Lydia [Chp. 3]

Let us stolidly accept that trains, in the absence of crashes, are without narrative glamour: they are in-betweens, carrying their characters along with the ingenious accumulation of hundreds of years of locomotive evolution. It would be nice to read that, here, at the quarter-mark of Lydia's journey, the train unhitched from its rails and crashed—catastrophically!—into a villa of trees. Or, what she was thinking about, laptop in lap: what if a gunshot punctuated the mechanical chug-chugging of train against track? A bullet, zipping through the air, in another car; an incurred fatality; and Lydia totally unharmed amidst it all! Another thought came to her around this time, the inverse of all the previous fancies. What if, while she had been preoccupied with her laptop, all the people in the train had vanished? It was one p.m., and the lady who had supplied her with crackers had not returned for a lunchtime option. Had she fizzled away? She thought about the conductor, replaced with a ghost-conductor, carrying along the same train-operations that had been codified centuries prior. These thoughts were common for her, even in the absence of trains. She slept with the light on, so that she could be conscious of all aspects of the space, at all times. Sometimes she would work herself into a frenzy over the smallest seeds of thinking. She would suspect that a ghost was behind her—a strange superstition for someone who did not believe in the superstitious—and fear the act of turning around. But only that same act, the turn-around, could cure her fear, confirming the obvious: there was no ghost. Ghosts to her were glum apparitions and rarely fatal; or at least that is how she defined them in her paranoiac episodes; but once the presence of the ghost was disproved, she went on, unbelieving. Now, she was struck by a similar draw. She could get out of her seat, making her way to another car, verifying the existence of other people—or she could not. Rationally, she was capable of calculating that the train was hankering on as usual, with its same cluster of people, but the feeling—it has all vanished—remained. She shut the lid to her laptop and got up, which was never less of a hassle; there is a psychological enormity to pressing the weight of your arm down against a laptop-lid, knowing that you are disconnecting from a world, the space returned to you alone. That is exactly what she felt then: a shrinkage, as if the train-space had compressed on all axes. It felt like the ceiling was slightly lower, the floors thinner; outside there were only drawling plains, speaking the same syllables, varying in vague half-perceptible fashion, like the earth had stripped itself of all its detail, retaining only what was needed to remain earth. Lydia lingered by the window for some time, frustrated at nature's hintless homogeneous texture; frustrated also that she never took up smoking, because one of her favorite habits was mentally framing her silhouette against a window, cigarette in hand, taking huffs with the ridiculous rigidity of someone who is contemplating the most serious thing in the world. In that moment she remembered, as a sort of revelation, the name for the adjoining space between train-cars: vestibule. The word rolled very nicely off the tongue, although she could not figure out why it felt—or maybe was—religious. Her curiosity on the matter terminated once she explored its linguistic proximity to vigil: about as far as the distance that remained yet between her and New York. Finally an oak tree popped up, interrupting the endless mass, and Lydia entered the vestibule.

Logically, the adjoining car would bear at least two other people. The bathroom—the only place she was brave enough to check—was unpopulated: a premonition. She squinted, handicapping her vision, and shuffled towards the window. It was blurry until she came right up to its threshold. First, she assessed the mid-range of the car, which had the same carpet as her own; the cats comforted her, giving her the courage to investigate the left column of seats, which was fruitless. There was no one there. She groped for her phone, instinctively, forgetting that it was dead. Still, its presence in her pocket comforted her. In a rush, her eyes raced to the right. And: both people who she had previously seen in the bathroom were seated, plus a few others. Back at her seat, a mild disappointment consumed her; there was nothing exciting about this train. Her heart was racing, but there was nothing to race for.

Her friends never sympathized with her ghostish spells, so she learned to remain silent on the matter. In any case, they were pervasive. Last week, she stayed perfectly still for three hours because she felt that if she turned her head a ghost would reveal itself. The men of the group were especially callous; or maybe less than callous, lacking in comprehension: how could someone feel something to be true that they knew was not? It was a joke to them, and overtime it became a joke to Lydia, who absorbed, as all the members did (if at variable rates), the same collective spur of information. Her life was full of moments where she intuited that everything was about to go into a frenzy—and though she laughed them off, with great vigor, her paranoias remained inescapable. Even now the group existed in a limbo to her, as if somehow, when she arrived in New York, she would find out that they had never existed.

The spaces that occupy us during transition are at best transient. How fun it would be to Lydia to unfurl the folds of time, selecting from its seams these transitory moments, stopping the train on its tracks. To the confused conductor she would say, "I like it here, now." Sumptuous subtleties of train technology could finally be indexed, cataloged, and filed away. Rivulets would cling to windows, frozen zig-zags; they could be appreciated permanently, without pooling at the bottom into non-discrete puddles. The problem of the pimple would never resolve, nor would it need to—who of consequence would see her, here on this train? Behind her, at home, her parents would while away, wishing her well; and in front of her, in New York, her friends would remain vague. Nothing could go wrong. In stagnation death would be a non-concern, and how beautiful would that be? The oak tree, willowing mightily like an ancient god, framed with streaks of lightning in the background, would remain paused beyond the window; all of its branches could be studied, its leaves understood. She could open the door to the outside and leave. She could walk through rain, leaving a person-shaped hole in rain-space as drops adhered to her, and feel the tree, listen to its bark, tear leaves off its branches. In her hands up close the leaves would ring true: green-yellow, grayish, and prickly. She would return to the train, finding that it had not deviated a second; and then she would smile, dry herself off, and twirl. This would be a happy whim. Instead, Lydia remained seated, seconds passing one after the other, in aggregate forming anticipation; of failure, of happiness; sending her spiraling into mind-palaces, but not of topazes, rubies, and glorious thrones—of fear and neurosis, misplaced expectations. And the impermanent train-space, known to be impermanent, remained abstract. When she closed her eyes and visualized its form, all she saw were the cats stitched into the carpet—white and blue-eyed, with bushy tails—and, with much less specificity, the vestibule, whose color (like those cute prints that sum all the pixels of a movie-frame, distilling it into its average color) was oak-brown. Stepping foot into New York would erase all these impressions with the ease of stamping away an anthill, whose scents, acrid and ancient, would resurface unexpectedly, with family, friends, years later, when the train-canvas would be dabbed with a new detail, hitherto obscure, like a ghost who remains dormant in the obscurities of a mansion until its inhabitants forget about its rumored existence. Memory, marred by conscious attempt, is best kept behind lock and ambiguous key. When Lydia lost things, which was frequent, she would never attempt to find them; she simply went about her day, waiting for the object to find its way into her peripheral (which it always did).

Online-friends, too, were transitory: a collection of summaries, summarily updated, without the group's consent. Lydia had a habit of telling the group everything about her life; sometimes they replied, sometimes they did not. In these moments, she was sandwiched between the important chambers of time. She would tell them, for example, that she was waiting for a dentist appointment, or that her mom, frustrated at her ineptitude, had coordinated a discussion with her impending shortly. Then, after the appointment, after the discussion, she would tell the group how they went, hardly checking to see whether new conversation had populated the chat. This lack of awareness was not a point against her; everyone did this. And, in spite of whether life updates were explicitly acknowledged, they were always read, thus involving everyone in the intimate narrative of each other's lives.

Zane was a school-teacher in Japan, whose knowledge of Japanese spanned just beyond what he needed to survive; he was liked by his co-workers, liked by his students, and liked by the group—even though his humor sometimes lacked the edge of tact. He liked inventing new words (or repurposing old ones) with comic connotations—"whaled"—and these inventions, innovations, or otherwise would inevitably catch on with the group. He figured most prominently in Lydia's head because his personality was most prominent; he was not ashamed of himself (he posted pictures of himself with alarming regularity) and gave off, of anyone in the group, the greatest impression of having a "life outside." Before Japan, he was a Jazz musician figuring in New Jersey; but he decided, at the age of twenty-five (two years ago), that he had not the grit to break out in the music scene. Now, he had no regrets. He led the tennis club at the school he taught at and his students did well at regionals (in one instance coming first). When Lydia recalled these fragments of life, she naturally operated in a parenthetical mode—life, actually, is one big parenthesis between two voids.

Anthony was vaguer, but not by much. He lived in Australia (but who knows where in), and supplemented the group with half-baked film knowledge that he had absorbed from the college he dropped out of at twenty-three. His first goal in life was to become a film director; now he worked at a grocery store. He liked his job, ringing up foodstuff, and had an amiable disposition that made him popular with customers—or at least the senior customers (the younger of their number preferred the quieter register-runners). Like all Australians, his conversation was punctuated frequently with profanity; but unlike most Australians, he was a hard worker, not at all "laid back." He attended the gym regularly and read philosophy when he could. Deeply spiritual, he was a laughing-stock of the irreligious group (Lydia, especially, could not tolerate his apparent "lack of rationale"; to him, this was "the point.") "Laughing-stock," though, should not be taken literally; the group liked Anthony, and they respected his arid religion, even if its form was frustratingly vague. It was him that devised the idea for the New York trip, and offered to pay for jobless Lydia's train-ticket!

Tom and Elijah blurred together in Lydia's head, as if two manifestations of the impulse; but really they were nothing alike—or, if they were alike, it was superficial. Tom was a musician, a "producer," although Lydia had not the faintest idea what that entailed, and played guitar for a band called Nomad. Elijah lived with his parents at twenty-five, attempting to pitch his first novel Invisible Stuff, which was about a man whose nose, when pinched, turned invisible. Every member of the group was skeptical of the premise, but when he began supplying excerpts, the prose was rich and untrammeled, the ideas denser than anything they could have expected; it was, in short, a masterpiece. But pitching it was a nightmare and he was on the cusp of giving up. Nomad's singer was a published author named, incidentally, Elijah, so Tom said he would show him the manuscript—which he never did. Nomad, for that matter, was doing exceptionally well; they sold out spots all over the Americas and had an Europe tour lined up for next year.

Tom had a crush on Erica. This was no secret, but it was also never discussed. When she entered the chat, he always behaved remarkably differently, as if he had hired someone else to man the keyboard. His humor when the chat was predominantly males was—like Invisible Stuff—"rich and untrammeled," but as soon as Erica signaled her presence, he retreated to a world of soft exclamation points. She picked up on this and ignored it; she had a boyfriend (and Tom, let us note, had a girlfriend!). She was an accountant at a reputable law firm somewhere in the states, but what little she supplied of her life did not make it easy to know her. Lydia, for whatever reason, had her age mentally marked down as twenty-seven, but this number's accuracy relies on the murky substrate of her memory.

Lydia recently had a spat with Beatrice and she would rather not remember her at this time.

There were five hours left and the plains were still homogeneous, if awash with rain. Lydia re-opened her laptop, to see if someone had replied to her message, but no one had. She paced to and fro the span of her car, spinning yarns in her head—silly yarns, without consequence—and holding her hands out in front of her, as if surprised by their existence. She looked outside, to the plains more frequently populated by trees: willows, oaks, maples, and felt sorry for the birds (how unfortunate, to fly in this weather!) Casting a sympathetic thought birds' way, she saw, in the blur of rain, a silhouette in the distance—like a man with a top-hat, dim and hazy, swaying in the wind, looking her way: and then he was gone.