Through a driving rain, Alec makes his nightly trek to the Monroe Street Station, arriving wet at the margins where his umbrella’s cover ended. The 6:28 is packed to the gills. The riders are all stuffed in the “quiet car,” which means that he is in the company of incurable neurotics who take the railway experience a notch too far, who cannot brook the slightest personal intrusion. At the threshold, he is confronted with a poster of a mime performing some physical contortion in the aisle. She has her index finger extended vertically across her mouth—the universal sign for communicating silence. Opposite her slouches a derelict with a goofy expression and bubbles about his head. He is yelling into his phone as if a hurricane had just made landfall.
If the North Shore Line is sometimes overcrowded, at least it offers a brief sanctuary between the twin danger zones of work and home. On normal occasions, Alec thinks of it as a decompression chamber. Even with all the digital mumbo jumbo, the myriad of devices, one couldn’t be expected to accomplish much in such cramped quarters. He generally gives himself permission to turn everything off, be present where he is for a change, watch the various storefronts and boulevards and cluttered yards and smokestacks slide by. Most mornings this detachment is as oddly calming as the unbroken waves of a beachfront retreat, as tranquil as an excellent excuse.
Still, there is the occasional “switching problem,” rails locking up at the junctions, which might cost you fifteen minutes. And when that became common enough to be incorporated into one’s psychological defenses, there might be some larger problem to throw off the entire day. A few years ago, the train in front of them derailed. It had only been traveling twenty miles an hour at the time; they knew the tracks were beat up along that stretch so the injuries were minor. They were herded down the escarpment, evacuees gathered like an aggrieved mob, exposed to a gale off the lake, until the rescue buses could be summoned. It wasn’t that Alec’s car took on the feel of a disaster movie, the last route out of Pompeii or Krakatoa, but the transit downtown and back was supposed to be his refuge, from family, junk mail, and the encroachment of grudges, perhaps the only place all day he could really disentangle himself. He might strike up a random conversation with a stranger, scrutinize the passing activity outside in a kind of reconnaissance, or simply contemplate where he stood in the scheme of things. The diversion carried the shock of how quickly circumstances could change, how life could take a precipitous turn.
The train lurches and then eases away from the terminus where the light is slowly falling across the landscape around the tracks, making less distinct the warehouses and water towers and abandoned cranes and piles of industrial debris. Despite having staked out a spot on the platform early, Alec nevertheless fails to get a seat. He decides to crouch down and sit on the one of the serrated stairs that spirals to the upper deck. From that level, he can see little more than the flip side of an opened newspaper, a prominent lingerie ad next to some article about the day’s latest act of barbarism. Someone up front sneezes and several people look up, as if rudely awakened, as if a foghorn had been smuggled in.
Right on cue, over the intercom a conductor declares the ironclad rules. “Please be advised that in the front two cars, there should be no loud radios or electronic devices. Cell phone conversations should be limited to emergencies and kept to a whisper. Try to imagine you are in a library or a church and act accordingly. Anyone not complying with these restrictions will be asked to move to another part of the train.” Of course, this is all spelled out in a booming drone, a voice from an invisible mountaintop.
Alec grows restless amid the ensuing hush. People in the quiet car generally took up more than their share of space, as if the compartment were a form of first class. The businessman will glare as he removes an expensive watch adorned with multiple dials. He jackknifes his legs and his cologne will move slowly through the coach as an alien element, altering the chemistry of the air.
Alec spots Paul Curren a couple rows up and manages to get his attention by raising his hand, as if a teacher had asked a question and he knew the answer. Paul is locked into his laptop and headphones but notices the odd display and shoots Alec a vexed look of interruption. Alec recalls last seeing him at a benefit concert a couple years before when he and Claire were still together. He would have been content to send a check, but she liked to be in a room with civicminded people, basking in the glow of nominal sacrifice. Paul quickly makes an effort to smile before enacting that open-palmed gesture of being constrained, pointing at his plugged ears. Alec nods, acknowledging that his neighbor is engaged in some digital interlude that demands his attention.
Maybe it is the arrow of this affront but Alec suddenly misses the old days, especially the era of the club car. There had been something magical about them, the synthesis of release from work, flowing liquor, and travel. He remembers how often it became a party on wheels, like now on Friday evening, people thrown haphazardly together, the men with jackets discarded and sleeves rolled up, the women with shoes slipped half off, balanced on the edge of their toes. You enjoyed the serendipitous quality of it. There was something about the jostling movement and being spirited away from one’s earthly toil that combined for a more potent intoxication, almost a sense of flight.
He and Claire had met in one of those rollicking cabooses before they were discontinued. But now the haze and conviviality of such a concept were as extinct as the sabre-toothed tiger. Privacy was the watchword now, each person entitled to his own separate universe. What was next, a meditation car, where the sociable must be shunted to the rear, holding onto straps, shoved together like prisoners? Or would the gregarious be forced up near the engine where the fumes are palpable and the noise of the pistons is deafening? He thinks maybe they could sort people out in terms of their attire, or political affiliation. They could cordon off skyboxes like the ballpark.
Alec is already on edge about a promotion that was to have been announced that afternoon, its omission a nagging mystery. That and the fact that last Thursday Jim Hingess saw him with Kelly in a muted lounge called the Boardroom, a good mile from where they worked. Jim later stopped by his cubicle to confess he had caught them in a close moment, Alec’s hand briefly drifting to her tapered waist in a recessed corner of the place. There is a company policy not to date the people you work with, which makes sense in a certain way and no sense whatsoever in several others. He’s never seen an official memorandum on the subject but has nevertheless witnessed swift reprisal for the rule’s violation. Where else did one come into more natural contact with a prospective mate than in the mutual hatred of management, the effortless proximity and humdrum meetings? Where better to get a glimpse of who people really were?
Kelly is spooked, inclined to lie low, to stifle any rumors. Maybe that was why she didn’t show up to meet him for a drink as planned. Though perhaps it was for the best because Alec was so overwrought about the phantom decree, so left hanging, he could barely think straight. He wants to call her from the train but hates the inevitable phrases lost to the rumbling, and doesn’t want his fellow passengers breathing down his neck.
For a while after the divorce, he investigated the streamlined methods, the dating services and fix-ups. For the most part, they were worse than job interviews and more soul crushing. Kelly was the first real candidate, slightly plump yet carrying herself in a vivifying, wholly feminine manner. Her light blonde hair, subtle cheekbones, and pale blue eyes imbued her looks with a sunny aura, though this masked a discerning temperament. She was smart, stylish, and even occasionally demure in a way that inflamed him, and if he had doubts, if some outings had misfired when he assumed she would react to some overture like Claire, he would make a tactical retreat, approach things differently the next time. For seven months their relationship had been enough, despite Kelly’s intermittent misgivings, to nurture a sense of possibility again.
The train makes a few stops—Belair, Knollwood, Gresham—and yet those who get off are merely replaced by others who descend on the vacancies like vultures. Jammed as he is near the pneumatic doors, Alec is robbed of access to a window. He doesn’t know why the ability to peer out should be so important, considering that the scenery which flashes by is so familiar. The station names, the sections of real estate moving from loading docks to high-rises to three-flats and hectic boulevards with auto body shops and nail parlors until you reach the three-flats and chimneys, lawns, and fences—all which he has committed to memory like a rote prayer. Nevertheless, he feels claustrophobic without any vantage so he gets up and heads against the force of the locomotive’s inertia.
He exits the quiet car and settles along a thin strip beside a steelcabinet where the electrical controls are stored, the warning over it declaring a current of one thousand volts. It is an hour-long ride out to Indian Hill, and he listens to the prolonged screech of the brakes at each stop and notes the pungent whiff of diesel when the engine finally came to rest. Many still engross themselves in their gadgets and magazines, but at least there are a few scattered conversations.
A woman on a phone behind him says, “Honey, I only turn that on when I do my yoga. It couldn’t have been me. If it wasn’t you or Marnie, it was a ghost . . .” Just being able to hear a normal human exchange seems to him a mark of progress.
Alec pulls out a pint of Seagram’s he grabbed on the way out of the Boardroom from his jacket and, turning toward the wall for an instant, takes a stealthy slug. He moves to the vestibule so he can see out but the darkness has solidified, obscuring everything except the penumbra of the streetlamps. The hard part of adjusting to divorce had passed, he thought, so that some days that period barely registered. Alec can’t help but feel it was bad luck as much as anything else, that in six years of marriage they hadn’t been able to produce a child for reasons not fully clear. The right combination not clicking in, the roulette ball
not tumbling into a favorable slot. Despite all the fun they had until those
last fatal months—he had not enjoyed himself so much ever—the mysterious
failure had gradually corroded their foundation. To Claire, it seemed some
disparaging testament from the gods.
He still talked to her every few months, an informal arrangement they had settled into as a means of joint contrition. These chats were mostly cordial, even if they had taken each other’s lives on a six-year tangent. Though once in a while, she couldn’t help but raise the theme of his alleged forgetfulness. It didn’t bother him much anymore but back then she would accuse him of repeating himself, of remembering nothing except what he wanted to, leading to lost birthdays and anniversaries, vanished grocery lists or directions to a friend’s cottage. It was just the stuff of any life’s juggling act, but these tiny mishaps bolstered her argument like circumstantial evidence. He kept mixing up his keys for the mailbox and the basement and his car trunk, producing his library card instead of a theater ticket. He was always dredging up things that had happened before—the tornado that had whirled awfully close or the time they won a trivia tournament. “Escaping into the past,” was how she put it once. “Why don’t you get a time machine, Alec? Just go back there and stay.” She said she was weary of reminiscence, wanted to be alive in the present.
The corridor between cars is stuffy and serves to amplify the clatter beneath him, so he decides to keep going toward the back of the train. Alec steadies himself against the jounces of that particular stretch and as he proceeds, the atmosphere appears to shift in some inexplicable way. More of his fellow passengers are conversing through their earpieces and a few even to those next to them. The temperature has dropped a few notches and the sense of confinement, of being a captive briefly abates. Then there is Steve Randavi, lolling on the edge of the abbreviated seat nearest the restroom and looking up, at last someone who makes no avoidant shift of his gaze. Alec thinks he sees an ephemeral smile make its way across his face as he waves him over. Steve is so dominated by vertical features, the lankiness and trim dimensions, he seems almost devoid of width. Alec hasn’t seen him for years but would have recognized him anywhere.
“Hey coach, how are you?” Steve said, retaining the subcontinental accent from his unlikely boyhood in Calcutta.
“Not bad. Same old, same old.” Several years before, Alec had joined him as an assistant coach for one of the local peewee league teams, the Crosstown Firebirds, which was sponsored by the hardware store on Holly Street. He remembers it as a happy time, his marriage sailing along, his career in steady ascent, and the team had even gone on to win the championship.
“Do you remember when that kid—what was his name, Felter—hit a homerun in the last inning? A walk off and the whole team jumped up and down for about twenty minutes? I’ll always remember that.” The image rises up like some newsreel from a hundred years before and Alec is surprised to feel an echo of that elation, the kind of unalloyed rapture only such a moment could produce. Even Claire, who was famously indifferent to sports, had cheered wildly. Again, it strikes him how easily you could briefly be catapulted to another time. But he cannot sustain the feeling of pandemonium as the boy circled the bases, the memory fading by degrees like a twilight.
“Oh yeah, that was really something,” Alec replies, “a beautiful finish.” But he’d had to quit the team after that and there is nothing else he can connect with the man. So he wishes Steve well and excuses himself, pleads that he is in search of a seat somewhere further back. He parts the thick doors again and is nearly heaved into one of the metal braces when the train barrels around a curve.
They come to rest at the Crescent Ridge Station with its bucolic view of the Dionysian fountain and wooded bike path. Even after a contingent of the homebound alight, the local remains inert, due to some sort of delay. The cabin lights flicker and a murmur goes up about another switching problem, but they come on again and the episode turns out to be a false alarm. It bothers Alec never to have the full story, usually a rumor that’s ninety degrees off, just like why the promotion decision has been postponed until next week. He has been
checking the real estate ads lately, figuring the extra money could liberate him from his dingy flat on the east side. He supposes the bigwigs relish keeping him and Stargell, the two obvious contenders, in suspense.
It’s unlike Kelly not to call him if she got waylaid somehow—hijacked by her crazy mother perhaps—but it grates on him just the same. She has been his salvation the last few months, even if it is not yet clear if she is serious. They both love the theater and have seen a dozen plays together, reveling in the electricity of live performance. Last weekend it was Uncle Vanya and the one before that American Buffalo, and they talked about them afterward well into the night, quoting a line here or there as they rolled around in bed. It occurs to him she might have had to go straight back to the bungalow to let her dog, Venus, out, while her mother unexpectedly flew the coup for bingo night at St. Sebastian’s.
Though it is improbable he will ever find a seat, Alec feels compelled to keep moving and, reaching one of the cramped lavatories, ducks in so he can take another pull from his flask. The burning liquid seems to have a cleansing effect, as if it might kill any impurities, any defects in his system on its way through. Glancing in the crude mirror, he is shocked at how young he suddenly looks, as if the image were from an old photograph, his hair a slightly darker shade, the skin tighter around his eyes. It must be some effect of the dimness of the tiny space, but he feels like he is wearing makeup for a role which requires him to shed twenty years.
With the train swaying over a trestle and the dull inebriation that is gently taking hold, he walks slowly, occasionally touching the edge of the inward seats for balance. He aims for the end of the car where a scrum of people gathers for the approaching Ashland Park stop. He sees someone familiar, a woman standing sideways, reading an issue of Harper’s, one leg cocked behind her against a closet that contains fire extinguishers. Alec has never been good at names, never been adept at reconfiguring the situations that arrived out of context, but even in profile, it comes to him that it is Olivia, in a long, tapered wool coat.
She was a friend of Claire’s from work, who lived fairly close by, and she and her husband had occasionally joined them with another couple for dinner or a show. Like the others, she had really fled for the exits when he and Claire split, gone into hiding. Alec garnered the impression that she found him obtuse somehow, though she seemed fairly good at concealing it. But Olivia is caught off guard now, clearly abashed at seeing him alone, as if they just stumbled upon one another at the county jail.
“What are you doing here?” she says, stealing his own question.
“I’m usually on the 5:42 express, but tonight I took the scenic route.” He stands farther away from her than he normally would, hoping she won’t detect the whiskey.
“How have you been?” Something in her voice suggests the inquiry is either coerced by social protocol or simply an interrogation to be swiftly reported to Claire.
“I’m fine. Promotion. Serious girlfriend. The works. . . . Have you seen Claire lately?”
Alec figured he had to ask. Yet just the mention of her seems to touch off some inner siren in Olivia, who coughs nervously. Alec knows she isn’t about to be terribly forthcoming about her. From early on they seemed to have entered into a blood pact to keep everything confidential.
“Oh, here and there. We’re all so busy anymore. Just the occasional lunch on the fly.”
Alec is sure this isn’t true. He wonders what Claire has told her about him, whether accurate or not, after all hell broke loose. Did Olivia know the catalogue of complaints, or might she have entertained another side of the story? How he had put his wife through graduate school and saved her neck at least twice, once when she picked up the wrong prescriptions at the pharmacy, and another time when she had fallen asleep at the wheel, reaching over and wrestling the car to the side of the road.
Another time, during a trip to Rome, they were descending the Spanish Steps. Claire liked to look elegant at such historic locations for the inevitable pictures, but she caught a heel and would have plummeted a hundred bone-crunching feet to the bottom if Alec hadn’t reacted with the reflexes of a leopard and grabbed her in midair. This was all when their marriage was on autopilot, when even the arguments had them laughing an hour later, before the rancor set in.
“We should have a drink sometime,” he impulsively suggests. “I mean with Frank, the three of us; it’s been ages.”
“Yes, good idea,” Olivia replies, some note in her voice betraying the notion’s outlandishness. “I’ll give you a call.”
He imagines not seeing her again until a wake or a funeral—he doesn’t want to speculate on whose. A divorce was dissolving the contract not just between two former lovers but nearly everyone else they jointly knew. Claire’s parents, Jed and Catherine, whom he was fond of, had similarly receded into the mist. Judgments were made, verdicts were rendered, sides were inexorably drawn up. But it had been nearly a decade now, and wasn’t that long enough to dwell in limbo? He muses where it all would have led if he had just done a few things differently.
The brakes shriek with the friction of gears until the train is completely
still, the doors whoosh open, and a small mob seems to carry Olivia slowly out
with them, as if on a low tide. She only half turns and wiggles her fingers briefly
to indicate farewell. Once she is eclipsed in the current of departure, Alec yanks
the pint out of his pocket again, and takes a long pull, no longer caring if anyone
saw, before fumbling the cap back on and slipping into the next car.
Along a firm straightaway, Alec’s qualms take a reassuring turn. In fifteen minutes, he will reach his stop, take the short stroll to his Pontiac and settle in for a relaxed evening. He would call Kelly, and she’d tell him one of her humorous tales of being ambushed by some risible dilemma, and soon it would all be water under the bridge. Then he sees Rex Jacobs, a guy he had caddied with and gotten close to way back when, before he moved to Denver. It is hard to think of him without Rayburn, Pembrook, and Mays, their mischievous gang amid a hundred aimless summer revelries, childhood friends who were long gone. Alec rushes up to greet him, with that surge of enthusiasm one reserves for certain people who were present when the world lay open before you like an exotic postcard. He hasn’t quite reached him when he feels a shudder, not from the train’s smooth course, but from the recollection that Rex died in a small plane crash some years back. As Alec draws alongside the drowsy figure,
he notes the striking resemblance, yet with a couple of the wrong details like an amateur portrait—the wider nose, the narrower frame—and shuffles by.
The alcohol is doing its work, loosening his associations so that they became jumbled, springing randomly along the walls of his mind. The office’s revolving “man trap” door that had been installed as a security measure at the main entrance, which imprisoned you until your ID was identified, the aquarium in the lobby with the creepy, oval fish which glided slowly back and forth, the plastic owls his neighbor used to scare off pigeons that roosted in his eaves when Alec and Claire had their first apartment, sentinels pointed directly at the bedroom, as if keeping it under surveillance.
Then he detects the insistent, staccato vibration of the phone in his pocket. Kelly’s number appears, so he steps into the next foyer which is an echo chamber like the rest of them but at least he won’t be broadcasting the minutia of his love life.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t come. I tried but I couldn’t,” she begins.
“Did your mother send you on another wild goose chase?”
“No, so many things went wrong today, I just wanted to disappear or something. You won’t believe it, but I went in that cathedral I’ve passed by a zillion times. I just went in and sat there. Are you alright?”
“I guess I’m just aggravated they didn’t announce the damn thing. Their
only plan is never to follow a plan.”
As the train sped over a viaduct, there was a kind of rattling in the receiver which might have been interference or Kelly reaching for her purse, or a dozen other distant sounds.
“Alec, honey, Hamlin did announce it.”
“That can’t be. They wouldn’t have let me walk out of there.”
“At the last minute. Stargell. I’m so sorry. It should have been you.”
He’d been told there had been some hitch with the decision—so maddened from the waiting—he was only too glad to sneak out a couple minutes early. If he had gotten the news there at his desk, he would have been more prepared. Here was the insidious penchant of calamity to blindside you, even when you were half expecting it. In an instant, the new house, the office with a view other than a brick wall went up in smoke. Alec senses a wave of melancholy wash over him with such force that he almost loses his footing.
“You win some. You lose some,” he says hoarsely.
“On top of that, I overheard Sheila Barnett whispering about us. I thought we had covered our tracks pretty well. These people should set up their own detective agency.”
“It doesn’t matter. Can we have dinner tomorrow night? Wherever you want, you can choose.”
“You know I want to, but don’t you see we have to hold off for a while. Throw them off the scent.” He knows how serious she is about her career and has a premonition that this is really the end of them, but he says nothing, lets her mumble some platitude, and then, perhaps due to some anomaly of being in motion, the line is cut off.
He crouches down, cradles the smooth contours of the bottle and takes one more draft, tilting it upside down until the last fiery drop has been swallowed. The train, which just then overlooks a cemetery, one famous for its grand mausoleums and a facade that resembled the gate of a fortress, slows down dramatically and halts altogether, with no station in sight. Again, the lights inside go off, eliciting a not quite simultaneous burst of sighs, in a timbre of disbelief.
Alec is aware that he is high, almost in the actual sense like a hot-air balloon at some elevation where the ground and everything on it lacked the vividness of reality. He keeps drifting back, not entirely of his own accord, in search of some prior serenity, before the strife and recrimination, before certain things went off the rails. He edges to the foot of the last car. They are only a mile from Indian Hill but the intercom sputters that there is another switching problem, the rusting mechanisms reluctant to give way. He wonders if the engineers ever got it wrong, skewing a train onto the wrong track, where the scenery changed and they would all head to another destination, another rendezvous altogether.
Alec steps inside the final compartment and realizes its composition has been altered. Somehow, most of the seats have been removed and obliquely he sees a shelf of cans and decanters and a rack of candy and pretzels and chips. A jar in the shape of a caboose contains a number of dollar bills and a conductor bends placidly behind the bar taking orders. There is an aura of smoke shrouding the air from an array of cigarettes and cigars canted at every angle. It hangs as an enveloping fog amid the old Friday atmosphere of careless
transit. Nearly everyone is standing, and the area is so crowded, Alec can barely
hear the sounds of the engine above their riotous pitch.
There is Ry Hamlin holding forth about some new initiative, while Stargell regards him with the rapt attention of an acolyte. This makes no sense as Alec knew they both drove, but this is then superseded by the anomaly of Curt Pembrook, his ruddy cheeks still the same, recounting some off-color anecdote to George Rayburn as they lean beside a set of golf bags. In the same circle, Deborah Stallings, with whom he’d had an affair long ago, inclines coolly,
jetting the exhaust from her plump lips in a tight shaft. Alec’s parents, both gone since the ’70s, are seated in a booth for their cocktail hour, composed and not feeling the need to speak, heedless of the tumult surrounding them.
Then Claire appears, tapping her foot to the music—a lively samba number—bantering with a chubby man in suspenders who stoops awkwardly to listen. She wears the simple yet dazzling mauve dress she had on the first time they met, the high neckline and irregular hem, the pinpoint earrings, bears the same beguiling, unreadable expression. As she turns, Alec cannot find any bitterness in those gleaming, pale blue eyes, and this is all he needs, a safe place he can stay for a while, an alternate route, a necessary detour until the way becomes passable again. Alec senses the old energy, the old confidence return as he arranges the words he will say to her. The whole assemblage beckons with the possibility of another track, and it feels for all the world that a sweet, gentle future lay spread out before him.
Thomas Benz won the 2017 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award sponsored by Snake Nation Press for a short story collection titled “Home and Castle.” Jacob Appel described it as “a first-rate collection that grapples with the toxic anxieties of contemporary America and tackles tough questions head-on—but with a blend of insight, empathy and humor. This is a major literary debut, one not to be missed.”
Benz won the Solstice Short Fiction Contest in 2011 and again in 2018 for a story called “Retrieval.” He has had nineteen stories published with magazines such as the Madison Review, William and Mary Review, the Mud Season Review, Blue Penny Quarterly, the Beacon Street Review, Willard and Maple, Blue Lake Review, Carve, and others. He was a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Collection Contest in 2013 and 2015. He received either finalist status or honorable mention for the New Millennium Short Fiction Contest in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
He has a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Notre Dame and has been associated with a few writers’ organizations in the Chicago area, including Off Campus Writers Workshop, Society of Midland Authors, and the Chicago Writers Association. His website is www.indielit.net. His Facebook page is www.facebook.com/ThomasBenzWriter.