There is, obviously, only one surefire, practical way to avoid finding out, too late, that the rules do apply, and that would be to jump from this train before I fall asleep and begin to dream. I’ve survived longer drops. Have the scars to prove it.
I also know that a potential crack-up and the temptation to bail have approximately nothing to do with each other.
I am on my way — on something called the Coast Starlight — to Portland, where I will switch to a line that heads northeast. This train’s name is slightly misleading, as it actually left the coast somewhere around San Luis Obispo. From Sacramento we traveled up the center of California, in the dark, though I’m pretty sure I caught the briefest glimpse of Shasta’s sun-blasted peak at daybreak.
If I do decide to jump, it would be good if a horse (a real one) were there, galloping alongside. Maybe a blue-eyed paint pony, brown with splashes of white to match his legs. I would leap into the saddle, exactly as if I knew how to do that, and we would ride off into the hills, to a place where there is no past, no lurking future. This train gives me far too much time, to remember and try to process. Everything. All there is or ever was.
The freshest hell has been mostly self-inflicted, sure, but that really is, at this point, beside the point. Because all that matters right now is I am heading back (praying at the very least for a daylong breakdown) to the place where everything I’ve buried all these years waits, resurrected and suspended in the distance; a collectible set of decapitated, snake-haired Gorgon’s heads, hung on my mother’s clothesline to dry.
Jesus. Settle the fuck down.
• • •
After the border we carry on through the western half of Oregon, stopping midmorning at Klamath Falls. I got off another train here, a dozen years ago, and the next morning stood between my mom and dad at Crater Lake, shivering and looking down from the snowy overlook at each other’s wavering reflections, dropping pebbles into the arctic-blue water. My folks had driven from Montana, and I had come from California, presumably to celebrate my birthday. I don’t know if “neutral ground” applied but think there could possibly be some situational equivalent — if we could even have named the situation — but that would have been asking a lot. In any event, turning thirty had freaked me out, partially because it felt so old, but mostly because I don’t suppose I’d ever expected to make it that far. I suspect my parents had been equally astonished and came at least partially to prove to themselves that the birthday girl was no imposter. And because they loved her. Me. That was real.
When they took me back to the train station the next day, my dad helped me with my bag, even though it was small, and there was hardly anything in it.
He said, “Do you ever think about—?”
“Sometimes. Really, Dad. I will. I still know how to get there. Don’t worry.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “I won’t.” It would never occur to him I didn’t mean it, and I have always envied that kind of trust. And I did mean it, for someday, and someday comes whether or not it suits all your well-laid plans, or the ones that were not laid (or plans) at all.
There had been no fighting when I left home, no falling-out — I simply went away. Or not simply so much as quietly, as there hadn’t really been anything simple about it. In almost twenty-five years we have met only that once, though contact has grown more frequent, and easier, as we have finally come to our own terms, I suppose, with all the freight of family and love and losing and not exactly telling the truth, to ourselves or to each other. It has become bearable, but only in retrospect. No clear delineation in the arc of time’s passing, just the realization that we have all, somehow, survived (three out of four, anyway, so I guess “all” really means the ones we know for sure are still standing). For the standing ones, there has been life. Lives. More than one each, I reckon. For me? For sure.
In Portland, I find the right track in the huge old station, but no train. I wander the neighborhood for a while, find myself at the river, and am happy, for this moment, to be there. It is always good to be near water, and I already feel the dull ache of missing the ocean. Of all the mind- and body-altering substances I dipped myself into in San Francisco, the ocean, as it turns out, finally proved the most addictive.
I get back to the station to find the train there, get on and claim a seat. I watch as more passengers arrive on the platform below, with their duffel bags and backpacks, rolling suitcases large enough to contain one large body or maybe two small ones. A dark-haired young woman stands by silently, carrying a black, busting-at-the-seams knapsack, a banjo case tucked awkwardly under her arm, a small metal box, and a white plastic bag with a red drawstring. A few minutes later she is standing in the aisle, asking if the empty seat next to me is taken. She turns out to be more girl than woman; sixteen, seventeen at the most. Her eyes are very blue — a cobalt almost black — and reflect more light than seems possible considering how dark they are. She’s pretty, but not the traffic-stopping kind, not as skinny and flat-chested as she is, in a gray hoodie, baggy camo pants, self-administered (it looks like) haircut, a scattering of piercings, and no makeup save for a smudge of black liner under her eyes. She reminds me of someone I know but can’t place — probably one of the young, just-coming-out lesbians at the bar.
“Nope,” I say. “It’s all yours.” I tuck my feet under me as far as I can, and pull down the armrest.
She shoots me a timid smile and thanks me. Slides the banjo case and the knapsack into the overhead rack, creeps into her seat, and sets her box and the plastic bag on the floor. After a minute, she picks up the box and holds it in her lap, drawing little X’s across the top with her finger, pressing down the corners with her thumbs. She places it carefully on the floor again, and fidgets it between her feet like a kid OD’d on cotton candy. Finally, she pushes it under the seat with her heels, apparently aiming to trap it there.
As the train pulls out of the station, heads across and then up the Columbia, she holds herself tight and still, arms locked to her sides and hands in her lap, as if she is sitting at a school desk, having been scolded once already for accidentally elbowing the teacher as he passed by. I lean away from the armrest and toward the window, hoping she’ll eventually relax, or it is going to be a very long trip to wherever she’s going. I wait a little while and then ask where that is.
She seems surprised to hear a voice, and for a second appears not to know where it’s coming from. She peeks over her shoulder before she answers. “North Dakota?” she says.
I glance behind us too, but don’t notice anything suspicious. “Is someone following you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re probably going to want to get comfortable, then. It’s a long way to North Dakota. And I don’t bite. I bet none of these folks do.”
The girl cocks her head, as if she is trying to determine whether or not the part about biting is actually true. Evidently she decides it is. “That’s a relief,” she says.
And she does seem to relax then, reaching into her bag for a scratched-up silver CD player and a pair of headphones that look like the cord has been delicately gnawed upon. She paws through a small collection of uncased CDs, settling finally on Elton John’s Greatest Hits. I am a little bit surprised, having expected something more along the lines of Nirvana, or Alice in Chains.
As she listens to the music, she begins to move all ten of her fingers as if plucking the strings of a phantom instrument. Not wanting to appear nosy, I turn to look at the vast, sage-green, white-capped river as it runs through the gorge and toward the sea.
Ready or not; the words appear vaguely neon tinted across my brain. I try to leave them alone, to not worry them like I would a loose tooth when I was little, until all that remained was a raw, gaping hole, and the prospect of a dime under my pillow to alleviate any residual emptiness. I know if I follow those words — ready or not — to Montana, ghosts will appear, rising up out of the goddamn prairie like those crazy little funnels of dust. A tornado: maybe that’s the answer to too damn many people packed into a too-small emotional space. Nothing, nobody really goes away — not once they’ve infiltrated your life. No matter how many brain cells you drench in rocket fuel and hold your little lit Zippo to.