Train Ride

Warren J. Cox

Warren J. Cox writes and paints in beautiful central Virginia, where he also works as an academic editor. His prose has been featured previously in Eunoia Review, Ducts, Corvus Review, Soft Cartel, Slippage Lit, Rabid Oak, Fluland, Scarlet Leaf Review, Emrys Journal Online, and elsewhere.

True confession: sometimes I mix up Schumann and Schubert and yes, it’s the whole ‘Schu’ part, I’m sure, that causes the occasional confusion, but also perhaps the fact that both of them may (or may not) have died of syphilis, according to different theories. In any case I always disentangle and clear up soon: Schubert was also Franz and Schumann was also Robert, while Schumann was nine years older than the genius pianist composer Clara Wieck whom he married when she was of age—according to modern standards also—but with whom he actually met and formed a connection when she was eleven and he twenty because supposedly Robert lived at Clara’s house for a year to take piano lessons from her father, and during this time he would dress up like a ghost and scare Clara a bit and that seemed to take because years later it was love and marriage and eight kids—count ’em, eight—as well as a jointly kept diary and nearly two decades of composing music and passion, we can presume; but then there was also Johannes Brahms entering this equation who showed up one day at the house there in Düsseldorf with long golden locks and played piano for Clara and later Robert, thus beginning a rich and more than a little interesting friendship-love thing between the three but especially between young Brahms and older Clara, a relationship which would continue through and long after the extended moment of Robert losing his mind–maybe owing to syphilis–and throwing himself to die in the icy Rhine only to be rescued and taken to an asylum where he perished later. Apparently Clara wrote in the diary of that early encounter with Brahms, that it seemed he’d been “sent straight from God” and, just speaking for myself, having listened to lots of Brahms in my time, I would have to agree with that—the petite twenty-year-old budding composer must have seemed like that at the time. I imagine something like a full body glow as he worked those keys, his frame gushing youth and virtuosity and held all the time by a divine glove of soft candle warmth.

As for Franz, Schubert, well, poor brilliant Franz died at just thirty-one, whether from syphilis or typhoid fever, but in any case not before composing one of my favorite String Quartets—No. 14 in D Minor nicknamed Death and the Maiden, and not before scoring out nine symphonies including his eighth which is called Unfinished, and the ninth which is called Great. Schumann mustered only four symphonies in a longer life but that’s not the point of all this, the point really is the Robert-Clara-Brahms tie-up and then perhaps the point is also where and how did Schubert get syphilis if indeed he did die from syphilis? Was it this Maiden?

Anyway…

So, true confession: sometimes my mind wanders to when I was staying down in a famous town, an ultra-muggy place with disconcerting clouds of nasty flying termites (they would swarm round convenience store lampposts and invade houses and wardrobes, thus bringing occupants to their knees and turning their faces in sheer despair toward the ceiling and sky) but also peppered with adorable dazzling little green lizards—anoles and geckos and skinks oh my—and this is a town noted for enduring hurricanes too, and so there I was about two steps from the mighty pulsating Mississippi, and maybe a few hundred more from the entire Gulf of Mexico which swayed and hovered there with all the fierce pressing power of biting surging unremitting life and the promise of crushing rushing death and infinite drownings, when I received a late morning text from a buxom shiny-black-haired bartender who wanted to know my neck measurement and I panicked and wrote I don’t know! because I didn’t know and didn’t know if I could find a tape measure either, but then it was true, as I reviewed, I had sent a text the previous night saying ‘yes I’ll be your slave’ because after all it was sort of like vacation and besides, there had not only been master-slave talk but also bingeing-Netflix-on-a-super-roomy-ultra-plush-couch talk with flavors of ice cream that threatened to break the pleasure barrier—cake batter THIS and cookie dough THAT—so I shaped myself up, stepped into some damn discipline like a soldier and rummaged in my friend’s house till I had the tape measure and wrote back “about 16 inches” and a moment later “will there be a collaring ceremony?” and “bring on the D-rings.”

Anyway…

So, true confession: one time I slipped into a four year relationship with a girl who was an opioid addict. I really didn’t mean for it to happen and I tried to walk away early on but No, this ended up happening, and of course we got so caught up in each other, all codependent and intense but sweet too, and after some time we decided to move from the east coast to the west coast to get away from her dealer connections and start anew and this worked, for about three months, before she resumed using because there’s no escape since of course the country is simply awash in drugs, so then we moved north, but stayed west, to where she had a family friend and this worked again but for two months only and during this period I tried to leave a few times only to be thwarted by her insistence and promises and warmth, but eventually, and even though I felt too scared and weakened and dizzied to leave, I finally did leave and took trains across the entire country with my heart begging to be ripped out of my chest, something like that, and with her apparition dressed from that last moment I saw her at the station—close-hugging jeans, preppy snug sweater, cute as a button in Converse All Stars, big brown anime eyes, soft and trembling and devastated and scared—flashing every few minutes in my mind and branching through my chest like pretty little lightning kisses that whispered of death or bad damage and felt like knife pricks, and with those visions came such heavy hopes she would be okay but weighted doubts too because how could she be okay without me?

How could she really be?

And that’s when I rode along through the Columbia River Gorge, starting the whole journey off by weaving in and out of Oregon and Washington state and soon gazing out—from around the beginning of golden hour with daintiest rose and violet and melting creamsicle orange hues beginning to develop then bleeding vividly through the sky above the majestic volcanic rock walls and evergreen-laden Cascade mountains—at the most incredible natural beauty I’d ever seen, and that’s when I saw the ram standing on an icy sun-splashed mountainside in Glacier National Park—the light reflecting wildly like a world of chilled diamond—and that’s when I journeyed too through Whitefish Montana where we stopped in the soft early morning light and blanketing snow and there a deer and a fawn were out, stepping around the idle train cars and parallel tracks to the side, and never was I sleeping, and that’s when I passed also through Minot and Fargo and Devil’s Lake North Dakota in the driving rain of night—pouring on like Pantera’s Greatest Hits—and over to Minneapolis/St. Paul and across the hulking Mississippi and hugging the vast Lake Pepin and through to La Crosse Wisconsin and Milwaukee then tracing south by Lake Michigan to Chicago and soon along Lake Eerie which I felt lurking there in the dark like a hundred Lernaean hydras, to deserted downtown Cleveland in the dead of night under pale grey streetlights, standing over like gangly zombie sentries, and then gritty Pittsburgh in the early blue hour that was really still black and glimpsing ghastly orange and yellow glows seeping through so many fogged factory windows on all sides as we rocked through at reduced speed, and never was I sleeping, and then around down to the Maryland panhandle and Harper’s Ferry where John Brown led a bloody raid with a thousand pikes in store and just a few men and slaves—a raid briefly successful before being a crushing failure and finally a success again through its reverberations—and then on to that final stretch toward Rockville and DC where I literally began to hallucinate from absence of sleep, since I cannot sleep on a train or a plane, and while staring out at a flickering glittering kaleidoscope or speeding bleeding phantasmagoria of light and shadow mixing through all the stick trees and everything blurring whirring together and reminding nauseatingly of certain godforsaken John Waters movies, and suddenly I would remember Her and wonder weakly if she was Okay with my head nodding bobbing floating like a buoy in the harbor of any Jaws movie and so desperate to rest and closing my eyes but always only to Snap and jolt aware with raw pain and disappointment; yes, that’s when I took trains—the first one called Empire Builder and the second Capitol Limited—across the entire country with my heart begging to be ripped out of my chest, something like that, and staring out all along the way at either so much magnificent breathtaking beauty or so much blank invariable darkness, and perfectly shattered.

Anyway…

True confession: here I am, and here we are. At least for now.

At least for a tracing moment.

Issue 10.1