Everyone That Got Off

at Back Bay I personally spoke to them individually, said the conductor, officiating down the aisle. Scorn came naturally to the narrator. What, pray tell, he said, were your exact words? Not loud enough for the conductor to hear. An imperceptible gust, an ectoplasm of dust and hair and punched-out tickets for the commuter rail—a great deal of my work deals with fictional writers writing about writing fiction. He mouthed the words. Imagine diagramming such a lip-sync, a multiple personality. He described himself as unrecognized, not not-great. Like climate change. He was no chaste champion of icebergs. He simply could not afford fossil fuel. Nor could the mammal both small and tall to whom he’d remained unmarried for seventeen years. Her psyche was mohair. Her fear was that he’d out himself writing on a topic insufficiently eponymous. They were childless. She said her female doctor was a prick. Pretentious to say that pocket notebooks were his finest work, but baby college students in satin baseballs caps, hockey fans four feet wide, their Satan-worshipping children in knee-length world-tour t-shirts—

The train rocked side to side. The lights went out and the starship made a starry sound. Out the dark windows, dank walls. He went online at night and built a Toyota. He opened a new tab and Frankensteined a Volvo. The lights came on again like dashboards, spacecraft, a bad trip at a bucolic Phish show, a girl of fifteen had thrown her skirt over his head and galloped off in her underwear. It might never happen again but he wished the train would take him farther than expected, he wished he would emerge changed.