Stuck on a Train Ride

 He did this to me, that crooked old man. Spat between his raggedy crowns and fillings, that thought so easily transplanted, and once manifest bore this chaos unbridled. I’m sure of it. “Don’t forget,” he began empirically, powerfully enough to nearly mute the rocking of his lawn chair, “that as I see it, these past 60 years of mine have passed in what feels like…,” and at this point he squinted confusedly, wrapping and knitting his gray brows in surveillance of an estimation, “six months.” Goosebumps appeared all over and the skeletal forefinger of the reaper crept around his shoulder and pointed imposingly past the elder’s unconvincing smile and into my more nervously genial one. The phantom chill knocked the door on every follicle, waking my senses and causing my scalp to tighten. Somehow the geezer hadn’t noticed Death’s incumbent presence—or maybe he had—and instead took observation of me, “Oh don’t worry now, that’s just my silly old fault Jack.” Chains and all, the specter left with my nervous blink and so too the tension with an ever more nervous laugh.

Grandpa, as mysterious and clumsily abrasive as you are, sometimes I wish my mother had warned me about you; although among everything else she could’ve said this most likely would be of the least importance. Proper warnings about psychedelics, MDMA, marijuana, terribly cheap gas station cigars and potentially cheaper, plastic bottled, 100 proof corn vodka would’ve done better. Mixing those substances with a thin lanky frame, semi-paranoid disposition, cracked square frames, and a passion for literature—enough to attempt a Master’s degree—could’ve been avoided altogether. Then how much warmer would June wind feel? or summer grass? probably ten thousand times better. Hell, at that rate one could attempt to enter the dating field with more grace. Ditch the eight month dull, mind-rotting slog at a barely functioning rehabilitation program, which probably only worked because of how terribly I wanted out and never to return. Discard the awkward conversations on first dates, covering needle holes with long sleeves, or even, God forbid, the newfound worry-ridden air permeating within every one of my past acquaintances who kept a mental ledger. Mom you could’ve, probably would’ve, kept my feet steady along this solemn march. 

Of my mother’s personality, I could only responsibly glean two facts among the overscrupulous mountain of semi-senile blabber built in my spent youth under the old man. Before the nurses wiped his ass, I did, and some nights while sunken into two threadbare leather armchairs and blankly watching a Seinfeld rerun, we pecked at our food and he’d reminisce about her. Now often the conversation, punctuated with chewing and hacking of a lung, was also a rerun of an aforementioned rumor, disagreement, or anecdote. Naturally, I could gauge the progression of his Alzheimer's just by the slight modifications these would have over time but I digress. Though the night before I left for college, he chiseled a precise image of her at once.

“You know, your mother…was quite the adventurer—which she sure as hell didn’t get from me—and when she had you…I don’t know it was interesting to say the least. The woman shouldn’t have chosen your father,” and for the first time we could agree on something, “but she was young…and naïve. The girl still liked collecting seashells at 23 and restoring old film pictures yet somehow thought romance and action movies were…ahem. What did she call it? Ah!,” at this point he looked vacantly from the TV to me and quoted with his fingers, “Unbecoming. It’s funny, sometimes you two sound so similar…but maybe it’s just long-word-itus from college huh? All that and she still ended up having a child with a slick-haired good for nothing ex-marine who smoked cigarettes and never read a classic in his life! Oh I was right about him. A year later, and—well—you know what he did! And then there she goes pushing you to me and saying ‘take care of him, I’ll be back soon’ and then bam! Nothing!,” something vitriolic sparked, but after a mumbling fit and repeated spearing of his food with his fork, he subsided. The man then turned his attention lazily to a small spruce bookshelf next to him where a thin package was wrapped in newspaper.

“Grandpa, what is that?” I asked. 

His wrinkle patterned fingers struggled to grasp the package, and he placed it before his lap, “Well I was cleaning out the basement yesterday as you know and…I forgot this…she…I guess nothing was harsh…but this was the only something she sent, and it arrived 5 years before she died.”

“Do you know what’s in it?” 

“Not a clue, felt wrong to unwrap myself.” 

There past the wrapping, inside the padded shipping envelope, I was gifted a first glimpse of my mother by her estranged and consequently reunited hands. Just the sight of the portion which stuck above the envelope’s lip sent a forceful jitter up my spine and the contents spilled onto our dust-covered rug. I first ran my hands over the letter, deciphering the archaically perfect cursive which time nearly rendered illegible. The yellowed ruled paper groaned while crumbling in reaction to my thumb’s every gesture and read:

Dear Jack, 

While I guess by now I’ve been long gone, there hasn’t been a day that we haven’t thought of you. I guess, even now after so many years I regret leaving you behind. Hopefully it all turned out for the better and you don’t have to suffer the same way we have, but if you do, you will see more of this letter, and hopefully it will help. Both I and Chris—I mean your father—love you eternally. 

Love, 

Mom and Dad

Yet somehow those words floated weightlessly from the smiling woman trapped within the photograph whose meek posture and gentle bow of the head in that navy fur coat decided not to argue with my preconceptions. Instead she leaned brilliantly before the snow covered buddha of Kamakura with an amber youth, eyes dilated at the cameraman. She was a person with a shadow not far behind, who wielded two green stars that shot hopefully across her midnight. I flipped over the back and read cursive unlike her own. “Japan 2010.” 

Devoid of care, I flipped through the accordion stack, which at that moment, only substantiated my suspicion that the entire package served only as a cruel joke if anything. The pictures at the beginning were a muted and dim mirage, the figures blurry and color drained as if erroneously developed, with captions reading “Melbourne 2011, Taipei 2012, Jakarta 2013,” and so on until they became undeveloped entirely and dated 50 years or so in the future. How morbid, how insensitive I thought—I couldn’t stand it. That night I laughed alone in my bedroom, pressing my face with my fingers full of mania, bent concave, the legs of an arachnid, and I gagged on my tears. This photographed woman, whom I only knew as the joy-filled exuberant bundle of oddity my grandfather recants, was a stranger. Those two souls became separated when my head hit the pillow. 

Without warning, just like the graveyard incident when I was 15, where my signature was forged on the burial papers and presented as a cherry atop my first encounter of their, according to the nearby gardener, long-standing graves. Who authorized it! When could they have died? Never! The graves were probably empty! The secretary who investigated nearly keeled in catatonia after reading the report of a mortician, whom we learned spoke their first word a week ago, declaring my mother 85 and deceased from old age. My father, on the other hand, lived until he was 87, and died of a combination of stress and coronary thrombosis. It had only been 14 years. Nonetheless, I hadn’t even developed a legal signature. Lies were harsh, but this became harsher. Even in absence and frozen time, she wielded the keys to my head.

That morning I left with a stomach full of scrambled eggs and a lukewarm “goodbye”. Closing the trunk of my dilapidated silver fox of a 1998 Nissan Altima and sinking uncomfortably into the cigar stench ridden seat, I looked ahead at the road, then at the shipping envelope I placed on the passenger seat, and back ahead. During those twelve hours of driving to a place I unknowingly would shove me through a maze of needles, bottles, and smoke for four years, my knuckles grew white, choking the steering wheel, seeing the same woman in every passerby along the road. 

College was a long train ride, and all too quickly did the scenery pass, with faces of friends who I only allotted the superficial in conversation, and lovers who I chased only seeing the image of a pure woman collecting seashells, and who eventually stabbed my heart with the knife my pent insecurity pushed between their palms. So then the unfortunate girls in all their midnight spurred a drink or pill until a hole opened in my soul. Thus, the cycle ended with my graduation.

 Years went by where I felt the train had picked back up. After getting fired from my newly acquired position at an upstart magazine within a month from drug use, I half-drunkenly self-admitted into a rehab center. Waiting amicably behind his driver’s seat door, my grandfather congratulated me with a pat on the back, and once I returned home I saw the true picture behind his living situation. Bundled in a tight blanket of senility, the man’s autonomy diminished before the very next year and I, who became recently employed as a journalist, made the decision to put him in a nursing home. It was a local one—a fixer-upper of a senior living facility—that I could frequent after long shifts. 

It was those nights, the lonesome arrivals at an empty house that was never mine, when the train occasionally became “stuck”. The first time, after I did an expose of 9/11, I nearly lost my mind. Stumbling in through the doorway and into the living room, I flipped the light switch, shimmied out of my shoes while walking to the kitchen and microwaved some mashed potatoes I made the night before. The microwave broke an infinity that I became entranced within while staring at the rotating plate, my mind elsewhere, and I then returned to the living room. “What to watch, ahh what to watch,” I thought to myself, fumbling with the remote like a caveman to a musket. Now matter what button I pressed, fresh batteries I placed in the back, or four letter words I shouted, the TV wouldn’t turn on. 

Something came over me and I shouted, “Son of a bitch!”

My hands acted on their own and hurled the remote, shattering the poor thing that served me so devotedly. I pressed my temples aggravated and looked up towards the clock which hung above the TV. Eleven o’clock. Minutes, maybe ten or so, past without the hands moving and out of frustration I shoveled a spoonful into my mouth. Hot! Hot! It was steaming, my taste buds became singed immediately and I spit the cursed thing all over my carpet in pain. Just then the TV blipped on with a slight static hiss, fast forwarded rapidly and remained stuck on a frame of Alex Trebek staring into the screen.

“I thought I only put them in for two minutes?” 

In disbelief I noticed the steam rising, just as it had ten minutes ago, and I recoiled. That night, I ran frantically about my living room, down the hall to my bedroom, and finally my grandfather's room, trying my best to find a clock which would move. Under the digital reflections and the idle metal spikes time laughed at me—if only it were jest—with a tone only muted by my grandfather’s alcohol. Crows hawked and mourning doves broke my drunken stupor and I unstuck my face from the dried pile of drool which stained the polluted carpet, and feverishly got ready for work. 

Episodes like these happened then every other night, ushering only my worst habits for a remote anodyne, and yet even these held steadfast a lingering pang. Why was this happening? What caused this to happen exactly? These nights, and the events I called “delays”, became increasingly horrifying. Who could remain sane when one night lasted for 120 Jesus candle’s worth of time, or what I calculated to be 2 days? Or how about when three days passed in what felt like two minutes when I cut my hand with a kitchen knife mistakenly? The only answers to the nature of time, and if perhaps my grandfather had any knowledge or experience of any “delays”, was met in vain when I received news of his passing. 

Here now, stuck in this house, all I can think about at 9PM with two—no six—beers in the hole is the note that bodhisattva wrote to me. Outside the window I can see the bat which is frozen mid-flight illuminated by my garage’s motion sensor light. How does a man get himself into these situations? Huh, Jack? I need comfort, but yet these pictures…these pictures! All this time, the accordion album wedged in my wallet is developed! Developing! The letter! I rush to my bedroom, falling at once with an inebriated gait, to uncover a box beneath my bed where I store it all. The letter, mother the letter, how can I thank you enough! Somehow, the next paragraph is only but a few words along, the ink spreading itself. No, now the rest of the page in a flash appeared. It reads:

For you, Jack, are stuck like us, and we took our whole lives to see the sun finally pass. Around the world, we have aged, we have traveled, and we have come to understand something on the beaches of Italy. When I was young, I was caught in a riptide, and only using my wits, I escaped by first hitting the sand and then by following the current. Only once at its end could I swim perpendicularly and escape the evil thing’s clutches. We are at that point in this slipstream ourselves, because of our own self-loathing and fear of the present, and once we escape by our math (your father watched my pen before but my math of course), I will be 84. 

If this reaches you I ask that you be kind once we meet, and I know this may sound weird, but in the future. 60 years have passed, while in not one have I forgotten how you felt, swaddled in my arms. So for now if you find yourself lost, give yourself the pain, and the clocks will speed ahead. There soon, in 50 years will you find us. 

Tears, white knuckles, the taste of grinded enamel and teeth, it’s all I have to drench these words before me. There in the midst of it all, I heard a knock on my front door.