The light
was gray and the air was close, cold. My eyes kept going in and out, ceasing to
function, coming back, and while I could talk on the phone to my mother, sitting
there on the near-empty Long Island Railroad, dim for once, I couldn’t do so in
a way that could be understood. As a result, she remained cheerful, oblivious to
my intensifying despair of ever getting on a train going the correct way, of
ever getting anywhere again, let alone being with her or anyone going forward. The
two train conductors I encountered in person remained blasé as I became more
disoriented, including about becoming more disoriented.
I was trying
to get to the Iroquois Park stop, but I made a rookie’s error getting on a
train going the wrong way at Woodside because I just didn’t think because I just
couldn’t think any longer. But I was still expected to do things people
who can think are expected to do, like call when I’m on the train so they know
to pick me up or present questions about train routes to conductors in a semi-coherent
manner. Instead of myself the trusty traveler, I was the anxious woman who is
there, there dear’ed and ignored, some annoying non-silent lady who should
really be traveling with a man, or at least not alone, and I felt myself devolving,
legs treading water without moving
After some long
minutes or hours being frozen, I got up, looking over my shoulder, over my other
shoulder, and began wandering between cars, opening the first door I found.
Pushing
down that
faded lever erupted me into a car stuffed with rows upon rows upon rows of
maskless white Long Island people, all facing me, all lit garish by the normal
fluorescence, until I blinked and found myself in the fluorescence of Penn
Station, where everyone was also unmasked, including me, to my additional horror.
Next blink I’m
back on the gray train, masked, looking out the window at blurred gray
landscape moving faster than the train, unable to orient. I sit up in the hard, old seats, designed for commerce not comfort, and again
attempt to interact, to ask for help in a semi-coherent fashion from my
mother on the phone, who again suggests I talk to the conductor, and then the
conductor, who tells me, bored, I can get off the train at the next stop, climb an
impossible number of rickety, steep metal stairs to get to the opposite
platform within a minute and from there maybe find a
connecting train that might link up to one bound for Iroquois Park. And here’s
an updated schedule that is even less readable than the last one, letters blurring
into unrecognizable symbols blurring into blur
Iroquois
Park, Iroquois Park, Iroquois Park; when can I rest? I stare out the window,
the relentless non-view, and think of the native Iroquois, slandered as vicious
fighters, white man killers, in an early social studies text that I had the
misfortune to remember in detail, though I could not identify where I was and had given
up on understanding anything happening in the present at that point
