counter. “Please stop.”