A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories

I smiled. “Sounds good. I might get off there.”

“You’re a liar and a fool. What you want? Adventure? Romance? Go ahead, jump off the train. Ten seconds later you’ll call yourself an idiot, grab a taxi, and race us to the next town.”

“Maybe.”

I watched telephone poles flick by, flick by, flick by. Far ahead I could see the first faint outlines of a town.

“But I don’t think so,” I heard myself say.

The salesman across from me looked faintly surprised.

For slowly, very slowly, I was rising to stand. I reached for my hat. I saw my hand fumble for my own suitcase. I was surprised myself.

“Hold on!” said the salesman. “What’re you doing?”

The train rounded a curve suddenly. I swayed. Far ahead I saw one church spire, a deep forest, a field of summer wheat.

“It looks like I’m getting off the train,” I said.

“Sit down,” he said.

“No,” I said. “There’s something about that town up ahead. I’ve got to go see. I’ve got the time. I don’t have to be in L.A., really, until next Monday. If I don’t get off the train now, I’ll always wonder what I missed, what I let slip by when I had the chance to see it.”

“We were just talking. There’s nothing there.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “There is.”

I put my hat on my head and lifted the suitcase in my hand.

“By God,” said the salesman, “I think you’re really going to do it.”

My heart beat quickly. My face was flushed.

The train whistled. The train rushed down the track. The town was near!

“Wish me luck,” I said.

“Luck!” he cried.

I ran for the porter, yelling.

There was an ancient flake-painted chair tilted back against the station-platform wall. In this chair, completely relaxed so he sank into his clothes, was a man of some seventy years whose timbers looked as if he’d been nailed there since the station was built. The sun had burned his face dark and tracked his cheek with lizard folds and stitches that held his eyes in a perpetual squint. His hair smoked ash-white in the summer wind. His blue shirt, open at the neck to show white clock springs, was bleached like the staring late afternoon sky. His shoes were blistered as if he had held them, uncaring, in the mouth of a stove, motionless, forever. His shadow under him was stenciled a permanent black.

As I stepped down the old man’s eyes flicked every door on the train and stopped, surprised, at me.

I thought he might wave.

But there was only a sudden coloring of his secret eyes; a chemical change that was recognition. Yet he had not twitched so much as his mouth, an eyelid, a finger. An invisible bulk had shifted inside him.

The moving train gave me an excuse to follow it with my eyes. There was no one else on the platform. No autos waited by the cobwebbed, nailed-shut office. I alone had departed the iron thunder to set foot on the choppy waves of platform lumber.

The train whistled over the hill.

Fool! I thought. My fellow passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I already sensed in this place. All right, I thought, fool, yes, but run, no!

I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I heard his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.

I kept walking.