Guide to Disabled Railing

Spasms II

2007-06-05T23:46:11Z

You would think that the author of the celebrated article "IPC: Hard Facts about Software," would stride into work. His stride might be neurologically undersupplied. It could be technically downgraded to a limp. But a stride is still a stride. When you've got one, that's how you take things: in stride. There was some celebrating when my article appeared in the autumn, 1995, issue of Industrial Process Control Quarterly, under the CEO's byline. But time moves swiftly in Silicon Valley. By 1996 no one was celebrating. I was missing deadlines, missing meetings, missing the point. Dottie probably assumed, as did the other women around the office, that I was still missing the wife. But I wasn't. A year had gone by. My divorce was no longer souring the way the lights fluoresced, the partitions partitioned and the cursors blinked. The way the boss bossed, that was a different matter. Dottie had hired me. She ran Technical Marketing, once consisting of nine cubicles but since the layoffs, amounting to five. When Dottie leaned against my partition edge and began talking, her words dug at me like fingernails, brittle and insistent. On a particular morning she was fresh from a meeting with Sales, had picked up the latest marketing drivel and was sharing, as we say in California. Listening to her, my jaw advanced and locked. Dottie folded her arms, glanced down at the carpet and said she was wondering about the Partners in Productivity brochure. I briefly wondered about Dottie's neck and how it would be to nuzzle. We both stared at the carpet as though the missing brochure copy might appear there. Now I was wondering about something else. Like how I had spent my childhood with a woman towering over me, and why the same thing was happening in my adulthood. Only a few years before I was still walking everywhere with a crutch. I limped my way upstairs, downstairs, on and off subway trains. And when I needed to stand, I stood. I stood up. I stood my ground. I stood for something. But since my mid-40s, I had stood for very little. My balance had mysteriously disappeared, and walking had all but stopped. Now I was in a wheelchair, pushing 51, and not even pushing the wheelchair. It was battery-powered. Oh, I still had the crutch. It stood proud, like a soldier's old rifle, in the corner of my cubicle. I used it once a day to hobble to the men's room, under orders from my physical therapist. After crutching back to the cubicle, I dropped, a little too relieved, into the power wheelchair. Dottie was leaning over me now and leaning on me. Where was the brochure copy? I stared up at her, lies and deadline-missing excuses forming in my head. I didn't know where the copy was. Except that it was in my head, some part of my head that was shut down tighter and darker than a coal miners' strike. I didn't have to justify myself. I wasn't going to stand for it. I was going to sit for it. The rest of the world experienced such moments on their feet, toe to toe, mano a mano. But things between Dottie and me were all skewed. Her breasts were above me, and I wanted them below me. I wanted height and alpha-male posture. I slid forward in my wheelchair and pushed up with the left arm. Within seconds I was standing, more or less straight, bearing my body weight on the nonparalyzed left leg. Facing Dottie at her altitude, I smiled with the secret knowledge of homo erectus. I might just deliver the Partners in Productivity brochure sometime soon. I gave my torso a straightening and extended the lower back. Crossed neuromuscular signals erupted in all directions, goading my spastic extremities. My paralyzed right arm and leg involuntarily shot out, flexed and shook. Dottie watched. She had seen plenty of my neurology before. A second or two of limbs flexing crazily, dead fingers flailing in spastic staccato, and this would stop. But today the spasms weren't stopping. My fingers kept twitching, the arm shaking. I pressed the right hand against my thigh to calm the spasms. Dr. Strangelove trying to stop his own hand. I wanted to say that Partners in Productivity might be ready the next day. But the grotesquerie of my hand was getting to me. It was scooping out my insides like melon balls. And my real balls? They had ascended halfway up my chest. They were hanging off my lungs, making it hard to pull in a breath through my not-too-paralyzed diaphragm. I need that brochure now, Dottie said. She slipped away, all hurry and revulsion. I dropped down hard in the wheelchair. Turning to face the screen, my footrests knocked over the waste paper basket. I leaned over and righted it. Fear and confusion swirled about my cubicle. I knew better than to assert myself with physical capabilities I no longer had. Like punching yourself in the stomach. Dottie's disgust clung to me like a mist. A 50-year-old man who let women crush him like a five-year-old, who let a cripple's hard-won career decompose?. That man should be placed on a 24-hour suicide watch. I hit the wheelchair joystick and rolled into the hallway. There was nothing out here. There was nowhere to go, except the men's room. Or the coffee alcove. Which, I decided, would do. When you can't get strong, get caffeinated.

Dexter

2007-06-08T22:30:33Z

A tricky, one-handed maneuver, holding a cup of coffee, wedging open the office building's back door with my wheelchair and rolling outside, but so worth it. Under morning sun, the parking lot shone black and empty. At the edge of the pavement I perched my coffee on the hood of someone's Toyota, lifted the paralyzed leg against a guard rail and stared at the tracks. A weathered wooden sign warned No Trespassing Union Pacif. The rest of Pacific had splintered off. Which made you think of the San Andreas fault and California splintering off from its own coast. Should I take this sign as a sign? I laughed out loud, took a swig of coffee and looked up and down the rails. The land along the tracks was barren except for the occasional tumbleweed. The decor ran to old boards, portions of a tire, a T-shirt gradually being claimed by the earth, two fluttering Safeway shopping bags and one remarkably intact teddy bear. The crossing gates up the street went clanging down. My spirits went clanging up. Just after 10 a.m., it was, and damned if the morning Amtrak train wasn't headed my way. Increasingly, I'd been coming outside to watch it. The train was a high, two-story thing, big enough to generate its own wind and drive grit into my eyes. Blue lettering described the functions of the silver Amtrak cars: sleeping, dining, lounging, observing. I wanted to go on a train, anywhere, just to go. To go without bracing myself behind the disabled controls of my van, fearful of traffic and tense as a fighter pilot. To go without someone like Dottie telling you to buckle your seatbelt or fold up your tray. Just to go. Sadly, a freight train came into view. The engine rumbled. The box cars rattled by with Chevrolets or bauxite or hobos. The Amtrak train was late. On some mornings, it never appeared at all. Too bad. The coffee break was over. Whatever happened to hobos? What made those gaunt, desperate guys stare out of open box cars at Dorothea Lange holding the camera? Were they thinking she might also be holding a dime? Were they looking for work or just looking for the next thing? What got them through the 1930s, sleeping in freight yards, finding food and water where they could, watching out for railway police. Had they acquired a desperate knowledge of the road? Did they know that when there's no next paycheck, there's always the next town; that when you can't face tomorrow, there's no avoiding Turlock; that when life stops, the spirit keeps moving? Maybe hobos were gone, but this was still their country, this rubbishy no man's land beside the rails. Say a hobo came walking along the tracks, or just some homeless guy pushing a shopping cart full of cans. Would he see a guy in a wheelchair as an easy target for panhandling, or for robbing or for nothing? Would I roll inside the offices or stand my ground? What do you say to a hobo? Hey, how's it hanging? And wheelchairs being notoriously nonthreatening, and one thing leading to another, how about coming inside the office for some coffee? With any luck, the hobo would be black. He would take cream, no sugar, and gratefully partake of one of the free pop tarts in the coffee alcove. Dexter would be his name. Wandering down the hall, coffee and pop tarts in hand, we would find Dottie in the conference room. Dottie, I'd like you to meet Dexter. He's in the market for industrial process control software. Most of his processes are badly out of control. Particularly the aluminum can retrieval and recycling process. Dottie, I don't think we have a brochure for Dexter. But I'd like to write one. I'd like to target the Dexter market. What do you say, Dottie? All this made me laugh, slap the Toyota once more and wish I wasn't out of coffee. I was definitely out of time. Back to reality, back the cubicle, back to the wall. But first, back to Dexter. What if I brought a Dexter inside for a little face-to-face with someone in Sales? Would that someone call a security guard? Would I get fired and, if so, what would go in my Personnel file? "Employee invited ragged, homeless sales prospect to meeting." This demanded a second cup of coffee, yes, which I would bring outside, where internal discussions would continue. Because it was coming out now, my inner Dexter, and I was feeling dexterous.

The Cursor Winks

2007-06-12T04:32:01Z

I rolled outside with a second steaming cup of coffee, the morning expanding, possibilities opening. After turning down the wheelchair speed control, I maneuvered between parked cars, skirted the guard rail and crunched into the sandy strip along the tracks. The rails shown with silver, their sides with rust. The wooden ties baked in creosote. The rocks sighed. I sipped my coffee. The office building's door banged open and Roger what's his name from Sales banged out to his car. In seconds he would notice me, the wheelchair man in no man's land. This might raise Roger's eyebrows, but he wouldn't raise the alarm to Dottie. So the crippled technical writer was eccentric. So he liked the non-pixel-based zone behind the office, however declasse. Maybe a wheelchair guy had some affinity with heavy grease and thudding wheels. I half waved at Roger, but he did not seem to notice. Roger of software sales, purveyor of the virtual. He would not even see the wheelchair in our local strip of Rust Belt America. Confident of my invisibility, I lifted the coffee cup in salute. Roger waved back. Whatever. Time and caffeine would get you in a caring mood. Pretty soon Partners in Productivity would matter, brochures would matter, I would matter to my work, my work to me. One big productive partnership. Time and caffeine and sun. You had to admit that Union Pacific had achieved something of a moonscape out here. You had to look hard to find a single weed. No dead grass, no thistles, nothing. California's arid ground burst into weedy life at a hint of rain. It took a lot to reduce the desert to raw mineralscape. Someone had worked hard spraying or burning. No, you had to rule out burning. In the burning season every afternoon I would hurry home from fourth grade. When his doctor's office hours concluded, my dad would drive home, don old suit pants, and wander the empty fields, tossing matches here and there into the dry grasses. We were making a firebreak, he told me. At first he carried a rake and sometimes a hoe. By fifth grade, he had bought a flamethrower, a pump-action device fueled by a backpack of kerosene. As the rough clumps of desert stubble erupted into flame, the two of us would stand and watch dry brown turn to orange, then to smoky black and white. My father stared into each blaze as though extracting a message, rocking back and forth on his feet, hands behind his back. He seemed unaware of my presence, absorbed in the flames and their grim secret. Watching him, I grew frightened and attentive. "Your mother is the vilest bitch in hell," he would say, regarding the orange flickers. A moment later, his childhood sweetheart Virginia Himmelstein would appear to him in the fire. He should have married her, he would tell me. Not doing so was the worst mistake of his life. That, and becoming a doctor. It was important to keep him talking, to calm him, all part of my life-and-death work of saving our family. I also watched to make sure none of his fires went astray. Several blazes had gotten loose in the desert winds, and my father had become a generous contributor to the local volunteer fire department. At dinnertime, he stopped tossing matches, surveyed the charred patches and pronounced his fires out. Calming my mother required more vigilance and imagination, and my younger brother and sister weren't much help. I knew when my mother was feeling good, because she talked and smoked with her friends. She would light a cigarette, immediately light another, then another. As she talked, her gestures expanded, her laugh grew wild, and three cigarettes burned parallel in her ashtray. She smoked only one and did not appear to notice the rest. But other people did, and when my mother was at her high-strung, erratic worst, I felt the eyes of the locals upon us. Even I could see that she no longer went to town dressed as a doctor's wife, but did her errands in frayed gardening shorts, blouse knotted, hair askew. As her divorce and my adolescence approached, she seemed to dwell in a state of tears, anger and accusations at me. She drove too fast along the desert roads, flying into a rage at whatever child was closest. I was siding with my father against her, she said, our station wagon bouncing through rocks and dust. I thought of the 50 cents I could make washing her car. Did I believe she had a drinking problem, she asked? No, I said, Uncle Dave, her brother, had the drinking problem. I watched her neck arch, her face tighten in anger. I said, "Uncle Dave joined Alcoholics Unanimous." I had deliberately chosen the wrong word and was pleased to see her pound the steering wheel and laugh as greasewood and cactus flew by. It was important to convince her I was a child and did not dread the hours alone with her after school. Actually, if Union Pacific timed it right, they would only have to come through once a year with some weed killer. One spray, and that would be it. This kind of sandy desert liked to pack itself down. Anything, car tires, footsteps or the rain itself could do the packing. Even an eight-year-old with his lunchpail could trod down the desert grasses before they got a chance. I did this without knowing, five days a week, making the parent-instructed beeline up the dirt road to where the houses began and the school bus stopped. On the way I had a view of high snowy mountain ranges and fields full chaparral unobstructed by a single house or neighbor. The dirt track got an annual visit from the town's road grader. Within the space of a half hour the metal blade scooped away the encroaching mesquite, gouged earth gutters along either side, and left mounded banks of adobe and sand piled fresh. The effect was permanent. The tracks left by the grader lasted throughout the year, despite wind, rain and cars. Their pattern, a tweedy herringbone, hardened to a gloss in places, such was the weight of the tractor's tread, the pressure of its steel teeth. The pattern moved one morning as I trudged buswards. My eight-year-old mind tried to grasp the phenomenon, whipping and sinuous, that slid ahead of my feet.... Snake. Large, bulging diamond-patterned skin, soundless and reptilian, throwing S loops flawlessly. Then it was gone, and so was I, stumpy legs running for my life. The rattlesnake was pursuing me. I felt this, rather than saw it. I did not want to see it chasing me, up on its tail and rattle, across the desert. I don't know when I opened my mouth and let out the crying that sought no one or everyone. I was almost on the town pavement now, hundreds of yards from the snake, still bawling for my life. Ahead a woman ran down a driveway, her posture bent as though to be closer to my height. Her house dress was flying all about her and her arms were as open and ready as the blade of the road grader. She was going to scoop me. Which she did, pulling me to her breast, which was not warm but hot. We had both been running, after all. It was Mrs. Pluckett, our closest neighbor. Mrs. Pluckett, my mother said, eavesdropped on the neighborhood's shared phone line, a partyline. I'd heard my father say that Khrushchev was towing the party line, so none of this made sense. I knew only that Mrs. Pluckett was a giver of hugs. On the slightest pretext she was inclined to put an arm around you. Her hugs were as puzzling and unfamiliar as the man hawking knives at the county fair sideshow. Yet her large embrace was something you could count on, and half fear, as you entered her kitchen with one of the Pluckett sons. The boys were bent on tearing up chaparral and building forts in the desert. A worthy cause, though something about their mother made you want to stay behind in her kitchen and eat oatmeal cookies. For now, I was sobbing and tearing beyond control. Looking up at Mrs. Pluckett, I got out something about the snake. Her arm went around my head, soft dress and pulsing bra against my cheek. GraduaIly I opened my eyes and come to consciousness, crying clearing things the way a rain storm clears the skies. Mrs. Pluckett held my hand and walked me to the bus stop. My eyes were smeared, but I did not care. I did not even care that she was holding my hand in full view of Sally, Steve and Jason, third-graders who assembled each day for the bus. We normally busied our waiting selves by exchanging insults and kicking nuts from the neighborhood deodar trees. But not today. No one said anything. I waited unapologetically, holding Mrs. Pluckett's hand with something like pride. I had never done such a thing with my own mother, neither the embrace, nor the handclasp. This must be the prize for enduring an ordeal, a rare, not to be repeated thing, especially the embrace with Mrs. Pluckett's warm scents and soft even swellings. The school bus drew up, brakes grinding, mechanical door opening. One thing about the school bus, whatever happened on the school bus, stayed on the school bus. Hard to say why. But once you stepped off, the distractions and intensity of gradeschool took over. People forgot about your tears, and so did you. In the end you knew a lot about weed control. Whenever the end was, which you kept expecting and kept eluding. Because there was the next thing, even here in the rail barrens, a strip denuded and denatured, land reduced to its abstraction, the right of way. The sun was beating on the back door of the office. The steel surface would be hot. Just grab the knob. The brochure was insurmountable. I had to watch every penny these days. Whims and indulgences had to be kept within budget. No they didn't, and this was a quiet no, a calming one. It led me inside, to my desk, to the phone and to the Amtrak 800-number where, yes, there was a train every day to Seattle where my brother lived. Every day including Friday. And as for wheelchairs, there was plenty of room, even a special room for special people with special needs. Which I booked, rattling off the number of my last remaining credit card. After which, I felt something like elation. The screen cursor winked at me and I at it. How could people be productive without partnering? How could there be productivity without partners? This was how the world worked, particularly the industrial software world were development costs ran high, as high as expectations. And to keep those costs low and those expectations high, there had to be trust. Playing to each other's strengths, industrial science and computer science. That, by definition, was what made partners partner, producers produce. The knowledge that we were all in this together.

The Cursor Falls

2007-06-12T18:58:13Z

Layoffs having cleared out Marketing Communications' cubicles the way a fry cook empties an egg carton, you would have thought there would be more privacy, not less. But with brochure copy spewing out fast, me giddy with productivity, partnership spreading like a smile, when I laughed out loud, Dottie's secretary way down the hall asked, "Are you okay?" She'd probably heard my Amtrak call, too. Never mind. We were partners. And partners supported each other. They understood each others' industries and processes. Their productivity was our productivity. It was as simple as that. And at 2:30, it was as simple as e-mailing the brochure draft to Dottie. Which wasn't so easy, because I kept getting this "invalid password" message. I phoned Dottie -- gone for the day -- and I was just about to phone technical support when Julia from Human Resources appeared outside my cubicle. I caught her expression, very Personnel, with mouth set, eyes averted. She was clutching the folder which, I knew from observing others, contained my severance pay, cubicle inventory form and pre-execution checklist. Julia led the way to the small conference room. She was large and her face puffy, but she walked with grace and exuded maternal understanding. Fear was rising in a froth, terror popping up the side of my cheeks. Julia shut the door, opened the folder. "I probably don't have to tell you...." She was a decent person. They all were. And this was my comeuppance. For years of sneering at people who had offices with doors that closed. For sitting sullen when everyone cheered at the annual sales conference. For not finding a new job. For never really knowing her or Dottie or anyone else here.. * * * I shook Julia's hand when it was all over and definitely felt her cringe. I couldn't tell if it was the awkwardness of the moment or the fact of shaking my left hand while the right one sat paralyzed on my lap. Surely she was used to me after all these years. Or maybe in this final hour she was dropping pretense and giving rein to a certain revulsion at my cripple's bony, withered wrist and hooked, spastic fingers. This thought unnerved me, and I rolled out of the conference room too fast, paying too little attention, and banged my wheelchair into the wastebasket next to the Xerox machine. I had hit the wastebasket before, making it wobble and tip. My boss Dottie had promised at least twice to have Maintenance move the copier so my wheelchair could get by. But now the rubbish container lay on its side, a litter cornucopia of botched Xerox pages spilling onto the carpet. A momentary embarrassment, and no need to make a valiant one-armed effort to retrieve the contents and right the wastebasket. For it was understood that this was a team effort, that I fit into Red Oak in a certain way. That within the confines of the Americans with Disabilities Act, there was room for me and my wheelchair and wastebaskets and narrow passageways. Thanks to me, no one could say narrow minds were in force at Red Oak, my being employed and all. For which I was grateful, adaptable and cooperative. In all moments, even this one. Except that now I had a certain adrenal flush and felt the daring urge to boot the wastebasket upright, to give it a flip and a tip with my wheelchair pedals, deftly knocking the accordioned papers back into place. I did that now, turning the joystick of my electric wheelchair with a hard left, and knocking the wastebasket not upright, but end over end, so that it emptied itself completely in a vomit of paper, staples and coffee grounds. Which kicked me up an adrenal gear, and into the conviction that one more whomp with the wheelchair would back flip the wastebasket into place, leaving others to deal with the spilled contents. And with another joystick maneuver, I caught only the edge of the wastebasket, which dealt a surprising blow to the cubicle partition behind it. The electric wheelchair is a close cousin of the electric forklift, a tough, battery-laden vehicle designed to move heavy loads forcefully, between charges. My wheelchair was now nicely charged, thank you very much, and I couldn't resist a head-on probe of the same partition, which had once seemed wall-like in its rooted substance. But with a second slam, it rocked like a stage set. Gasps could be heard in the far distance, but the near distance was much more interesting, things giving way as they were. I knew now that the limiting factor in the cubicle wall's life was its joints. And that a full-speed reversal, wheelchair backing up with joystick bent to the ground, that action aimed at the partition joint, would have more or less the impact of a suicide bomber. I blasted through the wall backwards, hit a desk in Sales Support, then threw the joystick forward and came out the way I came in. There were people watching, but they were standing in groups far up the aisles. Knots of them, terrified and effete. I knew I had a brief opportunity and took it, cruising back to my cubicle and pausing for a 30-second scan of walls, drawers, files, bulletin board. Time enough to grab and run. Glowing in the heat of combat, it would come to me. There it was. I snatched it from the wall, drawing pins flying. It was my nephew's sketch, "My Uncle Playing Tag." An eight-year-old's color pencil depiction of me sitting on a sofa while he and his older brother raced back and forth, daring me to grab them with my good arm. "My Uncle plays tag sitting down," he had explained to a friend. No explaining now, as I wheeled out of my cubicle and caught a disturbing view of Sales Support's conference area now open and exposed, an upholstered partition sagging over a desk, books spilled in the foreground. Never mind, around the corner and out the back way to the car park. And surely someone was going to stop me. But, no, unimpeded all the way to the disabled parking space where my van waited. I twiddled with the controls concealed in the taillight, then the electric motor commenced pulling a bicycle chain, which yanked the door out, then open. Another twiddle and the hydraulic platform for the wheelchair began whirring up, paused, then rotated out, precise and so ludicrously slow that a secretarial temp, of all people, opened the building's back door and began yelling into the parking lot, Julia peeking over her shoulder. The lift still descending from the van, my mechanical dependency exposed, what to do but throw back my head, bare teeth and emit a laugh, operatic and mad. But they remained gawking at the back door, so I shrieked and cackled, brilliantly recapturing a moment from my fourth form Halloween play. But they were still there so I flailed my paralyzed right arm with the hooked fingers and made to rush them under battery power. They withdrew, and I rolled aboard the wheelchair platform and began slowly ascending, deus ex machina-style. I gunned the engine and made my cripple's escape. My Uncle Playing Tag. * * * After Julia's departure, I must have sat in the small conference room for half an hour, spinning these fantasies. When I returned to my cubicle, one of the temps from Sales was waiting with cartons. Kari, said her badge. It was better having a quasi-outsider take down my calendar, roll up my Sierra poster and stash my miniature cactus in a carton. The stapler is mine, I said, lying.

Grinding, Mechanical Things

2007-06-24T17:58:00Z

It was like someone had me in a 24-hour chest lock, in protracted imitation of CPR, squeezing the life out of me, the terror into me, while I went about rote tasks, such as opening my wallet to retrieve the Amtrak reservation. The ticket agent silently eyed the number and went to work on his computer, gazing over Raskolnikov glasses with half lenses. Train's a little late, he said. I pushed the wheelchair over to the high backed wooden benches. Actually, "pushed" isn't accurate. My functioning left arm shoved the wheel rim, and my left heel dug at the floor. I was using the spindly folding wheelchair, because it would fit in the trunk of my Seattle brother's car. It took a lot of effort to propel myself this way, even when I was 30 years younger and roaming the corridors of a Los Angeles rehabilitation hospital. Seattle was a long way. It was 24 hours away. This thought made me shake my head as though dispelling light anesthesia. Actually, having barely slept in the last two days, a little sodium pentothal wouldn't make much difference. I grabbed a pant leg and hoisted the paralyzed foot onto the bench. If someone objected to this shoes-on-seat situation, I'd be too tired to argue and too tired to move the foot. So, I'd stare at the person and drool. I laughed out loud. No one around me noticed. No one around me was under 80. Get a load of this crypt-like Southern Pacific waiting room. Coughs echoing off the beam ceiling three stories overhead. The Amtrak agent's stapler going down, the sound going up, the echo bouncing off a dusty mural of the California Gold Rush. Below, the sense of a waiting room full of refugees. An old woman sharing the bench with my foot wore a jacket of puffy, thread-dangling tweed. Her fiberboard suitcase was trimmed in cracked brown plastic, what used to be called leatherette. I was old enough to remember leatherette. Too bad I couldn't remember what happened this morning. Was it yesterday that I had mounted a full assault on Amtrak's 800 number? I wasn't traveling because now I was unemployed and couldn't pay for traveling, and I wasn't hanging up without a refund. Let me speak to your supervisor, I'd said. I'll take Amtrak to small claims court, I'd added. The agent sighed a little too much like Dottie and suggested that I either use the ticket or tell it to the judge. Travel or gavel. And now I was here, my head lolling, objects sliding from my lap. At least the train would have a bed. When fear finds its gear and slips into traffic, you become its trailer. Terror is the driver. Towed along by its grinding, mechanical force, sleep, judgment and volition all shrink into the back seat. Terror has no destination, never stops for gas, just drives on and on, uncaring, uninsured, unconscious. Fear needs no rest, but you do, badly. A little too much like 1968. I didn't sleep for days after my injury. Ambulance guys lifted me off a Berkeley street, carted me to the campus hospital, and there I stayed, paralyzed by nerve damage. In the evenings, drifting towards sleep, the slightest stimulus wakened me. A door slamming, the rattle of the medicine cart, footsteps in the hall, anything jerked me alert, got my full adrenal attention. Fear wound the reels, life's movie flickering, no intermission, on and on. No one could talk me out of the terror. The traumatic moment was over, and wasn't I safe and recovering? No. I was as inert as a rump roast at Safeway and kept asking the nurses to lift my hands out from under the covers, then tuck them in, then take them out. But wasn't this temporary, being paralyzed from the neck down, terrified from the sundown? No. A night injury on a residential street, and the night kept going for days?. When the nurses gave me pills, and then shots, everything in me dropped, except for one eyelid. Until on the fourth or fifth night, I dropped again, this time into darkest space, tumbling toward the darkest worst. After that, I slept. A pile of magazines slipped from my lap to the floor of the Amtrak waiting room, as I watched, dazed, gaga. The woman in the threadbare coat silently rose and picked up the reading material I wasn't reading. I offered her a magazine. The woman shook her head. I arranged the magazines on the bench. It's a high-performance job, being crippled. The one-handed management of objects demands full attention. Rest is essential. Sleeplessness does for quadriplegia what marijuana probably does for air traffic control. It wasn't doing much for me. Losing a job should not trigger all this adrenal, fight-or-flight panic, even for a cripple. Not in 1996. Silicon Valley was booming, companies had plenty of jobs and I'd soon be back at work somewhere. I knew this was true, and it didn't matter. I was pedal-to-the-metal with fear. Across the waiting room the snack bar proprietor went about the turning off of lights, the rolling down of old-fashioned metal shutters, the snapping of padlocks. He was a middle-aged Hispanic guy, which was to say, my age. The man performed his shutting and closing with care and certainty. This was all you could do. Shutter, lock and hope for the best. Someone might come at your place with bolt cutters. Someone might sue for salmonella. You had to trust. Time for a musculoskeletal change of scene. I pushed myself up to standing, turned 180 degrees, dropped my butt on the bench and lifted the foot onto the seat of the wheelchair. Now I was sitting on fine old wood and had an excellent view of the ticket counter, brass scrollwork, Art Deco. The agent was nowhere to be seen. The clock said 10:30 p.m., then after a few New Yorker cartoons, it said 11. This bench hailed from an era when California had many more oak trees than orthopedists. My butt ached, and I needed to define certain terms, particularly "a little late." I grabbed my crutch and hobbled the 30 yards to the agent's window, fatigued, wobbly and ready for nothing but straight answers. I pushed the agent's bell. When would the train arrive? The agent clicked away at his computer screen. Oh, he shrugged, the train was last seen departing Paso Robles. Lots of freight trains, he added. I crutched back to my wheelchair. Midnight brought another dimension of folly to the trip I shouldn't have taken. There was nothing to do but doze and drift in the Amtrak station. The commuter trains had stopped running, and there was no way to get home to the suburbs. 1968. It wasn't just that I was lying paralyzed in Berkeley's campus hospital. My parents were there too. They journeyed mightily, and separately, to see me. My father arrived on a morning flight, his five o'clock shadow visible at noon. I had once rubbed my boy's face against his, feeling a pleasurable warmth and foreign bristly skin. My mother drove in each afternoon from a suburb, bearing food and nervously joking with the fellow nurses. At first, my parents brought a measure of reassurance. Soon, they were musing about my next moves as a paralytic?which rehabilitation hospital?where I would live after that?. Student life, my web of friends, all had been shown to be insubstantial. My parents had regained power with the afternoon ease of a Paraguayan coup. I wanted them gone. I began with my father. In late morning he stood at the foot of my bed opining about my future life. After some rehab, he pointed out, I could live in a special wing of the campus hospital. I and the other wheelchair students. Except, I told him, I wasn't going to be a wheelchair student. He told me to face facts. I told him he hadn't faced a fact in 30 years. He took an afternoon flight home. At lunchtime, the day nurse guided a fork to my lips. I was beginning to sleep at night, but only for a couple of hours. Feeding took forever. This room, this room?smelling of shit every morning, bedside teams observing the limbs. Can you move this? That? Any feeling here? There? No, we thought not. In late afternoon I woke to find my mother standing at the foot of the bed. She asked how I was. They were interchangeable, my parents, both foot-of-the-bed standers. I told her things were peachy. The nurse chirped that my mother had brought an enchilada. It's actually a burrito, my mother said. I couldn't raise my head enough to see. Barely audible, my mother whispered to the nurse, her voice strained and tough, "He really needs to sit up." " 'He' will tell you what 'he' needs," I said. The silence filled with rustling aluminum foil. Raspy whispering, voices not audible, but I caught something about a crank or cranky. "Oh, I'm a cranky old crank," I said. The nurse said she was going to crank up the bed. Hard not to like the nurse, the way she smiled and held my gaze. My mother held the burrito close to my face, nervous, missing my mouth. Closer, I said. Chicken. Hot sauce. Good desert boy stuff. I let her wipe my face with a napkin. The nurse brought a wash cloth. My mother sighed, looked at the wall, then me. "Son, I think you'd better have a look at the wheelchair ward upstairs." "Mother, I told you no. No. No. No. No." I was screaming this, as much as one could with a half paralyzed chest. "No. No. No." Nurse whispering, and the door closed. With the room empty, I faced the campus evening, catching the glint of a bicycle rim, the swaying of tree shadows. No, no, no. At 2 a.m., most of the Amtrak passengers were dozing, a couple even snoring. Not sleeping could push you over the edge. Sometimes you needed a push. Sometimes you needed to push your own wheelchair, with your own arm. Sometimes you need to push yourself outside to the platform, take in the night air, gaze down the track at whatever was coming. At 3 a.m., the other passengers streamed into the chill night to join me. A rotating light appeared in the distance, sending up a bright cloud through the eucalyptus trees. A swoop-nosed locomotive neared, the headlight went dark, and the engine roar dropped to a purr. The Coast Starlight drifted by, silent except for the occasional rasping of a wheel from the two-story stainless steel coaches. The train was bigger and more improbable than I'd imagined. It came rolling like the Empire State Building on its side, car after car, baggage, dining, observation, and then the sleepers named for states, Ohio, Arkansas, Minnesota. Doors opened, light spilled across the platform, and uniformed Amtrak agents stepped down, extraterrestrial in their capacity for 3 a.m. chatter. Two train guys hoisted me aboard. One folded my wheelchair, and the other handed me my crutch. The conductor, vaguely Wild West with his vest and dangling chains, inspected my ticket, tore off a portion and said he hadn't a clue why the train was late. Good night, he said, departing without eye contact. Within moments I was bouncing through Santa Clara, holding tight to the sink in the corner of my room with my one usable hand, wondering how to brush my teeth without falling. I wedged my butt into the corner, released my grip and picked up the brush. Now I stood staring at the other side of the tracks. In the compartment everything was cozily miniaturized, bed, sink and toilet. The door locked against the world, and the world streaming by Amtrak window curtains. I saw castoff things of iron in back of autobody shops, peeling tanks, shopping carts lying on their sides. Terror was a grinding, mechanical thing that held you in its maw. This train was a grinding mechanical thing too, but it held you like a mother. A good mother who knew you had to grind on and on, because nothing else felt safe. Who knew that although, once aboard, it was hard to get off, eventually the whole thing would arrive, come to a stop. Meanwhile, you needed to be warm and enclosed in a tiny room that was a conveyance. You needed to be borne like a Pasha through Santa Clara. You needed to have someone fold down the Amtrak sheets and place this chocolate on the pillow. I didn't want to eat the chocolate. I wanted to cry.

Night Journey

2007-06-27T18:15:30Z

I and my bed and my ticket stub, my plastic urinals and glycerin suppositories, my underwear and books, all of us were moving through the night. The train ducked behind the high steel walls of a bridge over 101, the Silicon Valley artery. Corporate towers and artificial lagoons glowed in the all-night distance. Lights came at me from either side of the train, one window over the bed receiving San Jose, the opposite window by the sink absorbing Sunnyvale. The north and the south of things visible at once made me fold down the toilet cover and sit. So improbable, a room the width of the train, windows on either side. The two-story car deadended on this lower floor. Passengers made their way through the train on the upper level. Beside the tracks, a barrio clung to life. Small stucco houses, old cars and two young Latino men standing in a driveway, taking in the passing train, faces open as front porches. Rows of apartments, tan and dark tan paint peeling, barely 25 years old and already exhausted in this land of the new. A young couple on a dark sidewalk, talking. In a generation or the neighborhood would take up the Gringo's obsession with trim, tight lawns. For now there was something better. Street life, affordable housing inadvertently created by the railroad which cut a working-class swath through neighborhoods where most property values doubled every few years. Trains, rumbling, sounding their horns, jarring the dishes, reminding the middle classes of their tenement roots. So the gringos had left, and Latinos had gotten a neighborhood. Now the train slipped beside the night Bay. Distant suburbs bunched like glowing moss along the shores, swampy darkness in the foreground, the vast waters shimmering beneath the moon. Everything was turning, the night, the water, the track. On it went, the most ordinary sights...the Leslie Salt plant eerily floodlit like a penitentiary...street sweepers parked in formation saluting the City of Hayward...peeling clapboard houses waiting for arson in 4:00 a.m. Oakland. I hadn't slept, and I couldn't sleep, for too much was passing by.... And this was nothing but the Bay Area, home forever. Everything was jerking and lurching with the rails. Moving from the sink to the bed, for safety I slid against the wall. I took a long time getting my leg brace off and maneuvering myself under the sheets, the bed tilting and jerking. The train returned to the edge of the Bay at Richmond, banking in S turns through Hercules, Rodeo and Crockett. In the exhausted night, I stared at the Amtrak ceiling. The rails hummed under the car, banged, hummed again, briefly exploded in a steel-drum staccato. Racing toward Sacramento, I could hear the straightness in the tracks. Three nights without sleep. I had thrown away a job, thrown myself aboard a train. Something rose through the rails, unaccountable...joy. I had felt it even 45 minutes before, rocking through the freeway flatlands at Berkeley. The hills and campus rose in the distant dark, just visible between trackside warehouses and poles. On the high ground, all promise and permanence, the university, mother of the mind, alma mater. Fiat lux. I wasn't entirely cynical about it back then, even as a senior when it was fashionable to be sick of studies. In fact, I'd been studying pretty hard that June night in 1968. When the Berkeley student union shut, I quickly walked across the campus, sticking to the lighted paths. Steam rose ghostly from grates and a faint mechanical hum emanated from buildings where generators, pumps and mechanisms kept Coca-Cola bottles chilled and laboratories alive. Moving through the darkest places, I occupied myself with thoughts of the defeat of nature, how night revealed the University's urban underpinnings, with Strawberry Creek and its redwood banks reduced to Central Park. I had been studying for the last final of college. Striding up Spruce Street into the North Berkeley Hills, passing storybook houses, I recited the last of the verb endings for my Spanish III final. Was it too late to stop at Jim and Patsy's? Maybe so. Jim and Patsy, like all around me, were drawing inward, becoming couples, preparing to move on. "Hey, man." This from someone up ahead. I'd passed Virginia Street and was about to cross Cedar Street when three young men walked toward me. They were black, two with bandannas covering their heads, one nattily attired like a racetrack gent. "You got any money?" At this I smiled and shook my head. Everyone in Berkeley wanted spare change. Something collided with my chin. It took a moment to accept that it was a fist. Something salty filled my mouth, along with a loose piece of something sharp. The night, my brisk stroll, everything had stopped. The young men stood waiting. One of them grinned proudly. He was showing me something. It was shiny, silvery like a cap pistol. Guns, real guns like the ones I'd seen on television, were dark, dull metal. I was not going to be fooled and stepped toward the safety of the street light. With the bang, which was not terribly loud, the step ceased. Things descended with the gravitational precision of a stage curtain. My puppet body slipped downward, strings cut. The head bounced, then settled in a field of black rocks, the view of an eye resting on pavement. The head, my head, lifted slightly. Now it was flung, the back of it scraping over the hard roughness below. As the head jerked forward an action shot rolled into view, a foot kicking at my belly. Now I understood that this body, my body, was presumed to be dead, and it was being moved into the shadows, out of sight. The jerking continued, my unfeeling body advancing over the pavement. I recognized a kick to the stomach, not from the impact, but from the aftermath of diaphragm gaspings. Now there was air, welcome air, and with it the panicky knowledge that I had not been breathing. I moaned something, "help." Footsteps disappeared into the night. A moment, then another "help." I raised my head. I had heard the shot and knew approximately what had happened, but there was no explaining why nothing moved but my head. Shock. Perhaps people felt like this in massive shock. People who were dying. "Help." There was so little air. Compared to the distant sounds of traffic on Shattuck Avenue three blocks away, my moans were barely audible. Too little sound. Too late. "Help." Worth another try, or was it? Perhaps it was better to conserve energy. This had been a sad life, and this was a sad end. I raised my head again. I knew now that I was positioned under oleander bushes lining a neighborhood church. I could see the sidewalk. But it was very late. There were no cars. No one walking. And I was very tired. Understandable that one could be sleepy after something like this. Rest was healing. And it had all been very sad...and it was night...and one had the right to sleep. "Help." I was not going to stop. "Help." I was not. "Help." There were still possibilities. "Help." Even without enough air, or enough volume, this would have to do...futile, incessant.... "Help." A door banged open across the street. Footsteps. Feet scraping by me. The rough softness of a blanket on my neck. Someone crouched down slowly, the way old people did. "It's okay," he said, "an ambulance is coming." Which I could hear, because I was right on the ground where sirens skimmed over the earth, and could see when red swept lighthouse-style, over the pavement. Inside the ambulance, the world was surprisingly bright. I told the white-clad attendant I was afraid of dying. "It's a good sign that you're talking," he said. On a gurney in the student hospital, a police detective leaned over me. He understood, he said, so many drug deals went awry. Who was it, he asked? I told him I had been studying my Spanish. He asked me again, and now I understood that this was my body, my energy, my life. It would be spent or conserved. I would talk to this detective later, or I would not. When a photographer leaned directly over my face with a massive camera and exploded a series of flash bulbs inches from my eye, I decided this was the ultimate indignity and let myself sleep. When I awoke it was morning and my divorced parents, unaccountably together, stood at the foot of my bed. Everyone was smiling, except for the neurosurgeon who told me about the bullet in the spinal cord. Yes, he said, I was paralyzed from the neck down right now, but perhaps not forever. I did not know what to say. And it was hard to speak with spinal fluid running out my nose. A nurse asked if I wanted my hands on top of the sheet or under the sheet. I thought she was mad. Until I tried to move my arms.

Reaching

2007-07-04T18:40:55Z

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.

Close

2007-07-11T01:08:43Z

The small compartments lining the sleeping car's hallway, glass doors open, curtains swaying with the train, squeezed the corridor into a narrowness. With barely room for my crutch, I hobbled tightly toward breakfast, elbows in. Crutch, lurch, crutch, lurch. A rail whomp threw me sideways, but I bounced against the wall, righting myself. It was all over before it was over, the train knocking me off balance, me vertical again, panting with fear and discovery. In quarters so tight, if I toppled forward, I would grab the wall, and toppling sideways, the walls would grab me. I couldn't fall. I could only go and go and keep going. Which I was doing now, my head high, moving down the shoulderwidth passage entirely upright. Yes, bouncing occasionally from wall to wall, but gazing ahead, not looking down. Wouldn't my new physiotherapist be proud? He'd taken a 50-year-old's spastic right leg and turned the spasms into a walk. Twist your hip, he'd said. See how the right leg leaps? I had cringed as the inert limb did its involuntary flexing. Good, the physiotherapist said, use it. I twisted the right hip, the unfelt foot jerked upward and dropped somewhere ahead of the other. I had to see where the unfeeling right foot landed, lest the left foot trip over it. That's why I keep looking down. But not now. Flailing unimpeded, almost like a runner, I was looking up. Without fear of falling, without fear of anything, hauling. Damn the carpeted goings-on below, I hadn't walked this free and easy for decades. On and on toward breakfast, eyes up, looking at things. The compartments' glass doors revealed people staring, scratching, yawning. It was all so wonderful. What a trip, in the true, 1960s sense of the word. Not the contemporary usage, not a trip to drop off a boat trailer at the in-laws or visit the Tomb of the Unknown Account Executive. But one of those hippie voyages of youthful pharmaceutical discovery. A trip, for people who had lost their way, lost the point, lost their minds or lost their job. At the end of the car, I hit the electric switch plate on the door, whooshing it open. Below, metal plates slid across the floor, as the gap between coaches banged and crashed over a coupling far below. A paralytic's madhouse, but fuck it, I had come this far, and there was a candystriped handhold to my upper left. I grabbed it and dragged myself into the next car. On and on. Sleeping car number two, and I was breathing hard, pushing the cardiovascular envelope. A glimpse of memory now, like the corner of a postcard. Parking my Plymouth Valiant somewhere near Union Street, San Francisco, and crutching toward a blind date, 25 years ago. When I could limp for blocks, never mind the sidewalks tilting, curbs dropping, pavements sagging. For I was young and neurologically intact enough to keep my speed and keep my balance. The sidewalk crowd milling in front of Perry's bar, beautiful people of the 1970s, parted to make way for the lurching cripple with his crutch. Blind determination for a blind date. Did the waiting girl expect to meet a disabled man? No. Someone I barely knew in Los Angeles said someone he barely knew in San Francisco was this girl, and here's her phone number. I had made the phone call standing up, breathing deeply and working my bad arm to dispel terror and maintain vocal lightness. I must have cut quite a figure, twisting and limping into Coffee Cantata, offering my left hand to shake, right arm hanging crooked and twitching, me all smiles and forced cheer. Chit here, chat there, until it was over. Good night, and we'll have to do this again. We didn't, of course. The girl, whatever her name was, did not return my call. Very well. I had steeled myself. Which now seemed rather pathetic, for the only steel had been in my leg brace. A young man with the wounded emotions of a child willing himself into adulthood. Laughing at everything the girl said. Swallowing his coffee slowly, lest the unlovable cripple came vomiting up. And now, one sad marriage and sadder divorce later, limping through a sleeping car. And feeling downright superior looking into spacious rooms with arm chairs and wide beds. Fancy quarters, but they only had a single window. Ha ha, and fuck them with their one-window suites. Whomp. A rail tsunami tilted me hard to my right. I teetered stiff as a statue through a compartment doorway. With cartoon speed, a woman inside shoved me into the corridor. I kept lurching forward, because, as on the night of the blind date, stopping at was dangerous. Besides, I had adrenaline to burn off. All these close calls. Close to danger and death. And close to something else. It was just coming into focus as I limped through a vestibule. Close to help. The neighbors who had called the ambulance. The old woman who had just shoved me to safety. Bad people came at you from nowhere, but so did good ones. You had to be ready for either. And forward momentum was a fine thing, a joyous thing. And I owed a debt of gratitude to the old lady who had shoved me out of her compartment. But I had moved on, she had moved on, and it was all moving on, the farmers' fields outside, the sleeping car, the jiggling water glasses in the compartments.

On a Roll

2007-07-14T00:54:14Z

Fast now, trackside poplars whipping by the train's corridor windows, the lazy flatness of the Sacramento Valley bouncing like a flimsy table. Hard to believe that all this agri-dullness could lead to the Northwest. To Washington, bursting with watery life, sloped with fir trees, shivering beside snowy peaks, aquiver with shellfish and alderwood-smoked salmon. Time I had breakfast. Tilting to the right on a curve, I hit the electric switch at the sleeper's end. The door slid open on a lounge that stretched the length of the car. Low armchairs at this end, a bar with settees and booths at the other. Passengers sitting and standing, chatting and coffeeing. Sculpted sconces threw their light upward at a ceiling that wasn't there, for this was a dome car. With glass from bottom to top, scenery, currently agricultural, jolted past at all angles. Inside it was like some period scene aboard the 20th Century Limited or the Super Chief, except for people on mobile phones, cameras dangling. I stepped inside, holding tight to the door frame, crutch hooked in the crook of my paralyzed arm. A bartender fought his way through the tilting conservatory, parting the crowd with a pot of coffee. Occasionally a patron flagged him down and held up a cup. As the train jolted, the bartender poured, pivoting like a gyroscope to keep the coffee stream aimed. Along the windows, bud vases jiggled with fresh carnations. I couldn't stand and sway in this doorway forever, but the lounge car, all openness and unobstructed views, had nothing to grab. Eight overstuffed armchairs held eight overstuffed passengers, each with laps for emergency falling. Maybe I could limp ahead holding the swiveling backs of the chairs. Or the backs of the passengers. We were probably somewhere near Red Bluff, California. An abandoned high school sailed by, its parking lot marquee promising a flea market on a Saturday ten months before. Now, weedy fields, a row of trees, followed by corrugated sheds, and more fields, the latter being plowed. Looking to my left, I could see one possible course: sidle against the bulkhead, then grab the wooden ledge under the windows. The latter held coffee cups and carnation vases. It could hold me. I took a lunging step toward the glass and slammed my crutch tip against the bulkhead just as the car tilted leftward. Upright, I leaned against the window, pretending to regard the view. Safe now, or reasonably so. A woman swiveled her armchair to stare at my paralyzed hand. I stared at the gray stripe running through her hair. She smiled at me with her badger streak. I smiled back, remnants of fear-of-falling adrenaline pulling my lips back like some canine. Too bad I couldn't pass out a fact sheet explaining that the right hand and, yes, I am right-handed, is neurologically out of action. And the frozen fingers arch as though preparing to hit a piano chord, a lost chord, permanently lost in the spinal cord. As though on cue, the spastic fingers now began flapping like an untethered sail. Enough to make a grown man cringe. But as my fact sheet would explain, the brachial radialis, withered biceps, and shrug-capable shoulder muscles could bend the spasming arm out of sight. The old man in the next chair limply raised his hand in a gesture of help. Perhaps he once had a stroke or was having one now. He barely turned his head, making the faintest watery eye contact. Take mine, the gray-streaked woman said, standing, gesturing at her chair. Women get you with their eyes, which is why I said no thanks, and turned to the window, observing out loud that we had a beautiful view of a river. Gosh, the Sacramento, lolling and muddying in its Army-Corps-of-Engineers banks. What a river, look at how wide, what a year of rain we have had. Bam. A rail fist slugged me off balance and terrifyingly past my center of gravity, my hand straining to grip the window shelf, but too late. For I was falling slowly, tilting imperceptibly, toward dropping on my face. While I pulled and gritted and churned my torso muscles, in a failing effort. Like hanging by your fingers on the edge of a skyscraper. To do what I had just done. Stay upright. The gray-streaked woman had taken my arm. Thank you, I said, dropping leaden into her chair, breathing heavily. "Would you like a roll?" This from the woman. Her breasts were bursting through a T-shirt with North Dakota the Sunflower State, and I hadn't had a roll with a woman in a long time, and, no, she wasn't trying to humiliate me. She meant the Danish pastries on the stainless-steel counter, but I didn't, woman fear and lust eddying like the river outside. I muttered thanks, staring as she positioned a poppyseed Danish on a paper plate. I could see that she was not so young, but bouncy. And I wanted to commend her for being this way, but all I could do was nod stupidly and bite into the pastry. What I really needed was some coffee. She smiled. I said she must be from Fargo, North Dakota. Nope, she said, never been there. Seen the movie, she added. I was thinking this was a good sign. "Quite a tale," I said, meaning "Fargo." But this pun thing was happening in my mind with "tale" and "tail," sleep deprivation blurring the thought-versus-speech barrier. Or the adult-versus-smutty-schoolboy-with-Tourette's barrier. I fell silent. While she stared expectantly. And the silence dragged on. Whatever next thing I said would have a forced, leaden quality that would move the conversation the way a barge pole moves a barge. Women don't just float down the quadriplegic river of life and land in your lap. We were just sitting here and talking, which required no dates, no singles groups, no smoky bars. Just stumbling through a train and into each other. A meeting like this might not happen for the next decade or so. "A friend gave it to me," she added glancing at her own breasts, no, fool, the T-shirt. And I was aware of my paucity of words, versus her abundance, though despite the word count thing, she was all bright eyes, and we were making conversational progress. Yes, we were. Because when women like you, they help you choose a shirt, slice your steak, even converse. And sometimes when you can't make things happen, things happen anyway. Even coffee, which the bartender was transporting down the aisle. "If no one's been to North Dakota," I said, "how do we know it's there?" She looked at me like I might be psychotic, then smiled like I might be funny. She laughed. I laughed, swelling with pride, for that was a risky move, humorwise, but established a bond, like maybe we were both a little offbeat. And she said her friend was born in North Dakota, and I said check the birth certificate, then laughed again, then moved things right along by exchanging our destinations, me Seattle, she Portland. I watched as she quietly intercepted the descent of the cup and saucer, which the bartender had aimed at me, but she now held while he poured. Cream? Sugar? Now the cup was brimming with coffee, and I was brimming with gratitude. Because there's a way of helping that says "this is no big deal" and "you're not helpless," the whole thing more of a bridge than a burden. The bartender was talking. "I've got a seat for you, sir." "This armchair is fine," I said. "He means in the diner," she said. "You want breakfast, right?" And what was this sweet roll supposed to be? The two of them obviously knew about trains and breakfast. A suave quadriplegic would toss this off with a bemused shrug, then head for the dining car with the woman. I still had a nanosecond to get the words "do you want to have breakfast with me" squeezed out of my brain and into my mouth. I was almost looking at her, and the words were there and maybe would come out if I made a punching gesture in the air. Which would be ridiculous, with the bartender looking on. Time was going by. "Well," she finally said, "I'll see you." Now, humiliation pooling about me, I wanted to get away fast. I tried to rise from the low chair. The bartender hoisted me to my feet, the woman looking on. I crutched toward breakfast. The bartender held my forearm, guiding me like a child to the principal's office. This was not one of life's power moments. But that's the thing about the Starlight. With things lurching, you can fall at any moment, so you have to think about this moment, not the one that just happened. On the P.A., the tinny conductor announced Redding in eight minutes.

My Land

2007-07-23T21:38:45Z

Every seat was occupied and Amtrak waiters were doing burly pirouettes with plates aloft, the whole scene swaying and jerking. The dining car had the curvelinear shape of the lounge, with white table cloths and more carnations ajiggle in crystal bud vases. A maitre d' showed me to a place at the end of a bench, completing a foursome with greasy-haired guy next to me, an elderly couple across. As she passed down the aisle, the gray-striped woman said hi. I watched her slide into a booth and commence an animated exchange with table mates, all gestures and expansive smiles. She would talk to anyone, that woman. Pancakes, omelettes, French toast. Across the Amtrak table a 65ish woman loved Universal City on her sweatshirt. She stared out the window, then eyed the sugar packets one by one. Her husband, gray chest hair popping out of a black work shirt, held his menu like a fallen road sign. The man next to me lounged against the window, his greasy head blocking my view. Thus, our table. We considered the menus in silence. Down the aisle, the woman with the gray streak had people laughing. At least I was not the only single person stashed at a table. With one restaurant car for the whole train, diners rotated in and out of seats the way sailors moved in and out of bunks on a submarine. No empty booths. Something sad about our breakfast table of television-watching, conversation-phobic Americans. It fell to me to get things going. Hi, I'm Paul. This was Bill and Joyce. And that was Joe, with an accent. I joked about being jobless. Bill and Joyce had jobs, resident managers of a bible camp in Oklahoma. Did the Sacramento River look big to them? No. Lots of rivers in Oklahoma this big. No kidding, I said, thinking this land is your land, this land is my land. But maybe not Joe's land. He had comment about the river being big or small, just a shrug. Nevermind, for now we were ordering omelettes, every last one of us, even Joe, looking surly with unwashed hair drooping over his forehead. The waiter was pleased with our unanimity in the breakfast order department. Next, discussion of the night's bumpy ride. Was it hard to sleep? At first, according to Joyce. No problem, said Bill. Sleep okay, Joe? Is very late train, he said, eyes wandering in search of a better table. I wanted to point out that Joe was not addressing the question and he was not addressing the table, that we were the table, all four of us. Nevermind, for Joyce was into her grandchildren, even one great granddaughter, near Corvallis, Oregon. That's some dry, Bill observed, watching dust rise in a distant field. I didn't know what he was really seeing. Big farm machinery doing something on the other side of a row of poplar trees, churning California topsoil into the air. Some dry. This land is our land. Which is why I wasn't going to venture into abortion, family values or Republicans uber alles. We were going to enjoy our omelettes. Awful jiggly, said Joyce. The diner had just lurched in a direction opposite that of my coffee. The cup had been on a sound neurological trajectory toward my lips, but now brown liquid slurped onto the white tablecloth. I placed the cup on the saucer, feigning nonchalance. "This no good." Joe, roused from his omelette, held the bottle of ketchup. Joyce smiled and said it was for his hash browns. I asked where he was from, like maybe the Crimea. Joe cut his bacon and glowered. Los Angeles, he said, now going to Portland. Is much business in Portland, much biotechnology. I stared at the persistent Sacramento River. Kids chasing their dogs and others riding bikes along the opposite bank. A distant sign for a Ford dealership slipped behind houses. We slipped into Redding. This was a freeway town, but not now. The train revealed Redding's riverfront and railfront and now its old station, sloping mission style, with a bit of lawn and several people waiting for a train scheduled to arrive at 4:30 a.m. It was now 10 a.m. The double-paned train windows in thick steel walls muffled the sound. A silent movie of an elderly couple getting off, two getting on, then Redding's station sliding away. Redding dropped, the river view opened. Maybe crossing a bridge, though on a train overhanging the rails and jutting into the scenery, it was hard to tell. The view was turning. We were aloft on a curving viaduct, the Starlight climbing and banking. Snowy peaks loomed in the distance, many miles, possibly hours away. Redding spread up a circular sweep of foothills, a bowl, massed with poplars and aspens and elms, riparian and lush. California's arid flatlands were running out, watery slopes taking over. The high train arced like a bird over this green butt end of the hot San Joaquin Valley. Water, just out of reach, made shady big-leafed trees wave like fan dancers over sparse neighborhoods. Redding was modest and wooden. Paint peeled and screen doors hung askew, cars sagged and the green rustled overhead. We were picking up speed, running straight and level, houses thinning, trees gathering force. Then blackness. We had entered a tunnel. The darkness pounded. We were leaving unseen the Redding along Interstate 5 whose exit signs delivered exactly the same experience as they did 300 miles earlier, where ads on your motel's TV screen urged you to eat and sleep exactly where you were. In the rail tunnel darkness, Joe was eating the last of his omelette. Bill polished off his side order of grits, light yellow and gruel-like. Grits aren't California. Neither was this train, but an Amtrak bubble moving through California with the nation's citizenry, including Joe, from Los Angeles' Slavic quarter, his cheekbones high and flat as a Tartar plain. Russian mafia, perhaps, bound for Portland where is much business. The train shot out of one tunnel, through forest, and into another. We emerged to cross the waters of Shasta Lake on a causeway. Then into another tunnel, the journey shaking and pounding with change, biological zones shuffled like a deck of eco-cards. Big investment opportunities, Joe said, in biotechnology, in Portland. We were now out of tunnels and into canyons. A wide stream bounded beside the tracks. Did I know interleukin is still opportunities, Joe said, his words prodding like an I-beam. A wide mountain stream burst crisp and splashy, burbling and fumbling over boulders, spitting at the trees, smacking itself like a three year old on a play date. Everything was lightness and foam. A fly fisher in classic long boots stood in the current, casting and reeling. The train sped along the banks, curving into the river bends, shifting the light sideways for a better view of that thrust of trees, this foaming eddy. So this was the upper Sacramento River. With trout ready to leap into your frying pan, a postcard of heart-wrenching mountain stream perfection, viewed from the overhanging-into-the-scenery window of a banking train. The stuff of Isaac Walton. Joe was saying something about limited partnerships. Bending closer to the window, I could see the train itself, high, silvery and long, snaking behind us. Joe's head was still in my way, and he made no effort to move, lounging even more broadly against the glass, staring at the dumb waiter in the kitchen area. Bill and Joyce would give him a church-camp wallop. But I could only crane my head at the river, thinking how Russian novel heroes loved birches, frozen lakes, and a land of tundra, and why didn't he? Joe, you dumb fuck, move your head. Now he was saying something about Probinol and how the clinical trials were going well and you could get in on the ground floor. Joe, shut the fuck up and look at the ground, not the ground floor. He inclined his head closer, literally getting in my face. Had I read about Probinol? "Joe, would you mind moving your head?" He wiggled his neck. "Is okay, no stiff." Joe leaned forward to block a Kodak moment of the Starlight in a tight curve, river frothing beneath a steel bridge. "You are familiar with limited partnership?" I was about to tell Joe that the river was full of genetically engineered fish. Special striped bass. Genetically engineered. See the barcode on that ketchup bottle, Joe? Scientists have genetically engineered barcodes into the bass. They look like stripes, Joe, normal stripes. What won't they think of next? The miracle of recombinant DNA, recombining stripes on a bass with stripes on a package. So you've got pricing information barcoded on each and every fish. Want to invest? Shooting above the tree line and rising like the space shuttle was Mount Shasta, stark as the Matterhorn. Good fortune had placed me here. And the bad fortune, that I could no longer drive distances, so what? I was roadless in this Canyon of the Sacramento, off-road, on the railroad. Amtrak, the nation's off-road vehicle. And we were, after all, a nation. Like the lost family a divorced child endlessly tries to re-create, at parties, around a dining car table, anywhere. A nation of Bill and his grits, Joyce and her sweatshirt and, yes, the immigrant and his roughhewn avarice. Sorry, I told Joe, can't talk limited partnerships on limited sleep. Have to go. "Can you please to write name and e-mail." Joe produced a pen and scrap of paper. I left a tip by my plate, meals being free for those of us in the sleepers. I wished everyone a warm farewell and told Joe my phone number which happened to be the same as Amtrak's 800 number. I swiveled my legs into the aisle, and fought my way back up the aisle, grabbing table edges to steady myself. In the lounge, Mount Shasta?s surrounding black lava badlands were rotating into view. Here it was treeless black rubble, behind me it was distant hazy valleys, and straight up, the white shard of Shasta hulking and looming. A disabled person's wilderness moment, roadless and reckless. I stood holding the edge of an etched glass partition that said California Parlour Car. Up and down the lounge the sculpted lights glowed, curtains swayed, carnations sang. A bar slanted across the car, a bartender behind it drying glasses. He smiled. I wanted to tell him that his was a sacred task, priestly in his care of the curving glass and the sharpening mountain. This land is our land.

A Warm Pretzel

2007-07-27T20:05:06Z

The bartender asked if I wanted a drink. He was a short blond guy, a middle-aged surfer type, face hidden behind big glasses. A drink I couldn't turn down. It was like being called to something higher, like Mount Shasta, all 14,000 feet of it upswept from the tracks, so close that a jogger might sprint to the top. Those white stripes must be glaciers. A Virgin Mary, I told him. He opened a small can of Bloody Mary mix, poured it over some ice. To the morning, I said remaining stockstill, afraid to release my one-handed grip on the swaying bar and lift the drink to my lips. Over there, said the bartender. I slid into a booth. He sat down opposite. Nice train, I said. Oh yes, this was the Coast Starlight, Amtrak's best train. Recently upgraded, he said, thanks to a guy at Amtrak West. Brian Rosenwald. He had thought up this Parlour Car. Did I know it had a movie theater downstairs? The diner was a real one, with food cooked fresh in a kitchen. Brand new sleeping cars. Even a kiddie car for families. Rosenwald's idea was to take a slow scenic train, fancy it up and you'd have a land cruise. Like an ocean cruise but without shuffleboard. I told the bartender that I could see it working, this land cruise idea. He said the train had been selling out. It's kind of late, I said, six hours. He sighed. Yes, there were some problems with Union Pacific. They owned the tracks. Oh ho ho laughter further down the lounge car, and there she was with her gray stripe. She had an elderly couple in her thrall and seemed lost in extroverted merriment. Peeking over the top of my Virgin Mary, I watched them tying up three of the armchairs, and barely looking at the view. She'd found her elderly suckers for the next few hours. How could she keep talking, that woman? A sweet roll was all I'd gotten from her. Calculating and holding all the cards, as women do. I felt it rising in my chest, a jabbing urge to do her harm. Also rising, nausea of my own bile. My bladder started pinging as Shasta's side peaks came into view. The bartender helped me to my feet. How stunted, my life of urine. En route to peeing I would miss the young pines in dead lava rivers, the white shard of the peak, all so exquisite and turning with the tracks. I missed everything by choosing coffee over life, by not using a catheter and a leg bag like a sensible quadriplegic. Bad choices. I frantically crutched, keeping close to the table edges. No time. Pass her, force a smile, keep going, or risk going in my pants. Pee might flood me anyway. A urinary reminder of my breakfast-invitation cowardice and shame of 50-year-old woman failure. I raised my head to flash her a smile. She was gone, her seat empty, the elderly couple staring out the window. I must have driven her away. Not quite in time to the toilet. Fuck it. No returning to the Parlour Car with a wet crotch. I continued through the narrow corridors. In my compartment, I flopped on the bed. The window shades were up, and Mount Shasta was down if I wanted to look. Which I didn't. I was tired of things going by outside. This was my room, and I was inside. And with a few minutes staring at the Amtrak ceiling, I had drifted to where inside always was. * * * Early evening in Sproul Plaza, the December dark already black as the asphalt, I sprinted to my bicycle. Throngs of people surged across the Berkeley campus, horns honked, a red-faced evangelist yelled his last for the day. Some impulse made me stop running. I stood by a tree, as though awaiting instructions. An impulse, mildly foolish, to linger in the early evening, to savor something in the enclosing dark, before bicycling away. In months this would all be over with graduation, whatever that meant. I had no plans. Which was fine, because something would happen. Something always did. I recognized this as a new feeling, trust in the future, trust period. Lights spilled from the student union. The night sky sparkled and the scent of pretzels heating in a cart at Bancroft Avenue suffused everything with yeast and promise. I had nothing to do, standing by the tree, but I had no reason to move. I was a senior now, and I had a claim on this evening and everything around me. Despite the aching failure that I had hardly had a date in college, I could stand straight. Something like confidence had settled in my chest. Even girls, with their unpredictable warmth and terror, seemed almost within reach. Now for minutes at a time, I could talk to them, eye to eye, face to face, and maybe soon, body to body. The stand was so close, and a moment like this called for a pretzel. And even if the French's mustard wasn't good, there was too much salt, and the thing was gone in an instant, it proved to be a fine instant. Enough to start me pedaling home. I hiked my book bag over my shoulder and caught a glimpse, an absolutely positive glimpse, of that girl. All svelteness and black tights and leotard top, the sexy intellectual, one hand on her hip, talking to someone in front of the Student Union. Oh, well. I unlocked my bike. It wasn't as though we didn't know each other. We had tried out for a campus political play, Vietnam Follies. I had stood in front of an empty classroom with a mimeographed script, portraying a US Marine. She, Judith, had played a Saigon prostitute. I had dominated and abused her, while she strutted and flounced. Our audition lasted two minutes. Outside in the hallway, she became surprisingly unlike the part, her eyes, warm, open and steady. Mesmerized, I fumbled for conversation. See you around. And now I was seeing her around. No, I couldn't do it. Besides, I'd just unlocked my bicycle. But I could walk it, walk the bike over to her, and chat. Who knew? Now I was doing that, me walking and the bike rolling, approaching her, the impossible. Hello. Oh, hello. She recognized me, even remembered my name. I would bolt right now, except she was laughing about not getting the part. We?re not for Broadway, she said. We?thrilling. We?re not even a sideshow at a peace rally, I said. Laughter being wonderful. Especially from a thin faced Jewish beauty. And maybe we both had thin faced Jewish beauty. This came to me now, the possibility of my own big-nosed handsomeness, hitting like a drug, exhilarating and preposterous. Though I was already running out of the next thing to say, already running out of nerve. But running was okay, particularly with a bike, which made you look like you were on your way. So, why don't we do coffee some time? And her face brightening said it all, so much that mine flushed and reddened in the darkness. Quickly tearing off scraps of paper from our notebooks, numbers exchanged. See you, see you. And that was it. I walked on, bike clicking. Now I was heading back to my rented room in a house full of rented rooms. I leapt off the bike, grabbed my keys. Then leapt back on. There wasn't room in the rooms. I pedaled up into the hills, getting higher with each block. The hills did that, they took you up. And the higher you got, the more you looked down. And what was down was small and manifold and singing with night. And I was singing too, old songs from my parents' record player. I was surprised that I still had the songs, even though the records were gone. Where were the records? This was something I could talk to Judith about. On our date.

A Good Pounding

2007-08-07T23:17:46Z

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.

Snowstuck

2007-10-09T04:47:06Z

By breakfast, we had ascended the high plains north of Mount Shasta and now hurtled straight toward Oregon, blasting along at 80 mph, parting snowy fields like a razor. The low skies churned gray and dark, but the whiteness reflected the secret sun upward into the dining car.

As a desert boy, I saw snow every couple of years. The stuff fell thin and melted fast. But here the snow was profligate, undulating like a white comforter, softening and muffling the landscape. The sense of movement, the rich snowy ground, the promise of the peaks ahead and, not to be underrated, the caffeine in the morning coffee, all of this conveyed hope. Things could be as sad and lonely as this high California prairie, but they still held beauty. Yes, I told the waiter, more coffee, please.

A light seating in the diner. Not that many people heading toward Klamath Falls on a Friday in January. I had a table to myself and could luxuriate, no one watching, in the speed, momentum and onrushing snowy future. No wife, no girlfriend, solitary days ahead. And yet there was love. Oh, why not, I told the waiter, cream and sugar. Blasting on and on over the rails, the unvarying and inevitable route, the future coming at me with more snow, the Cascade Mountains and, if one had the fortitude, lunch in two hours.

The train began to slow, the sense of a faint grinding, probably the brakes. The whitecapped fence posts ceased their blur, I got a good look at a probable ranch house. That is, a yellow wooden home that might have once belonged to a rancher. With narrow high windows, two stories, no stucco and, across a highway, rangeland. Then a lone, snow-laden shed. A kid on a bicycle. And as we came to a stop, the outskirts, or inskirts, of a small town. I laughed aloud at my "inskirts." Amazing how things could work out, I thought, placing a tip on the table. The train was halting as breakfast was ending, and now I could hobble, without jolts or fear of falling, toward the next thing.

Making my way up the narrow dining car passage, I lightly grabbed at table edges, just enough to steady myself, taking care not to pull the tablecloths away. The electric door whooshed open at the end of the car, and I stepped down into the lounge, made my way along the dark passage behind the bar. Hurry. I crutched hard, pouring on the quadriplegic steam. At any moment, a freight train would rumble by, and we would resume jerking and tilting toward Seattle. Hurry.

The Parlour Car shown with reflected snow light. Without movement, without scenes rocking by its greenhouse windows, the car felt more like a cocktail lounge in an airstream trailer.

"Three hours?" Leaning against the bar, perfectly coiffed, purple cashmere sweater, a woman groaned.

"Afraid so," said the bartender.

She turned and headed for a booth where her husband bent over a map.

"Three hours of what?" I jammed my crutch against a bracket under the bar.

"Track trouble," said the bartender, rattling a rack of glasses. "We'll be here awhile."

Kind of fun bellying up to the bar when the bar wasn't bellying itself. The bartender gave me a what'll-you-have flick of the head. I asked for an orange juice and made my way to a booth.

Three hours. No book. Just a view of a highway slanting from the train past a stucco house, a shed set among bare trees, a sign facing the wrong way. Three hours. Across the aisle, in the booth diagonally opposite, the woman sipped her drink and the man rattled his map. Something hissed. The man picked up a walkie-talkie, no, a scanner. The thing was spitting static as the man clamped it to his head. He put it down and resumed map rattling.

Affluent people out for a train ride, a view. Easy enough for me to say hello. I sipped my orange juice and watched. She was saying something. Had he remembered? Yes, he said. Will they pick up the car? Sure, he said, they're only in Sunnyvale.

Silicon Valley types. BMW drivers. A guy like this knew guys like this. People who needed brochures written...even speeches. High rollers, career builders. People you networked with. My ears were open now, picking up every utterance the way a seashell picks up the ocean.

Mmmm, she sighed. He took to the scanner. Staticy words rising and falling. I pretended to stare out the window.

"A crew is coming from Klamath Falls. Maybe a boom car. I can't tell." He stared at the bar.

"The bartender doesn't know," she whispered.

"He might."

"God, Howard, everyone isn't a trainee."

He strode to the bar, ordered a beer and muttered something about a boom car. Sorry, said the bartender. Howard slid back into the booth. Told you, she said, he's no trainee.

Better not act like I'm in training when we talk. Which we would, just give me a few minutes. I'd think of something. Feign ignorance about the delay, ask a question or two about trains, and he'd be off.

When you had a wife who looked that good at that age, had people who came and picked up your car...life was less about back strain, more about status.

"The bartender might be interested in track repair. Does that make him 'trainy.'?"

"Howard, you want to play Lionel, play it. Leave me out of it."

"Leave you at home, you mean."

She whispered something. He glared, put the scanner back to his ear. More staticy voices. He strained to look out the window. She folded her arms. Silence. The sun seemed to have changed angles. Time, 40 minutes or so, passed. Now and then I glanced their way. She faced the window, while he stared at the map. He looked up, and she regarded the aisle. They would probably welcome an outsider. Innocent diversion with a crippled guy. Have a seat, won't you? I would ask, what's a boom car...a BMW bought in the boom...a beamer for boomers?

This made me laugh out loud. The man stared at me. I spread my arm across the table to show I was in control, tossed my head lightly to suggest a casual air. I smiled back. The man looked away. Probably thought I was demented. Never mind. Triangulate. Talk to the woman, slide in next to her, then get to know him. What do you do? What do I do?

A boom car. Must be one of those flatcars with a crane. The man longed to see it do what? Lift up its long straight thing and go boom. Maybe that was the thing about these two. His long straight thing rarely lifted itself. No boom.

Squeezing into their booth would be visibly awkward, so much effort expended, that I'd need to cover with a joke or two. Folks, I could use a boom car myself to get out of this booth. If this looks like a noisome, arthritic maneuver...it is. I'm just swiveling my legs into the aisle, first one, then the other. Leaning forward, getting over my center of gravity pushing up with the good arm...whoops, awfully tight between bench and table. Howard, could you give me a hoist?

I know you techie guys aren't easy with the touchy-feely.... Tell you what, Howard, if you grab here, under the arm...rather than the arm itself...then lift. Great, that was excellent, Howard...and note that we are on first name terms...splendid. So why don't the two of us go outside and assist the track repair crew? Howard couldn't help laughing...thereby bonding. Well, see you later. Oh, here's my card.

First, a solo run-through of the get-out-of-the-booth thing. I slid my good leg into the aisle, grabbed the bad one, or tried to. The paralyzed foot was wedged. I bent low to look. The table leg was in the way. Now, a matter of twisting the paralyzed ankle, encased in its plastic brace, into place. Better slide back around, reach under the table, position the foot-in-plastic, and try again. I grabbed the ankle, twisted the toes forward, pulled...but couldn't quite get the shoe around the table leg. This was becoming embarrassing. I was losing patience, and soon, my temper.

Seated at the end of the bench, turned toward the aisle, with one foot in the aisle...spacing out, focusing in...I stared at the empty booth opposite. The woman down the aisle rose, strode past me to the bar. My face went crimson.

I was sitting there like a dork, in one of those odd poses of cripples in nursing homes or panhandling on the street...askew, facing the wrong way, looking at the wrong things. While the able-bodied strode past, taking care not to step on your foot. The woman passed by with another drink. She thought mine was typical cripple behavior, sideways sitting and table staring. Her ice clinked in its glass. The world continued. I was slightly wedged, horror growing at the scene...cripple in his oddity, people moving by. Leave the funny man alone. That's what cripples do. Sometimes they want money, sometimes not, but they always do their sideways sitting-and-staring thing...while we do ours.

Only that morning, making my way from bedroom to stairway, I had glimpsed, under the closed curtains of a compartment, two sallow legs. Pajama bottoms, old blue veined feet emerging, someone talking. An old woman's voice. She was going to get him breakfast. Be right back. He would remain in his old pajamas and his blue feet, in the compartment. He would be there all the way to Seattle. Forgotten and diminished, the natural cripple order of things...while horrified people like me noticed and passed by. Too bad for him. Good thing I could climb the stairs. To bad I was now stuck in the aisle like a minor gargoyle...or Rumpelstiltskin's assistant...or just some wheelchair guy who sat in a park all day watching people eat lunch.

"Here." The bartender appeared. He grabbed the wrong arm. I showed him the correct one. He pulled. My foot...I'd forgotten...hooked on the table leg. The bartender bent down, twisted the foot into the aisle, then lifted me into standing position.

"Thanks. Some trouble with external rotation on my right lower extremity." I didn't want to appear retarded.

The crutch. I had angrily flung it out of my way in the midst of ankle grabbing. Now it was across the booth, leaning against the window, too far to reach. I turned to the bartender. He was gone. I waited, one hand on the table, one leg holding my weight. Bottles rattled in the storage area behind the bar. I could yell, but that would call attention. It was unthinkable to sit down and get stuck again, necessitating another rescue...certain proof that I was retarded. My leg was beginning to shake. I grabbed the booth back and hobbled toward the couple.

"Excuse me."

The man...Howard...looked up. He put down his scanner. I told him about the crutch. He frowned and narrowed his brows. Let me show you, I said.

I lurched up the aisle. There was the crutch.

"Normally I place it on the floor. Just wasn't thinking." I smiled at him, all nonchalance, casually glancing about the car. "Thank you very much."

"Sure. No problem." He headed for the scanner.

The crutch. It was now on the floor under the booth. He had placed it there, in his literal minded way. Bending over was dangerous, sitting down again was madness. Yet hadn't I gotten myself out of the booth in the diner, only an hour ago? The secret? Sliding in, bad leg first. Which meant sitting on the booth's opposite side, sliding the good leg under the booth and kicking the crutch my way. A small ping from my bladder. Oh my god. Yet hardly a surprise in the wake of coffee. Still no sign of the bartender.

I had no choice. Scanner clamped to his ear, a rapt Howard was writing something on a napkin. No choice.

"Excuse me."

He kept transcribing. I pressed on with a sorry-to-bother-you-again intro. It will just take a second, I said. My wife can help you, he said, not looking up. She forced a smile. My bladder gave another urine-swelling jab. Weak sphincter muscles, Yellow River ready to burst down my trousers....

"Can you grab my crutch?"

Her eyes widened. Had it sounded like "crotch?"

"My aluminum cane."

She turned to her husband. He waved absently, shooing her up the aisle, all the while writing with the intensity of a cryptographer.

"Sorry." I did a sort of quadriplegic mince, bending slightly in that bladder-clamping way. She followed me, suspicious or puzzled, I couldn't say. At the booth she stared blankly.

"Right there on the floor," I said, a nasty edge creeping into my voice.

She considered this matter of bending down. Would I stare at her butt?

"Please," I said, bladder tightening like a fist.

She bent, grabbed the crutch, handed it to me. "My God," she said, eyeing it before I felt it, the rivulet, visibly yellow and smelling faintly of coffee, hosing just below my zipper.

I couldn't even manage a "thanks." Crutch on arm, I set off lurching through the lounge. I moved with the blank-eyed bewilderment of a child who has been slugged on the playground. Never mind the elderly couple in the armchairs. Yes, they would see the dark stain down my trousers. Hit the electric door switch plate, keep going. There were trousers in my suitcase. Dry, folded, and ready. As for these trousers, I could rinse them in the sink, get them washed at my brother's house. Everything back to normal.

Later this afternoon, trousers dry, urine-spurting moment forgotten, I would appear for wine hour in the lounge. Just as an actor who's had bad reviews turns up for the next performance. I would go on.

Hitting the door switch for the last sleeping car, my foot-trapped reverie in the booth seemed an indulgence. So what, if a leg gets stuck under a table? Get angry, get up, get going. Get real. I had bigger neuromuscular fish to fry. Even if the Starlight wasn't moving, I was.

Wine Hour

2008-01-30T20:28:26Z

Shoving my jeans in the Amtrak compartment's tiny sink, water spitting from the faucet and splashing onto the carpet, I rinsed the one pant leg and hung the sodden denim on the towel rack. I washed out my underwear, and while the sink drained, a kid rode along the slushy highway on his bicycle. The townspeople seemed oblivious to the train parked across their snowy field, unaware of the old man now sponging off his crotch. Only train passengers and carnival workers lived in metal rooms parked at the edges of towns. Maybe my jeans would dry before Seattle.

Seeing myself in the mirror over the sink, I wasn't cringing. Why should I? The facts were simple and small. A man with a half-paralyzed bladder slides into a booth, pretends he's normal, and he's not. Wastewater from the bodily plant discharged, without permit, into the surrounding environment. Denim environment decontaminated through water-solvent rinse, and evaporative phase now underway. Plant visitors could see the results drying on the wall. The shame was invisible...the voodoo power of urine...smelly psycho-emotional essence...the angry yellow. The trick: remember that what went bursting forth at the coiffed and carefree in the lounge car...was only a metabolic byproduct. My trousers would dry quickly in the Amtrak air. I bent over to turn up the heater, and stretched out on the bed.

Whomp, things tilting, Starlight moving and me waking from a dreamless doze. The sun was lower. A vast lake, much of it frozen, stretched toward distant white mountains. We ran along its banks, Upper Klamath Lake, according to the route guide. The Starlight folded itself around curves, rear cars visible as it arced, overhanging its tracks to project my window into the winter mountains. The lake was mine, all its white flatness, distant blueness, ice ripples in your face, coldness palpable. When the lake receded, I worked myself into fresh trousers. Almost 3 p.m. Wine tasting.

A middlebrow experience, but if you're looking for what passes for action aboard the Coast Starlight on a given afternoon, this is it. The wine tasting. People gather in the glassy dome lounge and grab a few cubes of pepper jack while the bartender announces the vintages, sounding half mystified himself. And then everyone goes to work on the merlot. It's the idea of doing this while the natural spectacle unfurls that makes the thing extraordinary. If the Starlight is on time the second day, wine hour occurs south of Portland in the farm flatlands of the Willamette Valley. Fortunately, on this day we were hours behind, and on the verge of a cliffhanging ride down the snowy Cascades. Stumbling into the lounge, I found the last empty seat. Now all eight armchairs were full, and the one next to me was the fullest.

"Well done, mate. Plopped yourself nicely, didn't you?"

He was large and British, red-faced as something out of Dickens, talking too loud and leaning too far over my chair. I stared out the window.

"Those ladies want to dance," the Brit said, placing a hand on my chair, "but we haven't the music and I'm too bloody old." He burst into expansive laughter, turned to the old woman beside him and then to me.

I folded my arms and shut my eyes. We were slowing past the few shiny metal roofs and smoking chimneys that comprise Chelmut, Oregon. The station was barely a shed. A young couple with skis wandered away from the train. The remoteness, the snow piled high and not a moving car in sight, the great silver liner sliding into town with skiers...perhaps it was like this in Switzerland.

"Up on your pins, man, and show us how. You're a sight better than I am with that stick, as the Duchess said to the Vicar."

I slouched lower, lolling my head to one side. Something hit the back of the chair, and my eyes opened reflexively. The Brit, gasping and laughing, had his lummox hand just behind my head. He gazed about the car, seeking others to pull into his orb.

"Portland come up quickly, does it?" He leaned over me. "I reckon it's rather big."

"Not big enough," I said.

"I admire your guts, man. I've watched you making your way about."

Side impact. "Thank you," I said. Tearlets oozed into my eyes. So much coarseness and kindness in one go. Impossible to know how to proceed.

"See this?" The Brit dangled his hand before my eyes as though to hypnotize me. "This bit, here. Palsy."

Better take the foot off the conversational brake. "It looks puffy," I said.

"Paralysis, mate."

"You had a stroke."

"Of bad luck, mate."

The tracks ran straight, the snow ran deep. I thought of telling the old Brit about reforestation, how it turns the wilds into one gigantic Christmas tree lot. But there was no sense in encouraging him.

"Bit sparse, Portland. Isn't it, mate?"

"Portland is miles away," I said.

"London comes at you all chockablock. Not like this. Fancy a top up?" He grabbed my glass.

I tried to grab it back, reaching across with my left hand, but the gesture was futile. This guy needed to learn American laws. Like the Extrovert Limitation Act of 1998 and the Lummox Travel Ban of 1995. He could be doing some serious time. The train lurched over several logs or maybe an entire Chevrolet. When the track calmed, I remained agitated. The Brit tried to pass me the glass. I kept my hand on my lap, glaring into the distance.

"Mate, it's bubbly." He maneuvered the glass under my nose like smelling salts. Effervescence rose up my nostrils.

I folded my arms, as best a quadriplegic can. He muttered to the bartender.

"Sir." The bartender handed me the glass. I took it and said nothing.

The Starlight was creeping along a single track as low clouds thinned to reveal a widening canyon. On the near slopes, conical firs massed in snowy array. Each was so Christmas-tree perfect in its white symmetry, the replanted effect was unnatural, like a gigantic Macy's window display. I wondered how trees could find purchase on such cliffs. The slopes flared into a gorge, rounded and wide. A stream sparkled thousands of feet below, headwaters of the Willamette River. Over this spectacle of the Cascades, the Brit kept talking. It was mate this, and mate that.

Wisps of fog rose up the canyon, Oregon's version of Valhalla with concrete snow sheds protecting the train from avalanches. The tracks pierced rocky cliffs to enter dark tunnels. Across the enormous chasm a distant outcropping of black rock, maybe lava, stuck through the snow.

"Medical condition makes you a teetotaler, does it?"

I sighed. "My doctor has advised me to maintain silence."

"Bloody doctors. Mine wouldn't know has arse...."

This should be the most civilized of salons, national park splendor outside, champagne and quiet elegance inside. But sadly, the dregs of the Coast Starlight were drawn to me or me to them. Nothing seemed to faze this man.

"...said to stay off the drink on account of the medication. Sod it, Doc, I said, put me off drink, and you put me off the planet."

"You'd probably like another," I said. This popped out of my mouth like a burp, the wisdom more a feeling than a thought.

He chortled, slapped my shoulder and held his glass aloft.   The bartender was at his side in seconds.

"Mid-air refueling, mate." He studied the bartender's sparkling stream. "It's tanker cars, isn't it? You're our bloody tanker car. Watering us down. Fueling us up. Not as fast as the Bristol Express, but a sight jollier." The Brit downed his glass, laughing at a passing tree or his reflection in the window. The bartender poured him another. I feigned a sip of my own glass, mindful of balance and bladder. A potted plant would be handy.

"Drink up, mate."

"I will soon. Won't you have another?"

"Trying to inundate me, mate? I know your sort. Shanghaied and pressed. Your bubbles are going flat."

To play along, I took another sip. He watched closely. I took another. There was probably some Chinese proverb about this, fighting fire with fire, getting a souse soused. I raised my glass in mock toast. He gestured for me to drink up, downing his glass. The bartender poured him another. I felt obliged to show progress and sipped some more, the stuff shooting into my veins.

"What do you do for a living?" To keep him drinking, keep him talking.

"Living, mate? This is living. Butler." He offered his hand.

"Bendix," I said.

"No, my profession. Butler. In service, mate. Gentleman's gentleman, they call it in American films. Retired now. Worked for bankers, actors." He absently flung his glass-bearing arm toward the bartender. "Done his job plenty, haven't I? Worked in pubs. London Transport. After the war, crying need for bus conductors, there was. I didn't last. Insulted a bloke."

Trying not to chortle, I inhaled, then sneezed, champagne. He brightened and leaned over me.

"Wasn't all that amusing, mate. But it gets better. Want to know what I said to the bloke? He was queuing for the bus and had this little dog under one arm. I told him 'no,' he couldn't take his dog on the bus. I already had a dog on board, you see, for a blind lady. Two dogs get in a scrap, don't they? Come on, mate." He took the bottle from the bartender and poured foam into my glass. "I was shooing him away with his little chihuahua dog, and he hoisted the middle digit. I said take his hairless mutt and insert it in his arse. He wrote down my badge number, sent in a letter."

The track I'd spotted thousands of feet down the slope was ours, a leg of a giant switchback. The train emerged from another tunnel and entered a snowshed that framed the forested chasm through open arches, stalactites hanging in storybook curtains. We went into a complete turn, the length of the Coast Starlight curving around the lounge car.

"Bloody sacked, mate. Next thing, I'm in the Grosvenor Hotel kitchen. One thing led to another."

Soon, we were coming out of the snow. It was hard to say how we'd gotten here. One thing led to another.

"Good God, man," he bellowed at the bartender. "The train is late and the drink is absent."

With the moment expanding all around me, I raised my glass in salute to the glorious ride, to him, to us. The bartender handed him another bottle. He poured. I took a gulp, began to cough and a cascade of abnormal neurology sent my diaphragm into spasms along with my hand. Champagne sloshed on my pants.

"Fluids all about," said the Englishman. "We'll be ejected soon. Don't fancy lying in the snow."

I dabbed at my pants with a napkin, thinking that only a single letter separated champagne that was swilled from that which was spilled. And spastic could be drastic. Uh oh, bladder conditions were racing, body divesting itself of alcoholic holdings...drink blurring the difference between filling and filled...and I would soon feel something too warm and wet down the front of my trousers...the urine smell arriving like a bad hospital memory. These swiveling armchairs were impossibly low and inclined to turn.

"Up on your pins, mate." The Brit rose and yanked my paralyzed arm.   His gut swelled through a tight buttoned white shirt, and I was toppling toward this belly. Just as the Starlight lurched and flung me over my center of gravity. The Brit hooked a sausage arm through mine and dragged me between the chairs. "Don't spew, mate, not here."

"I have to pee badly. Hurry "

He punched the electric door, stepped between cars and waited for the door to slide behind us. "This will do, mate. No one is about." He indicated a gap near the shifting floor...with seconds before my urine burst...the toilet way down the hall. "Here, before you piss yourself. Haul out the trouser snake and point him there."

So unreal watching my yellow stream disappear between the clanging metal parts. Would it freeze outside? Would it hit someone in the lower level of the car? I zipped up.

"Winters, I used to piss in the snow. Don't know why. Could have pissed in the pub, couldn't I? But you need to leave your mark, don't you, mate? I recollect a bloke who...."

I shoved the Englishman's shoulder...don't know why. His shoulder proved to be surprisingly soft. Don't know why. Maybe he was talking too much. Or maybe I wasn't talking enough. Or maybe he was just there, and I hadn't pushed anyone like this, mano a mano, since I couldn't remember when. Since I'd been shot, of course, when I'd lost the ability, or seemed to. But I'd only lost the nerve.

"Blimey, that was deliberate. Bloody hell." He feigned a shove at me. I watched with alcoholic detachment, thinking, yes, he might push back. And so what? I would fall against the rubber wall, maybe lose my balance over the bouncing coupling. Maybe fall down. And then I would get up. Cut, perhaps, maybe bruised...like a bruiser. I stood there leering at him, all insolence and intoxication.

"Right cunt, you are." He was having trouble balancing over the jiggling floor plates, moving like a walrus on stilts.

The cold was getting to me, mountain air swirling through the bouncing gaps in the floor. The Brit was getting to me too, but less now. The electric door from the sleeping car whooshed open. A woman, hands in cardigan, gave me a look of are-you-coming-or-going. I stood my ground, for what did it matter? Not a trace of pee on the floor. And hardly a smell. I let her squeeze by me. The butler gestured for her to pass. Her presence had a mildly sobering effect. I stared at the floor...rubbed my chin...looked up at the butler.

"Doing a spot of Hamlet, are we, in between fisticuffs?" He pressed the switch plate on the lounge door. The door opened. I wasn't going anywhere. Elderly passengers in the lounge stared at us, we at them, and the door shut.

"What are you doing, mate? Having another slash?"

I shook my head. "Have to lie down."

"Here, mate? This isn't a bloody infirmary."

"What is it then? One cripple, one guy with a stroke."

"This bloke is going bloody maudlin. Mind you, he's fit enough to take a swing at me."

Punching him had punched me through some barrier. There were two things. This I'll-be-nice-and-don't-shoot-me-again thing...cowering out of the way and safe. And this pugilistic-cripple-with-his-fists-up thing...balance wavering and fierce or maybe pathetic.   It was hard to say. God bless us everyone. Who said that? Tiny Tim. God bless everyone who kicks butts. I said that. This made me burst out laughing.

"Bloody demented, he is. Here, mate."

He grabbed my arm. I wrenched myself away. Better when I was pushing him. Time for something else. I stood there waiting. The next thing was unclear, but I had the mindless certainty of an adolescent. Cripple on steroids. One thing led to the next. Maybe I would have some more champagne...no, let things sober up. The cork was out, and something had been building up in the accumulation of days. The fact that I was an adult man and I had endured and I had power and I knew things.

And one thing I knew...this guy was lonely and old...so be kind to him. And get away. Falstaff had his uses. And then it was time to be king.

"I have to go pee again," I said. "This time in a toilet." I limped down the hallway.

"Don't understand you, mate. Oh, I know I take the piss."

"That's what I'm taking." I shut the lavatory door in his face. I opened the door. "You're a good guy," I said, shutting the door again. The airplane-style toilet whooshed, and several minutes went by. I heard him wandering down the hall, muttering bloody hell.

Feathered

2008-03-08T18:12:27Z

In the mornings I drank my tea and stared at the toaster, hoping something new would pop up. Late August, my freelance checks rolling in as reliably as the fog, the days shortening. Summer almost lost. I phoned my brother in Seattle. On a warm September night the Coast Starlight's doors shut. Something in me opened, as San Jose drifted by.

There were other, better trips to take. But I'd been thinking about this one...since the last one. On the way to the dining car, I knew enough to hustle while the train was moving slowly, to make tracks. In the empty Parlour Car, this "making tracks" thought exploded in my mind with such irony that, while my gaze fixed on a compelling lumber pile in the Santa Clara twilight, a rail tsunami knocked me onto a bench. I rolled here, crutch rolled there, but we were soon up and moving. Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer.

The dining car was bright, the fish of the day was coated in nuts, and most passengers sported badges from a tour group. Hello, I'm Margene. Hello, I'm Frank. Hello, I'm badgeless and something is missing in my life...aside from part of my spinal cord...which I miss the way Germans probably miss the Alsace-Lorraine...once thought to be vital, but now gone. I was gone too, as soon as we slowed for Oakland.

Back in my compartment, the car attendant had folded down the sheet and placed a chocolate on my pillow. I stretched out on the bed. Oakland's station slid into view. People stood on the platform, their faces expectant, their eyes open to those of us hidden behind dark, sealed windows. A young man appeared from the train, a portly woman threw her arms around him, tears streaming. Baggage carts passed unheard. Now the silent scene began to move, then accelerate, south. Downtown Oakland had streets, and stop lights and people eating sushi at a jazz club. One could see it all, and it had to be seen, right now, by me. And brick apartments. Lights out, but people could still inside, behind the blank windows. A leisurely rhythm to the red circles of warning flash from the crossing gates that held the cars in place, their bored cow bell chiming. Only one car waited, a lonely wait, the train so full. And goodbye and goodbye. Apartments and houses fell away, for Oakland was falling away, or giving up, a dark no man's land taking over. Rails and rails and boxcars, and even an empty train like ours, the waterfront in the distance, its cranes bent over ships like giant insect arms. The Starlight slipped along smooth, new rails. Overhead lighted lemmings processed along a freeway. We began slowing for the stores, the parking and then the station of Emeryville.

Wasting time. For the plan, the sensible thing was to sleep early, wake early. The scenery and the sights would come at dawn with the Upper Sacramento River rushing its trout down the rocky slalom. A good night's sleep. This was compulsive madness, this obsessive viewing of trackside mundanities. There was nothing out there but Emeryville, then Richmond, one ramshackle, postindustrial scene after the next, interrupted by glimpses of suburbia and, briefly, the Bay...which I'd seen a million times. Obsessive staring through a train window at absolutely nothing. Emeryville. What a surprise that people milled, then waved and hugged. Another baggage cart. Get a life. Get some sleep. Hopeless, me being as charged as my wheelchair's batteries. Stunning to see the interior of the Emeryville station revealed by fluorescent lights. I knew I would be up for hours. It was maddening and pathetic and must emanate from some deep anxiety.

Methamphetamine, possibly slipped into my baked potato in the diner, that would explain this. Nothing else did. There was nothing thrilling about a kid on the platform adjusting his backpack, signs glistening in the Amtrak parking lot. Mental compulsion and fear of sleep and bad mothering brought one here to obsessive hours wasted on trackside trivia.

Or life's book turned a page, and there was this. Everything charged. I had come to Berkeley as a student, young and fresh, when San Francisco was Oz...and everything was young and fresh, though now I was old, which didn't matter. What mattered was matter, and in the enclosing warmth of a room that moved with its window, that matter was what it was, compelling and new with each moment. Life's losses were also a mystery, how they narrowed and pointed one down a chute. Which was destiny, and if one stayed angry too long and judged to the point of exclusion, one missed what the narrowing brought. It brought one to the narrows, the place where the canyon walls closed in. Which some would find oppressive, but also squeezed the current, and pinched the river into rapids. The waters churned, and foam rose, and things spun round in eddies. And it all happened invisibly, this intensification. Just as the tracks pointed one way. North, with deviations possible, but tracks work tracks. They did the steering. They only did it so long, so many times, so many trips. Only so many times to see the ordinary come alive.

And I wouldn't sleep. And for Christ's fucking sake, for once in my life, who cared? If the railside world was burning with life, I was burning with envy for its continuance...burning my candle at both ends. And now, propping the pillows against the wall and arranging my back so I could sit and watch the approach of Berkeley, Crockett, Martinez, I tried to accept that this was the sleepless adventure, and tomorrow I would be tired...and so what?

Doors began to slam along the train. Some slammed distant, others close. One could tell the difference. Such portent and breaking free, even a wrenching, as the wrought iron fence along the platform began to shift its posts, then shoot them by, then blur them into a grayness. For the Coast Starlight was leaving. San Francisco made itself known here, a beacon light on the Bay Bridge poking above Borders Books. This was goodbye. Soon the cities would recede, waving their distant lights as the train swung around the bay waters toward the dark inland...wheels running true as a watch on the 80 mph straightaway...halting at the provincial capital for fuel and water...then beyond Sacramento, blackness flying with barely a town...lurching toward snowy ridges and northern rivers.

Emeryville's wrought iron fence came out of its blur, slowing to a stop. The P.A. system scratched into life. Ahem. The conductor. We had a problem. Or the Union Pacific had a problem with a tunnel fire in Oregon. Our way was blocked. We would wait here, the conductor said. He was talking to U.P. headquarters in Omaha. But for the time being....

Time being what it was, I stretched out to get a better view of the ceiling. In the slanted place above, an entire berth had tucked itself away. There was room for another person in here. Always had been. I checked my watch, or watched my watch, watched the great silver liner becoming late and getting later, not to mention older, more pathetic. And because I was slipping, I knew enough to slip without transition, into waiting...a suspended state, fluid and passive...its antecedents present as warm ghosts...scenes of waiting for the bedpan to arrive, the limbs to move, the hospital months to end...the next thing to start. That next thing was starting now, two hours later, 11:30 p.m., when we inexplicably rolled out of Emeryville. Hoping for sleep, resigned to wakefulness, I half saw, half heard, the familiar stages...crossing the rickety bridge at Martinez, the Starlight sounding like a fleet of shopping carts with broken windows. The 80 mph flats near Davis. At Sacramento the doors opened and Amtrak guys noisily wandered the platform with hoses and carts. We slipped out of the station at 2 a.m., then stopped again. Distant floodlights, the thunks, scrapings and crashes of Sacramento's railyard. Now it was 2:15 a.m.

My God, we were going to park here and wait. By morning, this trip would have consumed itself. The train, its silverness, streamlinerness scraped off down to the rusting metal. Never mind the lateness. Watch the darkness swallow prime parts of the journey still unseen, Oregon's Willamette Valley lowlands, the vast Columbia River. I sat up and peered out the window. Blocking the view, a rail car on the next track.

It was a passenger car, single-story, with the grooved, curvilinear stainless steel of the 1950s. Lights were on inside. Now a man stepped into the night air. He lingered on one of those small end platforms where politicians once campaigned. This must be his private rail car. Inside it, I could see the corner of a desk, a blue sofa, wood paneled walls, a portable computer. The man seemed about my age, shirt sleeves rolled up, lost in thought. He descended a couple of steps and gazed up at the vast Starlight in front of him, then turned and looked up at the sky. Even in floodlit railyards one could see stars in the blackness overhead. The man strolled, hands in pockets, staring at the rocky ground. I decided to throw on my clothes and join him in the Sacramento rail night.

A preposterous impulse, the sort an amputee feels about his phantom leg. It would take me 20 minutes to dress, the doors were shut, there was a three-foot drop to the ground, and walking the trackside gravel was unthinkable. Yet we had things to discuss. Like me, this man wandered restless in the rail lands. He picked his way among the tracks and boxcars, dwarfed by acres of steel and imponderable mechanisms, where humans were half forgotten and safe. I wanted to know the private thoughts of those with private rail cars, people who lived on sidings. Actually, I wanted to live in a rolling rail home like that one, with tasseled lamps, Oriental carpets and a cook. And a woman? No, there was something inescapably bachelor about that railway office-cum-living room. It was a shrine to rich loners. People with their own rail cars lived content and unapologetic for everything that had gone wrong in life. I watched as the man returned, lowered his shades and, within minutes, turned out the lights.

Daylight and the train jerked into movement as tinny announcements for the diner prodded me awake, if not exactly alert. I was dressing by the edge of the Sacramento suburbs. By the time I'd finally maneuvered into my leg brace, the Starlight was well up the Valley, beyond the housing tracts, through the chaparral and into the crisp, flammable grasslands. Odd to see the train climbing. The next stop was Chico, scheduled for 2 a.m. Odd to be nudging the foothills instead of hurtling up the flat Sacramento Valley floor. Any moment, we would turn north, steered without a steering wheel, the road itself guide and master, descending to the farms-and-Wal-Marts flatland. Except we kept climbing, the engine laboring.

Limping through the sleeping cars, I caught glimpses of a parked dump truck, a rural convenience store, a gas station...the passing scenes charged, their ordinariness shot full of methamphetamine. I speed crutched into the Parlour Car, now roaring with Southern accents and ablaze with plastic tour group badges. A bald guy gave me a seat and a woman handed me a pre-breakfast sweet roll. This happened before I could brace myself in the usual I'm-not-really-a-cripple way, sunny and open. Quite unnecessary, such was the kindness of southern strangers. Around me voices sonorous, hitting words and syllables at odd angles in the way of Faulkner. Now I was less a cripple than a Californian amid non-Californians in California. The lounge bounced and swayed, Southern voices slid and slurred. We were headed somewhere, together, and not in the way of tourists but of pilgrims.

Waiting my turn for breakfast, the brown hills rose, the tall train snaking improbably up the lone track. Massive oaks began their march across grassy slopes, dragging branches like apes' knuckles. The Starlight crossed the shoreless edge of a reservoir. Lake Oroville, according to a sign. Across the water, Sierra peaks loomed. Up and up, hills steepening into walls, a gap opening with an exhausted California summer river visible at the bottom. An announcement from the conductor. The Feather River Canyon.

In my college days, the Feather River Route...Chicago...Western Pacific...was the stuff of billboards. Visible from the F bus crossing the Bay Bridge, a red neon feather glowing atop the Western Pacific's waterfront office building. Now the Western Pacific no longer existed and the red feather was long gone. But I was still here, along with the rails and Amtrak. Unless the crew had jumped off, quietly slipping away while the train slowed through the mountains. Which would leave the Starlight sailing on like the Mary Celeste. The locomotive driver would have clamped a wrench to the throttle before he leapt into the chaparral. Leaving the train to slide driverless atop the cliffs.

The bartender reappeared with a tray of coffee cups. The engineer was probably still on the job too, although in my mind he was easily distractible. Probably staring too intently at the intricacies underpinning the tracks. Revealed in turns, these railway structures of beams and trusses. Look at this, marvelous as clockwork. The rails flew up the mountain, and where the land stopped, the man-made spans took over. Pillars and girders hung off the canyon sides, composing themselves into a viaduct. The parts reached and crisscrossed, holding the train the way a ballet dancer holds a ballerina. A little scary being held by the Union Pacific, what with its rails splitting, tunnels burning. The tracks straightened, canyon walls falling vertically. Hard to say what supported the train now, trestle or rock. We made our oblivious way eastward at cliff's edge.

In the dining car, menu-dropping moments as the gorge deepened. I peered past my omelette, over the tops of trees, into the airy depths. Occasional rail outposts, sheds and maintenance cars, clung to the mountainside. I clung to them myself, reassured to see a wooden hut, elfin in a forest service sort of way, standing among the trees. Big mistake to look spectacularly down the cliffs. Too easy to imagine the Starlight toppling leftwards, bouncing and tumbling, roof over wheels, to the river rocks.

The Starlight drew itself on, its engines and cars and half eaten omelettes. The canyon turned, the train's ledge narrowed. But a thin ledge was enough. The irony of the street-pummeled, paralyzed survivor fearing a train ride...my body ever riding on fear. I could feel how the end would come, stumbling too hard, head slamming, neck cracking, bloody ribs splintering. The irony of a cripple choosing to ride a train that bucked like a bronco...yet was oddly reassuring. For the moment-to-moment fear of falling, steadying myself here, bracing myself there, functioned like a Tibetan mantra. It physically occupied me, forcing the deeper fear, the cellular panic of abandonment, to fall away. Nameless historic dread of parents missing in action...no one driving the train...the uncaring chasm...well, never mind all that. As for my railcar-smashing death on the boulders, well, let it happen. Enjoy the view on the way down. And just in case it continued, this steady rolling at cliff's edge, creation turning and progressing, what was one to make of this? Except to be grateful for survival and the mystery of forces that crushed you while others conveyed you...over mountains, through time and into the now of things. Like here, this moment in a Sierra foothill valley like many others...with its scary railroad...which wasn't scary unless you looked.

I was looking now as the canyon narrowed and the river disappeared. A tributary descended into a granite chute, twisting and frothing. We were nearing the top of the gorge, where the water tumbled into a cataract and under a bridge. The Coast Starlight slipped out of the canyon and into the safety of a flat, dark forest. We drew to a stop beside a highway. On the P.A. system, the conductor began going on about changing crews.

With the train stopped, I hustled into the Parlour Car. A sparkling day on display, highway adjacent, piney woods beyond. Guys, doubtless railroad guys, sauntered in the sun. New crew or old, it was impossible to say. They weren't in any particular hurry. They weren't in any particular schedule. By now, we should be well into southern Oregon, not eastern California, near Lake Tahoe. A disaster that did not look like one. It looked like the morning of all mornings, with a small rusty pickup now stopping on the highway. A woman stepped out, reached in and now stood with a baby, gazing at the silver superliner. A man approached from the far side of the pickup. The two of them said something, nodding. She hiked the baby up her blue-jeaned hip. Utterly instinctive, this baby-on-hip posture, known to women worldwide. She waved. The man stuck his hands in his pockets. She waved again and jiggled the baby. And I couldn't help standing, crutching to the window, waving back. Invisible behind the tinted glass, I gave up. She waved again. The baby had to see this, the big train in the forest. The man beamed. A young couple with a battered truck, a squirming baby, taking a sunny moment to admire the two-story train with the unseen man admiring them. They had everything, knew everything...and the Starlight began to move. Rumbling over a switch, then another, a set of tracks peeling off...directional choices having been made. Regret and loss rolling into the valleys and slopes of the forested Northern Sierra.