Train Songs

“I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I’m doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there’s some feeling of communication, it isn’t necessary that it be understood.” John Coltrane

The metal cylinder goes shhhoooush along the rails through the varying chambers of barely glimpsable archways, doors, and stairs only proven by signposts of graffiti and the glow of invisible workmen’s dangling lights. The cars rock in a sluggish metronome. Peoples’ heads, of varying heights, pitch in unkempt, coiffed, and garbed notes in the halogen space and fabricated lines of the train-stave. The people, with all their flourishes—their pink hats, purple purses, blue jeans, music cases, briefcases, compacts, knitting needles, video games, folded over schoolwork, clutched books, boxed purchases, bagged leftovers, gym bags, earbuds, newspaper-fingers, lip-synching, watching sideways—ride along with in the syncopating pulses of autonomic valves and organs. Sixty to one hundred beats per minute in varying degrees based on health, height, weight, and sex.

By fate or chance, I keep forgetting the earbuds that, along with the mortar of preselected recordings, wall away the random world of people. I look at the plastic folder that protects the essays inside—readings on the neurobiology of hate and love. I feel too tired by these unnecessary explanations. They remain heavy in my lap; I look away from the plastic into the crowd. The thin semitransparent skin of the cocoon macerates and sheds so there is nothing partitioning me from the train. The train chugs along, crooning its work song. I am connecting to my sitbones, mindful of the person next to me, whose arm moves to adjust what he is reading every so often. As strangers on a train we sit closer than friends. The irony brings me to ground, fells me. I look at the man who does not look at me, though we are inches apart. The train is full and empty. The irony brings me deeper down, down to the earth we glide over and which falls below the electric rail and castaway trash. It drives me deep into the unders, to something muddy and timeless.

Once, when a dear friend died, I had a dream that I was riding an old train. I was sad, as though every cell in my body had been filled with a drying resin. I watched out the window in the stiff leather seats. The car was mostly wooden and the window looked like a frame for the passing hills—pastorally verdant but far away as they rolled endlessly one into another. As it is with trains, the nearby was all blurry and I could only watch the distance. I heard the train roar as the swish of the back car door opened. Then I heard the slap of the door shutting muffled the raging sounds of industry again. My head stayed leaning chin-to-knuckles and forehead-to-window, unmoving. The methodical footsteps of the rider moved to wear I was, halfway into the car, a little closer to the rear. There were three seats in the row. Keeping one seat between us, Donnie came and sat with an empty seat between us. He said nothing. He was my floppy-haired, big-footed friend who had asked me to prom years before as we sat on my driveway. And he was gone now. There were no more long walks through the quiet “executive” homes. No more lectures about how I should date boys. No more hugs or fights. No more window to tap in the dead of night. But there we were, riding the train together a long way from home. I felt better with him near me. I had felt bad for lying to him the last time he has seen me. He had asked, “Are you happy?” and told me he loved me and wanted for my happiness. “Of course I am,” I had said. I will never forget how sad and understanding his eyes were. This was many years ago now, but I can still feel those eyes and the weight of him in the space next to me on the train. The next few days were all grief, tears, and regret. Then there was another dream. The same dream. This time, we rode together a long while, both of us looking forward. We said nothing. I could feel the gallop of the train, an old steam engine. I could hear the whistle far ahead in the front. Finally, Donnie said to me in a voice more grown-up than he ever got the chance to be, in a voice one uses to speak to children, “It’s going to be alright.” He smiled at me and I woke up. The dream stayed with me for all these years. Maybe I needed to hear his reassurance. Maybe in some way he was there—to say goodbye. I know that what he was to me was all of these things. And here on a train, watching the people and feeling the space full next to me, I still feel my friend with me. Age may bring the lessons of grief, but it also proves the indomitability of memory and the permanence of heart.  The song continues.

The darkest night a New Yorker can see is in a subway, observable through the scratched plastic lenses of the car; even in this darkness, at these late hours, there is light. There is the play of music. There is the company of strangers. I am far back in my sitbones now, riding the momentum. This is not Billy Strayhorn’s A-Train or Coltrane’s Blue Train. It is the Redline 1-Train and it has its own howling song. Fortune or fate, memory or ghosts, I am sitting in the train with the brass and bass shivering through all points of contact, a conductor in a circuit. The train makes surprising sounds, birdlike trilling between tunnels, whistling at stretches, screeching beyond high, sighing as it leaves a station, changing resonance as it leaves the small tube to the vaulting chambers, roaring through the rain and weather.