But he had turned and was walking off down the aisle, beautifully balanced, not swaying with the train’s motion, this way or that. He moved in a clean, lithe, well-cared-for body, which the train’s swerving could do nothing to as he went away.
As he reached the door, he hesitated, his back to me, and he seemed to be waiting for some final word, some order, some shout from someone.
Forward, I wanted to say, by the numbers! March!
But I said nothing.
Not knowing if it would kill him, or release him, I simply bit my tongue, and watched him open the door, slip silently through, and stride down the corridor of the next sleeping car toward a past I just might have imagined, toward a future I could not guess.
A Touch of Petulance
On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fete, commuting from another time, another year, another life.
His fete was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fete disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:
“Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?”
“No!” The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, “Yes. A very late edition.”
Hughes glanced around. “Excuse me, but—all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?”
“Future?” The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. “Indeed,” he whispered. “Future change. God, what a joke.”
Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline:
May 2, 1999.
“Now, see here—” he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-left-hand corner of the front page:
WOMAN MURDEBED
POLICE SE
EK HUSBAND
Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—
The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.
The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened. In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:
Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant,
of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—
“My God!” he cried. “Get away!”
But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.
Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us—us? What land of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!
The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with traveling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to con front the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous traveling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.
“Who are you?”
Someone must have shouted that.
The train rocked as if it might derail.