Train
by Zoe Palmer
The train roars with all the thunder of God himself, engine pounding low and wheels crying in a high scream almost loud enough to drown out the screaming from inside. Almost. Nothing ever does. Maybe it’s because the sound is so loud, or maybe it’s that once you hear it, the screaming gets inside your head and never leaves. I’m not sure.
Once upon a time, this was a beautiful train. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore…maybe they never did. But it was a steam train, and warm; velvet and smooth brass on the inside, iron and solid steel on the outside. I imagine it must have been even more horrible to ride the train in those days, in the soft glow of the lamps and the wealthy, welcoming compartments.
The station hurtles toward me. I lean out the window and feel myself slammed by wind created by the train’s speed. Laying my head close to its side, I find the pull for the whistle and yank, a vain attempt to overpower the screams the train carries in its belly and in its wake.
The sky is the ethereal blue of air stacked on air shot with dying sunbeams. I duck back inside and my hand falls on the worn metal of the break lever, almost hot to the touch. As we begin to slow, an unholy screeching, a sound I’d call tortured if I didn’t know exactly what tortured sounds like, rips from the wheels and track. Sparks shower up around the car. One flies through the window and alights almost gently on my hand. I reach for the speaking tube. Discolored, warped out of shape, it looks as though metal has found a way to rot. I pull out the stopper, and sound pours through. The screams are so close I could reach out and touch them, a discordant symphony played on the human capacity for pain. I clear my throat.
“The next stop is Those You Never Loved,” I announce. “If you’d all stop fucking screaming for once, maybe the doors would open.” I laugh. “Yeah, right.”
It’s not funny at all. I jam the stopper back in and the cab—slowly, slowly—returns to the quiet of the train’s screeches and roaring with that symphony soft below it. I hook the end of the tube back into place. The station is suddenly around us, shooting past, and then stills as we coast gently to a halt. Steam billows around me, and for an instant there is no train, just me in my tiny compartment floating in the clouds, borne aloft by the sounds of screaming.
The doors remain shut.
I once opened them, opened the whole train up, tried to free everyone, despite the warnings I’d been given. It did not end well. And even after, they still took my arm as payment.
It only takes one hand to run the train. With a sleeve of faded blue, I swipe steam from the window and peer out onto the platform. Wooden planks. Longing, so deep it makes the soles of my feet ache, swells up inside me. I don’t know why I always torture myself by looking.
My mouth parts. My eyes widen. The longing vanishes under astonishment. There’s someone standing on the platform.
How is there someone standing on the platform? No one gets on this train.
The chorus of the suffering swells behind me. If I keep the train leashed for too long, it will grow and grow and never come to a climax.
I hoist the window and peer out. It’s a young man, fair-haired, in aged and battered formal wear. A black jacket with a single button and a shirt with a few miraculously pure white spots left in the grease of wear. He jogs toward the front of the train.
I am also the conductor. I check the brake with fingers that, I note, shake slightly, vibrating as if my hands are five-pronged tuning forks, each paired to the same frequency. I open the door leading to the first car.
The air, after what feels an eternity trapped in the train, freezes to my skin. I purposefully don’t look around, keeping my head down. The couplings are still smoking. I step out onto them and across, hearing the soles of my boots hiss. I brace myself, grasp the handle, cross to the first car.
All compartments save one are empty, for which I am infinitely thankful. The solitary passenger is so old and so huddled I cannot tell if it’s male or female, keening with invisible suffering. The sound drills into my ears. In some ways it’s even worse than the whole trainload in chorus.
I ignore it anyway, grab the pad and ticket-punch and everlasting stub of a pencil. I think this is what I’m supposed to do.
When the door opens, he swings into view with a cheer utterly at odds with—with everything. “Good day,” he says, with a warm, polite smile.
I have no idea what to say. I stand there and take in the only human being not in pain I’ve seen in a long time. In too long for me to be comfortable remembering.
Luckily, he doesn’t have the same problem. He says, “Oh!” and dips into the pocket of his dinner jacket—he’s wearing a dinner jacket—producing a crumpled ticket. He presents it to me with a flourish. “My ticket,” he says grandly. Like saying, “my card.”
I examine it minutely, which is easier than looking at his face. It is absolutely genuine, but I don’t punch it yet. “Are you,” I begin, and stop to clear my throat. “Are you sure this is what you want? This train isn’t a pleasant ride.”
I want to laugh at the complete inadequacy of that statement.
He looks over my shoulder, at the screaming passenger, and sobers. “Yes,” he says, to both my question and my statement. “I’m going to the end of the line.”
“There isn’t an end to this line,” I tell him, with utter certainty.
With a shrug, he says, “I’ll know it when I get there.” He looks down at his ticket, and then back up at me with raised eyebrows.
If he wants to ride the train, who am I to refuse? I might not even be allowed to. That thought momentarily blanks out my mind with panic, and before I realize it I’m punching his ticket and handing it back.
“Thanks,” he says, grinning. I take a step back and let him mount the steps up inside. The youth eyes the compartments before heading toward the one with the screaming passenger in it.
“Wait!”
When he turns to look at me, eyebrows raised again, I realize I don’t have a reply ready to explain myself. “You’re not one of the regular passengers,” I say, gesturing helplessly. “Come ride up in the driver’s cab with me.”
The corners of his eyes crinkle. “Sure.” He sticks out his hand. “By the by, I’m Hero.”
“Hero.” I squeeze his hand tentatively.
He waits patiently for me to release him. “That’s right.”
“That’s a strange name.”
“Only if you’re used to normal ones.”
“It’s also a girl’s name.”
“So?”
I finally let go of his hand, and he grins at me.
***
He’s good company. For someone who hasn’t had company in forever and a day, this feels like a miracle. He talks and I listen, mostly. He talks about a lot of different things. People, not on the train. Places, not visible from the train. He never talks about the train.
This doesn’t leave us a lot of room for dialogue, but he is determined to try. So I talk about the weather, and the train, and, occasionally, myself, and he listens, and sometimes we manage to have a conversation.
We’re in the middle of one about the importance of good heavy shoes to travelers and train-drivers, when I am abruptly no longer myself.
I am power, I am adamant, I am huge, my mind is wrenched along unfamiliar tracks, blank with my own steelness, I feel heat boiling inside me, and I scream with speed.
I am the train.
Inside me there is a different kind of screaming. I taste the shrill cacophony of pain, agony in a thousand million flavors, sheer and terrible.
I scream my own ferocious screams and feel the torment of those in my belly rise louder. With delight, I do it again, and their pain leaps deliciously to my metal senses.
Then I feel something smaller.
It is with a touch on each shoulder that I have shoulders again. After the shoulders, my back returns and then my arm, legs, the rest of me. Dizzily, I realize I am human. Flesh and water, blood and bones. Not metal. I’m not the train.
The hands are still heavy and fever-warm through cloth. “Not yet,” Hero says. “Come back.” He stares intently into my eyes.
Momentarily they are blazing lights, wide and unblinking. Then tissue orbs, with lids. I rub them, dislodging his hands with a shrug. The train surrounds me, and the passengers’ pain is remote and only audible, not my meat and mead.
I don’t shudder. I lick dry lips and step back from the young man and the radiance of his concern.
“We’ll be coming up on the next stop soon,” I say. We won’t.
He, I am sure, knows this. He leans sideways against the wall of the compartment (in a flash I feel it inside me and then blessedly it’s gone.) I busy myself checking dials. Just when I think he’s quiet, Hero says, “That’ll keep happening.”
I know that. It’s happened before.
When I say nothing, he asks, watching me, “Do you know who ran the train before you did?”
I watch the pressure gauges. I don’t want to watch him. “I’ve been here a long time.”
“I think you must suffer just as much as the passengers.”
I laugh, really laugh, the sound pulled out by surprise. That hasn’t happened in as long as I can remember. Must’ve happened before the train, though. “Then you’re a fool, and I hope you never find out exactly how wrong you are.” A jerk of my head backward. “Can’t you hear the screaming?” A shiver, like my skin’s been replaced by a carpet of crawling black ants, works me over. “Can’t you feel the slightest inklings of their torment? I’m just the driver. You don’t hear me screaming.”
“No,” he says.
I shake my head, rattling my brains in my skull. “We’re coming up on the next stop,” I say again, and lean and look against the window. He lets me elbow him out of the way without a word.
My voice sounds normal enough to me, tired and rough, but he must hear something in it I can’t, because he lets my words stand.
***
Hero never gets used to the screaming. I hear it always, of course, but there are times I’m not aware of it. But I can see in the set of his head that he is always conscious of it. Unless it’s my imagination.
It’s also probably just my imagination, but the interior of the cab doesn’t look nearly so broken. There’s less warping, more straight lines around me, and light on surfaces I could have sworn were too tarnished to reflect anything. It’s still miserable, but if it’s not my imagination it must be Hero.
He is leaning so far out the window that I hope we don’t hit a rick in the track. I lean against the wall and watch him. He strains farther out, then suddenly tumbles back inside, more than half a collapse. “Stop the train!”
“What are you talking about?” I glance over the gauges. The engine speed is normal, as is heat, pressure, everything working as perfectly as it always is.
“There’s something on the track. We’re going to hit it.” He waves his arms when I stare at him. “Hurry, please!”
I’ve never stopped the train except when we reach a station, but I can’t ignore the pleading urgency in his voice. I reach for the break lever.
It’s probably just my imagination, but the brakes seem to resist me. Hero jitters beside me, tenser than I’ve ever seen him, as the train decelerates. He’s hanging out the window again before we’ve rolled completely to a halt, and when we do stop, he lets out a breath of relief and vaults out.
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My feet yearn for solid ground. But I can barely stand the stillness. Even if I were permitted out, what makes me think I could set foot on the earth again?
I retreat from the window and close my eyes, wedging myself into a corner of the cab. I do not open them again until I hear clanking and scraping, and Hero reappears at the window and somehow slithers back inside.
He is carrying someone. “Tied to the track,” he says, as if that’s an explanation, and lays her gently down on the carpet.
Her eyes are closed. “Is she dead,” I say.
“I shouldn’t think so,” he says. “Why would someone dead be tied to the track?” This makes sense.
Her eyes snap open. Light gray like clouded silver, or like tarnished clouds, they take in the inside of the train and then they are furious.
“You brought me inside!” She shoots up with a lunge, knocks Hero to the ground. She rages into his face. “Back on the train, everything for nothing, why couldn’t you leave me?”
I have instinctively backed myself into the corner again. I don’t know how to deal with people, let alone people filling my train with vital anger.
“If you’ll just let me up,” Hero pleads. “I can talk better when I’m up.”
She sinks back on her heels and suddenly the anger is just surface roil, and beneath it she is bereft and terrified. Devastated. Trapped.
It’s very strange to see your own expressions, the ones you know intimately from the inside out, on someone else’s face. “Are you from the train?” I ask, and my voice beside Hero’s and hers is hoarse and I know she cannot be, because she looks like a person and because her voice is not ripped up by screaming.
She shudders. “A train. But I was a temporary.” I’ve never heard of those. “Or I thought I was. We got off. And then they were going to put me on another one. I decided I’d rather die.” She brushes down her stained and ripped frock. Now I can hear the ghosts of the screams she made in her voice.
“You tied yourself down, didn’t you?” Hero’s is nothing but gentle.
She nods, looks away. “They let me do that. I thought, anything is better than being forced on a train again. Especially if it wasn’t going to be temporary.”
She’s probably right.
She eyes me, and there’s the anger again. “Are you the driver?”
I nod.
“And you just let it happen?” She’s up on her feet, advancing on me. “You know what it’s like, you must, I see it in your face, and you don’t help—”
“I’ve tried,” I say. I lift my arm, the one that’s just shoulder, stump, and sleeve. “This was the least of what happened, and what they did to me.”
A missing arm is nothing compared to the horror of the everlasting agony of the train, but I suppose she believes me that they did worse. We can understand each other. She lowers her eyes.
“You’re not a passenger on this train, though,” Hero says. “It’s not moving.” He gives her his full smile when she turns to him. “I’m Hero, by the way.”
“Is that a description or a name?” she asks, humor worn but flashing, and then adds, “Mine’s Polly, I think.” She looks to me.
I shrug.
“You wanted to die rather than be on the train,” Hero says. Concern and empathy are pouring out of him again.
She nods, once, sharply.
“But you did leave it,” Hero says.
Polly looks like she’s searching for the trick in his words. “I suppose so.”
“If you got off once, it must have been because you were allowed to. And no one put you on this train—no ticket. So what’s to stop you leaving now?”
She’s shaking her head. “But at the station—”
I feel queasy again. And then suddenly I don’t. I have nothing to feel queasy with, am nothing but still steel, building potential. Oh, I think. I see I’m the train again.
Something is wrong. Not moving is wrong—there are hardly any screams. I peer inside myself, and there I am, little alien flesh-thing-me, and inside that self I know my awareness is me-the-train, in which flesh within which—
I arrest the dizzying plunge into infinity and realize that my metal mind feels nothing but exquisite tenderness for the poor weak thing. I will protect it into eternity, and it will never need to scream.
There is someone beside it. Another flesh-thing, but one I do not know. One which should be a passenger. Should be screaming. The fury that rises like steam pressure is pure and clean, scoured in heat, a beautiful, purposeful rage. I will crush her. I will destroy the invader and feast on her agony. I tease out her soul and begin to squeeze—
With a tearing wrench, a feeling like metal crunching, I snap back into my human body. I’m tiny and messy and liquid, squished and squishing. Hero’s hand is on my cheek and I realize it’s because he’s slapped me. I reel away. Collapsing to my knees, I retch into the corner.
Polly is white-faced, gasping. Hero comes up behind me and rests his hand on my shoulder. Despite this, when he asks, “Are you all right?” he’s talking to Polly.
“I think so.” She holds one hand at her breastbone. The soul doesn’t have location, though. Her fingers curl into a fist.
***
We wave her off. Or Hero does. I watch him poke his head out the window. When he pulls it back in, beaming, I ask, “Why did you bring her back on the train in the first place, if your whole idea was to get her off it?”
His beam fades, somewhat. “That wouldn’t have worked. You can’t make people free, exactly, not of this.” A corner of his mouth quirks back up, ruefully. “We all have to save ourselves. People have to want to change.”
I close the window with more force than is strictly necessary.
I become the train several more times, at irregular intervals, always between stations, and every time it takes longer to come back at Hero’s touch, and every time I have more trouble forgetting my own ecstasy at the suffering of the passengers inside me.
***
“The next stop is Those You Caused To Die,” I announce, and stopper up the speaking tube.
It’s been so long since Hero first boarded the train that I’ve almost forgotten how it was before him. Exactly how long, I don’t know. There isn’t any night from this train. Dawn goes to day goes to dusk goes to day goes to dawn, and there’s no difference between dusk and dawn. Just the same fading to colorless, no more light sparking on the remnants of bright spots on brass, and then fading back up. And I don’t pay attention to how many ‘days’ I see anyway. But it’s been a lot of them.
Turning to Hero, I crack a tiny broken smile and say, “Not sure what they mean, but—”
He’s looking at me without returning my feeble smile. “This is my stop.”
I miss the hook for the end of the speaking tube and when it leaves my fingers it collapses to the carpet on its slinking length like a snake drunk on apple cider. “What?”
He smiles, sheepishly. “This is the next stop to where I’m going.” He fishes in the pockets of his absurd dinner jacket, and holds up the transfer stub of his ticket. “I’m allowed off.”
I look at the faded paper. “So you are,” is all I can say, numbly.
Hero looks steadily at me, and in the peaking of his eyebrows I read hope fighting through concern. He rubs the ticket between finger and thumb and a second rectangle of paper fans out from behind the first, the last card in some winning poker hand. He says, “So are you.”
I am petrified. The ticket and the way he leans forward and the window behind him have paralyzed me like sleep.
And then the sky gives way to the station, roaring past, unmoving blankness replaced by blurring motion. I can move again. I yank the break lever so hard I feel something in the metal wrench and for a moment I think I’ve broken it. When I’m reassured that it’s still in place, that we’re slowing, I pick up the speaking tube and drop it back into its holder.
“A little tardy,” he says, with an evasive little chuckle. “We’ll have to go through a bunch of cars to get out now.” Hero rubs the back of his neck with his free hand, still holding out the tickets. “I’m serious. I want you to have this. Leave. You don’t have to stay.”
“Leave the train?”
“I’m pretty sure you weren’t the first driver.”
“You think I can just leave?” I say, my voice actually rising.
He gives me another clear, anxious smile. “Yes. If you take this.”
***
I watch him stand on the platform, as he was when I first saw him. He seems unchanged by his time on the train. I don’t understand how that it is possible.
It takes so much effort, so much of myself to reach out for the controls again. Bile, or tears, or maybe emotion, rises in my throat. I’d thought my eyes were calcified to bone but I feel them dampen as my hands find brass. I set the train in motion again.
He dwindles in my sight, smaller and smaller, and I crane further and further, not wanting him gone, but it is far too late for that. Without taking my eyes from the window, the moving world, I find the whistle and let it blast out, cutting through the screams. I think I see him raise a hand to me, a last attempt to stay my path, perhaps.
Then I can no longer see him. I turn forward, resolute, and let the screams back into my head, and feel the train around me alive, and I tell myself this is the only way it could have gone.
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About the Author
Zoe Palmer is a student of creative writing and cognitive science at Northwestern University, where she vainly attempts to study the human mind from these two vastly different/extremely similar perspectives. She has been previously published in Prompt Literary Magazine and Every Day Fiction.
“Train” © 2014 Zoe Palmer
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