Stranger on a Train (21 page)

Certainly, it was the antithesis of waking in the middle of the night in a hospital ward. No night nurses maintained a dimly lit vigil, overlooking the helpless sleepers. And the sleepers themselves were not contained tidily in rows of beds, but in a free-for-all quest for unconscious comfort. It was true that the Amish group were as neat and disciplined in their sleeping as they were in their waking. They sat in their seats (only the children were fully reclined) with their legs straight and their arms folded. Some of the younger men had allowed their heads to loll on their wives' shoulders. Some of the women slept with an arm around a small child as if to contain it, and train it in propriety even in the uncertain world of sleep. The men's legs were spread out, feet planted comfortably apart or crossed at the ankles; the women's were together and parallel with the vertical drop of their seat, their skirts straight as if they had smoothed them before setting off for sleep and hadn't moved since. A few snored, probably in Low German. Who knows what they dreamed?

The sleeping habits of the rest of the coach told a different story altogether. Repose, like hunger or sexual need, is a powerful human drive which, when the need is strong, overcomes training in social niceties and our public pretensions. Mostly people do it in private, with at most one other who is licensed to share the ultimate intimacy of sleep. What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and of utter aloneness when the one of you that isn't you is asleep is unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. They leave behind nothing but a careless, even an uncaring effigy, an empty shell that might toss and turn, snort and snore, but is no more the container of the mind and heart you communed with than an empty tin of baked beans. Sleep is a haven. Every man is an island when asleep. And this truth being disturbing, distressing even, we keep it for those we love, or those we have grown used to, and only then probably because we have to, if we do not want to make the choice between experiencing the comfort of others and the bliss of solitary unconsciousness. It's a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.

So public sleeping is a kind of revelation, and the observer of strangers asleep is as much a voyeur as someone peeping through a gap in the bedroom curtains. If you are not a dedicated voyeur, there is a degree of discomfort in witnessing the sleep of strangers, though it is a fascinated kind of discomfort: you look before you look away. Most of us wish to peep on the privacy of others, to see what people are really like when they are alone. Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can't watch all the time. And even if you can make a guess that other people alone are pretty much like you are, you can't ever be sure. Worse still, you can't ever be sure that you alone are pretty much like other people alone. Some things we never find out by asking or being with other people, so when we get the opportunity to cheat, to look through a crack in the door, watch a silhouetted figure through the window across the street, gaze at candid photographs taken with a high-powered lens, we do so, and the instinctive guilt is usually about equal to the thrill. What are we hoping to see? If they are like us; if we are weird; if they are weirder than us; but we also want to see what we are like, not just the individual peeping eye, but the general, collective
we.

Everyone slept as best they could, as comfortably as possible, shoes off, belts and zips undone, clothes loosened or rucked up, revealing bellies, bosoms and thighs. Each person slept under a spell that allowed them to fight for another inch of personal space, an extra ounce of ease regardless of what their waking self might think of how they appeared. Heads back, mouths agape, snoring freely, slapping their lips together, scratching, snorting, legs wide, torso flopped: with the perfect self-centred innocence of a child asleep. For all the world as if humanity had decided to forgo entirely all the social skills it had acquired in order to live peaceably in a group. Not the original savage animal, as Frank Leslie saw it back in the 1870s under the influence of evolutionary theories that threatened us with simian ancestors, but a tangle of individual post-Freudian omnipotent egos, each separately grasping for physical gratification, each engrossed in private dreams and desires.

By 8.30 the next morning the train had arrived at Toledo, Ohio. People had gradually started waking from six o'clock on, and tried to make themselves respectable again, straightening up their clothes, combing their hair, heading for the coffee in the restaurant car that would make them social human beings again. The chef was nowhere to be seen, but Marie, who was bright and perky and puffing up a morning storm in the smoking compartment, said that he had finally collapsed on the floor in the centre of an aisle and just lay there sleeping for the rest of the night while people carefully stepped over him.

I was nauseous with lack of sleep, but smoked and drank coffee through the morning, as we passed through flat anonymous country shrouded in morning mist. All I could think of was arriving in Chicago and connecting with the
Empire Builder,
where I had a bed. We were running an hour late, but when we reached the outskirts of Chicago and the tracks multiplied, merging from all directions into the frantic hub that was the dead centre of the American railroad system, we slowed to that alarming speed where you know that nothing but a complete halt can come of it. Surrounded by goods trains and containers, overhead cables screeching and singing, iron and steel, clinker, smoke, rust, dust, grime and the bone-juddering noise of metal wheels on metal rail jangling and grinding, shuddering to a stop, lurching into movement, the
Lake Shore Limited
finally came to a dead standstill about five hundred yards outside Union Station, Chicago. We waited in an expectant silence, and then waited some more. The child in the seat next to me began to sing tunelessly: ‘One hour we've been waiting … two hours we've been waiting … three hours we've been waiting…' He got to ten hours and then started again. And then again. I don't know how many times he started again, but a real-life hour and a half later we were still waiting in the goods yard as the freight trains took priority. No one murmured any complaint, we just sat, our bags packed, ready after our nineteen-hour journey to disembark and go home or make the next connection. Apart from the child next to me, who was beginning to sound like our psyches singing in our ears, and who, like my psyche, I thought needed suppressing, there was the grim silence of a captive, helpless audience with nowhere else to go staring through the grime of the windows into the noise and shunting chaos of the filthy, smoky air just yards from, but utterly beyond the reach of, our destination.

Two hours later we were allowed into the station, and I arrived at the check-in desk in Chicago with just fifteen minutes to spare before the
Empire Builder
left for Portland, Oregon. Given my anxiety level, you would be forgiven for thinking that I had to be somewhere at a given time. But missing a train is missing a train, a thing in itself, a source of compulsion that needs nothing more than a timetable. There would have been a very long wait until the next train to Portland, but waiting was what I was doing – what difference if it was on the train waiting for the next station, or in the station waiting for the next train? But I was nevertheless hugely relieved to get to the check-in desk before it closed.

‘That was nothing,' a woman behind me said as we were bustled along by the porters as if being late was our fault. ‘I once waited in the Chicago yards for eight hours.'

I understood the silence of the others on the train. It was sheer terror of what could be.

Expending Nerve Force

The
Empire Builder
left on time at 2.10 p.m., picking up speed through the yards and beyond, through the steel and smoke of the factories, past the suburbs, heading west, its engine pulling energetically out of the industrial north-east, tracing the dreams of the nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneurs of constructing a mechanised way to deliver civil society and all its subsequent unquenchable and profitable needs further and further into the westward wilderness. Did I care? Not then. Not one bit. I hadn't had more than twenty minutes' sleep and now I was shown to my
deluxe
sleeper. I had got the last late-booked possibility of a bed –
deluxe:
a double-sleeper with its own shower and lavatory at a hefty premium – or it was up and sleepless for the next two nights. I would have paid anything for horizontality. The conductor introduced himself as Chris and before he had a chance to tell me about the complimentary coffee and morning paper, I asked him to make up my bed so I could sleep, which I did until 5.45 p.m. When I woke and examined my deluxe accommodation, I found that not only was my bed twice as wide as the regular sleeper, but I had an armchair and a decent-sized table as well as my own mini, modular bathroom. The single sleeping compartment was essentially a lofty coffin, an enclosure almost exactly the width of the narrow bed with head room but no standing room. Even the slightest degree of claustrophobia would make an overnight trip impossible, quite without Edgar Allan Poe-ish horrors of feeling buried alive. I, however, have no degree of claustrophobia. On the contrary, I particularly like the small, just-so fit of confined spaces, so I was perfectly happy in spite of the contortions and wrigglings required to change clothes while sitting cross-legged on the bed, or the inevitable spillages of essential creams and lotions that I had managed only with difficulty to find while hanging upside down to reach the overnight bag wedged in the slim space under the made-up bed. To me, it all added up to cosiness and was, in any case, infinitely preferable to a night of insomnia in a public coach. This double compartment, though, was spacious enough to swing a cat in – not a large cat: I had a mental image of a small kitten swirling around at the end of my arm – but it was extraordinarily roomy as sleeping compartments went. Pity I had to leave it immediately for a cigarette.

On the way to the smoking coach I stopped at the bar to get a coffee and found myself queuing in front of an Amish woman and her son of perhaps eight or nine years old. They were everywhere on the rail system it seemed, the Amish. Was anyone back on the farm leading the horse-driven ploughs and hand-churning the butter? The boy stepped back as the train jerked and trod firmly on my foot. I responded with a yelp of complaint – he wasn't a small child. When he turned round and saw me I pointed down to my foot and made a caricature grimace of pain. He was delighted by my mock anguish and his plump, owlish face, topped with the regulation pudding-basin haircut, creased into a great grin, hugely but shyly amused at his achievement. I raised my eyes in cartoon hopelessness, and he started chuckling. His mother turned round and looked at him, smiling benignly down at the boy, and then nodding politely at me. They got their order and sat at one of the tables, and the boy glanced up at me now and then, still amused as he sank his teeth and most of his face into one of the most evil-smelling microwaved hotdogs it was ever my misfortune to have waft my way. Even so, feeling we had been introduced, or at least that I was owed one, I sat down with my coffee on the opposite side of the table.

‘Is that all right for you?' the woman asked the boy in a hushed, concerned voice that had a foreign but indefinable lilt to it. ‘It is good?' She was like one of those mothers you only see in old Hollywood films; a little old lady well before her years, utterly beyond womanhood, beyond sexuality, a matron who had done her reproductive duty and had no further need for allure, even of whatever minimal kind the Amish permit. She was unadorned, with a skin almost silvery with cleanliness. Wisps of grey hair strayed from under her starched white bonnet. Her wholemeal dress was light grey, rather than the blue the Amish women on the last train wore, but just as smooth and neat. There was something almost wizened about her – though she couldn't have been more than forty or so – as she bent down every few moments to the boy and murmured to him to eat tidily, stroking his hair, adoring him, asking if he were enjoying his extraordinarily unAmish-like meal, as it seemed to me. She was devoted and anxious about his well-being and contentment to a fault, completely absorbed in loving and worrying about her son, but she took the time to be well mannered and asked where I had come from.

‘England.'

She didn't respond to this with any greater (or lesser) interest than if I had said Pittsburgh, but nodded distractedly, more interested in how her boy was doing. ‘How is the weather in England?'

It wasn't at all clear to me that she knew where in the world England was, but she certainly knew, as all Americans do, that the weather there should be referred to. I assured her it rained a lot and she seemed satisfied to hear it. The world was as she thought and there was an end to it. And where was she going, I asked.

‘Home to Libby,' she told me, and hugged the boy.

After a moment she seemed to notice that more was required. She spoke shyly and quietly, rather rapidly as if to get communication over and done with as quickly as possible. She said no more than was absolutely necessary to say to a stranger asking questions, but she was not unfriendly. She and her family had been to her son's wedding to a girl from an Amish community in Massachusetts. He was the fourth of her boys to marry, and she had two married daughters: they all lived with their wives and husbands in Libby. She spoke as if Libby were New York or Paris; as if I couldn't fail to be familiar with the place. Then she clammed up, looking a little flustered; demure and girlish, and slightly guilty, as if she had already said too much to an outsider. She flushed even pinker than before and dipped her head down to murmur at her son, who nodded his satisfaction in answer to her queries and grinned at me from time to time with hotdog-filled cheeks, like a happy hamster. It was clear that any further curiosity would have been intrusive. For all my fascination, I couldn't find a way to enter into a real conversation with this woman so locked into her regulated contentment that any question about it from an outsider could only present a challenge. When I got back to my compartment and checked with the schedule, Libby was in Montana, just past Whitefish in Glacier Park, and we were due to arrive there at around 11 p.m. the next night.