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By Root 650 0

The Jewish man doesn’t look anything like my father though the way he’s holding himself right now is reminiscent of the behavior of many of my father’s friends who work at his studio. This man is older and has a beard, but it is the first time since that lunch with my father that I have been this close to a man during a meal. I don’t eat too much of the sandwich I order, which is paper thin and stale, or the lukewarm vegetable soup. Instead I finish a small cup of ice cream and drink a Tab and am about to light a cigarette when I realize there’s no smoking in the dining lounge. I nibble at the sandwich, stare out over the crowded dining car, noticing that all the waiters are black and that the train’s passengers are mainly old people and foreigners. Outside, a sepia landscape passes by, small adobe houses, young mothers wearing cutoff jeans and halter tops hold small red babies up to the train, waving listlessly as it passes by. Empty drive-ins, huge, seemingly deserted junk lots, more houses built of adobe. Back in my room, staring at the dress, my Walkman on, I’m listening to Boy George sing “Church of the Poisoned Mind,” a song on the tape the bought me in town last November.

• • •

Nights are bad. I can’t sleep even after I take Valium, which only makes me drowsy enough to pace the short length of the compartment, trying to keep my balance as the train speeds through deserts, stopping suddenly, without warning, jerking me forward in the dimly lit cabin. Opening the curtains, I can’t see anything except the tip of my cigarette illuminated in the window’s reflection. Announcements are usually made about sand being blown onto the tracks and there is one, at about three a.m., that involves a coyote. Falling asleep for a while, I wake up as the train passes through some kind of electrical storm on the border of Arizona. It is completely dark, then suddenly in a flourish of purple, violet lightning streaks across the sky, illuminating small towns for seconds at a time. As the train passes through these towns, you can hear warning bells, the glow of red flashing, the headlights of a lone pickup truck, waiting, as the train passes, lumbering on into the night, and these awful towns pass by, getting smaller, farther apart from each other, and I came by train not because I don’t like to fly and not because I wanted to see the country but because I do not want to spend an extra three days in Los Angeles with either my father and Cheryl or Graham or my mother. A closed mall, a neon gas station sign, the train stops, then moves on, the uselessness of postponing the inevitable, the closing of curtains.

The next morning, at breakfast, I meet a rich boy from Venezuela, wearing an Yves Saint Laurent sport jacket, who is also going to L.A. He has recently been to El Salvador and he keeps talking about how beautiful the country is and how people put it down far too often, about the Lionel Richie concert he attended there. While we wait for breakfast, the boy flips through a new copy of Penthouse and I stare out the window, at endless patches of fields and rows of refinery towers and trailer parks and radio relay towers jutting up from red clay ground. I open a notebook I brought with me and try to organize some papers I still have to rewrite from last term but I lose interest as soon as I start. The train stops for a long time in front of a Pizza Hut in some nameless city in Arizona. A family of five comes out of the Pizza Hut and one of the kids waves at the train and I’m wondering who takes their kids to Pizza Hut for breakfast and then the Venezuelan boy waves back to the kid in front of the Pizza Hut, then smiles at me.

I eat my breakfast slowly, pretending to concentrate on stale hash browns and hard, black-on-the-bottom pancakes so that the boy from Venezuela will not ask me anything. Sometimes I look up and out the window at pastures and at the cattle grazing in them. I pull a valium from my pocket and squeeze it between my fingers. Except for the rich boy from Venezuela who has been to El Salvador, the only other person remotely