by Jay Sigler
TRAIN
THOUGHTS
JAY SIGLER
Train Thoughts
Copyright © 2018 by Jay Sigler
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Edited by Emily Schein
Book and Cover Art by Rachel Garrison
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Graphic Design and Layout by Jeff Dometita
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Book Formatting by Derek Murphy @Creativindie
ISBN-13: 978-1985802421 | First Edition: April 2018
For Evan and Ella
Chapter 1
THE SECOND LONELIEST DAY OF MY LIFE was the day I lost my Vicky. The loneliest day of my life was after her funeral, surrounded by family and friends. The reception. I walked across the faded wooden porch into the house that used to be our home and mourners swarmed to me like flies to shit. My misery did not love company. I wanted to be left alone, so I could get back to dying alone. Instead, I was the center of attention and everyone did a fairly decent job of being concerned. The forced empathy these people were programmed to display was as transparent as the plastic wrap covering the food they brought. They were only there because that’s the price you pay when you label yourself “friend” or “family.” Ten minutes after leaving it would be, “Poor guy. Now, what do you want for dinner?” and their lives would continue as planned. No one really cared and I was getting sick of the heart-piercing condolences sharpened for situations like this. Somewhere amidst the stabs of “We’re so sorry” and “Let us know if there’s anything we can do,” I was trapped between a table full of comfort food and the rest of my life. Everything from roast beef to chocolate cake sat on the table as a failed attempt at consolation. The food was supposed to make it easier, but it only filled stomachs. I could eat the whole fucking buffet and still be empty.
I loved my wife with all of my heart, with every breath I took. She was my best friend for ten years and now she was gone for even longer – forever. It felt like someone had punched through my abdomen, grabbed my stomach, and squeezed until pockets of air and bile ballooned through their clenched fingers. The dry, gagging feeling in the back of my throat couldn't be remedied by vomiting since my stomach was clamped so tightly. This feeling became my normal state of being every moment I thought about my life without Vicky. I was lost without her and had no idea how to continue living or if I even wanted to. What I did want was these people out of my house, but there’s no sharp, polite saying that gets people to leave so you could ponder the best way to kill yourself.
On the outside, I did a decent job keeping it together for the duration of the event. There were fake tears in all the right places, conjured up for those who told me it would get easier with time, or some other equally unprovable theory. These tears were more for their benefit than mine. Seeing me cry in their presence made them feel they did their duty as the widower comforter. I saved the real ones for later when I was by myself. But for those three hours, I sat stoically and listened to everyone else reminisce about all of their memories of my wife, except for the most recent one about how she left us. That memory they avoided. And maybe it was selfish on my part, but I didn’t care what they had to say. As soon as they walked out the door, Vicky’s memory would be just that – a memory. They wouldn’t have to deal with the agonizing pain of endless reminders staring them in the face with every waking moment. That torture was just for me.
The bathroom cabinets still full of Cover Girl makeup that would never be used, but that I couldn’t yet bring myself to throw out. Sticks, brushes, swabs, gels, bottles, a collection full of colors, when all I saw was black and white, the Before and After. Desert Mist tan eye shadow applied over a True Blend Natural Creamy 420 foundation would never highlight her high cheekbones and petite jaw. Bright red Shine Blast lip gloss would only ever paint memories. The Conair curling iron still had shoulder-length strands of burnt brunette hair stuck in it. The empty chair once used to navigate these tools would never again be draped with the pink microfiber bathrobe that took too much effort to properly hang up when damp. Today's Woman magazines turned up in the most random places in the house, reminders of how a woman should live. The clinging remnants of her Tommy Hilfiger Freedom perfume hung faint in the air while I got ready for work. I could still taste the citrus and green florals that I would never smell fresh again. The only new thing I smelled was the sickeningly greasy roast beef that stained the air with its putrid stench. A smell I would forever associate with utter despair.
The smell had a different effect on the guests and the food lasted until everyone had their fill of comfort. After a few hours, my friends and family had stayed as long as predetermined for this type of situation, “family” staying slightly longer than “friends.” One by one, every person slipped out of the house and out of my life, each with a saying that could make millions if only copyrighted and stuck on a Hallmark card. The promises to keep in touch were as believable as any religion’s promise of salvation. It sounded nice but there was nothing to validate that it would ever happen. That was fine with me; I just wanted them gone.
When the door finally shut the last person out, I physically caught up to where I was mentally. Alone, I crumbled to the kitchen floor and cried. Hot tears mixed with hotter snot ran off my face and into the deep, narrow holes in the floor where she had last lain. I flashed back to the image of her lying there as I found her. I screamed and cried and dry heaved nothing but acidic bile from stomach muscles clenched painfully tight. As I gasped for breath to avoid choking, a million thoughts, feelings, and memories surged through my mind like a pulsing electrical current through a wire. Between each surge, I prayed for death. My wife was taken from me in such a horrific way and I was left with only myself and my thoughts. Shrouded in a cloud of pain and misery, I grasped at ways to get through what had happened. Vicky once told me that the mind is like a very powerful machine, so powerful it can get you through anything. I turned this phrase over and over in my head that night and the dark cloud of misery started to shift. I thought I saw a way to get through this.
Chapter 2
The idea of boarding a train to anywhere else and starting over was as refreshing as lemonade on a hot summer day. I could begin a new life where no one knew me and what I had been through. No one would know I was a widower and tip-toe around me like I was some fragile porcelain doll. No one would pretend to care, offering programmed responses thrown out solely for my benefit. I could start over. I could buy a train ticket to anywhere and simply forget my wallet, my keys, and my wife. Well, I did just that. Except I forgot to forget my wallet. And my keys. And my wife. I forgot to forget everything. The only part of my plan I stuck to was boarding that train. And I just ended up at work again.
The train is best described as a packed sardine can filled with people I don’t care about who don’t care about me. Each car on the train is set up so it jams the largest number of people into the smallest area possible. Given my background in mathematics, I al
ready know this is the car's length times width times height divided by the approximate length times width times height of each person. Though whoever figured this out for the train company assumed either children or vertically challenged people were the only ones who rode the train. There is no personal space for the vast amount of strangers forced to temporarily coexist with each other.
Seats on the car are split between two levels. On the bottom level, there are two rows of blue padded benches separated by an aisle that runs the entire length of the car from door to door. The squeaky backs of each bench can be moved so that both seats of the bench face in the opposite direction. Families do this to set up pods, one bench facing forward, and one facing backwards, four seats facing each other. It’s the closest thing to isolation you can get in this cramped environment.
On the upper level of the car, there are two rows of single padded seats separated by empty space that look onto the lower level. These seats span only half the length of the car and, like the benches below, the seat backs can be moved to face in the opposite direction. The other half of the car's upper level is a row of single seats running along the wall of the car, perpendicular to the train's motion. Sitting in this section, you are forced to face the person sitting on the opposite side over the empty space in the middle.
To get to where I work at Numerical and Systems Data Analysis, a two-hour train commute from the suburbs to the city consumes a sixth of my life. In this time, I’ve discovered that I am an upper-level person. I like knowing that it's going to be me and only me sitting in a seat, instead of dealing with random people coming and going at different stops. I like consistency. You could probably even tell which day of the week it was just by which shirt I had on. I tried sitting on the bottom for a few weeks when I first took the job and had to deal with everything from obese women smashing me into the window to elderly men taking a nap on my shoulder. The bum that made me smell his tangled long hair and soiled clothes for the entire duration of the ride was the last straw. But in order to get the privacy of the upper level seats, you need to get to the train early. Even if you’re a few minutes late but lucky enough to find a spot in the second half of the upper level, you’re still stuck facing another person, having to acknowledge that there are other people in this world.
Chapter 3
Alone in that tin can for four hours a day, I used to read books on theoretical physics or discrete mathematics, anything I thought would keep me sharp for work. After the funeral, though, the time was used solely to think about the death of my wife and contemplate nothing but unanswerable questions. Why did this have to happen? I hated the person that took her life. Why did it have to happen on a night when I worked late and wasn't there? I hated myself. Why is it that the police and detectives have no leads in the gruesome murder of my best friend and companion? I hated everything.
In an attempt to pass the time with something other than the pain and misery of these questions, I picked up the hobby of watching people on the train. Out of what was once a random existence of people, patterns began to emerge as soon as I started paying attention. The habits I observed in individuals were so consistent, I found myself piecing together the back stories of their lives. The trick was to remember that these were people I didn't know and didn't care about, which proved to be more difficult than it seemed. Vicky was right. The mind is a very powerful machine and in my intensely lonely mind, these people became my friends.
The second week after the funeral, I was back at work and the train was filled with three of my best friends that I'd never met: Sheila, Neil, and Frank. Learning their real names through hours of listening to their conversations made our friendship much more personal than just calling them Obese Woman, Old Guy, and Mr. Nice. They were already in their seats before I even stepped foot in the tin box. I had been at home deciding between white or wheat toast and between orange juice or killing myself. My choice was obvious for anyone paying attention. I still had white bread crumbs on my shirt. I took my single seat facing forward on the second level. Directly in my line of vision of the bottom row sat my friends, Sheila behind Neil, and Frank behind both of them, another typical day.
Sheila sat by herself since she took up more than half of the space on the bench. She was an overweight woman in her early to mid-forties if I had to guess. Sections of her jet black hair had started to gray so she kept it pulled back in a tight bun to hide it. This trick might have worked for her friends on that level, but not for me. From where I sat, my bird’s eye view saw the gray hair spiral out from the top of her scalp into her bun like swirling flushed toilet water.
When I looked at her face I saw that at one point in her life she was the most popular cheerleader in high school. She used to be beautiful, but had eaten too much comfort food at too many events. Perhaps greasy roast beef at sad events, maybe the cake at happier ones. Her chubby, oversized body was the price she had paid for being so popular and attending so many events. The greasy complexion of her skin and the raised bumps of acne suggested she didn’t have the slightest idea that eating whatever she wanted would eventually catch up to her. The greasy complexion of the McDonalds bag in her hand suggested that she still didn't know. Every morning I watched her stuff her face with sausage biscuits, Egg McMuffins, and hash browns that came out of paper wrappings so soaked with grease, I saw what she was going to eat before it was even unwrapped.
Despite her weight, Sheila had attractive albeit morose green eyes. The few times they passed over me, seeing me only as part of the scenery, I detected a definite sadness in them. Lonely shards of emeralds, they desperately sought to be a part of someone or something. In the way a light bulb will get extremely bright just before burning out, her eyes were stuck at the cusp of this brightness, one step from being forever gone, and it reminded me of the reflection I saw in the mirror each morning.
Her partner in crime, Neil, sat in the bench right in front of her every day. He was what the Marlboro Man would look like fifteen years after missing the memo that cigarettes were no longer cool. The deep wrinkles in his just-as-deeply-tanned skin suggested years of working an outside job, probably construction, given his broad shoulders. Pure white hair matched the single diamond earring glinting in his left ear, one of his two attempts at staying young. The other was trying to impress Sheila. His rough, rumbling voice practically growled out every word, letting you know how tough he really was.
“Lookit what my boat did to my ring this weekend,” he blurted, shoving an oversized gaudy golden ring right under Sheila’s nose. “I was tyin' the damn thing to the dock and the knot slipped and scratched the fucking thing.” There was a formula to all of his stories. They all involved his boat and some expensive trinket, anything that deferred focus away from him being the only character in them. Last week I had heard about the terrible reception his new cell phone got, preventing him from notifying the Coast Guard of the school of sharks he swore he saw. I wondered if these grandiose stories were his way of accepting his own loneliness or his way of ignoring it.
“Aw! No way! That’s too bad. Can you have it fixed?” Sheila responded between mouthfuls of food, both of them ignoring the tiny piece of egg that had flown out of her mouth and stuck to the window between their seats.
“Fucking hope so. Earned this ring in college playing football. It’s not like I can just buy another one.”
“Yeah, and it’s safe to say you’re a little too old to get back into college and earn another one,” Frank chimed in with a grin from his row behind them. When Frank smiled, it looked like he was crying. The worry lines all over his face were dug-out trenches that lead to nowhere. Slumped shoulders and a permanent turned-down mouth hinted at a hard life filled with people walking all over him, both physically and mentally. The deep lines that crossed his face like a spider's web weren’t the only display of his stress. The remaining tufts of hair over his ears were a thin nest housing a shiny eagle’s egg waiting to be hatched. Despite all of his physical implications, he greeted every
one on the train as if they’d been through some life changing event together. I never understood how someone could constantly be so positive after a life of such obvious torment.
“Real funny, tough guy. You think I couldn’t still kick some of those college kids’ asses? I’ll let you know there’s quite a few I’d be sending home crying to their mammies,” Neil responded with a smirk on his face, glancing over at Sheila to make sure she heard. She did. She nodded in agreement, or maybe it was in encouragement, or maybe she was just chewing.
“I know, I know, Mr. State Champ. Just pulling your leg. Happy Monday, guys.” Frank shook his head from side to side, smiling at his own teasing. He always managed to nod and laugh in the right places.
“You too, Frank,” Sheila said, following it up by jamming half of a hash brown into her mouth. “I hope you had a good weekend. Do anything special?”
“Not so much. The boss needed me to come in on Saturday and part of Sunday. Our group fell a little behind and we needed to make it up.” Seeing the look of pity on Sheila’s shaking head, he continued, “Don't give me the speech. I know what you're going to say. I should have stood up for myself. It’s okay, though. He knows I’m a hard worker so I was the team’s best shot at getting caught up.”
“Make sure you clean your toenails while you’re bent over, grabbing your ankles there, buddy,” Neil offered up, explaining the situation quite accurately.
Similar banter happened like this every day, usually for the entire duration of the trip. What I didn’t actually hear, I filled in from my own imagination. I got the gist. Despite their own personal hardships they were all in good spirits for each other. Neil knew that Sheila needed to listen to someone, so he shared his stories with her. Sheila knew that Neil wanted to stay young and impress anyone through all of his adventurous stories, so she listened and was impressed by him. Frank knew that both of them needed a friendly greeting or a joke and they both knew Frank needed someone to pay attention to him. What they had, their train friendship was good for them. It worked. It was their everyday therapy for dealing with the everyday problems in their lives outside of the train.
