Stranger on a Train (30 page)

‘The trailer's wonderful. Love it. A great place to work.'

‘Yeah, I can't get her out of it. I think she's hiding from me,' Bet complained, only half joking.

‘No, honey, she's like me, busy doing nothing. I got nothing to do and I'm still only halfway through it. Hey,' Jim said to Bet. ‘I've had a great idea. You like Jenny, I like Jenny, Mikey likes Jenny. You like Jenny, don't you, Mikey? Why don't we keep her?'

‘Yeah,' Bet agreed. ‘Good thinking. How we gonna do that?'

‘Hell, no one knows she's here. We can keep her in the trailer. It'll be just like
Misery.
You know, that movie about the writer? We lock her in one night, and I'll take it off on my hunting trip. We'll go way out in the woods, and I'll just shoot deer and let my hair grow until the search for the missing English Commie lady writer blows over.'

‘Just pinko, Jim.' I tried to join in with the game.

‘Nah, it's no good,' Bet said. ‘She got a letter yesterday. She told her boss our address. She must have known we'd decide to keep her for ourselves. They'll know she was here.'

‘That's OK. We can say she was here but she left after a couple of days and we don't have any idea where she's gone. Did you see
Misery,
Jenny? You remember James Caan was a storywriter and…'

I'd seen
Misery.
I thought it was quite funny. A nice take on the folly of writers' best hopes and worst fears. But during the drive back to the empty suburbs of Albuquerque, Bet, Jim and Mikey took on a more shadowy reality in my mind. As if they'd turned inside out, an underlying darkness gleaming glossily on the surface. The veneer of joking affection was replaced by a mythic malevolence, and an overriding will to action. My vision adjusted. Rationality, which I had held on to so far, receded, and I began to see only the gothic underbelly, the monsters that are created by lurking unresolved pain and disappointment; the underworld of decent normality, of suburban vacancy, of the ordinary turning to horror, that American movies understood so well. I passed from America-in-the-movies into movie-America, just as Buster Keaton had wandered dreamily from his seat in the cinema to slip through the screen and become part of the celluloid action.

When I got back to the house, I tried to walk the fearful feelings, the absurd feelings away, through the wide empty streets that went nowhere. I found myself in anywhere and everyplace, the empty space of modern American living, and I recognised it with an increasing chill in my heart. The movies were my only guide to these depleted suburbs, the bedrock from which the contemporary monsters of America emerged. In the cinema I had seen Freddy Kruger and his ghastly peers stalk these unending, dangerously clean, lethally clipped, vacant, peopleless, inhuman streets, free to pick and choose among the near identical residences which front door (always closed except to enter or exit the car) to storm, to which blankly normal household he would announce his beastly reality. Now I saw how these films came about, how they couldn't not have sprung into the head of anyone who walked along the antiseptic avenues, as I did, looking for signs of life. I walked for what seemed to be miles, but house after house stood mute, a clipped bit of lawn, a car or two, maybe a truck or a trailer, but no shops or bars or cafés appeared where locals could meet, greet and gossip. There was no sound of kids, no sight of the young, mixing and injecting life and play into the emptiness. It was uncanny. So safe that danger echoed with every footstep. Hitchcock, John Carpenter, Wes Craven and Stephen King understand this vacuum, this white hole available to be filled with all that is darkest and murkiest in the human psyche. The new gothic landscape, a heaven that whispers hell in all its neat, inhumane silence.

By the time I was back inside my trailer – now hovering impossibly between a haven and a threat – I was feverish with unreality, or, as it increasingly seemed to me, clearly observing the reality that I had until now failed to see. I have never been mad as such, by which I mean that I have never thought myself someone or somewhere other than I am, not heard voices informing me of truths inaccessible to the rest of the world, not seen visions that bore no relation to what was happening in the sight of everyone else. At any rate, whenever any of these things did occur, it was usually in my twenties and directly attributable to a very carefree use of drugs. But I do know a kind of madness that lies low in the mind, half-buried in consciousness, which lives in parallel to sanity, and given the right circumstances or even just half a chance, creeps like a lick of flame or a growing tumour up and around ordinary perception, consuming it for a while, and causing one, even when not at the movies, to quake in fear of the world and people and what they – I mean, of course,
we
– are capable of.

In the dark, that night, I had no doubt that the joking threat of kidnap was no joke at all. As a matter of fact, even in the cool sanity of this present moment, I suspect that there was something more than just a tease, but that night in my head the threat combined with Jim's evident fury, Bet's need for company and the wish of both for a sympathetic soul to keep Mikey happy, and whatever portion of cool sanity I possess couldn't be seen for dust. I spent the night in lonely terror, like all the children who had been spirited away in grim folk tales, like James Caan in
Misery,
like Tony Last at the finale of Evelyn Waugh's
A Handful of Dust,
condemned for ever to read Dickens to a madman in the jungle. I
believed,
by morning, that I would be consumed by these emotional cannibals I had unwittingly set myself among. They would refuse to let me leave. I would be secreted by them. Imprisoned. Sequestered. Killed. The waking nightmare lasted into the daylight. When I say I believed this to be the case, I mean that I absolutely knew it to be my situation. I knew also that it was ridiculous. That I was in a
condition.
That I might be pleased these kind and generous people with whom I had little in common liked me enough to joke about wanting to keep me. But knowing that was nothing like as powerful as knowing that I was enmeshed in a horror movie that had come to life. The horror, of course, was my horror at having got off the train; at joining the parade instead of letting it pass me by. Even for five days. I felt that I was dying and made it easier on myself by letting myself think that someone out there – instead of me – was doing the killing. That day, in order to shake the horror off, I read books (Zizek, for God's sake, on fantasy), I worked on the proofs, I lay on the bed breathing deeply, fighting for calm, but the fear that I would never leave that place remained. I wasn't due to catch the train until after lunch the following day. Until then I was trapped in anxiety: until the moment when I was due to leave, I couldn't know for certain that they would let me go. They just don't take me to the station. They keep me away from the phones. There is no other form of transport to get myself to the train, no passing pedestrian I can appeal to for rescue. They just drive me away in the trailer and I am lost. Getting to the train became crucial. And the more I tried to feel the absurdity of my fear, the more my fear told me that such things happen, that craziness occurs, that I might well be captured and … and what? Killed? Kept as a friend for lonely Mikey? Punished for having an easy life? It didn't matter what. The sense of threat was everything. An engulfing black cloud descended over me, and made a nonsense of all attempts at rationality or efforts at distraction.

I gave no indication to my putative captors of my state of mind, I think. I am rather good at keeping my madnesses private. I kept to myself as much as I could, but I ate with the family, laughed with Mikey and listened to more of Bet's stories of her childhood. Yet all the while the bizarre threat remained. Several times Jim and Bet reminded me of it.

‘Hey, ain't it great having Jenny living with us all the time?'

I laughed along with them. I dreaded the coming night when the fantasy would gain full control and the terror of abduction grow massive. During the night my heart beat so hard I thought I might die of it. In the morning all I could think of was catching the train, but that I was dependent on Jim getting me to the station on time. He might simply disappear to the commissary. What if he took me but contrived to be late enough to miss the train? What if he kept taking me to the train, every day, and I kept missing it, day after day, and we all began to live in a pretence that they were letting me go when it was perfectly clear that I was in fact imprisoned? I feared the politeness of a nicely brought up child who doesn't dare be rude enough to say to the stranger offering her a lift to oblivion that she doesn't want to get in the car with him. I thought of suggesting that I get a cab to the station, but I knew my hosts wouldn't hear of such a thing. I would be trapped by good manners into an eternity of out-of-town Albuquerque. In fact, I had the phone number of the daughter of a friend who lived in the city and worked at the university, but I didn't phone her. The phone was in the kitchen and I didn't want to be overheard. You remember that scene in the movie? And I feared too that I would blurt out my panic and reveal myself to a sane stranger to be ridiculous, as well as hear my own absurdity as I spoke the words. ‘I'm afraid I'm being kept prisoner here…' So idiotic, she would send a doctor to me, and in consultation with Jim and Bet it would be decided that the best thing would be for me to stay where I was, on calming drugs, and wait until the madness passed over. It would, of course, take for ever. I would never be free. I was their prisoner. No, no, I'd remember as the fantasy took off, the point was that I would be revealing myself to be paranoid, in a state of unreality, but all scenarios led back to the pit of fear I had dug for myself.

What all this was about was that I had got off the train. I'd stopped moving, meeting and withdrawing from people. I was grounded in a house with a family, and I wonder if Jim and Bet hadn't made their
Misery
joke whether I wouldn't nonetheless have generated the fear all on my own. Just five days, not even a week, and I was beside myself with despair that I was trapped, that I would never get away from people. To be a stranger on a train is to be inside a private anonymous bubble of one's own, waving at other passing bubbles; to be staying in a house with a family was to be engaged in a way that I found nearly intolerable, actually dangerous. And when the partial safety of my separate trailer was taken from me with the notion that it might become a gaol, full-blown panic ensued. The people I know at home I trust to let me keep a certain distance, to withdraw when I need, to need a degree of withdrawal themselves. Bet and Jim and Mikey I didn't know and couldn't trust to give me leeway, or to want it. The people I know at home I trust up to a point, but not enough not to need to feel I can withdraw. Bet, Jim and Mikey I didn't know or trust even to that point. I knew exactly what I was doing when I put myself on a train. I forgot myself, or mistook myself, when I got off it.

The final morning was spent in a haze of anxiety, added to by a flurry of will-we/won't-we-get-her-to-the-station jokes, and by Jim taking off with a teasing grin to buy cigarettes at the base at around midday, an hour and a half before my train left. I did the only thing I know to do when panicking about something that might, but probably won't, happen: I fast forwarded. I put myself past the time of danger, into the future, and had myself seated safely in the train moving away from Albuquerque. It's always worked a treat so far.

It worked, for example, when I was coming out of my last major depression in 1984. I'd spent three months sitting on the sofa, immobilised by the worst episode yet. But as you do, though as you don't believe you ever will, I was beginning to come out of it. I went to Vermont to stay with a friend and spent the final two days (having been warned against it) alone in New York before flying back. I'd never been to New York and I walked for miles around the only city I would recommend during a depression – the energy level buoys the most leaden of moods. I wandered around the park in the late summer sun, and settled on the grass to listen to a jazz band. A Japanese man began to speak to me. Well, I thought, strange city, strange times, go with it. That old grabbing-experience habit again, not quite guttered. We walked around the park and he told me that he had just returned from Edinburgh where he had been researching the use of lithium in pure depression rather than only bipolar illness. I kept a straight face, but was most impressed at my capacity to attract the appropriate professional. I asked him questions and then he was impressed.

‘Are you in the field?' he asked.

‘No, I just take a lay interest.'

Soon we were talking about diagnosis, and as we sat on a bench he explained to me the set of ten to fifteen questions psychiatrists use to diagnose and assess depression in patients.

‘Like what?'

He asked me the first and then waited, as if we were playing a game, for my answer. After six or seven he began to look at me more carefully, by the final question he looked very serious.

‘A severely depressed patient is expected to give certain answers to half the questions. You have given them to two-thirds.'

‘Oh, I was just trying to put myself in the mindset…'

He was not convinced. Nonetheless, he told me he was meeting a Japanese friend at Columbia and then going on to the best Japanese restaurant in New York. Would I like to come along? He was a round-faced, amiable man in his early thirties, who spoke gently and smiled kindly. Here I was in NY, I was being invited to eat great Japanese food with two Japanese people. Why would anyone in their right, or righting, mind, turn such an offer of spontaneous experience down?

We picked up the friend who had a car. As soon as they met, everything changed. I was put in the back of the car and the two men got in the front. They spoke to each other in Japanese, and addressed not a word to me. I began to wonder … One Japanese bloke in a strange city is another person; two, it turned out, became a cultural phenomenon. I was ignored, geisha-like in the back of the car as we approached the bridge.