Mine wasn’t the only empty seat on the train, so I wondered why he came to sit beside me. I was getting used to sitting alone on the train on this trip. Not that I minded. During a past trip a beautiful young female college student with a dazzling set of teeth once sat beside me. The train was full. We traveled in silence. Shortly thereafter at the next stop someone got down and I stood up to go and take the vacant seat. As I asked her to excuse me while I passed, she smiled at me with her dazzling teeth and asked if I was leaving because of something that she did. Her question caught me unawares. I apologized, but still, I changed seats because I wanted to sit alone.
This guy who came to sit beside me was a little older, though it is quite difficult for me to tell people’s age here in America. A simple rule of thumb that has worked for me is what I call by their hats you shall know them. Older gentlemen tend to wear hats no matter the weather.
He sat beside me and sighed the way the old tend to do as if the mere act of living and breathing exhausted them.
I noticed he was struggling with putting his box in the overhead compartment, so I took it from him and helped him put it up there. The box felt quite light.
“Thank you, I appreciate it,” he said.
“Not a problem, at all,” I said.
He extended his hand.
I shook his outstretched hand. He winced and muttered easy and smiled.
“Such a strong grip you’ve got there. I am not a spring chicken anymore. My entire body is now fragile.”
“I am so sorry,” I said.
“There is no need to be sorry. I once had a grip like yours,” he said.
I sensed that he was going to engage me in a lot of talking and I began to worry a little bit. The reason why I didn’t mind sitting alone was because I liked the company of my thoughts when on the train.
“I can tell you are not from here,” he said.
I groaned internally, but I smiled at him.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Your accent, to begin with,” he said.
In this country you could walk into the train on your head and sit on your ears without a second glance from most people, but open your mouth and speak with an accent and get ready for comments, compliments, or sometimes being thought a fool.
I admitted that I was an alien, and that immediately put him at ease—or did I only imagine seeing his shoulders unclench.
“I knew it from the way you helped me with my stuff and the way you are dressed that you are not from here,” he said.
I ran my eyes over myself and wondered what it was about my clothing that said the word alien.
“Forgive me for not introducing myself. My name is William. Remember it is William always, never Bill.”
I told him mine.
“That is quite an unusual name,” he said.
“It means that it is an honorable thing to work with iron,” I said to him.
“Wow. That’s amazing. I wonder why we can’t have names like that. Only the Indians, oh sorry, Native Americans have such names. They used to be called stuff like Big Wind, Dancing Bear, Crazy Horse, Wounded Knee, but nowadays even they have started taking our kind of names, like John Smith.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my own name was not different from Smith’s. We are both descended from people who work with iron. I could have told him about other names that denoted a profession too, like Baker, Wood, Milner, Chamberlain, and Cole, but I didn’t.
He brought out a refillable water bottle and took a little sip like a bird. He looked at me, replaced the cap of the bottle, and put it on the tray in front of him.
“You’ll discover that when you get to my age you have to be careful what you take in. No sooner do you take a sip than you have to rush to the bathroom to evacuate. Sometimes you get to the bathroom and you have to coax and persuade the damn thing to come out and oftentimes all you get for your effort are a few little drops.”
I nodded and smiled. Too much information, I said to myself.
“But you know one thing about you guys that I like, you never age. No never, you just remain the same from year to year. You are lucky to have the kind of genes you have. Now if only we could have your kind of genes. Look at me, how old am I and I am already falling apart?”
Just then the conductor lumbered in. He was a big, burly, beefy-faced man who looked like an ogre in an illustrated children’s book.
“Tickets, please. Tickets, Ladiiieees and geeeentlemen,” he bellowed.
He checked the old man’s ticket, perforated it, and handed it back to him.
I handed him mine. He looked at it, puffed out his cheeks, and said my name out aloud.
“I need to see your ID,” he said to me.
I had not heard him ask anyone for an ID before me. He simply took their tickets, perforated it, handed it back, and thanked them.
Did I just imagine it or did the old man sitting beside me just wink at the conductor?
I handed him my ID. He looked at it suspiciously and skeptically. He turned it from side to side. He made as if to put it under his nose and sniff it. He then handed it back to me without any thank you.
I sighed. I started to feel a little hot and sweaty all of a sudden.
The old man was smiling at me. I did not smile back.
“One thing I like about you guys is that you obey the law. It must be an alien thing. See how you were very polite to that guy. You didn’t argue. You did what you were told. I wish we could do more of that in this country, you know, follow the rules and do what we are told,” he said.
What politeness was he talking about? The conductor had picked me out for special treatment simply because I had an alien sounding name. But, again, I did not want to argue with the old guy.
I brought out my wrapped lunch and was about to dig in and then I remembered my manners.
“Join me,” I said.
It was customary in my culture to invite someone who met you while eating to join you. It was typically a theatrical performance in fake politeness. It was expected of you to make the invitation and the invited was expected to decline and say they were already full and then in turn you had to tell them to take just a little and they were expected to thank you and insist that they were not really hungry after which you went back to eating your meal in peace.
“You mean you are ready to share your lunch with me? Isn’t that the most amazing thing?”
I extended it to him since I could see he didn’t quite know how to act in this theatre of politeness.
He brought out his own lunch.
“I have my own lunch. See, this is what I keep saying, some people think aliens are bad, but I disagree. There are things we can learn from each other. See, how you were willing to share your lunch with me? That is something we could all learn to practice. We are taught to share in kindergarten, but no one actually shares in real life.”
I watched him eat his lunch with no apparent pleasure. He was still eyeing my own lunch.
“You know what the problem is these days, right? We have to watch everything we eat. My parents didn’t watch everything they ate, yet they lived longer,” he said.
I bet if I told him that I grew my own potatoes in my backyard and made my own fries in my kitchen he would believe me and it would make him happy. I wondered if he knew that cultures that showed hospitality to strangers tended to be conquered and overrun by those same strangers with time.
We were both done with our lunch and the train was lurching forward, if ever so slowly. He turned to me and smiled and began speaking.
“You know one thing I like about you guys who come to this country from out there? You have such interesting lives. Your life stories, ah, they are something else. Look at my own life; there is nothing remarkable about it. I lived in the same Cape house like all the other kids I grew up with. We all went to the same elementary school and were taught by good old Miss Hassett. Same middle school, same high school. I was on the track team in high school and that was where I met my wife. We were both outcasts as it were. We were the unpopular kids, so we gravitated towards each other inevitably. I tried going to the community college for a day, but had to leave when on the first day of class the teacher told us to gather around in a circle just like I had done in the first grade and play a little game he called Icebreaker. I left and got hired as a trainee machinist in a factory less than two miles from where I was born. I worked in that factory all my life. I never missed work for one day. It was hard work, but it paid alright. See what I mean? What a boring life I have lived.”
I did not see what he meant. Boring life? What boring life? The outline of his life that he just drew for me was interesting and spoke to everything that made his country different—stability and the fact that hard work pays a decent wage—but he didn’t know this. Maybe he knew but took it for granted like the more fortunate tend to do.
Turning to me, he touched me.
“So there’s this little Thai Food restaurant where I go to eat sometimes. I like eating foreign foods when the weather is cold. The way I see it if I can’t travel to those warm places my tongue can take me there! So the little guy who owns the place likes to sit with me and talk. Every sentence he makes, he punctuates with God bless America or America is a great country.
“So I was talking to this guy, this owner of this Thai restaurant, and one day he began to tell me his life story. He was born in Laos. So technically he is not Thai. But he says it confuses people, so he sticks to Thai. So he was telling about his life. He said he was seventeen when the communists took over in his country and he was conscripted into the army. They took him to another part of the country, the northern part I think it was, to work in the building of a dam. He was not an engineer or anything so he was doing manual labor, felling trees and all that. But he didn’t like the communists and was angry about the fact that he could not continue his education or earn good money to marry the girl he was in love with. So what did he do? One day he fled and went AWOL. He left the army and that part of the country and came back to the capital where he was born. He went into hiding and the only person aside from his parents who knew he had run away from the army was this girl he was in love with. One of the reasons why he had left the army was because he wanted to leave the country so he could earn enough money to marry her. So he was in his parents’ house in hiding and this girl he was in love with came to visit him. He was so happy to see her. So he told her he had left the army and that he was planning to leave the country and that when he had made enough money he would come for her.”
The train came to a jerky stop. Soon a high speed train zoomed past and our train waited for a while and started on its journey again.
“This girl, whom he was in love with, left his house that night and went and reported him to the authorities. She said she was a good communist and a good communist puts country first before father, mother, brother, sister, and lover.
“The next morning, soldiers kicked down the door of his father’s house and arrested him. They sent him to an island prison for reeducation. In this prison you had to grow your own food and work in the farm for the government. He was in this prison farm but all he could think about was how he could escape. One day, he escaped. Now you think the story has ended right? Wrong. He escaped but he was caught. They caught him and trussed him up like an alligator and brought him back to the prison.
“He was tried and they were going to shoot him. They asked him why he was trying to escape. He said it was because he wanted to be with this girl who had betrayed him. He said that he was in love with her and that he could not think of her getting married to another man. They let him live because even the communists recognized the idea of love.
“Eventually, he finished his sentence and was released. He came back to the capital and the communist authorities made his father sign an undertaking that his son would be a good comrade, otherwise they would seize the father’s house. His father signed. But this young man was restless and this time he bribed some people and he was smuggled out of the country. He was in a refugee camp in another country for some years and then a Catholic family with the last name Fish from Minnesota sponsored him and he came to this country.
“He trained as an auto mechanic but eventually realized that in this country we love to eat food from exotic places so he decided to open a Thai restaurant. He loves the ladies, this old guy. He is always happy and smiling and saying God bless America every chance he gets. He says the only thing he doesn’t like about this country is that polygamy is against the law. I think in their culture in Laos they are allowed to marry more than one wife. He says that love is too good and big of a thing to share with only one person. See, what I mean? Look at how interesting his life story is? In his one life he’s lived through war, prison, love, adventure, and escape. Compare it to mine. I am sure you have an even more interesting life story, right? No need to be shy. Accept it. Your life is more interesting than mine.”
I was thinking about the story he just told me. What he romantically called adventure, the other man must have seen as human cruelty and suffering. I envied him the inimitable stability that his own life story represented. He could predict tomorrow and have a master plan that covered the next fifty years, whereas the man from Laos could barely plan for the next day.
I was thinking that I needed to use the bathroom but was also wondering if I should wait and do it before the train came to the final station. My co-passenger was obviously having the same thought, but had no plans to delay it. He stood up to go and so did I.
When I came back from the bathroom, the seat beside me was empty. The old guy was gone and so was his suitcase.
I looked around at the other seats wondering if he had switched seats while I was away, but he was no longer in that compartment of the train.
I decided to search for him by looking down the train but changed my mind. I realized why this place would continue to feel alien to me. Why had the old man left without saying goodbye?
The conductor was walking down the aisle of the train removing papers from the back of the seats and screaming something.
He was screaming Boston South Station is next … but all I heard over and over again was Neptune Space Station, Neptune Space Station, and then the train entered a tunnel and it all went dark.