Sometimes the universe stitches itself together in improbable ways that make normal people wonder: Is this one large, elaborate prank the world is pulling on me? Like you’re a baby again, but this time the square peg really does fit inside the circle hole. What to do then? What to make of this?
Either this is true, and you’ve felt this way before — confronted with meaning where meaning has no business being — or perhaps I’m not a normal person. Or, if I am a normal person, then perhaps it is a mistake to write this past midnight, self-medicating my Train Brain (is this a thing? — if it wasn’t before, then it is now) with a 16 oz. Blue Crush Celsius. Regardless, this is the story of how I came to understand the loss of childlike innocence in the rag-quilt ways of a 36-hour train ride from Baltimore to Kansas City, containing: relationship troubles on the train, further instances of teenage boys calling me names and the various works of art without which none of this could happen — without which, you would not be reading this article.
***
Shakespeare didn’t know what he was talking about when he said all the world’s a stage. If he had any foresight, any real vision, then he would’ve said all the train’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. The unwarm attendants are directors, and they hand you your script written in invisible ink on the torn-paper slips that read your seat. When the metal sliding doors draw close like velvety red curtains, you enter stage and become the hero — or antagonist? — of the play about to unfold.
Being from Kansas, the only Amtrak I ever rode was from Baltimore to D.C. one weekend when I was already in college. I didn’t know the rule everyone else seemed to know about trains, which is to act as protagonist as possible. It seemed I was the only NPC aboard, witnessing it all happen helplessly from my seat. Before I could even sit down, I overheard an intriguing, loud phone conversation: “We’re going to a wedding for one of Michael’s friends from Amherst. Yeah, one of the — spouses? — is nonbinary, so I’ve been avoiding bride and groom. … You’ve heard of gay pride flags, right?”
Then, another hero steals the spotlight: a young man toe-walking up and down the aisle the entire ride, wearing headphones over his bucket hat and puffing his vape outside like a dragon during every smoke break.
The vape-puffing dragon is slain, his own purloined spotlight passed on once more; now, we turn to a couple who boards after midnight somewhere near the border between Kentucky and West Virginia. They’re the ambiguous age between 35 and 60 that comes from rough living and silently told sympathetic stories: sunburnt skin wrinkled like worn leather, smiles of missing teeth like bullet holes in the doors of a used car. She’s tunelessly yet jubilantly crowing “Take Me Home, Country Roads” one minute, the next weathering yells from her boyfriend (or husband?) in a way that makes the whole scene hard to watch.
“I miss my mom already,” she says. “Can you please just let me cry? That’s probably the last time I’ll see my mom.”
“Look at you, you fucking crazy crackhead!” he fires back. “Do you need mental help? I missed my mom the 10 days we spent seeing your mom — do you want to go back?”
Then, he storms off in search of a beer, enraged anew when the attendant informs him that the café cart is closed for the night. “No beer until morning?”
I paused reading the final few pages of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger to wait for this storm to pass. (Please disregard the popular red flags of men reading this book for a moment.) When I finished, I would switch to the other novel I packed, both stories being arbitrarily selected from my bookshelf for the train ride: We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates.
Anyone who knows anything about these books will laugh and shake their head in the bemused manner of watching two cars slowly skid toward one another across black ice, brakes futilely pumped: Oh, brother.
The two stories take similar approaches to tackle the same theme: the loss of childlike innocence. The grown woman crying, mourning her mother still alive — even her boyfriend (or husband?) joining her, making for two adults like kids wishing for their moms again — set the stage for me to consider my own ways in which I’ve grown out of that childlike innocence, like the Pokémon T-shirts I owned, now of course too small to wear.
But by the time of my five-hour stop in Chicago, it was too late to do anything about it. The future was already scripted.
***
Stepping off the train into Union Station, I thought I had the date wrong: Everyone was wearing green, but it wasn’t St. Patrick’s Day. Turns out, I was unfamiliar with the behemoth tradition of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago, and I was caught in the middle of it like a cow in a tornado. Dressed in blue, I only wanted to try deep dish pizza and visit the Art Institute, but doing that involved trekking through closed-off streets of day-drunk, festive young people all dressed in green. To the airplanes and satellites above, the streets must have appeared filled with wildly swaying pastures of grass for one weekend only.
Even wearing blue, I blended into the crowd by the sheer number of bodies surrounding me. That is, I thought I was, until I heard a name hurled at me that wasn’t my own: “Jack Harlow! Jack Harlow!”
My loyal readers — or, my editors plus some friends and family — will know I have a history of making meaning out of the things teen boys happen to call me. I’m working on the answer for why I attract these incidents, but I haven’t solved it yet. For now, I’ll continue to wax poetic on these instances no one else cares about.
Perhaps tired from the train, perhaps annoyed from feeling exposed by being singled out in a crowd — like how bugs angrily scatter from an overturned rock — I responded to this funny story-to-be in a way that makes me embarrassed to write.
“Jack Harlow! Jack Harlow!” the crowd of boys yelled, one of them running up to me to represent the bunch. “Oh… Sorry, man, we thought you were Jack Harlow — you look so much like him, can we get a picture?”
“I don’t know who Jack Harlow is,” I answered, slow from the shock of it all. Still, it was true. I had to look him up after. (I don’t believe we look anything alike.)
“He’s a rapper,” the boy explained. “Can we get a picture? You look so much like him.”
As I said, what I did next I am not proud of.
“Oh…” I stalled. “No.”
Then, I walked away, despite having just bought my ticket to go inside the Art Institute. At that moment, as I felt the once-gregarious boy’s bravado drained by my awkward and curt mishandling of what should have been a harmless and comedic situation, I decided to go to lunch first before trying my luck at the Art Institute later. I will go through great lengths and inconveniences to avoid undesired social interactions.
Again, in the perhaps karmic ways that the universe sometimes stitches itself together, when I later entered the Art Institute undisturbed by teen boys (I was on the lookout), I snagged on one piece in particular, like a sweater on a doorknob. It was a sculpture titled “Boy” by Charles Ray, and it can be described as a grown-man sized mannequin of a youthful boy, donning a tranquil face yet confrontational pose. Running out of time in the Institute before I had to leave to catch my train, I settled for snapping a picture to investigate later.
Now, I understand this piece as all-too-fitting with my literary choices for the train: It’s about the persistence of the aforementioned childlike innocence or spirit, even within adults.
Writing this, I kick myself for the ways in which I play accomplice in the suppression of my inner child. Why did I behave so unsociably with boys my own age, who were simply asking for a photo — even if it were some inside joke, what’s the harm in a selfie with strangers where I look busted from over 24 hours on a train already?
Was the grown woman crying, mourning her living mother and fighting with her boyfriend (or husband?) a messenger angel, warning me of what to avoid, or a ghost of my own future, telling me what’s unavoidable based on the decisions I’ve already made? Was she a ghost of my present, telling me what I’ve already become?
When I arrive at my home in Kansas, I exhume my old 3DS from where it was shoved beneath junk in the back of my closet. I insert an old Pokémon game I used to love and have played countless times over. I find that I don’t even have the patience to make it through the tutorial.
When the universe stitches itself together in improbable ways, and the result is an ugly rag-quilt reflection you don’t like the looks of, I ask only one question:
What to do now, what to make of this?
Riley Strait is a freshman from Olathe, Kan. studying Writing Seminars and English. His column, "In Medias Res," translates from Latin to "into the middle of things," shares narratives that bury occasional insights within fluff that often leave the reader wondering, "Did I ask?"
