Train Thoughts

by Jay Sigler

  Chapter 4

  About halfway through my commute to work we picked up more of my friends. They were actually two friends for the price of one, “The Happy Couple.” Gina and Rob. They were my closest friends, not only because they sat right in front of me, but also because I overheard all of their whispered conversations. Hearing these secret conversations not meant to be shared with others made it a much more personal friendship. There were no rings on either of their hands, but I assumed they’d been romantically together for quite a while by the way they kissed after getting off the train. It wasn't the long, passionate kiss of a new love, but more a comfortable, familiar peck. Gina would automatically extend up on her toes to meet Rob’s hunched-over looming face so that both lips hit their mark without any hesitation or thought.

  Rob was tall and skinny with narrow black-framed glasses that did nothing to remove attention from his receding hairline. The square lenses magnified eyes that were too far apart, resembling a bug’s when you faced him. He always had a smug grin on his face that told everyone he knew he was better than them. He interacted with Gina like he tolerated her, as opposed to listening to anything she said. He always wore a suit with black Converse sneakers. I wasn't sure if they were for walking through the muddy streets in the morning or his personal statement of how hip and cool he was. If given the chance to actually meet him in real life, I would most likely just ignore it. I only considered this cocky man my train friend because of his lovely companion, Gina.

  Gina, by contrast, was very short with red hair twisting down to her shoulders. The thick and tight curls reminded me of the type of pasta Vicky used to cook for dinner. Gina's shocking green eyes reminded me of two shots of Apple Pucker balanced on cheeks dotted lightly with freckles, reminiscent of a Raggedy Ann doll. At this time of year, her outfit was covered by a cream-colored jacked pulled tight, failing to hide the curves that made me understand what Rob saw in her. Despite her man being a smug prick, she obviously wore the pants in the relationship.

  “Rob, did you remember to empty the dishwasher last night?” she asked from behind accusing eyes on the day they unknowingly became my friends. They both sat on the upper level directly in front of me, facing each other, for a daily date.

  “Yeah, Gina, I did,” he said with an eye roll and a slightly skewed nod backwards that really meant, “Here we go again.”

  “Well, if it was empty, why did you leave your dishes in the sink, instead of putting them in the dishwasher?” she whispered through an indoor voice that came complete with individually accented words. That made her question so much more important.

  “Because I was looking for ways to piss you off, I guess.” He looked around from between slumped shoulders to see if anyone else noticed him getting a scolding and could share in his misery. “That’s what I do. I sit around thinking, ‘You know, Rob, what would piss Gina off? You should do that’, and then I do it.”

  “You’re such an asshole. Seriously.”

  I enjoyed these daily exchanges of words, because I used to be Rob experiencing this humiliation. I would get in trouble for letting the garbage bag get so full it would tear. It seemed like Vicky would wait until we were in front of a large group of people before playfully informing me how terrible I was. It used to drive me nuts, being put on the spot like that. I would play along, acting like my life was so miserable, but I really wasn't miserable and neither was Rob. Given the choice of being yelled at by the person I loved or sitting alone at night dealing with the desolate pit my existence had become, I would never do the fucking dishes again.

  Chapter 5

  I’ve worked even more since Vicky died. Preoccupation with my job is what kept the rubber band of my sanity stretched tight around my head, preventing it from slipping higher and tighter, eventually leaving forever in a quick snap. I worked around eighty-five hours a week crunching numbers as a Numbers Analyst, the logic being that if I thought about numbers I couldn't think about people, alive or dead. Surrounded by numbers, I was never alone. And numbers don’t die.

  My job at the lab where I work basically boils down to figuring out what “X” is in a given equation. The equations themselves usually look like a baby took a mouthful of alphabet soup and vomited it onto a piece of paper. They are handed down to us from whoever is the next rung higher on the corporate ladder. I can only assume this is my boss, Mr. Stark, not that I ever see him. My work usually presents itself in some form of email or online spreadsheet that I have to fill out. When I first started in this business so many years ago, we used the obsolete tool called paper. Once or twice a year, I am graced with an in-person appearance of Mr. Stark to get my review, but other than that, he’s just a first and last name in my inbox. For further separation, the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the higher floor in the building you get to reside on, so there is never any reason to come down to our floor. Another example of someone I don’t know and don’t care about.

  In addition to the mysterious management system here at work, the reasons the equations need to be solved were never quite explained. Our only instruction is to figure out X. Sure, I knew Boltzman's Constant was used heavily in thermodynamics, entropy was the measure of disorder in a closed system, and energy was measured in joules, but what the result was to be applied to, I never knew. I could be feeding the hungry or balancing the national debt. I could also be creating bombs or figuring out the maximum price to sell DVDs at Wal-Mart. The end result – how to cure cancer. But the reason I like the job is because each equation has a definitive answer. You are given Y and told to figure out X. There are mathematical rules based on logic and if you followed them precisely, you are given a result. It was pretty much the only thing that still made sense in my life.

  Like last week, I planned to bury myself in the numbers, to again hide in my office, lock the door, and appear too busy playing catch-up to be bothered. I was wrong.

  “Do you want to eat lunch outside with me today? Get some fresh air and take your mind off of things?” Julie asked. I could tell her sympathy from two weeks ago had continued on to the workplace. “I just can’t believe you’re back so soon after…..you know…so soon. It’s only been like a few weeks.”

  Julie was most guys’ dream, but her fiancé’s reality, tall and blonde with a body hitting all the right numbers. Both gorgeous and smart to boot, she was constantly reading classic literature and pursuing a psychology degree via night classes at the local university. All this in addition to figuring out X. She was my closest acquaintance at work and I'm not sure why. When we first met, I thought she was just a nice person who wanted to include everyone she could in her life. But over the past five or six years, we’ve become pretty close as far as work associates go, sharing the latest gossip about who was doing whom or thinking about quitting.

  I politely shook my head no and told her I was too busy for lunch.

  “You know, according to Jung, your energy well is dry. Your psyche is telling you to sit up and start paying attention to something in your life.”

  I told her it wasn't that, I was just really busy, but knowing a slew of remarks were about to be thrown at me like darts at a dart board anyway, I pretended to catch each one with my fingers so I could count them.

  “We’re just so worried about you.”

  Thumb pierced.

  “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

  Now the pointer.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Pinky stuck.

  “You shouldn’t be back at work so soon.”

  No need for rings.

  I remained silent while I shook my head no. The only thing I had to say was said as I waved goodbye to her back with my last remaining finger.

  Chapter 6

  That night, I arrived back at the house that used to be my home and ignored all the messages that were blinking at me on the answering machine. Unless there were payphones in the afterlife, I had nothing to say to anyone. I threw a frozen dinner into
the microwave without caring what variety of processed shit I would soon be eating. For the next four minutes of my life, I was reminded of Vicky’s death in the absence of her daily chatter. I tried to fill the space by telling her how my day was.

  “I went to work today and Julie came to my office again. We had to figure out the volume of a spherical cone as applied not only in Cartesian coordinates, but also in radius and degrees. The main crux was that the cone was expanding and contracting as a function of time.”

  The only response I got was the microwave beeping to me that its work was done. I took my burnt meal out of the microwave, barely feeling the tips of my fingers blistering from the cardboard. As I ate, I noticed the house was a lot darker. I had only been using lights that I absolutely needed on; the fewer reminders that at one point I had a happy life filled with joy and love, the better.

  After dinner, there was not much to do but watch two-dimensional images flicker their life lessons at me, perfectly solved scenarios occasionally interrupted by a laugh track. Like pity, the laugh track was only another programmed response I had to deal with - it didn’t even matter if the joke was funny or not. It’s amazing the shit people do just because they are told. Vicky and I used to mock these laughing drones by coming up with our own varieties of laughs and using them for the rest of the show. It was one of the many foolish games we played to amuse ourselves. I remember she came up with one laugh that can only be described as a guffaw. The high-pitched, “Heeeee Haaaaaw Heeeeee Haaaaaaw” she belted out during an episode of Three’s Company was so loud and unexpected that I had tears running down my face from laughing so hard. It sounded like a cross between a chipmunk and a donkey and true to our game, she had to use that laugh the remainder of the show. Each instance sent both of us rolling on the floor, stomachs clenched from laughing so hard. Now I watched television in silence, my stomach clenched a different way, laughter the furthest thing on my mind.

  After the fiftieth time going through all 178 channels and zero helpful lessons, I shut off the TV. The stillness that followed reminded me of how alone I really was. I tucked a cushion up into the crook of my armpit and just sat there in a trance. The grandfather clock given to us as a wedding gift finally interrupted the moment I was trapped in and began chiming that it was 10:00 pm. That was the time of night when Vicky would have fallen asleep next to me on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. I could almost feel the weight of her head pressed against my chest as I supported her; insistent upon lying there no matter how many times I shifted. I glanced down, half expecting to see her head, expecting to smell the vanilla extract from the shampoo she used. All I saw was my cushion; there was no one for me to support. I realized that every night would be like this until the inevitable visit from Death. I skimmed the blinking messages to see if I had missed a call from him. No such luck.

  Tired of sitting on the couch, I moved to the study and pulled out the notebook. The notebook was intended to hold my handwritten thoughts and feelings, suggested into existence by a certain shrink-in-training on the day of the funeral. Julie had learned in her classes that writing down one’s feelings were a therapeutic way to help deal with the pain of a lost loved one. A subconscious release of my emotions would help return me back to normal as quickly as possible, whatever that meant. Normal for me was having a living, breathing wife. But it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, so I opened up the notebook to the first page and saw that she had already written in it.

  “Always remember, do not waste the precious life you are given.”

  As a response I wrote, “How about, don’t waste the precious paper in this notebook.” and then flipped to the next page, where I began a list of ways to off myself in case I forgot how when the time came.

  1. Hang yourself from the shower curtain rod with an electrical cord.

  2. Take a bubble bath with a hair dryer.

  3. Jump off a building while on fire (in case the fall doesn't do it).

  4. Crash your car into a cement wall.

  I wrote a few more suggestions, but realized these suicide scenes bored me and promised myself that if I ever did go through with it, I would not use something from this list. I would be spontaneous. Then I went to bed.

  Chapter 7

  Repetition breeds habit breeds routine. This routine became my therapy. As long as my day-to-day life happened in little packets of time, I dealt with Vicky’s death at the appropriate time in the schedule, instead of the full grieving process it probably deserved to be. Wake up, eat breakfast, shower, catch train to work, work, catch train home, eat dinner, watch TV, mourn Vicky, write in notebook, go to sleep, repeat. I concentrated only on getting from one step to the next. If even one detail was out of place, my mind fell off track and I fell apart.

  I realized my need to adhere strictly to this schedule last week when I attempted to get from “catch train to work” to “work” and Sheila wasn’t on the train. This was my time to visit with my train friends. I frantically looked around but couldn't find her. I became very anxious and the world started closing in on me. Everything was not in its right place. I selfishly thought that she had left me; another person gone from my life. Beads of sweat turned into drops and ran down my face. My stomach tightened into a hard ball and I felt the fist that would soon start squeezing it. My breaths became shallow and rapid; I couldn’t get enough air.

  “Morning, Frank,” Neil said, settling in to his seat. “How you feeling today?”

  “Hey, Neil, I'm doing alright. Much better than Sheila, to say the least,” Frank replied over the empty bench between them.

  “Oh, yeah? What's the deal with her? Where is she, anyways?”

  “Well, she emailed me Friday night about something she ate. Said her stomach had been messed up all day. Asked if I had any Tums or anything I could drop by.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot you guys live down the street from each other or somethin', right?”

  “Across the street, yeah. Anyway, I didn't have anything in the house, but offered to go to the store and pick something up,” Frank said, as Neil nodded along with the story.

  Frank continued, “She didn't want anything, so I told her I hoped she felt better. She called me last night to say she'd be taking the day off work, in case we were looking for her.”

  “Ah, poor gal. Hope she feels better soon. Looks like it's boys ride in, so why don'tcha move on up here. You're not going to believe the shit that happened on my boat this weekend. I swear to god, I saw a shark fin in the water...”

  Frank moved up a row into Sheila's regular seat and Neil continued on with his story. The instant Frank told Neil that Sheila was out sick, the pressure lifted from my chest and my breathing returned to normal.

  I spent the rest of the ride analyzing what had just happened and my reaction to it. Julie would have called it transference, the redirection of internal feelings about someone to a completely different person. She had warned me something like this might happen. I technically didn’t even know these people and almost flipped out because one of them took a sick day. I chalked the whole thing up to the tired overemotional state of my mind. During the last few months that I had existed only in my therapeutic schedule, I had exchanged sleeping for working non-stop, crunching number after number, trying to save the world or make plastic bottle caps for water. The only human contact I had was with my train friends. Like a very powerful machine that overheats from running non-stop for too long, my mind had just overcompensated for my loss of Vicky, making me feel more attached to these people than I really was. I probably just needed to sleep.

  But sleep was difficult since Vicky had died. I was afraid to lie down and drift off because of the dreams that would hammer me. The most twisted and disturbing nightmares of my entire life. The first one occurred right after Vicky’s funeral.

  I was alone in a desert, sitting on top of a hill made completely out of sand. The landscape in every direction was dried out clay; broken chunks of it creating gaping holes in sections of the sur
face like dried human skin peeled back from a wound. The bottom of a hot pulsating sun had just kissed the flat horizon; foreplay before it actually disappeared into it. This embrace cast a strange glow over everything the remaining rays touched, turning it all into gold for a moment.

  I was naked except for shorts, with a wooden staff in my right hand and a rusty six shooter gun in my left. I tried standing up on top of the sand mound, but kept sinking as the sand shifted, sucking me down. The sand and I finally reached a compromise with my legs buried almost up to my knees but still standing. From this height, I saw a thick black shadow begin to coat the earth like molasses as the sun completed its penetration into the earth.

  During the final moments of the golden light, an enormous rat burrowed up from a peeled scab in the ground and ran towards me, keeping just ahead of the darkness covering the land. The rat was the size of a small chihuahua dog and had black fur matted down with either grease or dried blood. It bound towards me like a jackrabbit, its two back legs pushing its whole body forward, followed by its two front legs pulling its body. Then I saw that it was blind. Where its eyes should have been, there was nothing but dark gray scarred skin over the sockets. An unnaturally long and deformed tongue hung out of the front of its mouth between rows of sharp, pointy teeth as it panted. The bulbous, bumpy tongue touched the ground, slightly dragged under its legs from the forward motion.