Reaching

Sun blasted through my eyeballs. The morning, well advanced, bounced outside my windows, shades up. Sleeping was over, what with "Matthews, party of three, to the dining car" and "last call for Clyde" echoing from a tinny loudspeaker somewhere. Still, I settled back into the Amtrak sheets on the thin mattress, hoping for slumber, not another jobless-rent-due shiver. I sat up. The contents of my head pulsed and sagged like a bad hangover. Jacobsen, party of four, this is your last call for breakfast. It seemed I had been traveling for days.

I stared at the Amtrak toilet across the compartment. The train was shaking, occasionally pounding, now and then lurching. How was a functionally one-armed, one-legged paralytic with bad balance going to transport two brimming urinals? I gave my head a clearing shake, which sent the brain rattling. I pushed myself up. Now the urinals. I hooked them both over the shrunken bones of my paralyzed right wrist, and crutched sideways toward the toilet, leaning against the wall, and now the door, for support. Would a fall leave me lying prone on the Amtrak carpet for the next 18 hours, lolling in a pool of urine? I made it to the toilet, which being in a disabled compartment, supported a handy grab bar. Emptying the urinals one by one, the toilet whooshed like an airplane lavatory. Flush with victory. I lowered the cover, sat down.

Outside the window were fields and furrows of brown earth, lightly dusted with sprouts of green. The northern Sacramento Valley in spring. Now a dirt road, now another field, here with something leafy and bluish emerging from winter California. And through the other window across the room, a distant view of hills. Frisch, party of two to the diner.

Maddening, the plastic jar of suppositories, trying to open the thing with one hand. Always something to slow a morning's progress. Even the Starlight slowed as we approached?there was the sign... Chico. The train glided to a stop before a mustard-yellow Southern Pacific depot. One old woman creaked off. A young couple, probably college students, swung aboard with backpacks. The Starlight drifted away, 8 a.m., leaving Chico almost six hours late.

Doing the schedule math...the train would roll into King Street Station, by the Seattle Mariners Stadium, at 3:30 a.m. I was traveling like third class mail. And like, who cared? Who cared that the window shade was up? Any of you farmworkers out there interested in quadriplegic bowel habits? Here, you'll get a blurred glimpse as I aim this suppository at my butt. Part of the quadriplegic morning routine for 30 years, but this was the first time I'd laughed. Naturally, I missed, the slippery bullet shooting from my fingertips. It was lying somewhere on the carpet, a transparent object easy to miss. I found it by the door knocked it toward me with a crutch. Now, grabbing the metal sink, I leaned my paralyzed side into a corner and worked the suppositories into place.

A toilet window, better than toilet telephones in hotels. Across fields, a clapboard farmhouse squatted among huge old elms. Inside old women made jam, grandchildren made trouble, and middle-aged men made little money off the land. The Starlight rumbled through their orchard. Bowlegged ladders bending wood legs like inverted parentheses disappeared in the branches. A row of dilapidated stucco houses from the 1960s gathered dust from a distant, churning tractor. Within a high cyclone fence, a black asphalt pad, and propane tanks like huge metal Tylenols.

The Starlight's cars overhung the tracks, inserting the viewer into the view. Passing a man in his backyard, I waved. Through tinted glass he couldn't see me on the toilet. He had no reason to look. Trains were no use to him. They did not pick up the kids at school or drop stuff off at the landfill. The Starlight glided past in silvery blankness. No one reached for it, but it saw everyone reaching. Reaching for the house keys, the trailer hitch, the mother's breast. Everything out of reach kept everyone reaching. Selfless, desperate, or venal, it was earnest, this reaching. Loving. It tore at the heart, everyone trying to live. Everyone tore at each other. One had to be careful. But not afraid, not all the time. Or one missed the caring, which was part of it. Not all of it, but part. And if you missed the caring, you missed everything. Schmidt, party of three, this is your last call for the dining car. Someone cared enough to make breakfast.

All which served to lighten the six-foot journey to the other side of the car, jerking but not tilting, on straight track. And eased the flopping down on the bed, wriggling into trousers, then working the paralyzed leg into its plastic brace. A sleep-deprived person needs coffee, I was thinking, as the compartment door slid open. This was the right time to be here, in the Sacramento Valley, moving north. This was precisely the right time. The morning of all mornings. The Starlight was on time. Off schedule, but on time, the way it was on rails.

All of which further served to distract from the empty corridor rattling its embossed steel floor. Restrooms lining the walls gently flung their doors open and closed with the train's movements. My body smelled trouble. A floor pitching and rolling, a wall with nothing to grab. Enough to sound the neuromuscular alarm.

The real danger lay in thinking too much, lingering too long. I wedged my crutch against the steel baseboard and set off, hips twisting. Approaching the vestibule, the open area by the doors, no safety bars, no attendant, no hope?except to power through, crutching and limping, at last grabbing the handrail at the bottom of the stairway.

Clomping up the stairs, reaching for the railing, reaching for the next floor, reaching for breakfast. The steps turned once, then again. If I should fall, my body would only tumble so far. At the top of the stairs, the train tilted wildly. The upper story swayed like the top of a windswept tree. Time to think before trying another fast lurch across an open vestibule, corridors leading left and right. An elderly couple appeared, making their way like jaunty sailors on a rolling ship's deck. This way, the woman said. They staggered to the right with their sea legs, and I made a show of following. Into a tight corridor, barely shoulder width, too narrow to fall. Reaching safety.