A Good Pounding

With January's chill whipping about the platform, something was coming at me down the tracks at San Jose. It preceded the train, a surprise bursting from the Amtrak night. It was the sense, origin unknown, that things were right. The wife's departure had happened years ago and was history. So was feeling crushed and unlovable. So was being broke. I had work now. My lance free, my time costly, clients shoveled money at me. Freelance technical writers were scarce, venture capital funds unlimited, and the dot-com economy was expanding like the universe. Everything about 1997 was looking up, except for the thing that was looking down. Women. But with the clarity that comes of standing on a train platform, half shedding the present and besotted with the imminence of movement, why think about that now? The evening had love about it, love in the freshness of winter air, love in the Silver Superliner being on time. I had a ticket to ride.

I didn't know why the Coast Starlight had to park itself on a curve, creating this huge gap between platform and sleeping car. Like nine months before, lifting me on board took one ticket agent and one car attendant. I told the latter, freckled faced Wayne, to stash the folded wheelchair and bag beside my bed, and see you later. For precious stationary time was passing. I hobbled up the stairs and made my way almost through one entire sleeping car before things began to move. Never mind, for a fellow San Jose passenger helped me through the Parlour Car to the diner with its swaying white linen tablecloths, clattering plates and jiggling carnations.

A heady transition, one that pumped up my neocortex to a fever pitch of extroversion. I faced my dinner companions across the table with nothing but smiles and endorphins. Hello, I beamed. One man nodded, and the other looked at his companion as though seeking instruction. They were poring over a map, a perfectly legitimate touristic thing to do, but not during dinner necessarily, and definitely not when the person across the table was speaking. Hello, I said, my name is Paul.

"Mark," said the one across from me, raising his eyes for the briefest of instants. The other never shifted his gaze from the map.

The menu included petrale sole, and damned if the Starlight wouldn't be up to the task. Some chef would maneuver a skillet in the bouncing kitchen downstairs, shaking salt here while the Union Pacific tilted there. I could see him putting the fish on a plate beside al dente broccoli and baked russet, pushing "up" on the dumb waiter. The smart waiter upstairs would grab my dinner seconds later and hustle it to my table.

And dinner should be enough. But, no, in my mind, the train was a moving salon, vaguely haute, and sparkling with conversation. The super silver liner was supposed to nourish the soul as well as the alimentary canal. Which was why I turned my voice and my gaze toward the silent man.

"Sorry," I said a few decibels too loud, "didn't get your name." The man, mid-30s and deeply intent on map reading, looked confused, looked at his brother and would have looked out the window if I hadn't said it again. "What is your name?" I felt like an immigration agent.

"Samuel." No smiles. Back to the map.

Maybe the guy was autistic or something. I didn't care. It seemed to me that if a partial quadriplegic could make it to dinner, aim his fork at a moving plate and think of something to say, others could make an effort.

"Looks like you have a nice map." Mark held the thing up for me to see. It was like a chip diagram, a schematic of the Union Pacific tracks at their dullest, everything reduced to switches and sidings, with rail junctions bearing the names of defunct towns like Agnews. I told him it was very nice. He said nothing. We'll have another Show and Tell in ten minutes, I wanted to say.

I straightened my back to make the right paralyzed leg spasm into circulatory life and studied Mark and Samuel. They shared a nose design. They must be brothers. I watched them order dinner, avoiding eye contact with the waiter. Pot roast. Fettuccine. The sole sounds great, I told the waiter

The brothers whispered over the map, red crossing signals swung in the dark, and the dining car was all soft lights and hard realities. People could ignore you for no reason. You could care and others wouldn't. The superliner's conversational salon did not exist. But a lonely middle-aged man did. He

Before I knew it the sole was gone. Hayward was gone. San Leandro would soon be gone, then Oakland. I needed to be gone too, and screw the chocolate Bundt cake. I placed a tip on the table and left without a word.

In my darkened compartment, I propped myself up on the bed as the Starlight slowed and crept under a freeway. Soon I watched people hug and laugh on the Oakland platform. They gestured and pointed, clasped their faces in astonishment, hung their jaws and furrowed their brows, all inches away from the dark insulated glass. Their presentation, silent and intimate, drove me deeper into the compartment. I felt like an observer of reptile life at the San Diego Zoo. And who was the reptile? An oversized golf cart silently ferried baggage. The Starlight drifted on.

At Emeryville there was more of the same. What separated me from this Amtrak crowd, aside from the double panes? These people had spinal cords. They stood up, bent over, leaned toward each other. They wandered several yards in search of the baggage claim, changed course and wandered back. Most of them had the compressed movements of the middle-aged and elderly. A subtle distinction, for they were on the right side of the neuromuscular equation. I half dozed. Richmond, the Bay, then Martinez sailed by.

Tomorrow would be a long day, and it was time for sleep. It was definitely time for sleep as we raced across the marshland west of Sacramento, tracks straight as a ruler. I stretched out flat on the bed and felt a sideways thud here, a steel-drum staccato there from a switch. By the time my feet were under the blankets, urinals at the ready, it was 11 p.m. and sleep was overdue. At midnight, there was quite a production at the Sacramento Amtrak station. Things clicking, something hissing. Fueling, watering, who knew? Then out of town and into the northbound dark, with no excuse for not sleeping at 1 a.m. Amtrak insomnia, a curse leading to an unwanted view of the Chico Amtrak station. In the croplands blackness and blackness, telephone poles flying by. Trees flew too, night poplars. Now in the distance, a flock of grounded stars, the lights of a town. The hollow, shopping-cart rumble of a bridge, black girders slanting past the window. Beneath us was a river, perhaps the Yuba or the Feather.

They rolled straight out of the Sierras, these rivers, awash with gravel, gold and history. I had never driven here. And in these years of neuromuscular decline, I never would. How maddening that I did not know the name of this river. How stupid to have traveled here at night. An incomprehensible thought, for there was one train, and it was on time. The river would remain anonymous and invisible. So what?

I'll tell you so what. I sat up in bed. I twisted my torso into position. I slugged at the blanket, driving my only clenchable fist into the mattress. I pounded again and slugged and pounded and hit. The more I pounded, the more I gasped and the more pounding there seemed to do. This could go on forever. It didn't matter why, such was my desperation, my disgust and my outrage at the dimensions of my loss.