On a Train

I read you like the sky, the ocean, the sun and the moon.

I’m sitting. I’m sitting inside a train carriage. I sit directly opposite her. She faces me, a book held in her hands. The books in her hands change constantly. When she change, I would try desperately to glimpse the cover, then scavenge through the carriage to find the same one to read. I always find them, locating them within the overcoat pockets of fellow passengers or the side pouch of a suitcase. It doesn’t matter if they are English classic novels or trending web fictions.

(Take, for instance, this specimen of “BL” fiction:

“Peter had a set of deciduous teeth as pristine as pearls. Captain Hook, an alumnus of Eton, had melancholic eyes the shade of periwinkles and a mane of nonchalant, obsidian curls. Having lost a hand to a crocodile, he substituted it with an iron prosthesis: a hook even more cold and distant than his hair, leaving everyone close to him, human or otherwise, scarred in his wake. The crocodile, having once tasted his flesh, developed a fixation. It sought to consume every inch of him, regardless of lacerations inflicted by the hook. Thus, it followed him. No matter how many times he drove it away, it persisted. When the crocodile drew near, Hook would hear a ticking. Perhaps a clock. Perhaps a bomb. The sound finally precipitated his mental collapse. Sinking into the briny seawater, he dissolved within the crocodile’s solipsistic saliva and tears. The countdown concluded. The crocodile exploded. At last, they were together forever.”)

None of that is my story. My story takes place on this train. It is a peculiar locomotive indeed; so far my reckless expropriation of books elicits no physical retaliation. When I find a book, I can sit straight back in my original seat and finish it. Yet, upon completion, I might not remember where I took it from, only to find she has already moved on to a new one. I haphazardly toss the old ones onto the table (some remain partially unread) and spring from my seat to find the new one.

Before boarding, it was an ordinary dawn. She stood before me, wearing an awkward smile.

 “You aren't ready yet.”

 “I am ready,” I said hurriedly. I don’t know what kind of smile was on my face.

 “You are not.” Her smile underwent a total eclipse. She did not look at me. Since then, she never looked at me again. She declared: “you aren't ready, go away.” I retreated. But in the infinitesimal moment before the doors closed, I regretted. I followed her back and took my seat. I knew she noticed my persistence, yet she maintained her visual avoidance.

I have been watching her. During a lunch break back in high school, I discovered a print of The Night Café affixed on the classroom wall. I stood before that picture for a minute. I tried to enter it; I didn’t mind that it was just a reproduction, but my entry kept getting refused. A girl in school uniform and backpack passed by, offering me some polite words of concern. “Are you okay? School’s over.” It turned out my singular minute had been four hours. The afternoon sessions perished while I stood nearby the classroom door like a mourner. Surprisingly, within that four-hour/one-minute interval, no one noticed me except for that girl; even the tutors were not aware of my presence.

I have been observing her with the same intensity I reserved for that print of The Night Café. The sun dies day after day, and I am always watching her. Naturally, the act of reading necessitates a temporary suspension of this observation, yet any interval free from the text is dedicated to her. I can look at her now, clearly because I’ve just finished the old book in my hand and have already forgotten where I got it. I toss it onto the table, but the last gap on the surface has been occupied by the accumulated hoard. The book slides to the floor.

When she puts her book down, she chats and laughs with the people in the carriage. Our carriage is densely populated: a poet, chanting, with a large branch of peach blossoms upon his shoulder, our mutual acquaintances, and those who know her but not me. The smiles she accords them hold no awkwardness. She grants no smiles to me. She still does not look at me at all. Everything else is perfectly normal. I am right there, sitting directly across from her, yet her eyes never find me. Her ocular trajectory skillfully skims over me like a magic trick, never rest on me for even a second. Her hair grows long, then is cut short, then grows long again. The sun dies, day after day. The people talking to her rotate in succession. The blossoms upon the poet’s shoulder wither again, their messy white debris oscillating coating the floor swaying with the forward momentum of the train. She never looks at me, as if I do not exist.

So I have begun to interrogate my own existence. I look out the train window. The crepuscular light illuminates the wilderness, and as the light wanes, the glass reflection reveals everything inside the carriage. This “everything” encompasses: her, the stray lock of hair at the corner of her mouth, her labial movements as she smiles at others, the other passengers (who possess the honor of her smile and my jealousy), the book in her hand, the table piled with books between us. No me. In the faithful mimicry of the glass, I am absent.

Panic ensues. I search the carriage for anything reflective: the pupils of passengers, coat buttons, metallic cutlery, Nokia phone screens… all yield no trace of me. Only her eyes remain. Her eyes are the only thing that could possibly prove my existence. But she will not look at me. She keeps her head down, her eyelashes not even quivering. Like a rookie clown, I employ every stratagem to catch her attention. I begin to laugh hysterically. I laugh at her, I laugh at myself. I grow tired of laughing and transition to invective. I vituperate her; I vituperate myself. I grow tired of cursing and begin to weep. Just blowing my nose exhausts three 200-count boxes of tissues. “Please, just lift your eyes and look at me.” I grow tired of crying and become motionless, becoming as inert as her unmoving eyelashes. They are so long, her eyelashes. Why is she so cruel to me? Perhaps because her lashes are too long. People with long eyelashes usually lack a benign temper.

On a very clear noon, before the advent of midsummer, early-summer committed suicide. The wind was silent; the campus was submerged in a strange hush following summer’s instantaneous disappearance. I sat on the highest step of the academic building, being tanned while smoking one foul, esoteric cigarette after another. It is said that Vincent, while sketching in the meridional heat of Southern France, often forgot to wear a hat, resulting in his alopecia. Above my not-yet-bald cranium were clouds, looking like white gummies spilled from an overturned jar, creating a high chromatic contrast against the sky.

Another painter told me that the zenith of the sky possesses the deepest hue, and that deep blue fades into pale blue towards the horizon. Thus I habitually verify this optical theory every time I look up to the sky. That painter also told me they thought Braque looked like Picasso with a small cloud on his head. As I lit my fifth cigarette, my lighter broke. It emitted a series of percussive clicks under the pressure of my thumb, but the nascent flame was repeatedly extinguished by the wind. The wind was not forceful; the wind was very calm. The wind was like a static eyelash, I was slowly sliding down a cheek.

I stand up. Not to find a book this time. I’ve decided to get off. The sun keeps on dying day after day. Since our boarding, in the realms beyond my perception, the sun has died 1,460 times, perhaps more. My math is poor; I am insensitive to numbers. I only recognize that we are on a train chasing the International Date Line, where the temporal duration of a single day spans four years. Because the train does not stop before reaching the station, I have to seize the moment to jump/escape through the open window. This action can be exceptionally dangerous and might cause me great pain. The probability of a successful exit from this specific day is marginal; the more plausible outcome is a fatal fall, which would merely reset the cycle to the moment of boarding, unknowingly looping my misery. Ultimately, I abandon the attempt to jump. I walk to an adjacent carriage.

In the other carriage, nobody knows me. They are different from passengers I seen before. I tried to get to know them. Over time, they seem to recognize me. It seems I exist, slightly, in this carriage. This carriage also contains a poet, but this poets is older; they didn't carry peach blossom branches anymore, they just go straight to the point. There is also a bar. I wring out of my right hemisphere the contents of those books I read in the previous carriage, exchange them for cash, and surrender the total sum at the bar. In return, I receive large quantities of a toxic liquid solution. The carriage often sway violently. I frequently lost my equilibrium upon departing the bar, bruising my knees until they resembled translucent bean-paste buns.

Gradually, my cerebral matter dissipate due to excessive extraction; this not only makes me more of an idiot but also makes it harder to adapt to sobriety. Due to the increasing asymmetry between my cerebral hemispheres, I have to tilt my head to keep my balance, which makes my neck grow thin and long. I often temporarily forget many things, leading others to perceive me as having a placid temperament. When the very last book being traded for toxic solution, I attempt to discern my own image on the bottom of the empty glass. I seem to have perceived a shadow. I want to look closer, but the glass shatter. The glass was originally a person; that person had always brought me the toxic liquid. The glass-person was very gentle to me, just like the toxic liquid itself. But the glass is broken now. The shadow at the bottom of the glass transmute into the bar itself. I become the bar.

At dawn, I hallucinate a bifurcation of my own self. Because to exist as one person was too painful. Yet, turning in two is still futile; everyone here has already lost control. I try to transform into noodles, yet I’m incapable of achieving the state of salmon-dashi ramen. Personally, I prefer pan-seared salmon, but salmon sashimi will consider me blasphemous. Sashimi is a commodity for the mature, much like oysters; I run away in fear. People think I prefer soba, but the truth is soba likes me, so I have no other options but to choose it.

I wake to find myself lying on the carriage floor. I had not become the bar, nor the floor. I was like a clump of trash swept to the door, unresponsive to the outside world. A beautiful man resembling a figure from a canvas bypasses me and says goodnight. Then I see passengers who know me from the previous carriage passing by. They are still the same as before but struggle to reconcile my current state with their memory of me. They smile while backing away from me. Toward my confused face, they smile and assert their belief that I remained myself. But who constitutes "myself"? I can never see myself. If she refuses to perceive me, I am invisible to myself. I am merely the observer of her. Why am I looking at her? Who is she? What is "she"?

 “She” approaches me. The hour hand executes its final movement. After a long, full day, I finally encounter her eyes, those eyes are looking into mine.

“We’ve arrived.”

“I love you too.”

Fin.

14/10/2016