Switching Stations

It starts quite rough but, I think, gets better.

I fell asleep on the train, victim of the heat of the day perhaps, and the slow rocking of the carriage. At any rate, I woke up there, to the light of the setting sun bathing the interior of the car in soft gold, filtered through drying leaves. I was alone, though I had been traveling with companions when I boarded that morning, and while it bothered me somewhat I assumed that they had taken a walk to the dining car.
Thinking of the crick in my neck and the ache in my thighs I decided to follow them through the glass sliding door and into the painfully thin corridor that ran past the private compartments. Whether do to the paralytics still working their way out of my system from my ill-considered nap, or the ill-maintained track it took me longer than I thought reasonable to gain my sea-legs, and this contributed to a sustained sense of disconnection and disorientation to the world around me.
I couldn't shake the notion that it was not mere sleepiness that caused this feeling, indeed, even before I reached the dining car it seemed impossible that I was in the right place. The time was wrong, for one thing, we should have reached Edinburgh in the early afternoon, and it was now definitely trending towards evening.
What's more was that the terrain seemed all wrong, we were slicing through craggy hills home to wandering sheep, and dusky vales of dense trees, we were in the highlands, as clear as the crystal sky, not at all the sweeping farms and low dikes of the land around the city. Brow furrowed I continued forward.
The dining car was jarring in its strangeness, and I could no longer convince myself that I had simply lost track of time, or slept through a brief delay. Silently I cursed my friends for throwing me, somehow on a random train at Edinburgh station, but I smiled a little as I dug my cell phone from the pocket of my slim cut jeans, thinking of ways to repay my faithless, feckless compatriots.
I flicked open the phone just in time to see the last signal bar flicker and die and my grin turned to a grimace of frustration. Shaking off the black mood that threatened to settle about my shoulders I stepped to the bar and rapped on its glossy mahogany counter top (that morning it had been faux-wood) and when the bartender turned towards me he was wiping out a low-ball glass not pulling a plastic cup from a dispenser next to the ice.
“What can I do you for?” he was not the bartender that had been working when we got on the train and ordered are first round, this man was thinner, older, and his vowels were much more round. I guessed he was welsh, probably from around Cardiff, but I couldn't be certain. He seemed terribly familiar somehow.
“Rum and coke?”
“Right you are then.” he proceeded to pour me a double shot of some unlabeled dark rum on the rocks and, sliding it over to me, he popped the top off of a bottle of Coca-Cola, original formula.
“I didn't know you could still get this in glass bottles in the UK.” I said, taking the bottle and filling the glass, he just looked at me quizzically. “Can you tell me what line this is?”
“Nope.”
“The final stop?”
“That depends, doesn't it?”
“Does it?”
“On where you're going.”
I drank long, “Okay, what's the next stop then?”
“The switching-station, where else?” I realized, then, where I had seen him before, he had bumped into me getting on to the train that morning, there had been papers on the verge of spilling from his overstuffed leather briefcase and his tailored suit was rumpled. I had observed loudly that one was probably too wealthy when one stopped caring for a suit like that, eliciting a laugh from my companions and a glare from the man.
“The switching station?” I asked him.
“Of course, and from there to your final destination, or maybe just another stop on the line. Depending.”
“Depending on what?” I was growing tired of his elusive answers, and more certain that he was fucking with me.
“Any number of things, it's not really my field of expertise, you know?”
I sighed, somewhat pointedly, “Look, do you have a cell phone? Mine isn't getting reception.”
“Batteries dead, should have asked an hour ago. Now I doubt you'll find anyone still able to get through.”
“In this day and age?” I shook my head and he grinned a little ruefully, “Disgraceful, isn't it?”
He just snapped his towel at me, grinning and I pushed away from the bar. With a nod to him, and a tip of my glass, I wandered back to my compartment.
Even as I sat down I could feel the train slowing around me. It was not the clumsy slackening that I was used to, but rather it seemed to elongate, stretching until it reached its stopping point and then slowly relaxing into the station. Only when it had completed the transition did I gather up my things and slip out of the compartment.
I didn't have to fight my way through the usual throng of people to win the platform, rather we lined up and filed out, orderly, politely, and without exchanging a word, or more than a passing glance. It was almost British, and far more unsettling than it should have been.
The station was unlabeled, no signs hung above the two parallel tracks, and no map adorned the wall to orient me. Biting my lip I made my hurried way through the patiently waiting crowd, many of whom I found myself recognizing from that morning, towards the ticket window.
“Excuse me?” I called.
“Yes,” the eventual reply, from behind a yellowed newspaper, into which was folded a playboy from the late sixties, “can I help you?”
“I don't know,” I surprised myself with my own honesty, “but, could you tell me where I am?”
“Half way to wherever you're going I suppose,” said the man, folding his paper to conceal the magazine, and placing it on the counter between us.
“That's...”
“Not particularly helpful?” the smile that lurked about his heavily lined face was kindly and his eyebrows bristled with comic menace, “Maybe, but it's the answer none the less.”
“Right, so... is that it?” despite my best efforts a pleading note edged into my voice.
“Of course not,” I perked up, “there's all sorts of things to do here, I particularly enjoy listening to the birds, smelling the Amaranth (when it's not in bloom of course, you don't want to live forever), and talking. It's really best to talk as much as you can, while you can. It's amazing the things that we miss by not approaching our fellow humans, I would be mingling myself, but, well,” he waived one rough worn, and ink stained hand at the paper, “I've got to be catching up current events, you know.”
“Right.”
“So you just run along, wait for your train, and if anybody starts asking you anything you just send them along to old Peter, I'll soon put them straight.”
“...right. I will.” I turned away, “Thank you,” I called over my shoulder.
“No problem,” he replied, eyes fixed again on the young woman clad only in a mane of nut brown hair.

The platform wasn't as full when I turned my full attention back to it, and it occurred to me that I had heard two whistles blow during the course of my conversation, but not the rumble of trains approaching or departing. A fog had begun to kick up, boiling from lower in the vale to engulf the tracks and the station. The sun, at the edge of the horizon, seemed to burn all the more brightly for the comparison.
Thinking of Peter's seemingly heartfelt advice, I turned to my right and thrust my hand towards the first person to meet my eyes. They were young, but their eyes were old, their hand, wrapped about mine, was strong, but their shoulders were narrow and their chest flat.
“Hey, I'm Corbin.”
“Jesse.” They were guarded, suspicious.
“Where you coming from?” I tried to force as much genuine warmth into my voice as possible, but I wasn't sure how well I succeeded.
“Ultimately? America, Minnesota, St. Cloud. Directly? I got on the train this morning in Aberdeen.” still they did not meet my eyes.
“Aberdeen? No way, so did I. Going to Edinburgh for the festival then?”
“I thought so, now? I have no idea... Cigarette?”
“I don't smoke.”
“That makes two of us, but I seem to have acquired a pack, and you have to start some time, don't you?” they pulled a half crushed box of Marlboro Red's.
“You have a lighter?”
They paused a moment, a look of incredulity coming over their face, “No, figures. Stupid of me, really.”
“Probably for the best.”
“I guess, it's just...” They stopped.
“Just?”
“I don't know why I would tell you, but I don't know why I'd start smoking, other than that they were there. And here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“It's like this, I lived maybe a half hour from one of the brightest, most vibrant metro areas Stateside. Minneapolis has a great theater scene, local music that blows the hell out of just about anywhere outside of Portland, and the sort of cultural melting pot that people think of when they envision my country at its best. St. Cloud, however? Shithole.
“The block that I grew up on had more white supremacists than a Bavarian bierhaus in the late '30s. It was hard growing up there, pretending to be a man so I didn't get the shit kicked out of me, gritting my teeth and dating girls and keeping my head down.
“The worst part was, of course, that it didn't matter what I did. I was the fag, the queen, and the more I tried to put the lie to the labels the more they came after me with fists, and bats, and boards, and knives. I was stabbed, five times, in the early morning after I lost my virginity by three grown men who couldn't find their way home after bar close...
“I blew out of there a couple days after I finished high school. Figured Europe was my best bet, my promised land. Right. I ran out of money before I even made it to the continent, then I got a job, place to stay, started to settle in and soon I didn't really want to leave.
“After all, if I got beaten up at the pub for the way I looked, or lived, or loved, well. It reminded me of home.” they flashed a rueful smile, breaking off.
“I guess I'm just resigned to the fact that something is going to get me, I can't stay lucky forever. Smoking would be nice I think, choosing the thing that will kill me.” far off a whistle blew in the fog, “That's my train,” they said, “thanks for listening.”
They stepped off the edge of the platform and vanished without a sound, leaving me holding a crushed pack of cigarettes. “Thank you!” I called after them.
I turned around to find that the platform was all but deserted.
“Need a light?” the voice belonged to an older woman, though you didn't get that impression from her stance or hair, but from the way she seemed to fade, to fray a little at the edges.
“Yeah, thanks.” she lit a match with the flick of her thumb and held it towards me. I met her, inexpertly, half way with a cigarette, “What's your name?”
“Roxanne. Yours I caught a minute ago. What do you say we go fuck behind the ticket counter?”
I looked for the joke in her eyes but saw only a pall of desperation and fear. I groped for an appropriate response, but I heard behind me a whistle blowing, different from the others, more personal somehow, and I knew that it was my turn to step into the fog that was creeping into the station itself, casting its arms around the platform.
“I'm sorry,” I said, “But this is my train.” as I stepped backwards I saw her face twist with frustration and futility. She vanished into the haze.
Beneath me the fog drew together, gaining substance, and suddenly it was rocking away. From the fog about me I began to make out shapes, twisted metal and scurrying figures, shouting silently and hoarsely into emptiness. They were pulling bodies from wreckage, and, in a flash of color in a sea of gray, I saw the red of my bag, pierced on a shattered rail cast up by some great force.
Then the shapes faded into darkness and night, and the only thing that was real was me, and the train, brilliantly lit, hurtling alone into trackless wilderness.