Just as Beautiful

“Coffee, sir?”

Mark jerked his head back and opened his eyes. A quick glance around told him he was in the dining car of a train. The decor, the tables, and the benches were all a bit dated, but still relatively nice. Other than the man standing at the end of his table, the car was empty. The man’s hands were behind his back, his eyes were wide, and he was smiling expectantly.

“Um…” Marc blinked hard and looked down at the table in front of him. He took a quick, deep breath, and then looked back up at the man. “Yes, coffee would be great, thank you.” The man gave a polite nod and walked away. Marc looked to his right, out the window, and saw nothing but sand and the occasional tree. It was flat near the train, but in the distance there were hills, or maybe they would be called dunes. They were big enough to be interesting, but not big enough to be particularly beautiful. Wind swept across the ground in occasional gusts, only visible because of the sand it carried with it.

He drew his attention away from the window and shifted to the side just a bit. He reached his hand into the back pocket of his slacks where he normally kept his wallet, but the pocket was empty. He quickly checked the other back pocket, his front pockets, and his breast pocket before looking around, checking the bench, and the floor underneath the table.

“Here you are sir.”

The voice startled Marc and he banged the back of his head on the table as he returned to an upright position. He put his hand to the back of his head as he looked down at the coffee in front of him. A teaspoonful or so had spilled out of the cup, partially onto the saucer beneath it, and partially onto the table.

“Oh, that’s no problem sir!” said the man cheerfully. He pulled a spectacularly clean, white cloth seemingly out of nowhere and cleaned the spilled coffee from both the table and the saucer with amazing efficiency.

“Thank you,” Marc said dumbly.

“You’re quite welcome, sir,” said the man. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Um…” Marc hesitated. He looked to his right, at the sand dunes outside of the large window. He turned back to the man. “Where are we?” he asked, sheepishly.

The man cocked his head to the side slightly, a puzzled look on his face. “We’re on a train, of course,” he responded. Marc wanted to be annoyed at the man, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He was sure the man wasn’t being patronizing or facetious. He just didn’t know how else to answer the question. The man looked out the same window Marc had looked out moments before. “In the middle of nowhere, I suspect.” He continued to gaze out the window, an almost dreamy quality came over his face, and for a brief moment, he seemed to be far away.

“But…” Marc hesitated again, making a conscious effort to try not to sound rude to the exceedingly polite man. “Where are we going?”

The man looked significantly more puzzled than before. “Where are we going?” he repeated. He furrowed his brow and looked to the left, at nothing in particular, pondering. He turned back to Marc. “My deepest apologies, sir. I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

Marc blinked a few times. “When, and where, does it stop?” he asked. This time he knew there was a bit of impatience in his voice.

The man let out a brief chuckle. “Stop?” he asked. “It doesn’t stop, sir.” Then, suddenly, the smile the man had been wearing before this conversation returned to his face. “Enjoy your coffee, sir,” he said cheerily. Marc watched as he walked to the end of the car, and out the door, into the next car.

Marc looked out the window a third time. It was the same scene as before. Nothing had changed. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. He looked around the car. There was a newspaper on the table behind him. He stood up, turned, leaned over and grabbed it, and sat back down.

He began reading the front-page article, but as he kept reading, he became more and more confused. It was simply a story about a 5-year-old boy tripping at a park. The boy fell down on the grass. He got back up, and continued running. The article explained the event in great detail, including the author’s thoughts on the boy’s feelings, speculations about how the boy got to the park and how bad the fall hurt - why, in this particular instance the boy might have chosen to not cry, when on another day he might have. Marc flipped to the next page and saw more of the same. A story about how hot it was outside, another one about what the author had watched on television the night before, and a third about another author who had found a spider on her windowsill.

Marc quickly lost focus as the anxiety that had been boiling under the surface started rising even further. He put the paper down on the table and looked at his watch. 3:27. Not that it mattered. He was apparently on a train that went nowhere and never stopped. He had work tomorrow. Did he miss work today? Where was he? What was Cara thinking about where he was? Had he been home last night? He looked down at his coffee. Part of him wanted to take a sip, but he didn’t have much of an appetite for anything.

“Anything else I can get for you, sir?”

This time Marc’s knees nearly hit the underside of the table. “Jesus Christ, you scared me,” said Marc.

“My apologies, again sir,” the man said with a chuckle. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Is there anything else I can get for you?”

Marc looked down at the table and took a deep breath, then looked back up at the man. “Am I dreaming?” he blurted out.

The man pursed his lips in a thoughtful way, then pulled his rag from off his arm, folded it once, and set it down on the table. He then took the seat across from Marc. “Do you feel like you’re dreaming?”

“No, this doesn’t feel like a dream at all,” said Marc.

“Maybe a silly question then,” responded the man. “I would think that if I were to have that question I would be able to come to a definite answer quite quickly, without having to ask anyone.”

Marc stared wide-eyed at the man for a moment. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Are you doing okay, sir?” asked the man.

“No, I’m not,” replied Marc almost before the man had even finished speaking. “I’m on a train to nowhere. I have a life. I have a job. I have a wife. I don’t know where I am or where we’re going or how I got here or what’s going on.”

“Does it matter?” asked the man.

“What do you mean ‘does it matter?’” asked Marc. “Of course it matters. If I miss work because I’m on this train, I could lose my job. If I lose my job I can’t afford food or rent. I have friends, I have family. My wife is probably worried out of her mind. Of course it matters. I can’t just sit on a train the rest of my life.”

“You graduated last week, right?” asked the man, completely unflustered by Marc’s exasperation.

Marc looked down at the table and furrowed his brow as the memories came rushing back. “Yes,” he said. “I did.” He put his elbows on the table and rested his face in his hands and began rubbing his forehead lightly to try to help with the confusion. “I got my bachelor’s in Business Management,” he said, half talking to the man sitting across from him, and half speaking to himself to see if saying things out loud would bring him some recollection of how he got into this dining car.

“How did that feel?” asked the man after a brief silence.

Marc looked up at the man suspiciously. “How did you know that?”

“How did it feel, Marc?” the man said with an unmistakable air of kindness and compassion. The smile had been replaced with an expression bordering sadness, or maybe concern.

“It felt like shit,” said Marc. He knew he was a long way from crying, but a feeling behind his face told him he might be in the ballpark. “And I don’t know why.” He looked up at the man, noticing that the sad, compassionate expression remained on his face. “Working full time,” Marc continued, “in school full time, for years; never a spare moment to myself for years. God was I looking forward to being done. I was so excited for the free time. I was so excited to just be in a place where I didn’t have to spend every waking moment feeling anxious about the next assignment I had to do or the next test I had to take. To be able to be done and to focus on my career and my relationship without having this third thing looming over my head all the time. But I finished my last test and nothing felt different. Nothing changed. It’s like I’d forgotten what it was like to not be anxious and stressed and unhappy. I went home, I tried to do something fun. To pick up an old hobby, to watch tv, to talk to my wife… anything. It all felt wrong. It all felt like I was just avoiding something I was supposed to be doing even though I wasn’t.”

“That sounds awful, Marc,” said the man sitting across from him.

“It was, yeah,” said Marc.

“Did it get better?”

“No,” said Marc. “We took a weekend trip. I was depressed the whole time. I pretended to enjoy myself for the sake of Cara, but I couldn’t. And then when we got home I was even more depressed. Then, because I was depressed, we got in a fight. That made me more depressed. I couldn’t focus at work the next day, and I let something slip through the cracks. When I got home, Cara wasn’t there.” Marc looked up and made eye contact with the man. He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t break eye contact. He just kept looking at Marc with that same understanding expression. Marc looked back down at his coffee. For the first time, he picked it up and took a sip. It wasn’t hot anymore, but it was warm enough.

“I think in that moment I realized my relationship wasn’t as good as I thought it was. I think I’d told myself that it was just because I didn’t have time to focus on it, but I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t like my job, but I don’t know where to go next. I had had this thought in the back of my mind that all these other jobs would open up as soon as I got my degree. That’s not how it works. The thought of looking for a new job overwhelms me. The thought of finding happiness in any area of my life, let alone every area, overwhelms me.”

Tears welled up behind Marc’s eyes. He tried to pull them back, but wasn’t successful for very long. One ran down his face and stopped about halfway down his cheek. He wiped it off with his thumb. “I went to the medicine cabinet and gr-” Marc stopped and put his elbows back on the table, put his face in his hands again, and began to sob. Eventually he took a deep breath, wiped the tears from his face, and looked at the man sitting across from him.

“Am I dead?” he asked the man.

The man looked down at the table. “Marc,” he said, and he looked up and resumed eye contact. “This train doesn’t stop. It’s not going anywhere. Everyone gets on this train and the first thing they wonder has nothing to do with this train or anything on it - they wonder what the destination is. Maybe it would help you, and everyone else, to not think of this as a train at all, because unlike the trains you’re used to, if this one were to stop, it’d defeat the whole purpose.” He gestured out the window with a slight nod of his head. “Sometimes the scenery’s more exciting than this, but not very often. As I’m sure you’ve found out, the newspaper’s shit and the coffee’s worse. Sometimes it’s too hot in here, sometimes it’s too cold, and let me tell you that there’s not a damn thing you or I could do to fix it.”

“But,” the man continued, “I’ve talked to a good many people who were ecstatic to be here. You know why?” He gestured to the window again. “When the mountains and the snow-covered pine trees come, they appreciate it, but they find all this sand, the empty blue sky, and even this old dining car almost just as, if not more, beautiful.”

Marc looked out the window. Still nothing but sand and the occasional tree as far as he could see. He watched a gust of wind take some sand from one small dune, and watched it start to settle around several yards away. His eye caught on to the ripples in the dunes and the patterns they made. In the dunes, the way they were shaped, the way they were laid out, he somehow saw the wind. He felt that feeling behind his face again as he watched the grains of sand dance around just outside the window in the wind created by the speeding train, and he thought for just a moment that those grains of sand dancing were absolutely beautiful.

The sound of something hitting the floor startled him awake. He opened his eyes and saw the familiar ceiling and light fixture of his bedroom. He rolled to the side just enough to see the pill bottle on the floor. He sat up, bent over, and picked it up. He shook the bottle and heard the rattle of pills inside. He stood up, walked into the small master bathroom, and returned the bottle to the medicine cabinet where he’d gotten it the night before.

Still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing the day before, he pulled some shoes on, and walked out the front door of his apartment and down the stairs. He started walking, and didn’t stop until he came to a park. He found the nearest bench, sat down, looked across the grass, and smiled.