Disappearing railroad blues

Onboard the City of New Orleans, which is not metaphorical (though it might as well be), but rather an actual train — the long-distance Illinois Central line that runs from Chicago to New Orleans and back again daily, with varying degrees of mechanical compliance and passenger emotional stability. It’s a Monday. Morning. The train is fifteen cars long, not including two locomotives at the front and the weird semi-galley caboose thing the conductors seem to vanish into for long stretches. Fifteen cars, three conductors, and roughly twenty-five canvas mail sacks, most of them ink-stamped and half-split, the way real mail looks when nobody thinks anyone’s watching.

(For the record, I’m not sure whether naming a train after its destination is poetic or weirdly tautological or just a kind of retro-branded optimism in the tradition of dying things, like naming a kid “Hope” in a dystopia. This is one of those trains that was clearly designed at some point in the mid-20th century when people still thought locomotion across state lines was romantic and clean and socially admirable, before Southwest Airlines figured out how to herd us into aluminum tubes at $89 a pop and called it freedom. The steel rail still ain’t heard the news.)

The departure was not ceremonious. No trumpets. No waving flags. Just a slow forward movement, as if the steel wheels were feeling their way into the week, and the barely audible click of mechanical inevitability — that was the fanfare.

Fifteen passengers (a coincidence). Fifteen visible ones, anyway. Plus one more you could count if you were paying close enough attention, sitting in the club car with the cracked leather and fake woodgrain tables where the screwhead covers are missing and the yellow foam peeks out of the booth seams like the bloated yolk of a hard-boiled egg. He (i.e., me) is drinking bad coffee from a thick white mug that has a faded red logo of a smiling locomotive and is so chipped it looks more like a dental model than a beverage vessel. The coffee is both too hot and somehow already cold. If this were McDonald’s, someone would sue.

(Again for the record, I chose the club car for the windows, which are slightly wider and curved at the top like the corners of a Polaroid snapshot. You can press your cheek to the glass and feel the cold, lightly oiled surface vibrate with the rhythm of the wheels. The scent in the car is a composite: coffee, old wool, paper, and something faintly chemical — perhaps from the carpet glue or one of the conductor’s cherry cough drops. Someone is dealing cards. The players are all old men, of the type who wear suspenders without irony, with rings from cigars permanently ghosted into their fingers. The game exists more for its motion than its outcome, the way conversations are better when they never reach a conclusion. Penny a point, ain’t no one keepin’ score.)

The train pulls out of Kankakee, which is a real place in Illinois and not just a word designed to sound like something out of Carl Sandburg and his fog on its haunches, overlooking the harbour on little cat feet. It’s one of those towns you really experience only while leaving it: factory roofs, culverts, chain-link yards with trailers that have their windows wrapped in plastic, freight yards full of old Black men in safety vests and the rusted-out husks of old Chevys and Buicks and a Winnebago that hasn’t moved since the Clinton administration.

(Neither has Bill much, now that I think of it, though I bet all this Epstein stuff has him jumpy as Trumpy, squirmy as the Big Orange Wormy.)

Back to the graveyards of the rusted automobiles: Hoodless, dented, doors agape like mouths stuck mid-speech. Decomposing in real time. They remind me, somehow, of the teachers we had in high school. Dinosaur boneyards would look like this if instead of being wiped out by that big asteroid that hit the Yucatán, the extinction had been a profitable product of consumer obsolescence and planned depreciation.

(I believe I have mentioned the old men in the club car, playing cards without conviction. They pass around a wrinkled paper bag —the kind that looks like it once held a pastrami sandwich, now repurposed to smuggle bourbon or Cutty Sark or something that smells like overproof repentance. One of the men, with a Parkinsonian tremor in his left hand, calls another one “Colonel” though neither of them are military. The laughter they exchange is a practiced thing, a ritual, a social tic, not actual amusement but its placeholder. The players grin in that slow, knowing way that suggests both inevitability and wilful memory loss.)

The deep, bone-thumping churning of the wheels, once you hear it — and you have to eventually — takes over your internal monologue. A four-count beat: da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum, like a metronome for twisting on racks where the sinew of consciousness snaps and you drift into sleep. It’s the sound a brain makes when it’s trying to remember a dream — and failing. Kah-chunk, chunk. Kah-chunk, chunk.

(Every so often the track alignment shifts and the entire car jolts sideways about an inch, and everyone pretends this is normal. Which it is. It is. Duh-DUNK duh-DUNK duh-DUNK duh-DUNK.)

There’s a kind of transgenerational mythology being enacted here: the sons of engineers (railway engineers, not software devs), the sons of Pullman porters — they ride their fathers’ magic carpets made of steel with a vaguely inherited dignity, like they’re in on some international secret the rest of us missed while updating our iPhones. And then there are the mothers with babies asleep on their chests, bouncing their heels and doing that slow rocking motion like they’re tuning themselves to the train, as if the swaying of the railcar is a lullaby composed by friction and steel. The weird thing, if you think about it, is that this motion predates the earliest steam engines by millions of years. Predates us since other primates do it, too.

Outside: fields, barns, fenceposts in shallow snow, sad stumpy trees that look like they’ve been dozing off for fifty years, the occasional derelict station platform with a disconnected phone booth or a Coke machine that no longer takes coins. The scenery slides past with a kind of arthritic grace. You catch glimpses of other trains — freight haulers, grey and faceless, like black and white photos of dead Soviet apparatchiki. Sometimes they’re stopped on sidings, full of rebar and tractors and tanks of something toxic. No one looks out of them.

More farmland, and then more farmland, and then more copses of sad, stumpy trees.

Duh-DUNK duh-DUNK duh-DUNK duh-DUNK.

The conductor sings his songs again, softly but audibly, in a ghostly baritone that feels out of time and out of place, like the soundtrack from a 1930s newsreel that just drifted into the present moment, and you can’t tell if he’s aware he’s doing it or if this is just what his brain does to cope with the absurdity of punching tickets in a steel tube full of strangers who all look like they regret their decisions. He says, “The passengers will please refrain …” and doesn’t finish the sentence, like maybe it’s a reference or maybe it’s an inside joke with God, and the only appropriate reaction is to pretend it didn’t happen because somehow acknowledging it makes it more real, which you don’t want, not now, not while you’re trying to hold onto the illusion that this train is going somewhere rather than away from everywhere else. You wonder if it’s a lyric or an announcement or a non sequitur. Possibly all three.

Nighttime on the City of New Orleans: The sun goes down with suspicious speed. It’s suddenly dark in a way that feels chemical, like the glass has been tinted. Some kind of logistical ballet happens with air brakes and hitches and power lines, and the car you’re in becomes slightly darker and slightly colder and slightly lonelier than it was before. There is the familiar chaos of half-sleeping passengers rousing themselves in Memphis, Tennessee. A man spills a soda and says “goddammit” with the same tone one might use when waking to realize you’d missed your stop by two stations.

You realize you are that man.

I remain seated as long as I can, not because I’m not supposed to change cars with the others, but because I have become so fully invested in the minor comforts of my seat — the spring pattern in the cushion, the overheard conversations of anonymous travellers, the way the condensation from my coffee cup curls along my fingers like the gyrations of a Sandburgian kitty.

It all happens in slow motion, as if underwater. The snack bar closes. A guy in a Cubs cap, lugging a guitar case, gets on, and you pray he doesn’t play it. (He won’t. He’s not that guy. But sweet Mary, Jesus and Arlo Guthrie! He sure as hell resembles Steve Goodman without the beard.)

Halfway home, we’ll be there by morning.

As night folds over us — quietly, like a blanket being drawn up to the chin — I realize the train is no longer carrying people to destinations. It is carrying them through memory. The towns we pass fade into a bad dream. Batesville. Greenwood. Yazoo City. They flicker by like echoes, like words on a malfunctioning LED sign. The lights of the houses have a dreamy, gelatinous glow. Even the train feels slightly translucent, like a thought you almost remember. But not quite.

No. Not a thought. More a sensation of passing through something that’s vanishing while you’re still inside it. Something that smells like diesel and sawdust and the inside of your grandfather’s garage, the one where things broke slowly and were fixed slowly and still somehow kept working. And we’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done.