Strangers on a Train

by Ryan Burruss


Maybe it was the night’s rum, a couple of fingers—thick, bloated fingers—of Sailor Jerry on the rocks, a comfortable old blur, that made everything just a little jangled, like dropped keys, just a little out of place. I made my way down the narrow aisle, not quite drunk, not quite hung over, neon cobwebs at the corners, snippets of soliloquies that never went as scripted, chances passed, and the sun, the unforgiving early spring morning sun, all thrusting at me, through me, as I tried to find an open spot. Exhaustion swelled like a bruise growing in the space between my insides, to the point I want to say that forces beyond my control pushed me into that seat, that I had no choice in the dark matter, pardon the pun. I want to say such a thing, but did I see her first, or only after? Who’s fooling whom when you’re the only man in the room?

I would love to park the minutia of my days and nights at the feet of a higher power, but that delusion is a bridge too far, even for someone like me, for someone who profits in the chasm between want and need. Unfortunately, every single morning I’ve woken up with the metaphorical blood on my hands, I could always see the imprint of the reins laid out perfectly in my palms.

The facts of the case, if this were a true investigation, and not the musings of a man staring out his 40th- floor office window, would prove as thus: On a Thursday morning in April of this year, as I entered a commuter train into the city, the same train I get on every single weekday, I—happily married with two small children (and, based on an intuitive knowledge of my wife’s cycle, perhaps a third on the way)—took a seat next to an attractive woman. No great sin; I didn’t slyly remove my ring, or fix my hair. I merely sat down. I tell myself it was the first seat available, a matter of chance, but there is a voice at the corners, less neon than dull, a robin’s egg blue, that argues it is just another revision.

I put my black bag between my legs and stuffed my ticket back into my wallet, lifting my right hip to return it to its place, turning my face slightly to the left—I remember nothing further of this moment. Time stopped. I wish the trigger had been something clearly sensual, explainable—a hint of her old perfume, the distinct cadence of her breath, the deep, harsh tones of her hair—but I cannot remember anything tangible. All I knew in that moment when my right ass-cheek settled back in that seat was that I was sitting next to Ava.

Perhaps that is too dramatic a reading; I thought I could be sitting next to Ava, or someone of the basic size and shape of Ava. With each beat of my heart, though (and I could clearly count each one, as I had not yet exhaled for one beat, two beats, three beats, four...), I knew this could not be true. Or perhaps this is yet another edit, an efficiency of memory, a redline decision to believe myself quicker to reason than I was.

Rational or not, though, I was shaken something fierce. I felt cornered somehow, my body frozen. I imagine my fingers hovered over the arm rests, curled like an ancient caught in lava, preserved for all eternity, a full-body death mask, a mannequin.

After I managed a few quiet, shallow gasps, I tried to strain my eyes to the left without turning my head. I could sense only the height of the mass beside me, something like Ava. I decided to take a quick look.

The sun, however, further conspired against me; horny from on high, it continued to thrust through the train car, invading every window and, in the process, whitewashing the portrait of the woman beside me. I could only gather that her face was long and gently severe in its slopes and peaks, just as I remembered. Another obstacle: The woman wore giant, rounded sunglasses, purportedly to protect against the shine, but concurrently keeping her secrets secret, hiding all the evidence I needed to make a definitive identification, those raccoon-rimmed, almond-shaped galaxies that haunted my dreams.

It had been ten years since I had seen her in presentia actuale, touched her, tasted her. So much had happened, so much that I had come to know second-hand, from mugshots and casual reports from gossipy acquaintances, that it was unrealistic to think she would appear like this, as she was before, as I had learned her. I knew the Ava I had loved was dead, murdered by her own sadness, by the pills and the bottles and bottles of Nyquil she consumed to crawl inside her nights.

This woman was not Ava today, not even close. I had seen the photographs, easy enough to find online, the puffiness around the eyes and neck, the splotchy cheeks, the stringy, unwashed hair, the black marble eyes—the lights are off, folks, nobody’s home. The pixels could not lie, not like Ava could. Never to hurt, though, never with malice, but as a balm, to ease the edges of reality, to help the medicine go down, down, down. No, this woman on a train didn’t hunch to hide her height.

Or perhaps this was her greatest trick. Surprise, the stories of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. She did have a flair for the dramatic, one of many things we shared, and I couldn’t put it past her, no matter how impossible it seemed. This is the power we give ghosts; this is why we fear them, even though their very existence would prove our greatest hopes true, that nothing ever ends. 

The woman beside me, from what I could tell from my anxious, pathetic glances, was perhaps the right age, but only if Ava had aged differently than I knew she had. She was well-dressed in crisp colors, her hair tied tightly back. Her figure was long and thin, as Ava’s had once been. It was as if an Ava from an alternative universe, one in which she had crissed instead of crossed, had broken through the membranes that separate us from the infinite other “us”es, that lock us into one time and one space, and landed here, an alien in tight jeans on a commuter train hurtling through suburban Chicago. She was the Ava that should have been, the happier ever after, the envy of the universe.

I thought of an afternoon in one of her father’s hotels, high ceilings, long, gallant windows and a four-post bed: the sun burst through the curtains, long and yellow and immortal. She kneeled beside me, naked, her torso curled, almost relaxed, almost ready to pounce, almost knotted. Almost everything. The light caught her shoulder blade and cut down the back of her arm. I lifted myself, first on my arms, and then up on my knees, facing her. I kissed her neck and she made a small noise, small enough that I knew it was not for me, that it was something accidental, perfect, real. I leaned down further, and kissed her shoulder, placing my lips over the warm imprint of the sun, and I opened my eyes, looked down over the edge of her, down past where the light touched, where the shadows waited. It was as if I were speeding down a steep mountain road, all cutbacks and perilous turns, and below was nothing, everything, a shifting, dancing abyss that might have been a river, or a monster or the end of the world. I saw through the bed and the ten floors below us the, the subbasement, the underground garage, down, down, down, past the dirt and bedrock, past the things that carry us all on their backs. 

I only realized my hands were on her arms because I could feel them shaking against her. I was nothing, a pauper with nothing but student loans and a cubicle job, and in that moment, I realized how far even a nothing like me could fall.

The train made its scheduled stops. I pulled out a book and pretended to read. I could feel the sweat dripping under my arms. The woman seemed completely disinterested in me, almost purposely so. It was maddening. I struggled to look more indifferent.

I didn’t want to turn around, say hello, hear that soft voice that never quite matched the arch of the brow, not just because I was petrified that it was her, back from some rehab purgatory and better than ever, but because I was equally petrified that it wasn’t her, that this was just a stranger on a train, that everything I had come to know in the decade since I last felt her body beneath mine was true, that there was no happy ending, no cinematic third-act twist, that things do in fact fall apart, never to be put back together. That people can die before they die.

The call was made for the final stop, the end of the line. I rattled beside the idol I had fashioned, real even in her fiction, both attracted and repelled, as if she were too much data for me to process, Borges’ aleph, a cosmic Rosetta Stone, an overdose. I licked my lips, my mouth a desert. We pretend we want to know the truth, but rarely do we reach out for it when it crosses us. We lumber along a rail until it stops; instead of letting what we love kill us in glory, we simply peter out.

The brakes wheezed and sighed. Bodies rose and moved to the aisle like the faithful in their pews, lining up for a taste of the blessed cracker, another fictitious corpse, another beautiful mystery not to be looked at too hard. I gathered my meager things, put away the book I had pretended to read.

I stood up, nodded to an older gentleman who made a place for me in the exiting traffic. I filed out, just another asshole marshaled toward the gates. I stole one last glance back, when I thought I was safe enough away, took her all in, or as much as I could in the space between one thick, bloated beat and another. She was Ava. She was a stranger. She could have been either, neither, both. She was an alien, bug-eyed and deathly composed, a transient from another dimension, a loose end from some other me’s universe, a criss rather than a cross, a happily ever after two books farther down the shelf, something close enough to a victory not because it was, but because I had to believe it to be, because there was nothing else to hold onto, nothing but a river, or a monster or the end of the world.