Stranger on a Train

by Jenny Diski

  At breakfast I saw Glenys and joined her. She was sitting opposite a very small, wisp of an elderly black man, who still wore the natty clothes of his heyday. His face was creased and crumpled, but along with the feather he wore in his pork pie hat that had ‘Indianapolis’ written above the brim, he sported an embroidered waistcoat to put Big Daddy to shame, flared denims and a black leather string tie. This – I’m aware that I am forever describing Americans in terms of their likeness to movie or showbiz stars, but try though I might, this was inescapable – was Sammy Davies Jr revisited. Tiny, spry, fast-talking, and, in our breakfast companion’s case, a little mad. He was as inclined to talk to himself as to us, so sometimes he was hard to follow, but he was, as his hat indicated, from Indianapolis, and he was, like Glenys, taking a long-waited-for vacation on his own. He was going to Seattle to, again like Glenys, see the mountains he had never been in. It is astonishing how many Americans tell you of longing for American landscapes but fail to get to them decade after decade. The remarkably untravelled lives of many of the people I met on the train quite pulled against the notion of a continent in flux, all its people on the move. Actually, for the most part, they seem to stay still and dream. Indianapolis, who was in his sixties, I guessed, had only a few days away to see the mountains at last, even though he was retired, presumably because his funds were too limited for a longer holiday, but his train to Chicago to catch the Empire Builder had been so late that he had missed his connection. He muttered much of this out through the window, but Glenys had begun his monologue by asking where he had got on the train, so it seemed all right to interrupt his private recollections.

  ‘So you had to lose a whole day out of your vacation waiting for the next train?’

  He looked up and shook his head.

  ‘Nope, this here is the train I was booked on. Amtrak flew me from Chicago to St Paul’s to pick it up. I was waiting when it arrived. The plane was on time.’

  I was impressed. He wasn’t.

  ‘Yeah, but the train was part of the vacation, and the reason I travelled by train is that I’m afraid of flying.’

  I’ve rarely seen a man look so mournful, as he shook his head, dismayed at the memory of finding himself flying courtesy of the train company.

  In the smoking coach were a new collection of people along with the old. Sitting in the near corner was a tired-looking woman with a body that had broken free of its youthfully contained voluptuousness and weary blonde hair with roots so badly in need of doing that it was almost half and half fair to black. Opposite her was a young man with severely cropped hair and dim, close-together eyes that I guessed not only tiredness had rendered unalert, but with a body that rippled with youth and fitness under his white T-shirt. I took him for a soldier. He was indeed a soldier on his way back to his base after a couple of weeks’ leave. A woman called Martha, who I had met in line in Chicago station and who had immediately begun recounting in detail her adventures on the internet discovering her genealogy, and how everyone should do it, I should do it, and what, precisely, she had discovered, and who I had been avoiding ever since, was bending a willing acolyte’s ear, as indeed she was whenever I came across her. She talked on and on and on. When she finished with the importance of finding one’s roots, she moved to canonical books by women and feminist history. She was unstoppable, as if her every word was of everlasting interest and it was her duty to induct any lone female (and, because of the loudness of her voice, anyone nearby) into her world of historical self-justification. I wondered now, though, if perhaps she was manic, from the way she shot out the words as if they were all queuing and jostling to be said and couldn’t wait their turn. Next to her, but turned firmly away, was the conductor on another break, telling a man next to him almost word for word about the liberal lie. Martha finished some exposition about the invisibility of women in the historical record by blaming ‘the usual suspects’. Uncharacteristically, she paused and looked around the coach.

  ‘Ha,’ she gloated. ‘The joke went over their heads. No one got the reference to Casablanca. The usual suspects.’

  ‘I never saw that movie,’ the soldier said, trying to be helpfully dumbed down.

  ‘That is so sad. We’ve become ignorant of our own culture. Movies are very important…’

  And she continued with a lecture about the educational and social value of film. But Martha’s cultural understanding was stuck in the Forties. She clearly did not know that the film the soldier hadn’t seen was not Casablanca (which he could hardly have missed if he were an avid TV watcher), but the more modern cultural must-know The Usual Suspects. Thankfully, no one cared to explain the gap in her knowledge and Martha was allowed to remain satisfyingly superior.

  ‘Were you in the Gulf?’ the tired woman asked the soldier.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He spoke quite neutrally. He was a soldier describing where he had been, not venturing an opinion. He seemed too archetypal to be true.

  ‘My son was in the Gulf,’ she said, looking quite haunted. ‘I watched it happening on the TV all the time. I never turned it off, slept in front of it, ate in front of it. The doctor put me on tranquillisers and said I had to turn off the TV and stop watching the war. But I couldn’t. It was like I had to to keep my son alive. And, my god, when that stuff about friendly fire came out … Jesus, friendly fire, killing our own…’

  ‘Yeah,’ the soldier said, without any kind of expression on his face. ‘My sergeant said watch out for friendly fire. He said friendly fire kills you worse than enemy fire.’

  There was a small pause while we took this in, but no one indicated their appreciation for his exquisite irony. I looked at him a little harder, but I couldn’t see anything in his face that knew the weight of what he had just said. The eyes stayed dim, the voice flat.

  The blonde woman nodded. ‘It’s all the stuff they don’t tell you. Like when they killed JFK. God, I cried and cried over that. I loved that man. We still don’t know what really happened. They kept the truth from us.’ She spoke with raw passion and a grief that dated back to 1963. ‘I’m telling you, if we knew what we don’t know, we’d be angry.’

  The young soldier nodded, slow and solemn. ‘Yes, ma’am, if we knew what we don’t know, we’d know more.’

  And for me it was one of those moments when, like the transition that occurs when an oil and egg-yolk mixture suddenly emulsifies into mayonnaise, the texture of human existence cohered and thickened. I have no idea if life does this sort of thing accidentally or because it has an independent sense of humour and it knows you’re listening. Whichever, or whatever else, the humanity of humanity was on a roll just then on that train, and it wasn’t going to stop until I did. It was altogether a day of rich textures.

  Later that afternoon another stranger, Annie, seemed to be having the same thoughts as me about the arbitrariness of the homesteads.

  ‘Now why did they put that house right there?’ she wondered aloud, as we both happened to be staring out of the same window while we puffed on our cigarettes.

  Annie was from New Orleans and on holiday from her regular life. She had six kids aged from thirty-three down to ten. She was a single mother, black, and used to be a cook but had retired, earning extra money by doing a little babysitting now. She told me about her twenty-one-year-old boy who was diagnosed as hyperactive. He still lived at home, needing full-time attention, but the older children took it in turns to have him sometimes so that Annie could have a break.

  ‘The boy has trouble with angritude,’ she explained.

  She took him regularly to classes to help him deal with his emotional ups and downs. They wanted Annie to become a volunteer and work with other troubled kids.

  ‘You got to listen to kids. It’s no good shouting. I grew up with my grandmother shouting and screaming. I cried a lot. No need for that. There’s enough hatred in the world without having it in the family.’

  While she was away she called her son twice a day. He resented her leaving him. Her other kids w
ere good with him, but if he was having a tantrum they couldn’t cope with, they’d get her on her mobile and she’d speak to him.

  ‘Sometimes it takes two hours of me talking to him before he can calm himself down. He needs to hear someone speaking quietly to him, and he needs to talk himself and be listened to. Then he’s all right. Hey, life is like a train, it goes round and round.’

  ‘And it’s always late.’

  Annie laughed. ‘Yup. And why the hell did they put that house just there?’

  Human life in all its inescapable difficulty and the astonishing human capacity for somehow coping with or enduring it was positively parading itself on the Empire Builder. By mid-afternoon we were at Havre, another water stop where passengers could get out and air themselves. Taking advantage of a regular captive audience, the platform at Havre sported a large signpost explaining how the town got its name when two rivals in love fought over a local beauty. After hours of fisticuffs the loser stormed off shouting, ‘You can have’er.’ Every American town likes to have its mythic founding story, but Havre, I felt, just hadn’t tried hard enough.

  ‘Dumb, huh?’ a voice said in my ear as I finished reading it. ‘I hear you’re a writer.’

  A man in his late thirties or early forties stood beside me. He was short and stocky, in regulation baseball cap, jeans and a T-shirt. As ordinary-looking a man as you could imagine. ‘I don’t mean to intrude, but hearing you’re a writer, I’ve got a story for you.’

  I lit another cigarette and waited, trying to project a look that said I was interested but I wasn’t going to get in any way involved in his life no matter how terrible his story was. It was clearly going to be pretty terrible, because the ordinary guy’s eyes had taken on an intense and fiery look as he prepared to relate, yet again but never often enough, what had happened to him.

  ‘I was OK until nine years ago. I led a normal life working as a joiner in a local firm. I lived at home. We were a regular family. Then my mom died. I got bad feelings about it, but I carried on. Then five years later, when my dad died, I went berserk. I got suicidal. Real crazy. Putting a gun to my head. Playing Russian roulette and stuff. I packed in the job and went to live alone in the woods for a long time. I got crazier and crazier out there in the woods, and then one day I realised that I had to get help. I saw a doctor, a psychiatrist who put me on Prozac, thirty milligrams twice daily. It was depression, he said. That shit hit me hard. In a month my teeth were chattering so bad that they broke. My teeth actually shattered to pieces because they rattled so bad. I thought my brain was going to be shaken to a froth. If I was crazy before, I was twice as crazy on the fucking – excuse me – Prozac, and it wasn’t even my own craziness. When I finally saw a dentist, the state had to pay out seven thousand dollars to fix my teeth, I’d done that much damage to them. But they should have paid me a lot more. Damages. I should have sued them for what that stuff did to me. Prescribed by a doctor. I was trying to get better and it ruined my life, with the shakes and panics and what not. They still haven’t gone away completely.’

  ‘How do you live now?’

  ‘I’m an artist, like you. I carve sculptures out of wood. I live alone, and I have my work and fifteen acres of land my dad left me. I manage OK on a day-by-day basis, but I’m not the same man I was. I lead a very isolated life. I stay very quiet. If I didn’t have my sculpting, I don’t know if I’d be OK. I guess I’m still depressed. It all preys on my mind, what happened to me and how I felt and everything. It goes round and round in my head, you know, the whole thing. My mom and dad and the pills and the depression. I think about depression twenty-two hours a day, every day. Every day of my life. I try to get it into my work, but I’m a visual artist. I can’t write my feelings down. People should hear about what happened to me. About the Prozac and depression. You’re a writer. So you can write my story.’

  * * *

  By the late afternoon the unchanging landscape in the distance ahead of us seemed to be coming to a conclusion. We were approaching the outskirts of Glacier Park, which was the far edge of the prairie and the beginning of the Rockies. The great plain just came to an end and the jagged snow-topped mountains rose abruptly like a retaining wall. The train commenced its climb of the foothills just when the sun began to set and as we headed into the new landscape, rising towards the snow level, the daylight went out. We had to take the beauty of the Rockies and Glacier Park on trust. The man sitting next to me in the observation car sighed at the last dying rays of the sun.

  ‘Just when there was something to see, there’s nothing to be seen.’

  I laughed and said I supposed we’d have to take the train in the other direction to see the Rockies in daylight. ‘Holidaying?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, kind of. I’m recovering from brain surgery. I’m sixty-seven. I was an engineer. When I retired I started to get these seizures. I reckon it was because I was bored. Nothing to do apart from walk the dogs. The wife still works. So they operated. Said I had to lead a quiet life, but I figured it was the quiet life that was killing me. So I’m taking trips around the country by train. Just for something to do.’

  ‘What do the doctors say?’

  ‘That I shouldn’t.’

  He looked gloomy as he spoke, though his features had a natural downturn to them. Then he changed the subject, asking me about how things were going in Northern Ireland. He was Irish by descent. He’d supported the IRA for a long time, but now he was beginning to think he’d been wrong.

  ‘I want our side to be good, but they turn out just to be terrorists, the way they behave, the way they treat people.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s all wars. It seems like people just don’t want a quiet life.’

  ‘You don’t, either,’ I said.

  ‘No, you’re right. But I don’t want to be dead more.’

  At dinner life let up a little as a rather upmarket elderly gentleman in a good suit of clothes expressed delight that I was from the UK and regaled me with the pleasures of British television. Imported programmes from Britain were all he considered worth watching on US TV, especially the crime dramas. Through three courses he told me about his favourites and asked me about upcoming series that had yet to be shown in the States. He lovingly listed the programme names with the relish of a connoisseur: Morse, Cracker, A Touch of Frost, Bergerac, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Miss Marple … did I know them, were there any he had missed, he wondered anxiously? And Oxford, Manchester, Jersey, Denton, Badger’s Drift, St Mary Mead: were they just as they were portrayed? Morse, he had heard, though the episode had not yet arrived, had revealed his first name. Was that true, no, don’t tell him what it was. And there was a rumour that Morse was going to die. Had I heard that? It was just terrible. How could they do such a thing? And there didn’t seem to be a date for a new series of Cracker. But Jack Frost, Inspector Frost of Denton police, was still all right, wasn’t he? Could I at least assure him of that?

  I went to bed early, my head reeling with the intimate instant lives of others, strangers who popped up next to you, told you everything you needed to know about themselves and then waved as you or they moved on. You acknowledged people you’d spoken to with a nod and a smile as you passed them again in the aisle or at the bar or in the smoking coach, but you didn’t have to speak to them just because they’d told you about their despair or their sickness or the looming shadows of their lives. Nor did they require that you tell them anything about you. The niceties were over once you had said where you were from and where you were going. It was OK by them if you wanted to tell them more, but it wasn’t compulsory. You could stay as private as you wanted to, and when they told you about themselves, even terrible things that brought tears to your eyes, you weren’t expected to make a long-term commitment to them. They told for the sake of telling, you listened because you were there.

  I also went to bed early because I had to get up early. In the middle of the night, at Spokane, the Empire Builder split in two. One half went to Seattle, the other
half, my half, went to Portland, Oregon. Unfortunately, the smoking coach went with the other half of the train to Seattle. There would be no smoking from Spokane until we reached Portland. The next stop after Spokane was Pasco at 5.23 a.m. There would be a few minutes while the train waited at the station. I set my alarm.

  No one got off at Pasco, and a couple of very chilly-looking travellers got on in the steely, freezing dawn on the far foothills of the Rockies. The tired woman whose son had been in the Gulf was the only other passenger standing on the platform smoking. We looked at each other, puffing and shivering, and laughed.

  ‘Did you put your alarm on, or did you just wake up and decide to have a cigarette?’ I asked.

  ‘Alarm,’ she rasped.

  ‘We’re the last of the serious addicts.’

  ‘Dying breed.’

  We concentrated on smoking while stamping our feet to keep out the chill air. I managed the best part of two cigarettes before the conductor called out, ‘Suck hard, ladies, we gotta go. That oughta hold you till Wishram.’