a little solo work

Best if read aloud.

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Train of Thought

by Kyle Kratky

I’m departing from St. Louis, departing from the Amtrak station, my sister Laura, Laura with the golden hair, Laura with the snaggle tooth, Laura calls it the Amshack station. It is a twenty square-foot shack with faded white aluminum siding and one station attendant. The lone attendant seems to have been holed up there for months. He is always unshaven, his hair is always tousled, and he has an emptiness in his eyes that suggest his burden has exceeded what he thought it would be. Sissyphus, Atlas, Jesus, they have nothing on the Lone Attendant. This is what greets people traveling via train to St. Louis: a sullied shack and a hollow man.

I stake my position on the train next to a trendy woman with Hillary Clinton hair and a Saks Fifth Avenue bag. I make sure I am sitting upwind of the family with two babies so as not to get their scent, and I am out of view of the eight year olds trouncing about offering to sing Christmas carols to whomever will listen.

In four minutes and thirty-two seconds the socialite next to me is snoring snores that would scare off half of Jurassic Park. It takes only two minutes and twelve seconds more for the caroling children to begin scurrying by me every fifty-four seconds singing a different carol: In the space between the shouted lyrics of “Thumpitty thump thump” and “Then one frosty Christmas Eve,” I can hear a Gap/Old Navy collegiate fullback two seats over talking on his cell phone about the hot piece he banged last night, talking like he wants the whole train car to know, and maybe he does, probably he does, but this shit always happens to me on the Amtrak.

The train is forever departing twenty-two minutes late, arriving forty-six minutes late, stopping to let freight trains by, and as I sit and gape at the streaks of green, orange, and yellow zipping by carrying diapers, cars, and machinery off to distant suburban Candylands, a tidal wave of anxiety engulfs me like there will be no tomorrow, no tonight, like my train will never arrive in Chicago, like we’ll get hijacked by Bedouins or raided by bandits or bombed by the ever present “TERRORIST THREAT.”

I don’t travel. I’ve never had the money to voyage to London or Florence, and I am not brave enough to risk Thailand or Tanzania like adventurous world travelers. Study abroad seems counterproductive to my career goal to build theatre contacts here in Chicago, and youth hostels are too much like Space Camp (where I never slept and rarely ate) to excite me.

I have never wanted to be a migrant worker, and the whole Razor’s Edge experience is too Zen to me. I am roaming the countryside, moving bales of hay for food and meeting Buddhist monks who compare my life to a cosmetic device (“Your life balances upon a razor’s edge,” they whisper ominously, hoods drooping over their faces, the scent of myrrh in the air burning my nose), and all the while I am trying to stifle my laughter, trying to withstand the heat, trying not to kill myself from loneliness when I am alone or out of desperation when I am not alone.

Because I’ve tried meditation, you see, and I can’t seem to “harness the calm.” (Harness the calm, that’s what my friend Rachel says, Rachel with the suburban life, Rachel with the "life partner" named Kyle.) I can’t do it; because when I tell my mind to harness the calm, my thoughts collide and start playing etymological leap-frog with the words floating in my head.

Harness: cattle, black angus cattle, shoved in cages, killed, eaten, slaughtered, bloody faces, familiar places -- Gillian Hastings, my short don’t call her short she’s not short she’s special and beautiful best friend Gillian Hastings -- Hasty pudding with the little medallions in it, it is sweet and pungent and my Aunt Kim made it -- Aunt Kim in Oregon with the money and the parakeet and the piano, sending my mother nice gifts but they truly hate one another because they are sisters and -- O Sisters, my sisters, we’re drifting, building our own lives and I can see the kinship, the closeness washing out to sea as Angela buys her son a new DVD player, as Laura begins to take the tarot cards too seriously, as I lie about how I can’t come home on Thanksgiving because of a show, that’s right, right -- right, wrong, Einstein sips brandy and sits in an easy chair in my anterior lobe, telling me that light is both a particle and a wave and it bends when it passes at a finite speed near to an object with large mass, with large gravitational force, and if the whole universe is held together by four inexplicable forces, forces that could cease arbitrarily at any moment, then how the fuck am I supposed to clear my goddamned mind and harness the calm especially since there is a German-born Prince of Physics, a Guru of Science, Father of the Atomic Age sipping brandy in my brain?!

“CHICAGO UNION STATION is next ladies and gentlemen, Chicago Union station will be our next, last, and final stop for the evening.” And somehow, my five and one-half hour trip is over and I can see the Sears Tower looming at the threshold of the city like a mother waiting for her child who has been out long past dark. She is shaking a finger at me, scolding me, asking me, “Just who the hell do you think you are?”