by Jenny Diski
Maybe the chef hadn’t just gone to get Marie a hat, because since his return he’d been more ebullient than ever, jumping up from his seat, taking everyone’s hands and shaking them vigorously, his eyes glowing with something more than happiness, I thought.
‘You want to dance?’ he asked Marie.
‘I don’t dance.’
‘You want to sing?’
She shook her head, making her chef’s hat wobble. ‘I don’t sing. Sister Mary Ellen said it was bad to sing. So I never sing.’
‘No, no, it’s good to sing. Forget Sister Mary Ellen. Sing out, Marie. Sing your heart out.’
‘You’ll be sorry…’
‘Sing,’ we all urged. ‘Sing.’
Marie stood up in her chef’s hat and good travelling clothes and wailed an entirely tuneless but passionate hymn to life being grand. There was a brief stunned silence as we began to see that Sister Mary Ellen may have had reasons other than religious for preventing Marie from singing. But the chef wasn’t daunted.
‘That’s it, she outta the convent now,’ he crowed and we all joined in with Marie to celebrate her liberation.
It was around midnight by now. The young man and the woman who were both cold for different reasons had dropped in a few times for a smoke; a couple of men in their early twenties, in jeans and T-shirts and with longish hair, each solitary travellers, were settled on the corner bench chatting to each other about guitars but both aware of a straggly-haired girl probably not out of her teens sitting next to them. She had got on at Syracuse. She was following their conversation, or trying to, at any rate, attaching herself to them as roughly her age and peer group. One of them clearly was going to become her lover (or whatever kind of fumbling was possible at their seats or in the lavatory), but neither the boys nor the girl had yet decided which. They were drinking beer and the girl, who was a lot younger and more displaced than she wanted to seem, was making a show of getting drunker, of being one of the guys. She was quite plain and rather grubby but sweetly wide-eyed and lost, almost certainly always lost, used to wandering and coming together briefly but not for long with new human beings. I doubted that Syracuse was where she had started her journey, I even wondered if she entirely remembered the start of her journey, and I was sure she had no idea where or when it would end. Suddenly she became animated as she recalled something she had seen while waiting for the train, something she’d been dying to tell someone about.
‘There was this sign, you know, like a warning sign, in red. It said “Live Tracks”.’
She waited for the boys to show proper astonishment. When they didn’t, she helped them out.
‘I mean, like, live tracks. What’s that supposed to mean? The sign was to stop people from crossing the rails to get to the other platform, you know, to scare them, so they wouldn’t do it, but, I mean, do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that. Live tracks. Isn’t that incredible?’
She shook her head in disbelief at the contempt with which the authorities held people. The boys darted a glance at her (as I did) to check if she was making a joke, but she was genuinely outraged. The boys didn’t look at each other, but down at their knees. Eventually, after she continued to complain about the sign, one of them, very hesitantly, spoke.
‘Uh, I think it’s a sort of way of saying that they’re electrified. Like, electricity is running through them. They use live to describe something that’s electrified.’
He seemed to be waiting for the girl to laugh at him for taking her literally. She didn’t. She didn’t laugh at all, ever, probably. Her mode was intense and puzzled earnestness.
‘Really? So, like, this table is dead, right?’
The boy opened his mouth to explain that it was a special use of the … but he shut it again, deciding there was no point.
‘Jesus, I wish people would say what they mean. I mean especially official people. They ought to be clearer. Why confuse us? It’s like that door.’ She pointed to the door of the smoking box. ‘See, it says Out. Lots of doors say Out, one side Out, the other side In. What’s that? I’m always going in somewhere, whenever I go through a door I’m going in. I was in this place, then I go through a door into another place. That’s how I see it. I don’t go out, I go in. It’s just not truthful to say Live Tracks and Out. It’s like lying.’
And although this was possibly the most profound comment on language and perception that was made during my entire journey around the States – or even maybe in the history of linguistics – we remained excruciatedly silent, because we were all wrapped up with wondering, though hardly able to bear to imagine, what the inside of this waif’s mind could possibly be like and how she had made her way even this far in the world with only the capacity for absolute literalism to help her along. I felt we were in the presence of something extraordinary, a kind of idiot savant, whose absence of irony, whose complete inability to grasp the plasticity of language, might easily be mistaken for transcendental wisdom. The boys looked confused, as the question of which of them was going to sleep with her was superseded by what it might be like and whether it would be advisable to sleep with someone so innocent or of such a potentially dangerous cast of mind.
The chef, linguist that he was, who might have been expected to be interested in the problem but was too far gone in mania or drug high to concentrate on anything other than the frantic energy zipping around his body, simply maintained his own relation with the world and went on, never silent, restlessly talking, no longer listening or waiting for a response, jumping up, touching, leaving, coming back. I thought the time right to give sleep a go, and saying I’d see everyone later, in that American way I like, meaning in an hour or a year, I headed back from the smoking box to my coach.
The Filipino woman was slumped sideways in her seat, her grandson sprawled across his. I climbed over their hand luggage and her legs to get to my designated place by the window, and managed not to wake them up. The main lights were off in the carriage, just a couple of overhead lamps of those who couldn’t sleep causing a dim glow. I reclined the back of the seat, hoisted the footrest and covered myself with the blanket Amtrak provided. It wasn’t uncomfortable for taking a nap on a train but I’ve never got to sleep in a sitting position, even a half-sitting position; not in front of the TV, not on a plane, on a train, or in a car. Never, not once. Still, I lounged and listened to the rattling of the rails and the rocking of the carriages, the two women whispering a couple of rows behind me, the snoring from around the coach. I shut my eyes. Two hours later I was still awake and getting stiff. I turned and sort of curled up on my side. An hour later I was still awake. Maybe I had dozed occasionally, but if so, it was the kind of dim half-sleep where you drift off for a second and then jerk awake, as if your body has not given you permission to lose consciousness. I thought I’d read, but I was worried about waking my neighbour by putting the overhead light on. I gave up and tiptoed over legs and bags out into the aisle where I was free to make an inspection of my coach and its mostly unconscious inhabitants.
In the 9 February 1878 issue of The Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Leslie, travelling by railroad for much the same reason I was, noted:
From our Pullman hotel-car, the last in the long train, to the way-car which follows closely on the engine, there is a vast discount in the scale of comfort, embracing as many steps as there are conveyances. It is worth one’s while to make a tour of the train for the sake of observing these differences and noting the manners and customs of travelling humanity when tired bodies and annoyed brains have agreed to cast aside ceremony and the social amenities and appear in uneasy undress. The old assertion that man is at bottom a savage animal finds confirmation strong in a sleeping-car; and for the women – even under dear little five-and-three-quarter kids, the claws will out upon these occasions. For here, at 9 P.M., in the dr
awing-room sleeper, we find a cheerful musical party howling, ‘Hold the Fort!’ around the parlour organ, which forms its central decoration; three strong, healthy children running races up and down the aisle, and scourging each other with their parents’ shawl-straps; a consumptive invalid, bent double in a paroxysm of coughing; four parties, invisible, but palpable to the touch, wrestling in the agonies of the toilet behind the closely buttoned curtains of their sections, and trampling on the toes of passers-by as they struggle with opposing draperies; a mother engaged in personal combat (also behind the curtains) with her child in the upper berth, and two young lovers, dead to the world, exchanging public endearments in a remote corner. Who could bear these things with perfect equanimity? Who could accept with smiles the company of six adults at the combing and washing stages of one’s toilet? Who could rise in the society, and under the close personal scrutiny, of twenty-nine fellow-beings, jostle them in their seats all day, eat in their presence, take naps under their very eyes, lie down among them, and sleep – or try to sleep – within acute and agonized hearing of their faintest snores, without being ready to charge one’s soul with twenty-nine distinct homicides?
But if the ‘drawing-room sleeper’ be a place of trial to fastidious nerves, what is left to say of the ordinary passenger-car, wherein the working-men and working-women – the miners, the gold-seekers, the trappers and hunters travelling from one station to another, and the queer backwoods folk who have left their log homesteads in Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois to cross the train of the sunset – do congregate, and are all packed like sardines in a box? It is a pathetic thing to see their nightly contrivances and poor shifts at comfort; the vain attempts to improvise out of their two or three feet of space a comfortable sleeping-place for some sick girl or feeble old person, and the weary, endless labour of the others to pacify or amuse their fretted children. Here and there some fortunate party of two or three will have full sway over a whole section – two seats, that is to say – and there will be space for one of them to stretch his or her limbs in the horizontal posture and rest luxuriously; but for the most part, every seat has its occupant, by night as well as by day, a congregation of aching spines and cramped limbs. The overland journey is no fairy tale to those who read it from a way-car!
Certainly, it was the antithesis of waking in the middle of the night in a hospital ward. No night nurses maintained a dimly lit vigil, overlooking the helpless sleepers. And the sleepers themselves were not contained tidily in rows of beds, but in a free-for-all quest for unconscious comfort. It was true that the Amish group were as neat and disciplined in their sleeping as they were in their waking. They sat in their seats (only the children were fully reclined) with their legs straight and their arms folded. Some of the younger men had allowed their heads to loll on their wives’ shoulders. Some of the women slept with an arm around a small child as if to contain it, and train it in propriety even in the uncertain world of sleep. The men’s legs were spread out, feet planted comfortably apart or crossed at the ankles; the women’s were together and parallel with the vertical drop of their seat, their skirts straight as if they had smoothed them before setting off for sleep and hadn’t moved since. A few snored, probably in Low German. Who knows what they dreamed?
The sleeping habits of the rest of the coach told a different story altogether. Repose, like hunger or sexual need, is a powerful human drive which, when the need is strong, overcomes training in social niceties and our public pretensions. Mostly people do it in private, with at most one other who is licensed to share the ultimate intimacy of sleep. What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and of utter aloneness when the one of you that isn’t you is asleep is unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. They leave behind nothing but a careless, even an uncaring effigy, an empty shell that might toss and turn, snort and snore, but is no more the container of the mind and heart you communed with than an empty tin of baked beans. Sleep is a haven. Every man is an island when asleep. And this truth being disturbing, distressing even, we keep it for those we love, or those we have grown used to, and only then probably because we have to, if we do not want to make the choice between experiencing the comfort of others and the bliss of solitary unconsciousness. It’s a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.
So public sleeping is a kind of revelation, and the observer of strangers asleep is as much a voyeur as someone peeping through a gap in the bedroom curtains. If you are not a dedicated voyeur, there is a degree of discomfort in witnessing the sleep of strangers, though it is a fascinated kind of discomfort: you look before you look away. Most of us wish to peep on the privacy of others, to see what people are really like when they are alone. Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can’t watch all the time. And even if you can make a guess that other people alone are pretty much like you are, you can’t ever be sure. Worse still, you can’t ever be sure that you alone are pretty much like other people alone. Some things we never find out by asking or being with other people, so when we get the opportunity to cheat, to look through a crack in the door, watch a silhouetted figure through the window across the street, gaze at candid photographs taken with a high-powered lens, we do so, and the instinctive guilt is usually about equal to the thrill. What are we hoping to see? If they are like us; if we are weird; if they are weirder than us; but we also want to see what we are like, not just the individual peeping eye, but the general, collective we.
Everyone slept as best they could, as comfortably as possible, shoes off, belts and zips undone, clothes loosened or rucked up, revealing bellies, bosoms and thighs. Each person slept under a spell that allowed them to fight for another inch of personal space, an extra ounce of ease regardless of what their waking self might think of how they appeared. Heads back, mouths agape, snoring freely, slapping their lips together, scratching, snorting, legs wide, torso flopped: with the perfect self-centred innocence of a child asleep. For all the world as if humanity had decided to forgo entirely all the social skills it had acquired in order to live peaceably in a group. Not the original savage animal, as Frank Leslie saw it back in the 1870s under the influence of evolutionary theories that threatened us with simian ancestors, but a tangle of individual post-Freudian omnipotent egos, each separately grasping for physical gratification, each engrossed in private dreams and desires.
By 8.30 the next morning the train had arrived at Toledo, Ohio. People had gradually started waking from six o’clock on, and tried to make themselves respectable again, straightening up their clothes, combing their hair, heading for the coffee in the restaurant car that would make them social human beings again. The chef was nowhere to be seen, but Marie, who was bright and perky and puffing up a morning storm in the smoking compartment, said that he had finally collapsed on the floor in the centre of an aisle and just lay there sleeping for the rest of the night while people carefully stepped over him.
I was nauseous with lack of sleep, but smoked and drank coffee through the morning, as we passed through flat anonymous country shrouded in morning mist. All I could think of was arriving in Chicago and connecting with the Empire Builder, where I had a bed. We were running an hour late, but when we reached the outskirts of Chicago and the tracks multiplied, merging from all directions into the frantic hub that was the dead centre of the American railroad system, we slowed to that alarming speed where you know that nothing but a complete halt can come of it. Surrounded by goods trains and containers, overhead cables screeching and singing, iron and steel, clinker, smoke, rust, dust, grime and the bone-juddering noise of metal wheels on metal rail jangling and grinding, shuddering to a stop, lurching into movement, the Lake Shore Li
mited finally came to a dead standstill about five hundred yards outside Union Station, Chicago. We waited in an expectant silence, and then waited some more. The child in the seat next to me began to sing tunelessly: ‘One hour we’ve been waiting … two hours we’ve been waiting … three hours we’ve been waiting…’ He got to ten hours and then started again. And then again. I don’t know how many times he started again, but a real-life hour and a half later we were still waiting in the goods yard as the freight trains took priority. No one murmured any complaint, we just sat, our bags packed, ready after our nineteen-hour journey to disembark and go home or make the next connection. Apart from the child next to me, who was beginning to sound like our psyches singing in our ears, and who, like my psyche, I thought needed suppressing, there was the grim silence of a captive, helpless audience with nowhere else to go staring through the grime of the windows into the noise and shunting chaos of the filthy, smoky air just yards from, but utterly beyond the reach of, our destination.
Two hours later we were allowed into the station, and I arrived at the check-in desk in Chicago with just fifteen minutes to spare before the Empire Builder left for Portland, Oregon. Given my anxiety level, you would be forgiven for thinking that I had to be somewhere at a given time. But missing a train is missing a train, a thing in itself, a source of compulsion that needs nothing more than a timetable. There would have been a very long wait until the next train to Portland, but waiting was what I was doing – what difference if it was on the train waiting for the next station, or in the station waiting for the next train? But I was nevertheless hugely relieved to get to the check-in desk before it closed.
