The Train Ride

“Careful, dear, it’s hot.”

Harper watched as a gray-haired woman placed a small, porcelain cup and saucer on the tray in front of him with a soft clank. The little teacup rattled back and forth with the movements of the train, threatening to spill the cup’s hot contents all over his pull-down tray—if the cup had any contents to spill, of course, which it didn’t. The cup was empty.

Harper rubbed his hands together as he watched the short woman in the blue and gray uniform push her cart up the narrow aisle, placing another empty cup on the tray in front of the blond woman in the next row before moving on with her cart.

Harper slipped his hand into his pocket and fished around for his phone. It wasn’t there. He never went anywhere without his phone. But both pockets of his stiff, black dress pants were empty. No wallet. No keys. No phone. Nothing. He pushed his head back against the seat, wishing he had better prepared; he didn’t want to take a long trip without a phone or anything else to entertain himself.

And where was he going, anyway? He tried to remember, but his mind came back blank. He thought he’d known a moment ago, but if he had, it was gone now. 

Harper looked out the window to his left, but it was blank, too—neither night nor day, just an endless, gray emptiness. The kind of emptiness that holds nothing, not even depth or form. Just a hollow absence that made his feet go numb. 

Harper stretched his long legs as far as he could under the seat in front of him and raised his arms high above his head, carefully avoiding the tray table perched over his lap. He felt a pop in his back and wondered how long he had been sitting there. He wasn’t tired, exactly, though he felt like he should be. He’d been up all night, hadn’t he? Or all day? Or something. 

Harper stood, unable to sit still any longer. He moved his cup to the empty seat beside him and pushed his table up. He walked into the aisle, gripping his seat back as he swayed with the constant movement of the train. He stepped forward to stand next to the woman in the row in front of him.

“Excuse me,” Harper said, clearing his throat so that he could be heard over the chugging rumble of the train’s engine.

The woman didn’t move.

He leaned closer, placing his hand on her hard shoulder.

“Sorry to bother you, but do you know what time it is?” He chuckled. “Feels like we’ve been here forever.” But the women still didn’t move, just stayed staring straight ahead.

Harper gave her shoulder a gentle shake. “Can you tell me—”

The woman teetered a little in her seat, looking like an off-balance post, before falling over to the side, colliding with the armrest between the seats and jostling her tray table, nearly knocking the empty teacup off.

Harper froze, his hand still hanging in the air where her shoulder used to be. He waited for her to sit up, yell out, do something, but she just laid there, still and silent. He reached over and, not knowing what else to do, carefully pulled the woman’s stiff body up into place.

“Are you alright?” he asked, though, before he even finished saying it, he could tell she wasn’t. Her face was blank and expressionless, her eyes half-closed and vacant. She seemed to be staring off at nothing, as if she had lost the ability to comprehend what was happening around her. Her pale blue dress was neatly pressed and old-fashioned. She looked beautiful, Harper thought, as pity sprung up inside him unexpectedly. A beautiful woman trapped inside an unmoving body, looking at nothing, and not even knowing it.

Harper left the lifeless woman in her seat and wandered forward, steadying himself on the seat backs as he went. A couple of the rows were empty, but the others contained more stiff passengers in nice suits and attractive dresses, old and young, people from all walks of life, all sitting erect in their seats, and all staring forward with unseeing, half-lidded eyes.

An indistinct but dark feeling began to settle in Harper’s chest as he moved from row to row looking at all the strange people. He wasn’t sure he recognized any of the blank faces, but he felt like he knew them, like they’d been on a long journey together, but he couldn’t remember their names or anything about them. Trying to place the people in his memory was like trying to remember the words of a song—the tune was there, but the words floated off every time he grabbed for them, running and bouncing ahead of him, and always staying just out of reach. 

Harper leaned against one of the scratchy seats and ran his hand over his mouth. He looked out the windows again, noticing how small the aisle was and how close the windows were—the train car was actually quite compact, not the large, luxurious car he might have expected for a long trip. 

As he peered into the grayness outside the windows, it, too, made the space feeler smaller somehow, constraining—almost suffocating. The endlessness of the gray void pulled at him, and he could imagine himself drowning in it—unable to tell which way was up or down, or forward or back. He imagined himself and the rest of the passengers tumbling endlessly in the void, unable to stop, longing to get out, reaching for the edge of the gray, but coming up with only another cold handful of nothing. 

Harper forced himself to look away from the windows and straightened up. He gripped the back of the seat next to him, just above the bald head of a soundless passenger, and dug his fingernails into the hard cushion. He closed his eyes, trying to root himself in the reality of the train car. 

But it didn’t work for long. When he opened his eyes, the train felt like it was out of control, as if it was moving forward and backward at the same time. 

He shook his head, trying to shake off the disorientation, and strode forward, desperation building with each step. He needed to get off this train, get back on solid ground. 

Finally, he reached the front of the car, stopping in front of an old metal door. The train lurched to the right, and he shot a hand out in front of him, slamming his palm against the door. Then he grabbed for the brass knob with his other hand and pulled it open.

Harper stepped into the next car and saw the grey-haired woman pushing her cart up the aisle, setting teacups in front of each of the passengers as she went.

He walked to the nearest row and looked down at the hollow figure in it. Just like the others. He moved on, but the people were all the same in this car, too, row after row of unseeing, unmoving bodies.

Except for the gray-haired woman pushing the cart.

Harper sprinted forward with his arm out.

“Wait,” he shouted. But the woman had already reached the door to the next car. She opened it and pushed her cart through, slamming the door shut behind her.

The sharp sound of the heavy metal door rang through Harper’s chest. He needed to talk to her. She would tell him what was going on; he knew she would.

Harper raced through the shaky car to the door and threw it open. The woman with the cart was halfway down the aisle already.

“Hey, holdup,” he said. The woman set a teacup down and started forward again.

“Stop, please,” he cried. Panic rose up inside of him like a toxic gas. He couldn’t help it. The gray void outside the windows was starting to seep into his body. He could feel it saturating his reality—both inside his mind and inside the train car. He couldn’t think now beyond escaping from the void. The emptiness was all around him, but touching it was like trying to touch smoke. It simply parted and returned, parted and returned, over and over and over again. 

The woman stopped and turned to him, a gentle but disapproving smile on her wrinkled face. “You should be in your seat,” she said.

“Please,” Harper said when he reached her, “can you just tell me where I am? Where are we going? I can’t remember, and these people—”

The woman laid her hand on his arm and patted it. “You need to return to your seat, dear,” she crooned.

The woman grabbed his shoulders with surprising strength and turned him around.

“But I don’t want to go back to my seat,” he protested. 

“You must,” she said. “All passengers must stay seated for the duration of the trip.”

“But how long will that be? I’m ready to get off. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

The woman began pushing him back down the aisle, leaving her cart behind her.

“You must sit down,” she said. “Come, it’ll be better. You’ll see.”

Harper struggled against the woman as she guided him down the aisle. Giving her a strong shove, he managed to knock her into one of the rows, and she sprawled across a sightless passenger. He then shot up the aisle, past her cart, and out the next door.

He ran through the car, not even bothering to look down at the seats. He focused on the large, red door leading to the cab. The engineer would be in there. He would know what was going on. He would be able to stop the train. Harper would be able to get off. He would push through the grayness, through the void. He’d reach the solid ground and touch it, touch it and feel it, and it would be real. And this would all be over. 

Harper pulled the door open with a hard yank and launched through the doorway. In front of him stood the same gray-haired woman, now in a tight, blue engineer’s uniform with a large, blue cap.

The woman turned to face him, never taking her hand off the control stand.

“What are you doing up here?” she snapped.

Harper swayed a little and put his arm out on the wall beside him so he didn’t fall over. The train was starting to tilt, or maybe that was him. 

The woman set a switch on the panel in front of her and then rushed over to him.

She reached out to help steady him. “How long have you been out of your seat?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he responded, feeling like his head and feet were spinning in different directions. “How much longer will it be until we get there?”

The woman wrapped her arm around his midsection, and he leaned into her strong side.

“You know the answer to that,” she said, maneuvering him to face the open door behind them. “I told you the last time you were up here.”

“The last time?” he asked groggily. His eyes felt heavy, and his head felt light as she led him through the open doorway, away from the solid ground and back towards the gray. He bucked weakly at her grip, but she held firm.

“Yes,” she said. “And the time before that, and the time before that. You really must stay in your seat. It’s for your own good.”

Harper felt himself being dragged though the cars as a heavy weight settled over his body and mind, sucking him deeper into the grayness. It completely surrounded him now. He tried to look past it, but he couldn’t; it just went on and on and on, and he could barely see the train car anymore. The immensity of the vastness surrounding him hung around his neck like a stone, pulling him down, or up, he wasn’t sure, but never letting go. I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, as he clawed at the stone but could never get his hands on it. I can’t do this anymore.

He soon found himself being pushed into his seat. It was solid. Solid and fixed, like a refuge in the swirling ocean of gray, and he found he could think again. 

“How much longer?” he asked, feeling his mind begin to flicker between the endless gray and the reality of his seat, like an out-of-range radio station.

The engineer pushed him forward in his seat so that his head was resting against the course fabric of the seat in front of him. She grabbed a cord from between his shoulder blades and plugged it into the back of his seat.

“Mr. Harper,” he heard as he slowly drifted to and from her voice, “you know the journey never ends.”

The woman pressed him back into his seat and stood up, putting her hands on her hips.

“It really would be much easier if you would stay plugged in,” she said. 

With his eyes half closed, he saw the engineer pull his tray table down through the gray still churning in front him.

“Eternity is going to feel like an awfully long time if you keep waking up. You know you can’t handle that, Mr. Harper, just look at you. Now, we’ve done our best to make you comfortable. It wasn’t so easy to figure out what to do with you humans once we realized how you reacted to it all. But I think you’ll agree that staying in your seat is whole lot better than spinning around in that void out there, wouldn’t you say? So, you just stay plugged into your seat and pretend like you’re on a nice, long voyage. And don’t you come bothering me again. I’ve got to keep this train moving after all.”

And with that, the engineer ambled back up the aisle, muttering to herself as she went. “Darn humans, always worrying about what comes next.”

Just behind her, the gray-haired woman in the gray and blue uniform pushed her cart up next to him, placing a porcelain cup and saucer on his tray.

No longer able to keep his eyes focused, Harper let them go blank. He fixed his gaze, which was now like looking through gray water, on the table and seat back in front of him, feeling like a castaway on a single-person raft, riding the waves of eternity up and down forever. 

“Careful, dear, it’s hot” the woman said, just as Harper resigned himself to floating away on his little bundle of reality inside the train car racing through eternity.