A bright maroon leaf drifted past the slowly-moving train. Soon, manicured green lawns appeared, then tract houses, and finally the black loamy Northern Illinois soil, whose furrows passed like rapid little black waves that never seemed to end. Wave after wave, after wave...
I started when I heard: “MAHHHHHHHHH-TOOOON…Mattoon is the next stop.”
The train was in Central Illinois.
I looked at my wrist, but my watch was gone, and I wasn’t wearing my cell phone either. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pocket watch with the fisherman on the cover and snapped it open: 6:56. Somehow I had lost three hours and missed seeing most of the state of Illinois. My pill container was in my pocket, and since dusk was fading fast, I took what I thought were two uppers, and soon was grooving to the cadence of the train wheels skipping over the gaps in the track.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah!
It sounded like the beginning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah!
Stupid-assed people with their “Making Fun of the Classics” ringtones.
“Hello?” said a young, disembodied voice in front of me.
Pause.
“….Oh yah, we’re on the Saluki about an hour from Carbondale.”
Pause.
“Not again! OK, you…you’re cutting out. I’ll call you tomorrow and see if we can deal with the issue. Yah, bye.”
Issue?
“Who was that?” said another disembodied voice.
“Kyla. I’m helping her with her term paper. She’s having some issues converting from Mac to Windows.”
And I’m having some issues with calling problems “issues.”
Issues, quality time, texting, gaming, ripping a tune, peeps…terms such as goal oriented, core competencies, thinking outside the damned box, and partnering…all of this grated on my ears like a fingernail scratching slate. Stupid understatements like, “I’m a little bit outraged.” Idiot expressions such as, “Sweet!” and the mere mention of the word frappuccino made me sick. The list was especially disgusting when everything was done at the same time—“multitasking.” And of course, all of it had to be accomplished with speed, speed, speed! It seemed that technology had accelerated the revolution of the world so that each minute was compressed into 55 seconds, each hour was now only worth fifty-five minutes, and every day had only 23 hours, yet people were expected to squeeze 25 hours into that same day. Humans weren’t biologically suited for this, so they either did a half-assed job of it, or went nuts like me.
I glanced out the train window, saw the last flush of a maroon dusk, and found a pink pill to extend it just a little bit more.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah! went the ring tone again.
“Yo,” answered the disembodied voice.
Pause.
“He did what? Oh hah hah hah hah haaaaaaah. Man, he dropped a hammer on it? That was really stupid, hah, hahhhhh. I bet, yah, he’ll be limping for a while after that. Hah, hah! Bye!”
And you’ll be limping for a while if you don’t stop that horse laugh.
Pause.
Dah-Dah-Dah-Daaaaaaaah.
That tears it!
I leaned over the top of the seat in front of me and faced two upside-down teenagers dressed in blue jeans and Tshirts. Both of their eyes bulged, as if an angry cobra was hanging over the seat.
“Alright, if I hear that goddamned ring tone again, I’m gonna throw the phone, and the idiot it’s attached to, off of this fuckin’ train,” I hissed.
The two kids froze for a second, then quickly collected their laptops, iPods, cell phones and other toys and hurriedly left the car, looking back with terrified glances.
Children shouldn’t be allowed in the same car as adults.
As I was starting to doze again, I felt an unwelcome presence sit down next to me. Out of squinted eyes I saw six gold stripes on a green sleeve.
“Hey fella, it seems like you’re having some sort of trouble.” The soldier wore a black beret and had a chest full of ribbons. He sounded like one of the people talking about Cairo earlier on the trip.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I don’t think you are. You look like you’re being eaten up from the inside out. Let me ask you…are you happy with your life?”
“No.”
“People? Do you like people?”
“No.”
“Do you like anything?”
“No.” All I wanted to do was sleep.
“Listen fella, I was where you are now, about six months ago in Iraq. They told me that I had what is called ‘a thousand yard stare.’ Just before I planned to kill myself, someone gave me this.”
The soldier reached into his inside pocket, pulled out a mechanical pencil, placed it on the windowsill for a few seconds, and then held it up to my face. I slid my glasses over my brow and looked at the thing with my myopic eyes and saw clouds swirling around a maroon sunset inside the pencil—as if that simple writing instrument had absorbed a chunk of the sky while sitting on the windowsill.
“Sometimes writing things down helps,” said the soldier dryly.
“I’ve got plenty of pencils.” I didn’t want to touch the damned thing. I ignored the soldier, turned toward the window, and fell asleep again.
I was awakened by the train running over a switch. That’s when I saw the sign out the window—or thought I saw the sign…or maybe I imagined seeing the sign in the field stubble. Whatever the case, it burned itself onto my retinas like the after-image of a flashbulb. The sign was spectacularly ugly, a monstrosity supported by massive pillars hewn out of bituminous coal and painted in rude swaths of maroon and silver. Chunks of fool’s gold, glittering unnaturally in the dark, formed the words WELCOME TO SOUTHERN ILLINOIS! And below that, barely legible from the train window, was scrawled in maroon magic marker: IT’S GONNA BE ONE HELL OF A TRIP.
Chapter 3
I awoke to a dark, empty train car with the photo of a young Catherine in my lap, and placed it carefully into my shirt pocket. Through a dripping window I saw maroon-tinted, luminescent clouds descending over the roofs of old brick and wooden buildings burnished by light drizzle and stained orange by streetlights. The buildings were vaguely familiar, but distorted by an imperfect memory made decades ago. I had walked past these buildings many times during the two years I had attended SIU in the early 1970s. But the trees were different; many had entire limbs missing, and there were stumps here and there along the street. I had read about this. An inland hurricane had blasted through the region in May and left such incredible damage that it was still
