Live Tracks

A year later, I was sitting in Starbucks on Seventh Avenue opposite Penn Station waiting for the train to Chicago that would begin my railway circumnavigation of America. Back in London after the last trip and poring over the Amtrak brochures, I had discovered that it was possible to travel by train in a circle around the edge of the United States. The Circle Line to end all Circle Lines. The irresistible circle. I couldn’t resist it, and nor could I resist the deliberate repetition of an accidental experience that had stayed with me when I got home. I wanted more, a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere. Even better than the Atlantic crossing, I could sit still, listen to people talk, travel many miles and end up back where I started, and all for the effort of changing a few trains.

So I made my plans for a second, deliberate journey, tracing a route delineated by a series of romantically named trains. I would start in New York, take the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, and connect to the Empire Builder for the rest of the journey west to Portland, Oregon. From Portland I’d pick up the Coast Starlight down the West Coast as far as Sacramento, California, where I decided that I would take a wedge out of the circle and make an inland detour so that I could visit Bet and her hero in Albuquerque. To do this I had to take the California Zephyr from Sacramento across the Rockies to Denver, Colorado. At that point Amtrak failed me, as it fails most US citizens who want to go anywhere off the main routes: branch lines have been severely pruned in the name of profit. There was no rail connection to Albuquerque either directly from the Coast Starlight, or from the California Zephyr. I would have to take a three-hour bus trip laid on by Amtrak at six o’clock on the morning following my arrival in Denver the previous night, which would take me, via Colorado Springs and Pueblo, to Raton, New Mexico, where I would catch the Southwest Chief to Albuquerque. Since this was America, the land of vast spaces, it was only a hop and a skip to the oasis in Phoenix (four hours, say) by the Southwest Chief, so I could go and visit John and Maria again, before catching my old friend the Sunset Limited in the other direction this time (the ‘Sunrise Limited’, I suppose it should have been) from Tucson as far as New Orleans and then connecting to the Crescent, which would take me from New Orleans back to Penn Station, New York where I first started.

Sitting at my desk in London with the Amtrak timetable and a highlighter pen I whispered aloud the names of the trains as you would a poem or a psalm. It wasn’t enough to read them and think them. Amused, but also beguiled by America’s romance with itself, I wanted to hear the words out in the world, bouncing back at me in the silence: Lake Shore Limited, Empire Builder, Coast Starlight, California Zephyr, Sunset Limited, Crescent, Southwest Chief. I regretted that I would have to miss the chance to travel on the Adirondack, the Ethan Allen Express, the Silver Service, the Cardinal, the Capitol Limited, the City of New Orleans, the Texas Eagle and the Cascades, but I didn’t miss the opportunity to utter their names along with the trains I would be taking.

My route was planned, my Phoenix friends checked with to make sure it was all right to visit, a month-long Amtrak rail pass purchased, a flight to New York reserved for October, a book contract signed. Everything was sorted. But why? What was I doing? The book? Well no, the book was going to pay for what I wanted to do, and it was a useful cover.

‘Why are you spending a month going around the States on a train?’

‘To write a book.’

‘Ah.’

Once you’ve written other books, people don’t usually question why you want to write any particular one. And most of the time I could tell myself that the book was the reason I was going and leave it at that. But it wouldn’t quite do. I’d done the long train trip already, got the essence of the thing. Why do it again? Why not, if I wanted to do some travelling, go somewhere and do something I hadn’t done before? Because what interests me is repetition, intensification, moreness. I say interests me, but that is too cerebral; I mean what alarms me, frightens me, disturbs me, because at a visceral level what I want is singularity, reduction, lessness, but like that ever-troubling tooth that I cannot resist testing with my tongue, there’s the need to make certain. I never quite believe that I really want what I seem to want. Only by doing the opposite can I check to see if I’m not just making it all up. In any case, forgetting for a moment the degree of socialising involved, what was more beguiling than the idea of playing out the singularity of the straight line, the enclosing reduction of the circle over the whole geography of America?

But once I had set off, only got as far as New York City, I remembered also how much I like being a stranger, alone and unidentified in a place I don’t belong. I feel bold and free, journeying alone in another country. Uncluttered by connection. A planet watcher. Unfathomable myself because of my alienation. Sitting alone in a busy coffee shop on Seventh Avenue was exhilarating enough. I could sit in a coffee shop in London and get a little of that feeling, but it’s stronger being geographically elsewhere, being sure that no one you know is going to pass by and greet you as yourself. I thrill at being a stranger. I thought of the other travellers I would be with on the train as vignettes, moments or summaries of lives, flashing and vivid as they passed me by, then gone back to their regular existence. I can see other people so much better in my strangerhood. Strangerness brings people into sharp focus, so that like a firework display, vibrant patterns can be seen in sudden blazing light before the overall blackness of the sky returns and prepares us for the next revelation. Everyday busyness and regular social contact is more like a firework display in broad daylight. Of course, the other thing about a firework display is that you look at it, but it doesn’t look at you. The opportunity to see myself was another central motive. Being looked at, being known, even just being acquainted, fogs the glass between me and myself. I can’t see what I am. The narcissism of this is inescapable, but the ‘What am I’ question still beats in my head even after all this time, the adolescent question that should have been finished with but which remains, decade after decade, an incessant query. Better to admit it – that’s as far as maturity will take me. I spend my life trying to find the right circumstances to circle myself, to catch myself unawares and finally see what it is I am. Then what? I’ve no idea. I imagine, when the question is at last satisfied (no, of course it won’t be, but I imagine), a shrug, an ‘OK’, and then with infinite relief just getting on with it. In the meantime I take occasional wanders, using my separation from others as a mirror, or looking into the dark centre of strangers’ eyes to catch my reflection. The eyes of those who know me reflect a story, my story or their story about me – and tell me more about them than about me. I suspect that the desert fathers, those crazed hermits, suffered from a similar self-obsession. That my narcissism is insatiable is not a pretty truth, but there it is. It was the condition of being always in transit, of never arriving, of being a travelling stranger for as long as possible that I was after. I thought of the train as the twin centres of my sleeping accommodation and the smoking coach – the rest just a corridor I passed through in order to get to one or the other. I thought of America as the ground plan for this fractured but contained investigation of myself and others. Travel had nothing to do with it.

What of the folly in trying to repeat the unplanned and unexpected by instituting the planned and expected? I knew perfectly well that it couldn’t work. But supposing it did? And if it didn’t, wouldn’t that be interesting too? I had quite forgotten my shaken condition in Phoenix, and how badly I had needed to get home after experiencing the human interaction of a simple three-day journey. Or if I hadn’t forgotten, I thought at least that I could deal with it. I always think I can deal with things. And I never completely believe, when I am securely on my own, that my discomfort in the company of others and away from base is really more than a conceit. I find I need to test it.

So I was waiting for a month of strangerhood to begin. I wasn’t expecting anything to occur to me, just a series of events that I happen to be in the same place as. But how did I explain to myself the visits I had arranged which punctuated my journey? To Bet and her hero, for all that they were unknown quantities and therefore a continuation of strangeness, and to my friends John and Maria in Phoenix. A fear of the consequences of cutting myself off for so long without any familiarity? A failure of courage, perhaps. Probably. Or, less excusable, a thoughtless acceptance of convention? An unquestioned idea that a journey must have some points of reference, you can’t just go round in a circle without any destination. Why not? There have to be stations on the way. Do there? Wanting to be not in America, not travelling to places in America, but travelling on an American train, I had nonetheless arranged for myself to spend time with Americans, in the places of their homes. A contradiction. So what isn’t contradictory? Why not include contradiction in the contradiction of someone who wants most of all to keep still setting off to keep on the move for a month?

*   *   *

The smoking coach on the Lake Shore Limited was very different from the one on the Sunset Limited. As we pulled out of Penn Station and started our journey to Chicago, I was quite put out not to find grey lino scarred with burn marks, moulded plastic chairs bolted into serried ranks, overflowing ashtrays: all the hallmarks of a waiting room for reprobates who deserved nothing better, the ambiance of a punishment and isolation cell. This smoking compartment was a smart, square glass booth beside the bar. It was half the size, but designed by someone who had respect for smoking as a cultural marker. There was a carpet on the floor and the benches on two sides of the box were upholstered. By the windows were two small tables, like coffee tables with a couple of fixed chairs on either side. We were no longer isolated. The plate-glass wall looked on to the corridor, where people passed to and from the bar. They saw us, we saw them. To the passing non-smokers we may have been a warning in our glass case, an exhibition of an endangered species which owed its forthcoming extinction to its own foolish behaviour, but to us inside it felt like more a clubhouse than a sin bin. The back partition even had a mural: a man’s silhouette leaning lazily against the edge of the wall, full size, wearing a snap-brim hat at a jaunty angle and broad trousers that placed him in the Forties, the smoker’s finest hour, the great period of the cigarette: Now Voyager, ‘Why ask for the moon, Gerry, when we already have the stars?’ To Have and Have Not, ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.’ Casablanca, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the…’ When a cylinder of tobacco meant something. Curling up from the cigarette between the man’s fingers, held to his silhouetted lips, a black wisp of smoke, delicate, genie-like, spiralling up and up, from his mouth to God’s ear. Smokers had the ear of God, back then. The painting must have been designed by someone who once smoked and who still understood the cultural imperative of smoking, the value-added glamour, the addition of addiction to a ruminative soul, to say nothing of the sheer all-encompassing pleasure. If this smoking area was a cell, it knew the true nature of the crime it contained. But still, I missed the stripped-bare dinginess of the Sunset Limited’s mealy mouthed concession to nicotine junkies.

Sleeping compartments get booked early and Amtrak never take demand into account by adding extra sleeping coaches. I was too late to get one for this leg of the journey. So from New York to Chicago I was travelling coach, huddling with the huddled masses. It was just the one night. I boarded at 4.35 p.m. on Friday at Penn Station, and was due to arrive (although I knew better now) at Chicago at 11.15 the following morning. Sitting up, sleeping in a seat, would be no bad thing, I told myself. If I was going to experience train travel, I should spend one night un-feather-bedded. I made a point, however, of booking sleeping compartments for the rest of the journey, which made the trip much less flexible, of course. I had thought I’d be keeping timetabling to a minimum, just in case, you never know, to keep me free for spontaneity. There was still that lurking sense of how one ought to be a travel writer, free to make detours, when detours were the last thing I wanted. But the prospect of a month sleeping upright, of having no door to shut myself behind, made me decide to dispense with any fantasy of spontaneity.

The journey away from New York is most marked by what appears to be an entire suburb for the dead. A graveyard so extensive and ramshackled that it seemed as urban and frantic as Manhattan itself. Or perhaps it was New York’s statement on what exists beyond the city: nothing, just chaos and the dead. The seat in which I would spend the night was spacious and comfortable in maroon leatherette and it reclined. There was a footrest that could be raised so that the legs could be completely extended, and wide armrests. It would have been first class on a plane. There were worse places to spend the night. In the two seats beside me were a Filipino woman in her sixties, dressed smartly, and a small boy I supposed was her grandson. She didn’t speak, beyond nodding hello as she sat down beside me. The child fell asleep almost immediately. I watched New York State go by for a little while, and then made my way to the smoking compartment. It was empty. No Bet, no Raymond, no Good Samaritan, no camaraderie. I didn’t mind. So far, apart from ordering a caramel macchiato at Starbucks, I hadn’t spoken to anyone. Supposing it went on like that? What if the Savannah to Tucson trip had been an aberration and the entire present journey was to be spent in silence, in contact with no one? Another kind of trip altogether. In fact at that point I had so little desire to talk or make contact with strangers that when the door slid open and two round, smiley middle-aged men came in and nodded amiably at me, I had to make an effort to respond with a civil smile. It had begun, and oddly, I was reluctant to get started. Inertia probably, a built-in resistance to moving from a present state into a new one, whatever it may be. Which is why doing nothing seems such a plausible life choice. The men were a couple, taking a holiday, they told me. Travelling to and from New York.

‘Where are you from?’

The essential first question of all train-travel conversations.

‘He’s from the Philippines, and I’m from Bermuda, but we live in Las Vegas.’

‘I thought people went on holiday to Las Vegas, not from it.’

‘Oh no,’ the man who had been silent began, as if he had explained it many times before but never tired of giving the news out. ‘People think Las Vegas is just casinos. But that’s just the Strip, like Broadway’s got theatres. No, there are people living real lives beyond the Strip. Do you realise that a million people live full-time in Las Vegas? Things have changed. It’s a real city, and growing. We have families, suburbs, everything, just like a regular town.’

‘We love Las Vegas,’ the other man said. ‘Can’t wait to get home.’

We slipped into silence, as I, a little disappointed, came to terms with Las Vegas turning into just another regular place instead of a theme park of American toomuchness. A dowdy woman in her thirties arrived and sat silently in the corner smoking concentratedly. And soon a young black man with short dreadlocks arrived and sat down at the unoccupied table beside her. He lit up and inhaled hard, all the better to sigh deeply as he expelled the air from his lungs.

‘Whoa,’ he shook his ringlets slowly. ‘Man, I am coming from a cold situation.’

‘Yeah,’ the woman next to him said, nodding, but keeping her eyes down towards the carpet and smoking on. ‘My seat’s up at the front of the coach with people coming through all the time. The door opens and closes, opens and closes. It’s real cold.’

The young man stared at her for a moment. ‘No, no. I’m coming from a real cold place. From my baby-momma. We had a fight, a bad one so I packed my things and said I’m gone. She said go. Yeah, right, I’m gone. Man, it was a cold situation. You see? So I figured I’d head out west and visit with some brothers who left New York. I reserved a sleeper. I had a sleeper, man, but then I cancelled it because we got back, my momma – we made it up, my baby-momma and me. Next couple of days we fought again, and this time I was really gone. I was outta there in the middle of the fucking night. So I ain’t got no sleeping compartment because now they’re all gone and I gotta spend three nights sitting straight up in those goddamed seats. Three nights. Jesus. If I’d have gone the first time, I’d have had that fucking sleeper. Three fucking nights on a fucking train and no bed. But I tell you what, I’m feeling better with every mile that passes, the further away I get, the better it gets.’

‘Yeah,’ the woman next to him said. ‘But it’s real cold where I’m sitting. And they don’t let you change seats.’

The gay couple threw each other a glance, confirming their good fortune in their own contentment and their warm situation in the world.

At dinner I was seated in the spare place left by a party of three. Two very elderly men and the middle-aged son of one of them. Only one of the old men spoke throughout the meal. His friend remained silent, occasionally nodding agreements, but mostly concentrating glumly on the apology of a steak he was eating. The man who did speak was garrulous and cheerful and informed me, once he heard my accent, that he had been in the US navy and stationed in Falmouth during World War Two. I regretted that I didn’t know the area, though knowing of it pleased him enough. He had joined up to fight in the war aged fifteen, pretending he was old enough. His son, he told me, had been stationed in Guam during the Vietnam War. The son smiled his agreement. His friend continued to say nothing. They were holidaying, the two friends and the son, as they regularly did, by travelling the trains to fishing spots, and ‘to get away from the women’, he cackled. His son laughed tolerantly (one of the women being his mother) and his friend snorted his agreement.

‘You know, it’s so good, getting away, I might send your mother to live permanently with you,’ he teased his son.

‘Yeah, you’d be coming to get her soon enough. Once the dishes were piled high.’

They told me what I needed to know about travelling the trains, what every experienced train traveller or enthusiast would tell me as soon as they asked and I told them why I was on the train. The old men had travelled the US by train to all but five states.

‘We’re working on getting the other five under our belts before we die.’

What they wanted me to know was how terrible the service was, how run down the system had become and what a criminal neglect (or even deliberate destruction) of American heritage that was. The trains were invariably late, and it was because Amtrak’s profit only came from freight; passenger trains were required by law but ran at a loss. Freight, therefore, had priority at all times over passenger trains.

‘Course, they’re obliged by the federal government to provide passenger services, but they hell of a don’t care much for it. No money in us. Passengers are just another kind of freight, but not nearly so valuable. It’s all cargo – people, containers, pig iron – but there ain’t no profit in people. Any real business would adapt; supply and demand. Not Amtrak. If more people want to travel than there are seats, that’s just too damn bad. They wouldn’t even think of putting on extra carriages. Some of them freight trains are a mile or more long. You can wait half an hour for them to pass by. The passenger trains have got a set number of coaches and that’s that. So folk can’t rely on getting places on time, and they have to reserve a seat months in advance. Who’s going to use the trains? Just old guys like us with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to go to it, and a few holiday-makers. It’s a crying shame when you think of the history of the railroads. Hell, railroads made this country. Railroads forged a way east and west. Opened up the whole damn landmass. Now they just let the weeds grow if a route isn’t profitable. People died in their hundreds, in their thousands, making the railroads and blasting their way through the mountains. They don’t care. These new people. All they care about is making profits.’

The other man became quite animated in his nods of agreement, and the son, though he clearly agreed, had the look of someone who had heard this all before and too many times. But the old guy was right. It was extraordinary that the passion and drama that had gone into creating a comprehensive rail network in a country so large that you had to be slightly crazy to dream of it in the first place, had just died away. The achievement was so grand, so saturated in heroics and corruption, and so central to the development of the States, it was hard to believe that people would let it deteriorate into a remnant. But they had.

So far I had more or less avoided sitting at my seat. Either I was in the observation car while it was daylight watching New York State pass through Pennsylvania into Ohio via Schenectady, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Elyria and Sandusky; or I was in my stateless condition in the smoking compartment. Whenever I went to pick up something from my seat – a new pack of cigarettes, money for the bar – the woman and her grandson were asleep. En route from my seat to the smoking coach I passed a group of Amish, a whole bunch of them, taking up several rows at the back of my carriage. Somehow I was surprised to see them out and about, though I shouldn’t have been, because Hollywood has included the Amish in its shadow story of America, and, in Witness, precisely travelling by train. Still, the point of Amish in a movie, even if they are in Grand Central Station and observing a murder, is that they are Amish and their being out of their usual context was the axis of the plot. But here their unreality was startling. There were, I guess, about fifteen or so, and they spanned the generations, tiny children to old men and women. Young families and elderly couples. They spanned the centuries, too. The men wore pudding-basin haircuts under their pudding-crowned flat-brimmed hats, under-chin whiskers, blue workshirts, baggy trousers held up with braces but, because I supposed of their high-tech nature, no flies or even buttons, and heavy black coats. They reminded me of the seven dwarves in Snow White. The women’s faces were scrubbed pink with health and lack of make-up, as if they were permanently blushing, and they wore crisp blue dresses with dirndl skirts, flat black shoes and pleated white starched bonnets over their heavily controlled straight fair hair. The children were exact miniature versions of their parents, even the smallest; little adults bright-eyed and ready to go to a nineteenth-century fancy dress party. They were charming to look at, and as a group utterly oblivious of their own odd appearance or, if you like, everyone else’s odd appearance. Even the children appeared to show no curiosity about the people around them. They played quietly together or concentratedly alone as if there were nothing interesting to see in the world: all too neat, quiet and well-behaved to be entirely comfortable to observe. They, their parents and grandparents reflected only each other, as if the whole group was a single entity, an inwardly curved one-way mirror. They were perfectly self-contained, the women entertaining and fussing the clothes of the youngest children, the men reading or chatting to each other in a language of immigrants, though not recent immigrants since the language they spoke was Low German from two hundred years back, non-existent now in Europe. They made the interest I had in them, my urge to question them, seem crude and intrusive, although, in all reason, their dress and manner courted attention. But everyone on the train sitting nearby or passing to and fro made a point of ignoring them, as if their quaint clothes and manners were a form of disability that was not to be remarked upon or stared at. How strange it is during childhood that we are told it is rude to point, that is, to point out what is pointedly different, to remark on the remarkable, to notice the noticeable. Don’t look, my mother used to say, whenever there was anything worth looking at. So we all grow up and the fact that there were fifteen throwbacks to another century and another continent sitting among us as if either we or they had made a massive cultural slip was to be treated as nothing out of the ordinary. The young women smoothed the starched aprons of their tiny children playing with puzzle books, whose obedient eyes remained undrawn to the kids in jeans and sweatshirts who passed up and down the aisle with hand-held computer games or zizzing Walkmans, who themselves were oblivious of, or politely tolerant of, the alien presence among them. Me, I wanted to sit down next to them and say, What are you doing? Why? How can you imagine that locking yourselves into the imagination of a people dead for hundreds of years can be godly or whatever it’s supposed to be? Can I come and stay with you and see how it works? But then I find it just as difficult to pass by Hassidic Jews in London without a desire to ask them the same questions and why they think dressing and living in the past will keep them safe from the present. I knew the answer both Amish and Hassidics would give, so that wasn’t really my question. It was really a question about their fear, exclusion, their terror of individuality and modernity, and perhaps also a question about my fascination with such a structured form of rejection of the world. Like monks or junkies. A kind of group-identity that permits abandonment of the world. Why not do it in company and create a firm way of life around the rejection of all other ways of life? There were all kinds of ways to do it. I was once tempted to become a permanent resident in a mental hospital for much the same reasons. A fear of some kind of crucial loss – of individuality, probably – kept me from putting it into action, though individuality and independent thought are troublesome burdens much of the time. In any case, did I know for sure that individuality was suppressed in an Amish community? I made the assumption from the similarity of dress and the religious fervour, but perhaps that’s a crass assumption. Still, when I wanted to hole up in the bin, it was because I wanted to be shrived of the task of being an individual.

When I returned to the smoking box after dinner there was a strikingly beautiful black man wearing a white collarless shirt and soft cream trousers, and a young Chinese boy sitting next to him, concentrating hard. The beautiful man was explaining to the boy about languages, how he spoke a great many, and the Chinese boy, who evidently did not, or at least English wasn’t yet one of them, was nodding hard with perfect incomprehension in his eyes.

‘Welcome. Wilkommen. Bienvenue … You see? It’s easy. And Russian: Dobro pojalovat. I can communicate with people from all over the world. Hello, goodbye, my friend, mon ami, mi amore, muchacho, camarade … Now, you teach me Chinese. You … teach … me … Chinese.’ He pointed at the boy, back at himself and then at his mouth. ‘Speak Chinese. Chink, chink, chink. Hoi sin. Szechwan noodles.’

The boy nodded, remained baffled and smiled. ‘No good English,’ he said, confessing.

The linguist lost interest and leaned forward to me across the compartment, forcefully extending a hand. I took it and he enclosed it with his other one.

‘You touch an ethnic hand. These are black ethnic pinkies that you are clasping.’

‘And very nice, too,’ I smiled.

‘English. You’re English. I speak English, too.’ He nudged the ever-amiable Chinese boy. ‘She’s from England. Where we all once came from. Well, not you, or me, but America. She comes from the source of language.’ He turned back to me, still clasping my hand between his and shaking it heartily up and down. ‘I am overwhelmed to meet you. I am known to all my friends as Chef. You are now one of them. Do you ever have tea with the Queen? You can call me Chef.’

‘Thanks, Chef. You can call me Jenny. Are you?’

‘Am I what?’

‘A chef.’

‘Ah oui. I am. Ja. Si. Da. I am a multilingual chef of the haute cuisine.’

The chef was tall and beautiful and either naturally manic or stoned. He had that ebullience and breathless need to talk that could have been either bipolar illness or cocaine. Or he was just a natural comedian. But although he was delightful, I felt a kind of anxious tension in my head and neck that I recognised from being with people close to exploding with manic energy. A scrawny woman in the corner was laughing as the chef babbled on.

‘You’re a chef, huh? You make cakes? You make pound cake? I make great pound cake. In my book no one’s a chef unless they make a great pound cake.’

The chef rattled off his recipe for pound cake.

‘Well yeah,’ the woman acknowledged. ‘You know how to make a good pound cake.’

‘Did you doubt me? You, chère madame, recognise a great pound cake recipe when you hear one. I salute you. Wait. Wait here.’ He rushed out.

‘Crazy guy, eh?’ the woman said. ‘But he might really be a chef.’

The chef came back, triumphant, and ceremonially placed a pleated, tall paper chef’s hat on the woman. ‘I declare you now an honorary chef, madame.’

The woman kept the chef’s hat on. ‘Marie’s the name. Can I keep it?’

‘Sure, I got a dozen in my bag. I’m on my way to Chicago to cook a lunch for Willie May.’

An elderly black man in the corner who until now had been silent suddenly became animated. ‘Willie May? Willie May’s dead, ain’t he?’

‘That’s his father. The great Willie May. This is Willie May, the son. Also great. The father died not so long ago.’

‘That’s sad.’

‘Yup. But this Willie May called me from Chicago, and said, “Chef, I’m having some guys round for a barbeque in the garden. You wanna come and make it?”’

‘So what are you gonna make?’ Marie asked.

‘Aha.’ Finger touched to his lips, hands expressing the exquisite nature of the food he was going to prepare. ‘I plan to begin with a sweet potato soup. Then Beef Wellington. You know what Beef Wellington is?’ He described in detailed how he made Beef Wellington. ‘You just gotta taste mine one day. And we’ll finish with a fresh fruit sorbet, lime and lemon. Good. Oh, very, very good.’

Marie nodded, impressed, making her chef hat tip forward over her eyes. The old guy in the corner nodded appreciatively.

‘Who’s Willie May?’ I asked.

There was a stunned silence.

‘Come on,’ the old man said.

‘You’re kidding,’ Marie gasped.

‘No, man, she ain’t kidding. She’s from England,’ the chef explained, racing to my defence.

‘You mean they don’t know Willie May in England?’

I tried to look apologetic.

‘He was the greatest, I mean the greatest baseball player this world has ever seen.’

‘We don’t play baseball in England,’ I said by way of an explanation.

‘Yeah, but Willie May was something else. He was … he was great. What’s his boy like?’

‘A chip off the block,’ the chef said.

The old man nodded his satisfaction at the way of the world.

‘Hell, all this talk of cooking makes me homesick,’ Marie said. ‘I miss my farm. I didn’t want to leave my husband and my grandbabies. He and my son sent me on a visit to my sister for a birthday gift, so I had to go. But all I really want is to stay on the farm, cook up a storm in the kitchen, and bounce my grandbabies on my knee.’ She laughed. ‘That must seem pretty unadventurous to you, coming all the way from England and all.’

Actually, it seemed quite exotic to me: the grandbabies, the farm, the pound cake, the contentment. I realised I’d forgotten about the musicals. Here was Oklahoma and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and never mind that beneath the corn as high as an elephant’s eye and in spite of the joys of spring, spring, spring, the plots are as dark as death, and thick with murder, rape and criminal ignorance. I was back on a sentimental, celluloid journey.

Maybe the chef hadn’t just gone to get Marie a hat, because since his return he’d been more ebullient than ever, jumping up from his seat, taking everyone’s hands and shaking them vigorously, his eyes glowing with something more than happiness, I thought.

‘You want to dance?’ he asked Marie.

‘I don’t dance.’

‘You want to sing?’

She shook her head, making her chef’s hat wobble. ‘I don’t sing. Sister Mary Ellen said it was bad to sing. So I never sing.’

‘No, no, it’s good to sing. Forget Sister Mary Ellen. Sing out, Marie. Sing your heart out.’

‘You’ll be sorry…’

‘Sing,’ we all urged. ‘Sing.’

Marie stood up in her chef’s hat and good travelling clothes and wailed an entirely tuneless but passionate hymn to life being grand. There was a brief stunned silence as we began to see that Sister Mary Ellen may have had reasons other than religious for preventing Marie from singing. But the chef wasn’t daunted.

‘That’s it, she outta the convent now,’ he crowed and we all joined in with Marie to celebrate her liberation.

It was around midnight by now. The young man and the woman who were both cold for different reasons had dropped in a few times for a smoke; a couple of men in their early twenties, in jeans and T-shirts and with longish hair, each solitary travellers, were settled on the corner bench chatting to each other about guitars but both aware of a straggly-haired girl probably not out of her teens sitting next to them. She had got on at Syracuse. She was following their conversation, or trying to, at any rate, attaching herself to them as roughly her age and peer group. One of them clearly was going to become her lover (or whatever kind of fumbling was possible at their seats or in the lavatory), but neither the boys nor the girl had yet decided which. They were drinking beer and the girl, who was a lot younger and more displaced than she wanted to seem, was making a show of getting drunker, of being one of the guys. She was quite plain and rather grubby but sweetly wide-eyed and lost, almost certainly always lost, used to wandering and coming together briefly but not for long with new human beings. I doubted that Syracuse was where she had started her journey, I even wondered if she entirely remembered the start of her journey, and I was sure she had no idea where or when it would end. Suddenly she became animated as she recalled something she had seen while waiting for the train, something she’d been dying to tell someone about.

‘There was this sign, you know, like a warning sign, in red. It said “Live Tracks”.’

She waited for the boys to show proper astonishment. When they didn’t, she helped them out.

‘I mean, like, live tracks. What’s that supposed to mean? The sign was to stop people from crossing the rails to get to the other platform, you know, to scare them, so they wouldn’t do it, but, I mean, do they think people would really believe the tracks were alive? Like, how stupid do they think people are? You know, like rails are made of metal, how can they be alive? Only people and animals are actually living. Everyone knows that. Live tracks. Isn’t that incredible?’

She shook her head in disbelief at the contempt with which the authorities held people. The boys darted a glance at her (as I did) to check if she was making a joke, but she was genuinely outraged. The boys didn’t look at each other, but down at their knees. Eventually, after she continued to complain about the sign, one of them, very hesitantly, spoke.

‘Uh, I think it’s a sort of way of saying that they’re electrified. Like, electricity is running through them. They use live to describe something that’s electrified.’

He seemed to be waiting for the girl to laugh at him for taking her literally. She didn’t. She didn’t laugh at all, ever, probably. Her mode was intense and puzzled earnestness.

‘Really? So, like, this table is dead, right?’

The boy opened his mouth to explain that it was a special use of the … but he shut it again, deciding there was no point.

‘Jesus, I wish people would say what they mean. I mean especially official people. They ought to be clearer. Why confuse us? It’s like that door.’ She pointed to the door of the smoking box. ‘See, it says Out. Lots of doors say Out, one side Out, the other side In. What’s that? I’m always going in somewhere, whenever I go through a door I’m going in. I was in this place, then I go through a door into another place. That’s how I see it. I don’t go out, I go in. It’s just not truthful to say Live Tracks and Out. It’s like lying.’

And although this was possibly the most profound comment on language and perception that was made during my entire journey around the States – or even maybe in the history of linguistics – we remained excruciatedly silent, because we were all wrapped up with wondering, though hardly able to bear to imagine, what the inside of this waif’s mind could possibly be like and how she had made her way even this far in the world with only the capacity for absolute literalism to help her along. I felt we were in the presence of something extraordinary, a kind of idiot savant, whose absence of irony, whose complete inability to grasp the plasticity of language, might easily be mistaken for transcendental wisdom. The boys looked confused, as the question of which of them was going to sleep with her was superseded by what it might be like and whether it would be advisable to sleep with someone so innocent or of such a potentially dangerous cast of mind.

The chef, linguist that he was, who might have been expected to be interested in the problem but was too far gone in mania or drug high to concentrate on anything other than the frantic energy zipping around his body, simply maintained his own relation with the world and went on, never silent, restlessly talking, no longer listening or waiting for a response, jumping up, touching, leaving, coming back. I thought the time right to give sleep a go, and saying I’d see everyone later, in that American way I like, meaning in an hour or a year, I headed back from the smoking box to my coach.

The Filipino woman was slumped sideways in her seat, her grandson sprawled across his. I climbed over their hand luggage and her legs to get to my designated place by the window, and managed not to wake them up. The main lights were off in the carriage, just a couple of overhead lamps of those who couldn’t sleep causing a dim glow. I reclined the back of the seat, hoisted the footrest and covered myself with the blanket Amtrak provided. It wasn’t uncomfortable for taking a nap on a train but I’ve never got to sleep in a sitting position, even a half-sitting position; not in front of the TV, not on a plane, on a train, or in a car. Never, not once. Still, I lounged and listened to the rattling of the rails and the rocking of the carriages, the two women whispering a couple of rows behind me, the snoring from around the coach. I shut my eyes. Two hours later I was still awake and getting stiff. I turned and sort of curled up on my side. An hour later I was still awake. Maybe I had dozed occasionally, but if so, it was the kind of dim half-sleep where you drift off for a second and then jerk awake, as if your body has not given you permission to lose consciousness. I thought I’d read, but I was worried about waking my neighbour by putting the overhead light on. I gave up and tiptoed over legs and bags out into the aisle where I was free to make an inspection of my coach and its mostly unconscious inhabitants.

In the 9 February 1878 issue of The Illustrated Newspaper, Frank Leslie, travelling by railroad for much the same reason I was, noted:

From our Pullman hotel-car, the last in the long train, to the way-car which follows closely on the engine, there is a vast discount in the scale of comfort, embracing as many steps as there are conveyances. It is worth one’s while to make a tour of the train for the sake of observing these differences and noting the manners and customs of travelling humanity when tired bodies and annoyed brains have agreed to cast aside ceremony and the social amenities and appear in uneasy undress. The old assertion that man is at bottom a savage animal finds confirmation strong in a sleeping-car; and for the women – even under dear little five-and-three-quarter kids, the claws will out upon these occasions. For here, at 9 P.M., in the drawing-room sleeper, we find a cheerful musical party howling, ‘Hold the Fort!’ around the parlour organ, which forms its central decoration; three strong, healthy children running races up and down the aisle, and scourging each other with their parents’ shawl-straps; a consumptive invalid, bent double in a paroxysm of coughing; four parties, invisible, but palpable to the touch, wrestling in the agonies of the toilet behind the closely buttoned curtains of their sections, and trampling on the toes of passers-by as they struggle with opposing draperies; a mother engaged in personal combat (also behind the curtains) with her child in the upper berth, and two young lovers, dead to the world, exchanging public endearments in a remote corner. Who could bear these things with perfect equanimity? Who could accept with smiles the company of six adults at the combing and washing stages of one’s toilet? Who could rise in the society, and under the close personal scrutiny, of twenty-nine fellow-beings, jostle them in their seats all day, eat in their presence, take naps under their very eyes, lie down among them, and sleep – or try to sleep – within acute and agonized hearing of their faintest snores, without being ready to charge one’s soul with twenty-nine distinct homicides?

But if the ‘drawing-room sleeper’ be a place of trial to fastidious nerves, what is left to say of the ordinary passenger-car, wherein the working-men and working-women – the miners, the gold-seekers, the trappers and hunters travelling from one station to another, and the queer backwoods folk who have left their log homesteads in Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois to cross the train of the sunset – do congregate, and are all packed like sardines in a box? It is a pathetic thing to see their nightly contrivances and poor shifts at comfort; the vain attempts to improvise out of their two or three feet of space a comfortable sleeping-place for some sick girl or feeble old person, and the weary, endless labour of the others to pacify or amuse their fretted children. Here and there some fortunate party of two or three will have full sway over a whole section – two seats, that is to say – and there will be space for one of them to stretch his or her limbs in the horizontal posture and rest luxuriously; but for the most part, every seat has its occupant, by night as well as by day, a congregation of aching spines and cramped limbs. The overland journey is no fairy tale to those who read it from a way-car!

Certainly, it was the antithesis of waking in the middle of the night in a hospital ward. No night nurses maintained a dimly lit vigil, overlooking the helpless sleepers. And the sleepers themselves were not contained tidily in rows of beds, but in a free-for-all quest for unconscious comfort. It was true that the Amish group were as neat and disciplined in their sleeping as they were in their waking. They sat in their seats (only the children were fully reclined) with their legs straight and their arms folded. Some of the younger men had allowed their heads to loll on their wives’ shoulders. Some of the women slept with an arm around a small child as if to contain it, and train it in propriety even in the uncertain world of sleep. The men’s legs were spread out, feet planted comfortably apart or crossed at the ankles; the women’s were together and parallel with the vertical drop of their seat, their skirts straight as if they had smoothed them before setting off for sleep and hadn’t moved since. A few snored, probably in Low German. Who knows what they dreamed?

The sleeping habits of the rest of the coach told a different story altogether. Repose, like hunger or sexual need, is a powerful human drive which, when the need is strong, overcomes training in social niceties and our public pretensions. Mostly people do it in private, with at most one other who is licensed to share the ultimate intimacy of sleep. What you discover, when you first spend the night with someone else, is that, whatever the quality of togetherness the sex might bring you, the quality of separation and of utter aloneness when the one of you that isn’t you is asleep is unlike anything else in the world. People sleep alone, no matter that you are in their arms or they in yours. They go away when they sleep to a private place surrounded by overgrown briars and walls of unconsciousness as impenetrable as stone. They leave behind nothing but a careless, even an uncaring effigy, an empty shell that might toss and turn, snort and snore, but is no more the container of the mind and heart you communed with than an empty tin of baked beans. Sleep is a haven. Every man is an island when asleep. And this truth being disturbing, distressing even, we keep it for those we love, or those we have grown used to, and only then probably because we have to, if we do not want to make the choice between experiencing the comfort of others and the bliss of solitary unconsciousness. It’s a private truth. There are some between people. The solipsism of sleep is one of them.

So public sleeping is a kind of revelation, and the observer of strangers asleep is as much a voyeur as someone peeping through a gap in the bedroom curtains. If you are not a dedicated voyeur, there is a degree of discomfort in witnessing the sleep of strangers, though it is a fascinated kind of discomfort: you look before you look away. Most of us wish to peep on the privacy of others, to see what people are really like when they are alone. Even those you live with are alone sometimes and retain momentary secrets. You can’t watch all the time. And even if you can make a guess that other people alone are pretty much like you are, you can’t ever be sure. Worse still, you can’t ever be sure that you alone are pretty much like other people alone. Some things we never find out by asking or being with other people, so when we get the opportunity to cheat, to look through a crack in the door, watch a silhouetted figure through the window across the street, gaze at candid photographs taken with a high-powered lens, we do so, and the instinctive guilt is usually about equal to the thrill. What are we hoping to see? If they are like us; if we are weird; if they are weirder than us; but we also want to see what we are like, not just the individual peeping eye, but the general, collective we.

Everyone slept as best they could, as comfortably as possible, shoes off, belts and zips undone, clothes loosened or rucked up, revealing bellies, bosoms and thighs. Each person slept under a spell that allowed them to fight for another inch of personal space, an extra ounce of ease regardless of what their waking self might think of how they appeared. Heads back, mouths agape, snoring freely, slapping their lips together, scratching, snorting, legs wide, torso flopped: with the perfect self-centred innocence of a child asleep. For all the world as if humanity had decided to forgo entirely all the social skills it had acquired in order to live peaceably in a group. Not the original savage animal, as Frank Leslie saw it back in the 1870s under the influence of evolutionary theories that threatened us with simian ancestors, but a tangle of individual post-Freudian omnipotent egos, each separately grasping for physical gratification, each engrossed in private dreams and desires.

By 8.30 the next morning the train had arrived at Toledo, Ohio. People had gradually started waking from six o’clock on, and tried to make themselves respectable again, straightening up their clothes, combing their hair, heading for the coffee in the restaurant car that would make them social human beings again. The chef was nowhere to be seen, but Marie, who was bright and perky and puffing up a morning storm in the smoking compartment, said that he had finally collapsed on the floor in the centre of an aisle and just lay there sleeping for the rest of the night while people carefully stepped over him.

I was nauseous with lack of sleep, but smoked and drank coffee through the morning, as we passed through flat anonymous country shrouded in morning mist. All I could think of was arriving in Chicago and connecting with the Empire Builder, where I had a bed. We were running an hour late, but when we reached the outskirts of Chicago and the tracks multiplied, merging from all directions into the frantic hub that was the dead centre of the American railroad system, we slowed to that alarming speed where you know that nothing but a complete halt can come of it. Surrounded by goods trains and containers, overhead cables screeching and singing, iron and steel, clinker, smoke, rust, dust, grime and the bone-juddering noise of metal wheels on metal rail jangling and grinding, shuddering to a stop, lurching into movement, the Lake Shore Limited finally came to a dead standstill about five hundred yards outside Union Station, Chicago. We waited in an expectant silence, and then waited some more. The child in the seat next to me began to sing tunelessly: ‘One hour we’ve been waiting … two hours we’ve been waiting … three hours we’ve been waiting…’ He got to ten hours and then started again. And then again. I don’t know how many times he started again, but a real-life hour and a half later we were still waiting in the goods yard as the freight trains took priority. No one murmured any complaint, we just sat, our bags packed, ready after our nineteen-hour journey to disembark and go home or make the next connection. Apart from the child next to me, who was beginning to sound like our psyches singing in our ears, and who, like my psyche, I thought needed suppressing, there was the grim silence of a captive, helpless audience with nowhere else to go staring through the grime of the windows into the noise and shunting chaos of the filthy, smoky air just yards from, but utterly beyond the reach of, our destination.

Two hours later we were allowed into the station, and I arrived at the check-in desk in Chicago with just fifteen minutes to spare before the Empire Builder left for Portland, Oregon. Given my anxiety level, you would be forgiven for thinking that I had to be somewhere at a given time. But missing a train is missing a train, a thing in itself, a source of compulsion that needs nothing more than a timetable. There would have been a very long wait until the next train to Portland, but waiting was what I was doing – what difference if it was on the train waiting for the next station, or in the station waiting for the next train? But I was nevertheless hugely relieved to get to the check-in desk before it closed.

‘That was nothing,’ a woman behind me said as we were bustled along by the porters as if being late was our fault. ‘I once waited in the Chicago yards for eight hours.’

I understood the silence of the others on the train. It was sheer terror of what could be.