Train, again

I never wanted to die in my sleep. I wanted to die with my eyes open, to know that it was not a dream, to witness the world shifting.

He sat next to me, his head crooked awkwardly in his shoulder. He was leaning heavily, perilously away from me. I looked at his open mouth, the precisely formed upper lip, the forgotten scruff below his chin. I wanted to tickle him. I pressed my nose against the scratched-up glass instead. Anonymous, unvarying trees barreled by. When I thought about it too much I felt a reliable vertigo, like when you sit in your parked car and somebody is reversing right beside you. Like the world is going in a different direction than you are. It made me sick.

I was listening to the Shins. That year I was always listening to the Shins, and sucking on cough drops to distract myself from the cigarettes I wasn't smoking. I played three hard and fast games of iPod solitaire. I touched his shoulder. He felt felted. He felt soaked in the dripping glue of unconsciousness.

We dove underground. I put my head against the wall and felt everything rushing by. We were in a tunnel. If everything around me disappeared, I would have been sucked down quicker and quicker and I would have shrunken into nothingness. I took his hand. It was slack and flaccid. There were dark bristly hairs climbing from his arm and wrist up onto his hand, past his knuckles. I wanted to tell him he was an ape. I had never seen him shirtless and I wondered, again, if he had back hair. It frustrated me that he kept himself so private.

I wanted to get out my vitamin water but it was down by my feet and bending down would have wiped me out of existence. I was barely corralled in reality between the wall of the train and his round, uninterested hip.

Four more stops.

I decided I would wake him up after Canal Street. I was feeling nervous and impatient. We were rushing through the tunnel and all was fluorescent light. Everybody in the train looked sallow and distant. We were all in transition. Nobody ever sat on the train just to be on the train. This had never happened in the history of the city.

I squirmed for my phone and scrolled through my contact list again. There was no reception, of course. My mouth felt dry. He looked so uncomfortable.

The train squealed to a stop. Three more until we got home.

I made myself cough. "Adam," I said softly. Then again. "Adam." I felt bolder now. I reached over and snapped my fingers in front of his face. "Adam."

He shifted a little. Then he opened his eyes. Blinked at me several times, like somebody nearsighted, and closed his eyes again.

"Adam," I said, taking out my earbuds so that the overhead buzz of the train wholly took over, "it's almost our stop. Come on, wake up."

A woman reading a book looked up. I cowered.

He arched back to a sitting position, cracked his knuckles, looked thoughtfully at me. "How much longer?"

I shrugged a little. "Five, six minutes." I felt hyperactive, nervous, now that he was awake.

He rubbed his eyes, blinked again, and looked at me. He was pulling down one eyelid so that I could see the inside of it. His eyes were the color of moss in August.

"Okay," he said.

Train

I dreamed train.

Every time my tongue hit the back of my teeth it was small wheels rolling and jangling against the railroad tracks. Bread and butter slid along my mouth like grease along the intimate inner workings of that mysterious machine. When I exhaled white puffs into the air I was making the clouds that train made out of coal. Every grimeless cell in me yearned toward train.

It was hard for me to fall asleep in those days, and my thoughts always would drift to train, the lulling motion of it, the constant motion of it, the idea of getting somewhere. Train meant Chicago, train meant New York, but train also meant crossing countryside. Train solved paradoxes: you could travel without moving. You could be sitting, or sleeping, or writing a letter, and all the time the motion would be going on around you, and you could not even feel it, but you would wake up one day in Ohio, the next day in Indiana, the next day in Illinois. You could do two things at once without even trying. When you were in train travel was like breath, equally unstoppable.

I went and had my baked potato and didn't say anything at all and went to bed and thought my veins into railroad tracks, the capsules of my blood into a billion red boxcars. My heart was the grandest and centrallest of train stations. The skin of the potato was ground up into hunks of coal that little men, sweating, saving up, shoveled into the fire.