The Train Doesn't Stop

CW: Trauma

This train has only one speed: fast.

For as long as I have been aboard, it has not slowed, it has not stopped. I have been here for years or minutes. I am not convinced it matters.

“They’re coming back,” the small girl alerts our cabin. Her face is pressed against the pane of glass that composes the top half of the compartment door, watching closely. The glass is inexplicably fogged, but she can still make out shadows when they approach. The girl has unilaterally assigned herself the lookout, and no one stops her—she has created purpose in senselessness.

“Good. I don’t have the time for this today,” says the middle aged business man next to me dryly. He checks his wrist impatiently, but he wears no watch. I wonder briefly if he knows what day it is. I know he does not.

The girl hurries back to her seat on the opposite side of the cabin. She doesn’t bother to put much distance between herself and the quiet old man sharing the bench. It’s as if the man is inconsequential, and to her, he is. Her stocking-clad legs swing in a strikingly normal, childlike manner, fingers gripping the edge of the wooden bench.

I perk up. Hushed voices approach just outside the door. Two distinct sets of footfalls pace the walkway before stilling, and for the first time, I am unsettled. There are no shadows to accompany them, but the glass blurs with more fog in the places I imagine mouths breathe on the other side. We are being watched. Observed, like zoo animals. The girl does not understand this, so she does not concern herself with it. Her legs kick rhythmically.

The old man directly across from me raises his hand in a rehearsed motion, lips pursing as if to sip from a cup. His hands are empty. There is no cup. There is white crust on the corners of his mouth, the kind of gunk that gathers on the lips of old people breathing with their mouths open too long. He licks his chapped lips. The gunk is untouched.

The girl props her shoe up on the bench, fastening and unfastening the velcro strap absentmindedly.

“Will you stop that?” It is the first time I speak. The girl smooths the velcro down once more and drops her foot back down. She returns to swinging her legs. At least it is silent. Her layered tulle skirt is bunched up around her knees, and it is now I realize we are all dressed for different occasions. The four of us do not appear to belong in the same place at the same time.

The girl is dressed in frilly bright fabrics, the kind of outfit you’d expect to see at a playground after school. The old man is in a one-piece pale blue footie pajama with a zipper down the front, shoeless. The outfit is warm and practical and childish, like a daughter or wife dressed him for comfort and ease of movement. He looks to have been taken straight from bed. The middle aged business man next to me is in a stiff suit and tie, and I imagine the watch he keeps checking is an expensive one, if it was actually there. I am in scrubs, my hair tied back neatly in a surgical cap. I cannot see my reflection, but I know I look frazzled. I always do.

“What do you think they’re saying?” the girl asks.

“That’s what I’m trying to hear,” my words come out more harshly than I intend. She falls silent, picking at her stockings.

I listen closely, my ear pressed to the window. The voices are muffled, unintelligible through the thick glass. I know they are speaking of us. I strain uselessly to hear. It sounds like two people communicating through walkie talkies just a touch too far from each other, crackling in and out of coherence.

The train barrels on, tearing a path of its own through the atmosphere. I cannot imagine we are on tracks, as I cannot imagine tracks could hope to hold us at this speed. A storm rages along the cabin’s outer window, but we are sheltered in this pocket of the train’s interior. It is calm in here, and it is anything but out there. I am distantly aware this is a mercy. Within these walls, we exist independently from time, even as we hurtle through it. We are important in the train, but not enough to disturb the weather. Nothing interrupts the weather, nothing stops the storm, nothing slows the train.

The man next to me checks his wrist again, bouncing his knee as if he has somewhere to be. We have no material possessions on us, no loose items. The train is not sentimental; it only moves. To board the train, we are stripped of them, even though I have no memory of it. I feel no lighter.

The old man brings his hand to his mouth again, and this time, a porcelain cup meets his lips. My hands are warm. I am holding a cup now, too. I mirror the old man, raising my own cup to my mouth. The tea is vaguely bitter, some muted herbal blend that is familiar yet impossible to name. I see how someone could find this comforting—the old man certainly does.

A bead of liquid dribbles down my lips, and the most peculiar thing happens. Instead of dripping onto my lap, the tea forms a small puddle at the edge of my chin and falls forward, splashing onto the forehead of the old man across from me. He doesn’t react. He sips his own tea again. I watch my spilled drink form a neat mole above his eyebrow and stay there, suspended. I slowly tip my cup to the side, allowing a thin stream of lukewarm tea to pour out and drip across the cabin into the man’s eyes. He blinks it out and takes another sip.

The train is moving vertically, but gravity has made exceptions for our bodies. We remain firmly planted in our seats, even when it becomes evident the rain outside is pouring in the wrong direction. Or maybe we are pouring in the wrong direction. I am not convinced it matters. In the train, we are unaffected, just as the storm is by us.

“Come on,” the business man mumbles to himself, shifting anxiously in his seat. It is like he is mentally willing traffic to clear on the morning rush. He checks his wrist again and his lips form a thin line as he peers out into the storm. “I’ve got somewhere to be. Somewhere important.”

“Where do you need to be?” the little girl asks him, legs still swinging.

“Somewhere important.” He gestures his wrist to her. “Can’t you hear it?”

“What should I be hearing?”

He just shakes his head in response, never meeting her eyes, and continues bouncing his leg impetuously. Like he can make this train move faster. An intercom crackles to life. The muffled voices are now amplified into the cabin, but they are no less unintelligible. I instinctively check my own wrist and find my cup is gone.

“I don’t have time. I don’t have time,” the man next to me yells into his bare wrist. Sweat slicks his forehead, strings of greying hair glued to his skin.

“We’re almost there,” the girl insists. Her words do not placate him.

“Almost where?” I ask. I know she does not know.

She shrugs. The old man sips his tea again, gazing absently into the storm, as if we are inconsequential—and to him, we are. I stand and approach the outer window. My outstretched fingers finds the edges of the glass where window meets wall. In the ridges, there is wetness; there is rain. The pad of my forefinger meets my thumb when the girl cries out.

She is pressing her hands to her neck. Blood is falling through her fingers and behind her into her hair, dripping up the wall. The glass of a cup—my cup?—is lodged in the side of her neck. Red stains her skirt as she tries to dry her hands on the fabric. Her eyes are wild, panicked. They meet mine.

“Don’t touch it. Don’t pull it out,” I instruct, pulling away from the window like the rain is acid. My voice is steady. It always is, and I never am.

The girl trusts me. I don’t know why. I am not convinced she should.

“Please help me,” she begs. “I’m scared.” Through her small fingers, I see the glass.

“I’m trying,” I insist.

“But you’re not doing anything,” she says. She is right. My feet do not move.

Rain breaches the crevices of the window now, dripping through the cracks and along the wall. It wets the girl’s hair. Something pounds the door of the cabin, rattling the glass. The fog smears briefly in the shape of a fist.

Next to her, the old man’s breath rattles. He gargles. His cup is gone, too, and he is choking on tea. His legs kick out, toes curling against the floor through the fuzzy socks of his pajamas. His arms are reaching, fearful eyes meeting mine for the first time. He does not say the words, but he needs help. He needs my help. The rain is pouring in steadily now, gushing through the sides of the window as the storm penetrates our cabin.

The intercom crackles again, the garbled voices louder. A hand grabs the back of my scrubs, tugging me off balance. The business man is clutching his chest, eyes bulging, face bright red. He is pounding his palm against his sternum, trying to relieve a pain behind his ribs. I hear the watch now, the sound that had been driving him mad, but his wrist is still bare. An alarm is beeping incessantly from somewhere I cannot place. The sound is urgent, panicked like his grasping hands. The cabin has unraveled so suddenly, drenched too quickly in chaos, and my mind scrambles to make sense of it. We are in the train, we are supposed to be safe from the rain.

Yet we are soaked.

I shut my eyes.

I can help all of them.

I know this logically.

None of them are beyond saving, none of them too far gone.

The train barrels on. My feet do not move.

Hands are pounding on the fogged window of the door. The glass rattles. The intercom is too loud and I am furious and overwhelmed and confused that I can’t understand it. It’s so loud. It’s the loudest thing in the world, so why can’t I hear it?

These people need my help.

I can help them.

My eyes open. The glass window caves under the torrential downpour. The men and little girl are sucked out through the shards like a black hole in outerspace, washed into the storm. My scrubs are soaked, the cabin is flooded, and my feet are planted firmly on the ground. I am alone on the train, barreling straight into a new tragedy.

Because the train doesn’t stop.

The train doesn’t slow.

The train doesn’t consider who it has left behind; it only moves.

The beeping is louder than ever through the devastation of the rain. My eyes close once more, and it’s clear now, that sound the business man had been hearing all this time. It’s coming from the pager on my waist. Or maybe from the monitors or the vents or the codes being called over the PA. It is all of those things at once. I am not convinced it matters. They have all been irrevocably enmeshed, indistinguishable from another. They are all urgent and they all need help and there are too many alarms and I do not have enough bodies and arms to do something about any of them. Everything matters and it matters too much and too loudly.

I am needed.

I am needed.

I am needed.

But the train doesn’t stop. The train doesn’t slow. It never does, and I never do, and I never can.

I am needed.

The storm doesn’t stop.

The train doesn’t stop.