I’m on board Amtrak’s number 175 to Penn Station. I’ve traveled by train a couple of times in the past year, but last time I discovered that each car had one electrical outlet. Besides lots of room, besides that comforting, rolling motion, it’s what I think about now when I think about the train. My Powerbook has a weak battery, and I can plug in and type as long as I want.
The car is empty. Maybe three of us new passengers, two previously seated. So I do feel a little awkward taking the seat right behind this guy who I saw hustle on several minutes before I did. He’d already reclined his aisle seat, thrown his day bag and warm coat on the one by the window. He was settled. I’m sure he was more than wondering why, with so many empty seats all around, I had to go and sit directly behind him. But I felt something too. Why did he have to pick a seat a row in front of the electrical outlet? And if he grumbled when I bumped the back of his seat to get by, I grumbled because I had to squeeze past to get over to the window seat behind him.
I’m over it quickly because I’ve got my machine on and I’m working. And he seems to be into his world too. He’s taken a daily planner out, and he’s checking a few things. I see this because, his seat reclined, I’m given a wedge view of his face looking forward and to the side. I see his left eye and the profile of his nose when he turns toward his window. When the conductor comes by for our tickets, he asks if there’s a phone, then gets up to use it. I get immersed and barely notice him return.
I pause, my eyes have floated up. He’s holding a thick new book. I’m sort of looking it over with him. The way the cover feels, the way the chapters are set out. It seems like an attractively produced history book, and I bet he just bought it. He puts it down, then reaches over to the seat in front of me and brings up another.
The other book is the paperback of my novel! I cannot believe it! He stares at the cover for a moment, then he opens it. He’s reading the acknowledgments page! When he’s done he turns back to the title page for a moment, then puts the book down. He gets up and goes to a forward car, where the conductor said he’d find a phone.
How improbable is this? I mean, mine is definitely not a Danielle Steel, not a John Grisham. If it is this much shy of miraculous that I would be on a train with someone who had heard of my books at all, how much more miraculous that, because of an electrical outlet on a train, I’d be sitting inches from a person who just purchased the book and is opening it before my eyes? And look at it this way—of the possible combinations of seating arrangements in the train car, how many could give me this angle? And what if he hadn’t put his seat back?
I know what you’re thinking. That I should lean over and say, Hey man, you will never guess who’s sitting behind you! No, that’s not me. I don’t want to do that. I won’t. I want him to be my anonymous reader. How many opportunities does a writer have to learn a truthful reaction, really truthful, to his writing? How absorbed will he be? Will he smile at parts, groan at others? How about his facial expressions? Will his eyes light up or go dull?
As he’s walking back, he’s staring at me a little too strongly—but he can’t know who I am. I’m feeling, naturally enough, self-conscious. He can’t possibly know he’s in the eyes of the author himself—to think it would be even more ridiculous than that it’s true. It could be the bright yellow shirt I have on, which is a banner really? a United Farm Workers T-shirt celebrating Cesar Chavez. It reads Cada trajabador es un organizador. People are always looking at it and I practically can’t wear it because they do. But he’s not paying attention to my shirt. It’s that I’m the dude sitting behind him, typing into his ear, breathing on his neck while we’re on this empty train, with so much room, so many seats, with so much possible spacing. I think he probably doesn’t like me. He’s probably got names for me.
He sits down. He’s picked up the book! He’s gone to page 1 and he’s reading! Somehow I just can’t believe it, and I’m typing frantically about him and this phenomenon. He’s a big guy, six-two. Wire glasses, blue, unplayful eyes. Grayish hair, indicating he’s most likely not an undergrad, and beneath a Brown University cap, which, because he’s wearing the cap, indicates he’s probably not a professor. Grad student in English? Or he’s into reading about the Southwest? Or maybe the cover has drawn him to the purchase. He’s turned to page 2! He’s going! I have this huge smile as I’m typing. Bottom page 2, and yes, his eyes shift to page 3!
Suddenly he stops there. He gets up again. The phone is my bet. I’m taking the opportunity. I’m dying to know the name of the bookstore he’s gone to, and I kind of arch upwards, over the back of the seat in front of me, to see a glossy store bag, when just as suddenly he’s on his way back and he’s eyeing me again. I squirm under the psychic weight of these circumstances, though now also from the guilty fact that I’m being so nosy. I pretend I am stretching, looking this way and that, rotating my neck—such uncomfortable seats, wouldn’t you say?
He’s reading the novel again. Page 4, page 5, page 6! A woman walks by and he doesn’t even glance up, isn’t even curious whether she is attractive or not. He’s so engrossed! He’s totally reading now. No, wait. He stops, eyes to the window where it’s New England, beautifully composed and framed by this snowy winter. Those tall, boxy two- and three-story board-and-batten houses painted colonial gray and colonial blue, two windows per floor, hip and gable roof, nubs of chimney poking up. Oh no, he’s putting the book down. Closes it, mixes it into his other belongings on the seat next to him. It’s because he’s moving. He must hear my manic typing and he feels crowded and so he’s picking up his stuff and going up an aisle. What an astute, serious, intelligent reader I have to feel so cramped! My reader wants to read in silence, be alone with his book and the thoughts generated by it and his reaction to it and he doesn’t like some dude behind him jamming up his reading time and space with this muttering keyboard sound—it just makes me smile thinking how keen my reader’s psychic synapses are to be responding to what his conscious mind cannot know is occurring. It must be a raging psychic heat, a dizzying psychic pheromone. When he has settled comfortably into his new seat, he pulls the novel back up. He’s reading again! Reading and reading! When that young woman passes through on her return, no, again, he does not look up. He’s dedicated, fully concentrating. He’s really reading, one page after another.
New England: white snow, silver water, leafless branches and limbs. Lumber and boat and junk yards. The bare behind of industry, its dirty underwear, so beautifully disguised by winter.
My reader has fallen asleep. We haven’t been on the train an hour and my writing has made him succumb to a nap? Nah, I don’t find it a bad thing. Not in the slightest. It’s really a compliment. How many books do you fall asleep with? The conductor wakes him up, though. He’s sorry but he found that daily planner on the seat behind him and wanted to make sure it belonged to him. But my reader goes right back to sleep. He’s dead asleep now. A goner. I pass him on my way to buy myself a drink, and he’s got his left thumb locked inside the book, his index finger caressing the spine, pinching. You see, my reader does not want to lose his place.
We both wake up at New Haven. Probably getting a little carried away. I thought he might get off here—walking the book into Yale. He reopens it. He’s at the beginning of chapter two. He does read slow. He’s lazy? I say he’s thoughtful, a careful, considerate reader, complementing precisely the manner in which I wrote the novel. It’s not meant to be read quickly. He’s absolutely correct to read it the way he does.
Forty-five minutes outside Penn Station, many passengers have boarded, cutting my reader and me off. He is still up there reading, but with the passage of time, and our physical distance blunted more by a clutter of other minds sitting between and around us, the shock and mystery have lessened in me. I have adjusted, accepted it. By now I am behaving as though it were ordinary that a stranger two aisles above is reading my work. Like every other miracle that happens in life, I am taking the event for granted already, letting it fade into the everyday of people filling trains, going home from work, going. He is reading the novel, and I am certain, by the steady force and duration of his commitment, that he fully intends to read unto the end. He and I both can look around, inside the car and out the window, and then we go back, him to the book, me to the computer keyboard, no longer writing about this.
So when the moment comes, ask what, how? Tap him on the shoulder, say excuse me, but you know I couldn’t help but notice that book you’re reading, and it’s such an amazing coincidence, it really is so amazing how this can happen, but I was just talking with a friend about that very novel this morning—change that—I was talking to two friends, and one thought it was just great, while the other—change that—and one thought it was just great, and I wondered what you felt about it, and how did you hear of it anyway?
After the conductor announces Penn Station, we stand and get our coats on, and, the train still swaying, move down the aisle and toward the door with our bags. I’m waiting right behind him. Can easily tap him on the shoulder. But nobody else is talking. No one, not a word. So I can’t either, especially when I’d be making fake conversation. Train stops, door opens, people in front of him move forward, and a woman in an aisle steps in between me and him with her large, too-heavy-for-her suitcase. He’s shot out quickly ahead of me now, up an escalator, several more people between us. When I reach the main floor of the station, get beneath the flapping electronic board that posts trains and times and departure tracks, I have caught up with him. He has stopped to get his bearings. Just as I am at his shoulder, he takes off in the same direction I’m going.
So we’re walking briskly side by side in cold Penn Station. You know what? He doesn’t want to talk. I am sure he has no desire to speak with me. Would definitely not want to have that conversation I’d planned. No time for me to fumble around and, maybe, eventually, tell him how I am the writer. This is New York City, no less. He’s in a hurry. He’d grimace and shake his head, brush me off. He already thinks I am one of those irritating people you encounter on a trip, the one always at the edge of your sight, who you can never seem to shake. And so as I begin a ride up the escalator toward the taxi lines, I watch him go straight ahead, both of us covered with anonymity like New England snow.
Dagoberto Gilb lives in El Paso, Texas. A former carpenter, he now supports himself mainly by writing and teaching. His books include The Magic of Blood and The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna.
