A Miniature Encounter

Andrew adjusted his crossed arms, as if he were a cardboard box just emptied of its contents and settling into a new cube. He was here now, on the Amtrak, but the sensation of lateness kept apace with the moving car. He inched his blue suit-jacket cuffs over his wrists and glanced quickly around. There were two people across the aisle in separate benches behind him, and one more in front. He readjusted his arms into another box.

For a few seconds, Andrew closed his eyes. He was self conscious, and didn’t like to think of how he looked with his eyes closed. Like a man in a suit on the train, neck straight and stoic, who thought he was in a movie. Bradley Cooper would do that. It didn’t matter that nobody was paying any attention to him; he still hated himself for it. He turned and looked out the window to watch a droning and endless stream of transected deciduous plots.

Three hours earlier, Ali had woken up with a vengeance for the sunlight and the general notion of passing through the front door. He announced he had a “tummy hurt,” which Andrew knew was all theater given the bright fervor he used to say it. Yes, Andrew had seen enough tummy-hurt nights to know that when his son was sick, his chestnut hair matted across his forehead and his neck craned forward on the pillow. Andrew himself would hurt, too, with a quiet apprehension. This morning, Ali was already sitting up awake and indignant when Andrew came into his small yellow bedroom. The little bastard, he couldn’t help but think, seeing his own stubbornness in Ali’s shoulders. But he also saw Ali’s mother’s face, in the ability to stick an ice pick anywhere in the ground and hold out a fight. I love my kid, Andrew thought that morning, and what a bastard.

It was a war over breakfast, when Ali refused to eat the scrambled eggs and sunny (sun-butter) toast – which had been eaten every day through yesterday – and finally compromised over cheerios (it wasn’t Kellogs). Then, running back from the open kitchen into his room, he wouldn’t get dressed in anything that wasn’t the Rex shirt, with the eponymous Tyrannosaurus Rex on it. Ali pulled every item of clothes out of his small suitcase onto the floor. It wasn’t there, which Andrew already knew. Begrudgingly, he accepted the t-shirt that had been left out the night before with a pout. When the backpack was finally on and they were steps from the door, he announced with a scream that he had lost Bluie. 

“What? Louie?” asked Andrew.

“It’s Bluie! How could you not know!” replied Ali, with another scream.

Andrew looked back bewildered, luggage in one hand and slack keys in the other. It was then that Ali started to cry.

“He’s from the chicken nuggets,” Ali got out finally, between whimpers.

He meant McDonalds, Andrew immediately knew, and he bristled. For a quarter of a second an ugly light flashed across his nerve endings, along with the impulse to yell. Ali wouldn’t be budged. They removed the backpack and took a thorough look inside before putting everything back in, and then did the same again with the luggage. 

“You’ve only just got him, Al. You’re being incredibly difficult,” reasoned Andrew, not without gruffness. “There is no way you need this toy for school.” To this, Ali cried louder.

They found Bluie curiously standing on Andrew’s bedside table on a last-ditch run through the apartment. From the doorway, Andrew locked eyes with this tiny plastic Pegasus standing upright on four legs – how had it gotten there? But Ali was pacified after that. He made hopping noises to himself in the backseat while Andrew swallowed verbal bile against the mounting rush-hour. It was ridiculous to blame Bluie for their late start, Andrew told to himself – and yet he would have gladly thrown the small Pegasus out the window. Ali’s tears were dry by the time they rushed from the car to the classroom nearly 25 minutes late. “Remember this,” Andrew told him, patting the suitcase, and then “I love you,” finding himself kneeling to his son’s level with a sudden and innate urgency. Ali gave him a clumsy peck on the cheek before walking into the classroom, already in his own world. Andrew had stayed just long enough to watch him find his place with the other children on the rug.

It was always painstaking, so many moments, until you realize you’ve reached the last one, thought Andrew now; and he sat bunched up by the window and nearly shook with the thought of it.

It was no matter that Andrew almost missed his train and had to jog pitifully from the parking lot to the station; he had made it, and could let the tension peel off by the afternoon. Slowly, he unfolded himself and reached to unzip the fabric briefcase at his feet. The notes, prepped late the night before, would be in the soft inner pocket. Mentally lining up slides that still needed to be fleshed out, he thumbed through absently several times before realizing there was only a planner and an empty notepad. He pulled the notepad out and leafed through. No words. Heat crept up his neck. Quickly, he hefted out his laptop, which was dead. His hands shot down for the charger, and searched one corner, then the other – it must be here – but how – 

“Good morning, sir. Where to?” The train conductor stood in the aisle, and Andrew held up his phone to scan his ticket. 

“New York,” he said.

The car jostled as the conductor moved to the next person, a mousy-haired woman four rows ahead. It was such a serene day for everyone else, Andrew thought grimly as he watched the idyllic off-peak Tuesday scene. Beneath them, the wheels churned with a regularity akin to silence. 

Andrew continued to rummage, losing methodicalness to a frantic madness, until he began to digest the apparent truth that neither the laptop charger, nor the notes, were in his bag. He made one more pass and his fingers hit a small hard object – had his charger morphed in shape? – and pulled it out, coming face to face with blue eyes that looked sharply out from a blue winged horse. 

Quickly, he moved from horror to rage; the peace in the car was maddening. Without understanding his intent, he got up sharply from his seat, walked to the bathroom at the back of the car, let the sliding door slam behind him, and threw the little blue Pegasus into the hole designated for trash with outsized force. 

He felt better already. The box swayed and he knocked gently against the stall door. Andrew almost never used the bathrooms on the train; this one, he found, was squalid and claustrophobic under a green tint. He relieved himself and laughed shakily at his loss of control. Ali had loved the toy this morning, but he’d gotten it mere days ago, and it would be forgotten soon, along with the other aphorisms Ali liked to hold over his head at the end of the week – such as “Mommy takes me to McDonalds.” Andrew couldn’t even blame the kid. He would go back to his seat, refresh his memory on his prior notes, and text Mark to bring in a charger when they met. It was almost laughable now, the outburst. Of course everything would be fine.

Settling back in his seat, he pulled out a fresh new piece of yellow lined paper, then his prized ballpoint pen.

The blue pegasus was standing on his armrest, inches from him.

“Howdy, there.”

Andrew’s knees bumped up against the desk tray, which he had pulled out, and struck so loudly that the woman ahead turned back to look at him.

“You sure are jumpy for someone who just threw me in the trash,” said the horse.

Andrew looked around the car wildly. The woman was still looking back at him. “Do you hear…?” he asked, trailing off, to everyone and no one in particular in the car. Was anyone else seeing this? The woman turned back around. It must be the sleep loss, he thought; and I’m going mad, there’s nothing else – 

“Are you thinking about how you haven’t done shrooms since college?” asked the pegasus.

Andrew whipped his head back, eyes wide. After a few seconds, he craned towards the horse and whispered “how do you know that?” 

The pegasus had a blunt voice, and an implacable accent. “You talk about it in your sleep. You miss your buddies Cole and Aiden.” 

Andrew could only stare back.

“You should reach out to them. It’s been a while. No harm in showing a little vulnerability. It’s very in these days, sensitive masculinity.”

Andrew heard his words as he said them, and with each one became more convinced of his insanity. “Can anyone else hear you?”

“Pfft. I have no idea! Can anyone hear you? I am just myself – just as you are just yourself. What do any of us know?”

In another whisper: “What do you want from me?”

“Man, this is not a Nicholas Cage movie! Listen, I am just a small horse with wings. I don’t know what I want. It’s a good question.” The horse was shifting between its legs comfortably, moving its mane as it spoke. “You can call me Bluie.”

“Mmm,” Andrew nodded, thin-lipped. 

“Well, pleasure to meet you, Dada. That’s your name, right?”

Andrew cleared his throat. “Andrew, is my name. My son, he calls me that. Dada, as you said.”

Despite the horse’s pin-sized face, Andrew could make out a smirk. “Yeah I knew that, I’m just messing. I heard it from the kid. He’s a good kid. Really kind, funny.”

“I wonder,” said Andrew, knitting his eyebrows, “do you have anything to do with my things disappearing? I had notes on a few pieces of yellow paper, and my computer charger. I swore I’d packed both this morning.” 

“Does it look like I can pick those things up?” Blue replied. “Very accusatory, Andy. You’re the one that got on a train today, packed all those suitcases.”

Andrew flushed deeply. “It’s an important day at work, unfortunately,” he mumbled, looking down.

“What’s going on, then?”

Oh what use was it, talking to this plastic creature from a Happy Meal fabricated out of what was seeming more and more to be a mental breakdown. Andrew could conjure the exact vision of sticklike blue limbs clasped within Ali’s fingers just moments before he walked into his classroom. “There’s no way,” he found himself muttering incoherently.

“Really, I’d love to know. I hear a lot about this thing called work. You could be a painter – maybe a firefighter. Baseball player?”

Andrew smiled at the innocence, only tinged with irony. It wasn’t as if he could verbalize his work; that specific task was reserved for conversations between two humans where the words themselves belie a subtext of: we are on the same page about the type of language we use, and probably share the same tax bracket; or, let’s cut to the chase and pop open the beer bottles, shall we? He could only imagine writing it: IT project coordinator. Which is an empty word, so he could instead just write: Emails. Writing emails and responding to emails. Or: smoothing things out for external companies that want to implement the internal company’s (e.g. his) IT infrastructure. They were meeting today with a leading rideshare app that might opt in. He was presenting. It meant everything and nothing, and his computer was dead, and he had no charger, and no notes. And he was talking to a toy horse. 

“Hello? Earth to Andrew?”

“It’s only what you’ve made up, just a toy,” said Andrew to himself, shutting and then opening his eyes and patting at the seatback in front of him to make sure it was still there.

“My name’s Bluie,” said the horse dryly.

“Bluie.” Andrew shook his head, blinked hard again, and then took another long look into the tiny and expressive eyes before him. His jaw and eyebrows finally slackened with fatigue. “Alright,” he said finally, “I’m sorry.”

“All good. It’s gotta be a shock. You expect to leave the joint with a burger, and now you have a talking horse. Though, now that you mention it, it’s a good allegory for the place. That meat blend is not just cow.” Andrew couldn’t help but look back amused. “You seem like a steakhouse guy. The mystery meat is a little too mysterious, eh?”

“Hardly,” Andrew said, quietly but feeling the need to refute this image. “I ate enough as a child to know what it is. But why not serve Ali something better, when I can afford it?”

“Apple fell damn far from the tree in that case. The kid would live there if he could.”

“He really does like it,” Andrew said with an expression equal parts humored and pained. “My wife – my ex-wife,” he continued, “she takes him sometimes. Or, well, I don’t even know. He says that she does.” 

Was the point of this illusion to therapize himself, Andrew wondered? He was gliding down that slippery slope of processing his life’s unraveling (the slope being slippery from the number of trips already made), and he preferred to not make another right now. He heard the horse’s voice continuing in his left ear. “A glass of scotch to you, my friend. You’ve really lived it. Oh, come on buttercup, you’ll get through.”

The roaring was coming, the same one that came anytime he allowed himself to think about the last year, which he had to do all at once and never in pieces – getting served by their dog-walker – a 30/70 custody split – leaving the home; buying a new home, that wasn’t really yet a home, because homes need time and people, and neither could be maintained if he had to commute to the city Wednesdays through Fridays because two remote days at work was “the limit,” according to his boss; and particularly if weekends-at-Dad’s rotated bi-weekly, meaning that there never was and never would be enough time. Bluie’s voice cut through static – 

“Traveling the Eastern seaboard. Man! Never in my wildest dreams. Did you say this was New York bound? How much do you miss it? Pardon, you talk a ton in your sleep.”

“It’s not a vacation,” said Andrew. He winced at his hard tone, but kept going. “I really do have to get working now. I’ve wasted all this time, just talking to myself.”

No, thinking about the present state was not a topic he could handle. Andrew felt something terribly unsavory building up, a terrible dark green bitterness intruding on this one respite in life where no one needed anything from him, least of all him from himself. In truth, he resented the whole thing. He resented the construct of the train trip itself, the time it took, and most of all the fact that it was relieving. On that, Bluie was right. It was oftentimes the most pleasant time of the month, and it’s this that confirmed he really was banished from both dreams, both the Hartford and the New York homes. If Julia hadn’t taken the faculty position as they were falling out of love, he wouldn’t have to split his life in two. Two cities, two lives. He couldn’t let go of this truth, rolling it around like a desiccated marble in his mind. All the while he carried himself like a shell, for there was no one to speak to, and no time. When was the last time someone had made him really smile? It had probably been this blasted horse, with his bombastic way of speaking, inserting himself dramatically into the smarting pain of a life Andrew had created.

“In that case, I’d best make like a horse and get on my way.”

Hearing this, Andrew looked up. “What?”

“I totally get travel, man. You don’t owe anybody nothing here. Life isn’t gonna hit you till you step off this train,” said Bluie. “And thank god for that. But this is your train car purgatory. I’ve got places to see! My own life to ruin.”

Andrew shook his head vehemently, sitting upright. As much as he longed for the quiet, he felt inexplicably tethered to the pegasus now. “But that’s not what I really meant to convey about journeys, about life, and I wouldn’t want – Bluie?”

But as he spoke, Bluie was already dashing up the chair, leaping to the very top of the window that was cracked open to let the spring air stream in. The train was slowing as it neared the stop for Mystic, Connecticut beside a lush green roadside. Andrew watched in horror as the little blue horse teetered on the thin metal band, reading himself to launch into the airstream. “Bluie, don’t – “ he urged.

When Bluie tipped off, it took Andrew three seconds at most. He looked around the car in a blur, then stood, clambering onto the seat. “Oh, what the hell,” he said to himself, not quietly. And then, kneeling on the padded leather seats, he reached towards the emergency window exit and yanked down to pull himself out, off to pursue the tail of blue into the roadside forest.