Stranger on a Train (18 page)

And that thought – no, not remotely a unique thought; obvious, indeed, but suddenly urgent – pressed so hard on my unaccustomed core that I was heavy with grief. Though for what and for whom exactly, I couldn't, and still cannot, say.

J
OURNEY
T
WO

Live Tracks

A year later, I was sitting in Starbucks on Seventh Avenue opposite Penn Station waiting for the train to Chicago that would begin my railway circumnavigation of America. Back in London after the last trip and poring over the Amtrak brochures, I had discovered that it was possible to travel by train in a circle around the edge of the United States. The Circle Line to end all Circle Lines. The irresistible circle. I couldn't resist it, and nor could I resist the deliberate repetition of an accidental experience that had stayed with me when I got home. I wanted more, a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere. Even better than the Atlantic crossing, I could sit still, listen to people talk, travel many miles and end up back where I started, and all for the effort of changing a few trains.

So I made my plans for a second, deliberate journey, tracing a route delineated by a series of romantically named trains. I would start in New York, take the
Lake Shore Limited
to Chicago, and connect to the
Empire Builder
for the rest of the journey west to Portland, Oregon. From Portland I'd pick up the
Coast Starlight
down the West Coast as far as Sacramento, California, where I decided that I would take a wedge out of the circle and make an inland detour so that I could visit Bet and her hero in Albuquerque. To do this I had to take the
California Zephyr
from Sacramento across the Rockies to Denver, Colorado. At that point Amtrak failed me, as it fails most US citizens who want to go anywhere off the main routes: branch lines have been severely pruned in the name of profit. There was no rail connection to Albuquerque either directly from the
Coast Starlight,
or from the
California Zephyr.
I would have to take a three-hour bus trip laid on by Amtrak at six o'clock on the morning following my arrival in Denver the previous night, which would take me, via Colorado Springs and Pueblo, to Raton, New Mexico, where I would catch the
Southwest Chief
to Albuquerque. Since this was America, the land of vast spaces, it was only a hop and a skip to the oasis in Phoenix (four hours, say) by the
Southwest Chief,
so I could go and visit John and Maria again, before catching my old friend the
Sunset Limited
in the other direction this time (the ‘Sunrise Limited', I suppose it should have been) from Tucson as far as New Orleans and then connecting to the
Crescent,
which would take me from New Orleans back to Penn Station, New York where I first started.

Sitting at my desk in London with the Amtrak timetable and a highlighter pen I whispered aloud the names of the trains as you would a poem or a psalm. It wasn't enough to read them and think them. Amused, but also beguiled by America's romance with itself, I wanted to hear the words out in the world, bouncing back at me in the silence:
Lake Shore Limited, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, California Zephyr, Sunset Limited, Crescent, Southwest Chief.
I regretted that I would have to miss the chance to travel on the
Adirondack,
the
Ethan Allen Express,
the
Silver Service,
the
Cardinal,
the
Capitol Limited,
the
City of New Orleans,
the
Texas Eagle
and the
Cascades,
but I didn't miss the opportunity to utter their names along with the trains I would be taking.

My route was planned, my Phoenix friends checked with to make sure it was all right to visit, a month-long Amtrak rail pass purchased, a flight to New York reserved for October, a book contract signed. Everything was sorted. But why? What was I doing? The book? Well no, the book was going to pay for what I wanted to do, and it was a useful cover.

‘Why are you spending a month going around the States on a train?'

‘To write a book.'

‘Ah.'

Once you've written other books, people don't usually question why you want to write any particular one. And most of the time I could tell myself that the book was the reason I was going and leave it at that. But it wouldn't quite do. I'd done the long train trip already, got the essence of the thing. Why do it again? Why not, if I wanted to do some travelling, go somewhere and do something I hadn't done before? Because what interests me is repetition, intensification, moreness. I say interests me, but that is too cerebral; I mean what alarms me, frightens me, disturbs me, because at a visceral level what I want is singularity, reduction, lessness, but like that ever-troubling tooth that I cannot resist testing with my tongue, there's the need to make certain. I never quite believe that I really want what I seem to want. Only by doing the opposite can I check to see if I'm not just making it all up. In any case, forgetting for a moment the degree of socialising involved, what was more beguiling than the idea of playing out the singularity of the straight line, the enclosing reduction of the circle over the whole geography of America?

But once I had set off, only got as far as New York City, I remembered also how much I like
being a stranger,
alone and unidentified in a place I don't belong. I feel bold and free, journeying alone in another country. Uncluttered by connection. A planet watcher. Unfathomable myself because of my alienation. Sitting alone in a busy coffee shop on Seventh Avenue was exhilarating enough. I could sit in a coffee shop in London and get a little of that feeling, but it's stronger being geographically elsewhere, being sure that no one you know is going to pass by and greet you as yourself. I thrill at being a stranger. I thought of the other travellers I would be with on the train as vignettes, moments or summaries of lives, flashing and vivid as they passed me by, then gone back to their regular existence. I can see other people so much better in my strangerhood. Strangerness brings people into sharp focus, so that like a firework display, vibrant patterns can be seen in sudden blazing light before the overall blackness of the sky returns and prepares us for the next revelation. Everyday busyness and regular social contact is more like a firework display in broad daylight. Of course, the other thing about a firework display is that you look at it, but it doesn't look at you. The opportunity to see myself was another central motive. Being looked at, being known, even just being acquainted, fogs the glass between me and myself. I can't see what I am. The narcissism of this is inescapable, but the ‘What am I' question still beats in my head even after all this time, the adolescent question that should have been finished with but which remains, decade after decade, an incessant query. Better to admit it – that's as far as maturity will take me. I spend my life trying to find the right circumstances to circle myself, to catch myself unawares and finally see what it is I am. Then what? I've no idea. I imagine, when the question is at last satisfied (no, of course it won't be, but I imagine), a shrug, an ‘OK', and then with infinite relief just getting on with it. In the meantime I take occasional wanders, using my separation from others as a mirror, or looking into the dark centre of strangers' eyes to catch my reflection. The eyes of those who know me reflect a story, my story or their story about me – and tell me more about them than about me. I suspect that the desert fathers, those crazed hermits, suffered from a similar self-obsession. That my narcissism is insatiable is not a pretty truth, but there it is. It was the condition of being always in transit, of never arriving, of being a travelling stranger for as long as possible that I was after. I thought of the train as the twin centres of my sleeping accommodation and the smoking coach – the rest just a corridor I passed through in order to get to one or the other. I thought of America as the ground plan for this fractured but contained investigation of myself and others. Travel had nothing to do with it.

What of the folly in trying to repeat the unplanned and unexpected by instituting the planned and expected? I knew perfectly well that it couldn't work. But supposing it did? And if it didn't, wouldn't that be interesting too? I had quite forgotten my shaken condition in Phoenix, and how badly I had needed to get home after experiencing the human interaction of a simple three-day journey. Or if I hadn't forgotten, I thought at least that I could deal with it. I always think I can deal with things. And I never completely believe, when I am securely on my own, that my discomfort in the company of others and away from base is really more than a conceit. I find I need to test it.

So I was waiting for a month of strangerhood to begin. I wasn't expecting anything to occur to me, just a series of events that I happen to be in the same place as. But how did I explain to myself the visits I had arranged which punctuated my journey? To Bet and her hero, for all that they were unknown quantities and therefore a continuation of strangeness, and to my friends John and Maria in Phoenix. A fear of the consequences of cutting myself off for so long without any familiarity? A failure of courage, perhaps. Probably. Or, less excusable, a thoughtless acceptance of convention? An unquestioned idea that a journey must have some points of reference, you can't just go round in a circle without any destination. Why not? There have to be stations on the way. Do there? Wanting to be
not
in America, not travelling to places in America, but travelling on an American train, I had nonetheless arranged for myself to spend time with Americans, in the places of their homes. A contradiction. So what isn't contradictory? Why not include contradiction in the contradiction of someone who wants most of all to keep still setting off to keep on the move for a month?

*   *   *

The smoking coach on the
Lake Shore Limited
was very different from the one on the
Sunset Limited.
As we pulled out of Penn Station and started our journey to Chicago, I was quite put out not to find grey lino scarred with burn marks, moulded plastic chairs bolted into serried ranks, overflowing ashtrays: all the hallmarks of a waiting room for reprobates who deserved nothing better, the ambiance of a punishment and isolation cell. This smoking compartment was a smart, square glass booth beside the bar. It was half the size, but designed by someone who had respect for smoking as a cultural marker. There was a carpet on the floor and the benches on two sides of the box were upholstered. By the windows were two small tables, like coffee tables with a couple of fixed chairs on either side. We were no longer isolated. The plate-glass wall looked on to the corridor, where people passed to and from the bar. They saw us, we saw them. To the passing non-smokers we may have been a warning in our glass case, an exhibition of an endangered species which owed its forthcoming extinction to its own foolish behaviour, but to us inside it felt like more a clubhouse than a sin bin. The back partition even had a mural: a man's silhouette leaning lazily against the edge of the wall, full size, wearing a snap-brim hat at a jaunty angle and broad trousers that placed him in the Forties, the smoker's finest hour, the great period of the cigarette:
Now Voyager,
‘Why ask for the moon, Gerry, when we already have the stars?'
To Have and Have Not,
‘You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow.'
Casablanca,
‘Of all the gin joints in all the…' When a cylinder of tobacco meant something. Curling up from the cigarette between the man's fingers, held to his silhouetted lips, a black wisp of smoke, delicate, genie-like, spiralling up and up, from his mouth to God's ear. Smokers had the ear of God, back then. The painting must have been designed by someone who once smoked and who still understood the cultural imperative of smoking, the value-added glamour, the addition of addiction to a ruminative soul, to say nothing of the sheer all-encompassing pleasure. If this smoking area was a cell, it knew the true nature of the crime it contained. But still, I missed the stripped-bare dinginess of the
Sunset Limited
's mealy mouthed concession to nicotine junkies.

Sleeping compartments get booked early and Amtrak never take demand into account by adding extra sleeping coaches. I was too late to get one for this leg of the journey. So from New York to Chicago I was travelling coach, huddling with the huddled masses. It was just the one night. I boarded at 4.35 p.m. on Friday at Penn Station, and was due to arrive (although I knew better now) at Chicago at 11.15 the following morning. Sitting up, sleeping in a seat, would be no bad thing, I told myself. If I was going to experience train travel, I should spend one night un-feather-bedded. I made a point, however, of booking sleeping compartments for the rest of the journey, which made the trip much less flexible, of course. I had thought I'd be keeping timetabling to a minimum, just in case, you never know, to keep me free for spontaneity. There was still that lurking sense of how one ought to be a travel writer, free to make detours, when detours were the last thing I wanted. But the prospect of a month sleeping upright, of having no door to shut myself behind, made me decide to dispense with any fantasy of spontaneity.

The journey away from New York is most marked by what appears to be an entire suburb for the dead. A graveyard so extensive and ramshackled that it seemed as urban and frantic as Manhattan itself. Or perhaps it was New York's statement on what exists beyond the city: nothing, just chaos and the dead. The seat in which I would spend the night was spacious and comfortable in maroon leatherette and it reclined. There was a footrest that could be raised so that the legs could be completely extended, and wide armrests. It would have been first class on a plane. There were worse places to spend the night. In the two seats beside me were a Filipino woman in her sixties, dressed smartly, and a small boy I supposed was her grandson. She didn't speak, beyond nodding hello as she sat down beside me. The child fell asleep almost immediately. I watched New York State go by for a little while, and then made my way to the smoking compartment. It was empty. No Bet, no Raymond, no Good Samaritan, no camaraderie. I didn't mind. So far, apart from ordering a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, I hadn't spoken to anyone. Supposing it went on like that? What if the Savannah to Tucson trip had been an aberration and the entire present journey was to be spent in silence, in contact with no one? Another kind of trip altogether. In fact at that point I had so little desire to talk or make contact with strangers that when the door slid open and two round, smiley middle-aged men came in and nodded amiably at me, I had to make an effort to respond with a civil smile. It had begun, and oddly, I was reluctant to get started. Inertia probably, a built-in resistance to moving from a present state into a new one, whatever it may be. Which is why doing nothing seems such a plausible life choice. The men were a couple, taking a holiday, they told me. Travelling to and from New York.