Down the Rabbit Hole

I boarded the Crescent at 11:30 PM on July 25^th and since it had pulled out of NOL station, I’d been praying every half hour: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, which will hopefully come before this train gets to Penn Station.

I checked the time on my cell. It was nearly 3 AM on July 27^th and I couldn’t sleep. I fidgeted in my seat, trying in vain to find a more comfortable position. There are people in this world who have the idiotic notion that train travel is relaxing and romantic, that the sound of a train moving over its tracks is lulling. These people have obviously never traveled long distance in a train. Because train travel is not relaxing or romantic or lulling at 3 in the morning when you don’t have nearly enough leg room to begin with, the chair doesn’t tilt as far back as it’s supposed to, and the wheels screech every couple of meters.

We were about to pass through Greensboro, N.C. and I was one of a handful of passengers still awake in the car. A girl across the aisle from me was typing furiously on a tiny laptop. I could hear “Go Ask Alice” blare from the headphones of her iPod. It felt like I was heading down the rabbit hole. Amtrak was moving me and my two carry-on bags from New Orleans to Atlanta, Atlanta to D.C., D.C. to Baltimore. I stretched in my seat and tried not to think about the stranger I was moving in with, but my mind inevitably wandered back to him. I wondered frequently which would be more bizarre to me; the city or the man.

Probably the man. Cities had maps and histories neatly, or crappily, written down somewhere. If a city confused you, you could Google directions. They’d probably be shitty directions but at least you’d get where you needed to go eventually. Psychology was a kind of road map, but you still needed a mental landmark for reference. All I had was vague knowledge of a break down that happened when I was 11 and the roster of his favorite B-movies. The only thing he ever connected to me and Artemis with was a love of cheesy horror and sci-fi movies from the 50’s and 60’s. I think the only time I remember seeing him smile was when we watched “The Blob,” and people were being swallowed up in the movie theater.

There was something kind of horrifying about passing through all the cities and towns in the dead of night. You knew that there were supposed to be people walking down the empty sidewalks, you could feel it. And seeing the street lights lit for no one left a sort of dread that no amount of light or sound or train car walls could totally banish. It was like the Blob or something had come by and eaten everyone. Only you couldn’t see it or hear it. Instead, it was still out there, waiting to get on the train or for you to get off. We’d been stopped at Fayetteville two hours ago the first time I’d thought of this, and I’d spent the whole 15 minutes eyeing the doors and windows in panic. Even now, passing through Greensboro, I looked out the window and thought I saw something move by the empty bus stop. I really, really needed to sleep somehow.

The sky outside my window got darker for a moment as we passed through a grouping of trees. The wheels screeched and there was this weird, endless moaning sound the train made. It had something to do with passing through air or wind at high speeds, but I couldn’t think of it. My mind had already drifted back to Baltimore.

I thought of what would eat me there. I thought of dancing wall paper and my sisters. Artemis used to say that the wall paper in her room would dance at night, and that the skeleton man in her room would tell her what it was like to die. That was in the old house, the one mom and dad had lived in after they were married. I remembered what it looked like inside, but I didn’t know where it was. I wanted to find it. I wanted to ask the skeleton man if making the wall paper dance came standard with death.

I checked my phone again and suddenly it was 4:05 AM. The girl across the aisle still had her head phones on, but I couldn’t hear anything from them. Her laptop was off and she was stretched across two seats, sleeping. I moved the armrest of the seat next to mine and stretched out too. I moved my duffel bag onto my seat for a pillow and set the alarm on my phone for 7:30. I was supposed to arrive in Baltimore at 8.

It was 4:08 AM. The train screeched again as we entered a tunnel. In the echoes and growing darkness, as exhaustion finally took me, it sounded like a woman screaming.