crazy eights

Believe it or not, it isn’t the motion of the train that wakes me, it’s the cold shock to my hand when my drink flies out of its glass. Ice and all.

I open my eyes. I look around, am shook around: this train is moving fast.

I’m on a train.

I don’t know why I’m on a train.

I manage to look all the way around me. I’m in an empty car. Most of the windows are open, curtains billowing and snapping in the gusts of air. White stars in the dark sky flash by like signals. My left hand gropes blindly for a surface to set down my glass, but there isn’t one. The car rocks and squeals and rattles, my head jerks hard on my neck, the wind whines in my ears. It feels like I’ve been on this train a long time.

I’m standing up, holding a metal pole with my left hand, my right still gripping the glass.

“Hello?” I shout, but can hardly hear my voice over the groaning of the cars in front of me, behind me, heavy cars, maybe long lines of them, who knows what kind of train this is, what it’s carrying, how long it is.

I try screaming.

No one comes. It’s all right because I’m not panicking, not yet anyway. I keep feeling like there's something familiar about this train, this situation. Even the drink. I manage to lift my wrist to my face, inhale. Whisky. Now that’s strange; I’ve been sober a long time. Years.

How many exactly? It’s a number I’m proud of, that much I know. I remember late nights in church basements, coffee in styrofoam cups, the Steps, the toil of rebirth.

A lot of years.

I shake my head hard to clear it.

From the corner of my eye I can see my own long hair snapping and rippling around me. Dark red. It’s still so red, but I must be — by now I must be — My stomach gives a lurch. The wind around me is getting stronger, louder — are we moving even faster?

We. What makes me think there’s a we?

“OK, wake up.Wake up,” I say aloud. I’d love to dig in my pocket for a ticket, see a town I know outside the window, a billboard, anything.

But I just keep riding blind, teeth chattering. The shirt I’m wearing is cold and wet from the spilled drink and I reek of whisky, a smell I still love and is distracting even now though I am starting to understand I’m in danger, hurtling toward my likely death since it seems no one is driving this train and it’s picking up speed all the time.

But maybe there’s a way to stop it.

I wriggle in my skin, assert my life force. To start I fling the glass away. It rolls under a seat without breaking (too late to take a sip) and now my right hand flies to join the left so both are clutching the metal pole and yes, that feels better, safer, though the right hand is still whisky-wet and numb, and also — also, why am I standing when this car is full of empty seats?

Because I will never give in, some little voice in my head says. Because I’ve made up my mind to stay upright, no matter what.

But — no matter even this, a runaway train?

This definitely is a train, a passenger train apparently, though we are not — I am not — I don’t see any other passengers and am not sure I’m supposed to be one. But those are velvet seats, aren’t they? Fringed drapes at the windows? Scroll-patterned gold wallpaper, and at every seat those ornate Art Deco sconces shaped like waffle cones, the ones you see in movies, in museums, which give off almost no light?

The pole I’m holding onto: pure brass.

“Not of my era,” I mutter, though what era I am of, I couldn’t say.

I blink and hold onto the pole and shake my head. This better start making sense soon. Confused as I am, one thing I know for sure: I’m not a patient person. And when I’m frustrated I tend to do rash things.

Why this train is empty, where it’s headed, why it’s traveling so fast, why I’m on it — I have no answers. But it’s not my imagination, is it, that this train keeps going faster?

Maybe I could try to make my way to another car, where there might be a person, or people, who can make this train slow down or stop. Or at least could explain.

What is this is one of those luxury express trains, the ones that speed through the night so business travelers arrive at their destination just as a new day breaks. Maybe this train is like the Concorde. I’ve heard it flies so high you can see the curve of the earth through the windows.

The thought of that makes me feel sick right now.

Something about this seems familiar, and it isn’t a plane I’m thinking about, it isn’t any type of —

Red hair and a little flash of —

Yes, that boy. Yes, I did know him, I knew him for a long time.

I shake my head again. It doesn’t clear.

I decide to let go of the brass pole and try to make my way to the next car, because something about that boy, I can’t stand to — but just then the train starts to turn. The sound it makes is deafening, the squeal of metal, a long agonized screaming like something being killed. The bones of my head .Through the windows I see sparks flying. Orange red. I start screaming again and this time I keep on till my throat is raw. My body is being thrown sideways by the motion of the train and I’m holding on to that pole and saying the only prayer I know which is just Oh God oh God oh God.

In that whirl I remember the boy’s name is Byron, and he’s mine.

I know that, and only that, as I waken out of the curve. The train is running straight again. It is slowing down (a little?), the dark sky flows by outside, I’m still alive.

And I remember (or I’m really there?) standing at a bathroom sink, fluorescent lights overhead, putting on mascara (I am wearing a uniform, I’m a nurse? A waitress?), talking to a child whose head reaches the top of my thigh and whose voice is squeaky like a cartoon character’s. This is Byron with red hair, tiny cleft chin, a lisp. This is my son.

And I’m crying.

“Shonda, no, no honey — the third time this week. It’s a — Jesus, we got to get this under control. Shonda, I mean it, come on, baby” — I am warm all of a sudden. I am somewhere soft and a hand I know is on my face, patting, almost slapping, trying to wake me. I cry out. This time my voice is audible.

“I can hear me,” I am saying, but the words sound garbled. I open my eyes.

“Shonda, listen. Listen, this is getting to be — Aw hell, honey.” His arms are around me. So warm. His smell, so familiar.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

The speed is gone, the wind, the sound.

“They gotta switch these meds, baby. You can’t keep going through this.” He shakes me a little, making me open my eyes and look at him, though I don’t want to. I want the warm cave, the rumble of his voice in his chest against my ear.

“I drank,” I burst out, though what I meant to say was, “There was a runaway train” and he would know that was important because he, my husband, has heard it as many times as I have: “Drugs and alcohol — once you start, it’s a runway train.” Which it was, for me. My twenties, the first two years of my thirties.

It runs in my family. Two uncles, my cousin Alice, and my parents. Both of them.

My first sponsor, who was the one who called addiction a runaway train, who even got the letters RT tattooed on her inner forearm, told me to visualize the train, feel it. Hear the scream of brakes. Imagine the terror.

Not once did I mention any of this to Bryon and yet when he was four he developed a fascination with trains.

No one thought there was anything strange about that — not even me. Lots of kids love trains. But it was weird how he stayed fascinated, even when dinosaurs and firetrucks and laser guns came and went.

May 15, 2001 was the day of the CSX888 incident, also known as the Crazy Eights. Byron was not quite eight. But still.

On that day in May we’d just ducked into a bar (yes, a bar) to get out of a freak May snowstorm and the bus wasn’t due for 15 minutes and I thought OK a bar, whatever, it’s 15 minutes, and on the TV over those rows of shining bottles was a story about a runaway train.

“Locomotive number 8888 is pulling a a total of 47 cars, 22 of which contain thousands of gallons of a toxic chemical called molten phenol,” the newscaster was explaining breathlessly. In my mind I was seeing my sponsor’s tattoo, and my stomach was writhing because of those bottles: that one bright green, some kind of St. Patrick’s Day menthol gin that hadn’t even been on the market when I was drinking, and one with a 3-D cap the size and shape of a peach, but mostly those gold ones. Jack, my old friend Jack. Seagrams. Dewars. My lips burned.

“Mommy, the engineer got off the train and then he couldn’t catch up. Mommy, why did the engineer get off the train?”

Byron twirling on the bar stool.

“… applied the independent air brake, which disabled the so-called dead man’s switch,” the newscaster said with relish.

“Well, yes. But the real problem was that the dynamic break was not engaged, and the throttle was set at Notch 8,” the railroad expert explained.

“Hey, that’s a lot of eights,” the newscaster said, wide-eyed. “For all you numerologists out there.”

I remember only those bottles, full of summer sun, and the windows blinded by gusts of blue snow, the dark cave of the bar, and Byron’s maple-colored curls: me, letting go. About to drink. Ready to start the cycle again. Who would know? While in my ears the tale of CSX888 unfolded, sure to end in tragedy, somewhere in Ohio.

Now I open my eyes, the rough material of my husband’s shirt grazing my eyelashes.

“I didn’t really drink. It was only a dream,” I say through numb lips.

He tells me a neighbor called this time. He tells me he had to leave work early. I realize with shame that when I screamed in the dream, I really did scream. I couldn’t hear it over the sound of the not-real train but the neighbor next door could.

“So it was real. I mean real in some way,” I say.

“We have to fix this,” he says.

He is getting tired of the whole thing and Lord knows I don’t blame him. But no one could possibly be as tired of it as I am.

“Can you sit up?”

I don’t think so, but I try, and surprising myself, I do it. I look around blinking.

“Shonda.”

“No, no, I’m just” — I swallow. We’re in the living room, I obviously fell asleep on the couch. He hands me a glass of water from the coffee table. “Do you think you can eat?”

I shake my head. The quiet of the house throbs around us like a beating heart. We won’t mention him. “I can try to fix us something. Give me a minute,” I say, trying for reparation. “And I’ll call the doctor tomorrow. And Cindy,” I add, nodding toward her window across the yard. “I don’t want her to worry.”

He just shakes his head. Of course she is going to worry, of course he is irritated, his boss is irritated, I’m a pain, I understand all of that. Everything they prescribe for me gives me every possible side effect and few of the benefits, if any. This time I actually hallucinated.

Am I using? I ask myself again and again. Does it count if the doctor prescribes it, if I take it exactly as ordered?

“I’ll stop,” I say. And in that moment I mean it.

We’ll never know, my husband and I, if I would’ve kept my word. In the next minute the door opens and Byron is there, our son now taller than both of us.

Byron, last seen passed out in the street, a needle in his arm. Byron, assumed dead for the past year.

But now, here. Alive. My Byron gaunt, a face full of sores, eyes gutted in shadow.

He stands in our doorway and sways.

Then his dad makes a sound I’ve never heard him make and crosses the room, yanks our son to him, chest to chest. Byron. I scramble off the couch. We are all crying.

The thought going through my head is, the CSX 8888 ran for 65 miles but didn’t crash. Another locomotive finally caught it, linked to it, slowed it down, stopped it.

Just another locomotive.