On a Train

In a passage of an old book, I read about an encounter between a monk and Dostoevsky on a train. The two men had been seated together in the same section of the train on seats facing each other. In the book, the monk described Dostoevsky’s distracted demeanor and the preoccupied way that he nodded to the porter, never looking up from the papers that he was leafing through in his lap. He made a note of the way Dostoevsky's hand shook when the train unexpectedly lurched into motion and the way that the writer reached for a steady grip on the armrest of his seat. He said that once the train was clear of the city and rumbling along the open tracks, Dostoevsky finally looked up from his papers and glanced at the countryside passing out the window and blinked and squinted his eyes like someone who had just spent hours upon hours in a dark room, and it was only then that he heard him mutter a clipped sigh of relief.

As the miles and the hours went by, the two men engaged in a few halting moments of conversation that never went beyond a few awkward words or sentences, that never gained the momentum of the train carrying them along, conversations that died as quickly and as lifelessly as they began. The monk was eager to tell Dostoevsky that he recognized him. He wanted to tell him that he had read his books and he wanted to share his thoughts on them. But there never seemed to be a good place to inject this into the conversation, and every time they spoke and fell back into silence, it became harder and harder to bring it up. And the monk thought of all the reasons not to bring it up. He considered that Dostoevsky had no great reason to be impressed by the recognition; he was with himself everywhere that he went on Earth, and moreover, he was probably used to being recognized and being told that he was recognized and pestered with people's thoughts about his writing.

So the monk never brought it up. When the train reached the station, the two men traded a perfunctory handshake and grabbed their bags and went their ways. They got tangled up in the crowd out on the platform and separated from one another. But the monk spotted Dostoevsky a short while later. He saw him walking alone down a narrow passageway between the buildings. It was quiet there, away from the crowds, and there were puddles on the stones, and from some lonely place high above, the afternoon light shone down on the writer as he stopped and set down his trunk on the pavement and gathered the papers he had been working on into a neat sheaf and popped the latches on the trunk and set the stack of papers gently on top of the folded clothes inside and continued on his way. The monk knew that he would never see the man again, and he wished with all his heart that he would have told him that he knew who he was, that he would have pushed past the awkwardness and told him all the things he would never have the chance to say again. He decided then to pray for Dostoevsky, to fervently hope that he would find peace from the preoccupations and obsessions that seemed to be consuming him.

After I had finished reading this anecdote, I noticed a that there was a footnote at the bottom of the page that provided a date for this encounter, and I realized that it was only two days before Dostoevsky finished work on his novel The Possessed. I went to my bookshelf to grab one of my copies of the book. As I opened it up, I saw that the type on the pages had faded to the point that it was completely unreadable. There were a few places where the ink had been stamped heavy and I could still make out the letters, but the rest of the text looked like it was in the process of fading back into the page itself, receding into the weathered depths of the paper. It was as though the book had been left out in the sunlight and all the words had been bleached away in its sublime bliss. I had other copies of the book, but I was afraid to check them to see if they were in the same condition. 

The Golden Age

I was out on the west coast, wandering around the streets of the city, and I came across a beach where a famous scene from a historical epic had been filmed. I passed under a bridge where the echoes of the cars zipping by on the freeway overhead reverberated off the concrete walls, and on the other side there was the vast white beach, and further on was the ocean with the waves rolling in from the horizon, their swells tossing around blinding glints of light from the afternoon sun. In the scene, this empty beach had been filled with extras dressed in bright period costumes in striking shades of lavender and blue and orange. There had been giraffes and elephants and lions, golden trumpets and soldiers in bronze armor, statesman in robes unrolling parchments bearing official decrees.

There was a large flat stone that had been the centerpiece of the scene. The hero had stood in sweaty-faced defiance at the foot of the stone, his wrists shackled, glaring up at the centurion who stood on the top of the stone, huge and regal in the sun, his jaw set, his foot planted on an outcropping of rock, his iron hand resting on his knee. The trumpets and revelry had all abruptly stopped, and there had only been the sounds of the waves and the wind and the birds as the two men squared off entirely with their eyes, the camera flipping back and forth in a montage of menacing squints, the score finally punctuating the tension with a protracted buzz that stung like an insect born out of the sweat and the heat.

That was all gone now. The beach was deserted. The day was getting later. I walked along the sand. I knew that further down the shore there was a beach house that had belonged to the lead actress from the film, the one who had stood by the centurion in her clean white linen, secretly in love with the hero. Years later, the cast had all gotten back together to reshoot the scene for a reenactment that was being included in another film about the glory days of Hollywood. The cast had eagerly agreed to get back together to shoot the scene, because they had all wanted to spend the weekend hanging out at the beach house, reminiscing about old times and reclining by the pool in their light-weight summer shirts and sipping their margaritas to the smooth rippling notes of the piano playing up on the balcony as the cool breeze rolled in off the sea.

But it hadn't quite worked out. Nothing in the scene had really looked the way it was supposed to. All the same props and costumes were there, and everyone hit all their same marks, but all the traces of time were visible just beneath the surface. The lead actress had gotten older and the makeup didn't quite hide the lines around her eyes. The centurion's bearing wasn't quite as firm, and he had gotten fatter and the armor didn't quite fit him anymore. Even the film stock they used was a little different, making all the colors and costumes look like they had been transposed to some other time and place. Worst of all, they hadn't been able to get the lead actor back. There had been a falling out between him and the actor who had played the centurion. There had been some sort of scandal involving a traffic accident that had circulated in the Hollywood gossip columns for years. They had cast a replacement, but with someone else, shackled and trying to glare that same iconic glare in his place, the whole scene just fell apart.

The weekend at the beach house hadn't worked out either. The white-haired old actor who played the centurion had gotten drunk and mad and shoved the replacement lead actor into the pool. There had been an awkward scene between him and the actress who owned the beach house, and it had made everyone uncomfortable, and it ended up with her throwing him out. Afterwards, the piano had resumed its cool ripple, but there was something sad and even a little anxious between the notes. Guests started to slip away, offering a variety of hastily improvised excuses for why they had to go, blushing and smiling their awkward smiles, trying to say how great it had been for everyone to get back together, how it had all been just the same, so incredibly, wonderfully the same, leaving all the tables around the pool littered with half-finished margaritas until the last of them were gone.

But, of course, it hadn't been the same. I finally reached the beach house, and it was boarded up now. No one lived there anymore. The sun was going down out over the ocean and the house was latticed with deep shadows from the grove of untended trees that surrounded it. The waves rolled right up to the edge of the foundation beams of the crumbling wooden deck, provided with all the neglected ages that they needed to pick apart the whole property one piece at a time and pull it all back into the sea. I plucked a hot smoothed stone out of the sand and flipped it around between my fingers. No, things were never the same. 

All Fours

There was a documentary made about my childhood. Someone sent it to me on a film reel, and I projected it onto the wall of my basement and watched it in the dark. The documentary seemed to portray me as some sort of feral wonder child who spent all of his waking hours roaming the woods in misunderstood solitude, even though the only wooded area that I ever really played in was a patchy little spot out behind our garage where a worn out old tree presided over some overgrown brush that used to be a garden, and the only sparks of wonder that I ever remembered showing were purely accidental, sporadic and unremarkable.

There was a voiceover of me talking about how the teacher always liked to have me read the current passage from our reading book in front of the class, because she liked the cadence of my voice. She liked that I paused in all the appropriate ways in all the right places for the right commas and punctuation. Most of all, she liked that my reading showed genuine comprehension. This voiceover was played over footage of me roaming through the overgrown garden on a winter morning when it was still dark out, finding my way along the paths of hard frozen mud by spotting the places where the scattered patches of snow had settled into my previous footprints.

Still, I started getting into it, accepting the documentary’s conceits and embellishments, almost believing that this was a reflection of my actual childhood. But then something happened that ruined the illusion for me. The footage rolled on, later into the morning when the sun was up and the patches of snow were receding and a couple of early spring buds on the tangled weeds were starting to open. There were some railroad tracks that passed along the back of our property, and the footage showed me walking along the path by the tracks and then suddenly stopping when I heard something crunching around in the brush. The footage showed me standing still with my ears perked up, and then it showed me leaping forward with this tremendous bound and tearing along the path on all fours, propelling myself along at a ferocious pace with each stride.

This was just too much. I laughed and shook my head in complete disbelief. I look around in the dark for someone to explain it all to, to explain the logistics of the human spine and the inadequacy of a person trying to run that way, to point out the outright lie of the whole thing, to even got down on my hands and knees if necessary to demonstrate my own incapacity to perform such a feat, to confess all the long degradations of my lazy sedentary life. But there was no one there watching this thing with me. I was just alone in the dark with the steady rattle of the projector.

Night Parking

There was a spot that I used to like to take dates to when I was younger. I would turn down an alleyway between two tall buildings and then I would drive straight up into the sky, passing window after window as we climbed past the floors of the buildings, until we were up over the roof of one building and then the other and there was nothing but open space around us and the glitter of the city below. And I would keep on driving up until the front bumper of the car split through the clouds at the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere and we emerged to a view of the crescent moon drifting on an ocean of sky sprinkled with millions upon millions of stars.

There would always be a gentle little bump as I stopped and put the car into park, and then the car would just hang there in space as I pulled my hands from the gearshift and the steering wheel and took a deep breath. There was a very specific spot that I had to reach where the Earth's gravity and the car's gravity would balance each other out and the car would just float in place, pointing up into the night. The bump would always elicit a nervous laugh from my date and then a smile in the dark as the car settled and she realized that it was going to stay there, firm and floating, and she could lean comfortably back into her seat, the world turning calmly below miles and miles behind us.

Of course, it was never a completely perfect balance. And no matter how close to perfect I got it, it couldn't be maintained indefinitely. As the night would wear on, the car would gradually begin to slip backwards. At first we wouldn't notice it, and we would continue on in our drowsy enchantment with the cosmos, the dial on the radio turned low, catching faint signals off the atmosphere. But finally we'd start to get that dropping feeling in the pits of our stomachs, and then my date would bolt up straight in her seat with her eyes wide open, gripping the armrest or squeezing my arm, and I would laugh and tell her that it was all going to be fine.

And as we fell from the sky, gaining speed with every crucial second, I would reach for the lever for the handbrake, which I had rigged up to release a parachute. I would wait for just the right second, and then I would pull the parachute and it would catch on the air and slow our descent and the car would turn so that the wheels would be facing towards the Earth beneath us. And we would sway and swing and drift down between the buildings, the windows steamed over in the grey morning mist, the shadows of the car and the parachute scaling down the contours in the brick, until the wheels touched down on the pavement and the car would rock and compress on its shocks and find its hold again on solid ground. And we would look at each other and grin and shake our heads and breathe that long, long sigh of relief that can only come from finding that sure place on Earth once again.

Dropping the Needle

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right away, I noticed that something was a little off with the sound. When a car rounded a corner, the splash of its tires came a little too late. I walked past a house where a dog was penned up behind a chainlink gate in the back yard, and when the dog barked, it reverberated from the wrong side of the street, bouncing off the wrong walls of the wrong houses.

I decided to stop in and use the payphone at this neighborhood diner, so that I could call my wife out in the real world and let her know about the problem. There was a cacophony of misplaced noise as soon as I stepped in the door. The busboy dropped a dish and I heard the howl of a passing train blowing its horn in the night. I saw one of the diners wave his hand in the air and call to the server and point to the empty coffee cup sitting on the table in front of him, but the only thing I could hear was the intrusive crackles and beeps and buzzes of the emergency broadcast system breaking in to make an announcement.

The payphone was in a narrow hallway in the back by the restrooms. I picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. I had to make a very deliberate effort to concentrate on what numbers I needed to dial, because I kept hearing the random beeps and clicks of the buttons just before I hit them or just a moment afterwards. My wife answered the phone and thankfully her voice was matched up with mine as we talked to one another. I explained to her that she hadn't quite synced everything up the right way. She told me that she had dropped the needle on the record at the exact moment when the lion logo was roaring for the third time, just like she was supposed to. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and shook my head. "Lion logo!? There's no lion logo. You're thinking of something completely different." I looked down at my watch and told her that I was heading back. I hung the phone up on the hook and I heard my coin dropping through miles of the payphone's inner mechanisms, clattering down through endless caverns of metal and machinery, until it finally landed with a wet plunk in a pool of water somewhere deep down in the dark.