Passengers

You forgot how to read.

There was nothing wrong with your train ticket. It’s typeface was crisp, the font size was legible, and it was printed in English, but you couldn’t tell at the time. While the shape of the words looked familiar, you couldn’t remember what any of them meant. They might as well have been printed in Russian for all the sense they made. You were confused and ashamed of your impairment, but it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t realize how sick you were. You didn’t know you were dying.

“Feeling alright, hon?”

You glanced up from your train ticket. The stranger who had spoken to you was somewhere in her mid-forties and the picture of an obvious tourist right down to the fanny pack and the hefty camera she toted around her neck. You hadn’t known people still bought fanny packs.

“I’m fine,” you lied. Each word triggered a burst of pain in your head. “Thank you.”

“Sorry,” said the woman in a drawling accent. “When you stopped talking out of the blue there, I got a little worried.” The woman let out a nervous giggle.

You stared at the woman. You wondered when you had spoken to the woman and where she had even come from in the first place. You were certain she hadn’t been around a minute ago. You tried to think back, but it was like fog had rolled into your head hiding all but the most immediate thoughts. You were certain the hot weather must have been getting to you. The late August heat had been terrible on the surface, but on an underground Amtrak platform it became almost like sitting in a sauna. You initially thought it would be worth it to get away from the crowds in the waiting area, but that was before you spent an hour sweating through your shirt, before you developed a nagging headache, and before you forgot how to read.

The woman was still watching you with concern. Concerned adults made you nervous, so you said, “Really, I’m fine. Sorry for ignoring you, ma’am. It’s been a long day.”

“Don’t apologize, hon.” The woman smiled and leaned back against the wall. “I hear you. This city can really take a toll on you.”

The distant roar of an oncoming train sounded down the tunnel. You thought it might’ve been your train, but without the ability to read you would never know. You glanced down at your ticket, but it remained as unreadable as ever. Your hands shook. A man made an announcement over the intercom. His booming voice echoed in your head.

“Excuse me,” you said. “I uh…” You fought through the fog in your head to find a believable excuse. “I lost my glasses and I can’t read the time on this thing. Can you help?”

“Of course, hon.”

“Thanks,” you said, handing the ticket to the woman. You folded your arms to hide your twitching hands. “My mom would kill me if I missed this train.”

The train engaged its brakes and the sound, piercing and terrible, hit you like an endless series of nails driving into your head. You couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think. You covered your ears, but it did nothing to muffle the screaming of the brakes. Then, almost as quickly as it flared up, the pain faded back into a manageable throb. The train had finished pulling into the station. With a ding and the hissing of pneumatic doors the passengers began filing out.

You blinked away the tears then looked back to the woman to see her rifling through her fanny pack. The woman made a small sound of satisfaction before pulling out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

“Let’s see here,” said the woman now wearing her glasses and using a finger to follow the words on the ticket. She hadn’t looked at it long before she glanced up at you. “You’re visiting Montpelier? You didn’t mention that before.”

“I live there.”

“Do you really?” The woman didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve always wanted to visit Vermont. I’ve heard it’s so beautiful in the fall when the leaves change. I was thinking of vacationing there this year, but my husband insisted, absolutely insisted, on coming to New York again. Well, either New York or Vegas, but I wasn’t going to let him near slots again. Do you like living there?”

“Sure, it’s great,” you said. “What did you say the ticket’s time was again?”

“Oh, the time…” The woman went back to examining the ticket, but after a moment she paused, biting at her lip. “I’m real sorry, hon, but that train’s gone. Likely left a good twenty minutes ago.”

“What?” It didn’t make any sense to you. You waited an hour without seeing a train. You were certain you hadn’t missed it. You didn’t know I had stolen time from you. “Are you sure?”

The woman pointed to a spot on the ticket. “It showed up at 11:33. It’s noon now.”

“That can’t— I didn’t— there wasn’t a train.” You grabbed the bag at your feet. A wave of dizziness struck you, so you placed a hand against the stairwell wall to steady yourself. “I have to go.”

The woman called out for you, but you ignored her. You needed to go outside. You needed to make a phone call. You needed to find a way explain yourself to your mother and doubted Sorry, I zoned out and forgot how to read would fly as an acceptable excuse.

The ground refused to stop moving beneath your feet, so you leaned on the wall as you stumbled toward the stairs. I whispered in your head, but this was when our connection was new and barely formed, so you mistook my words for another announcement that was too distorted to understand.

You didn’t remember the stairs to the waiting area being so steep or the fluorescent lights at the top being so bright. People shoved their way past you as you climbed the stairs. Some muttered vague and not-so-vague insults under their breath.

“Teenagers,” an older man said to his companion as he brushed past you. “Always hopped up on God knows what.”

It took you a moment to realize he was referring to you. At first you were annoyed by the suggestion you were on something, but then you wondered if the man could’ve been right. Your memories of the past few hours were hazy at best. You wouldn’t have taken anything willingly, but it was always possible someone slipped you something. You hoped that wasn’t the case. You didn’t know how to handle a situation like that.

So you told yourself it was always possible that overheating and dehydration were responsible for your current condition. Those were problems you could solve. It would be fine, you told yourself. Once you had water you would be fine. I admired your resolve.

I spoke more fervently, but my words were lost in the noise. The waiting area was a cacophony of irritable people herded into close quarters. A legion of children wearing identical blue-and-red Jacobsen Family Reunion NYC shirts played mobile games on the loudest possible setting while their guardians shouted to each other over the noise. A businessman complained to his bored-looking partner about the poor cell reception. A group of Buddhist monks in dull orange robes sat in silence next to a pair of idling musicians with their instruments in bulky cases at their feet. Tourists milled around, trying and failing to not look lost or confused. A paunchy middle-aged man, ignoring the dirty looks sent his way, blared nu metal from headphones wrapped around his neck. It was so very loud.

You tried to remember where you last saw a vending machine, but the fog in your head was now impenetrable. It was near impossible for you to keep a complex thought for more than a few seconds at a time. The idea of water was all you could prevent from slipping away entirely. Once you had water you thought everything would be okay. Your eyes would work right, the dizziness would go away, your hands would stop shaking, and you would be able to think again. I considered telling you that water wouldn’t help, that there was no quick fix, but I didn’t have the heart to crush your hope. You couldn’t hear me anyway.

With every step you took, the dizziness became worse and the sounds around you grew louder and louder until they were all you could hear. You slumped against a wall and covered your ears with your shaking hands, but it didn’t help. The noise was constant, overwhelming and inescapable, as if someone had turned the entire world’s volume to max.

Someone nudged you with a boot. You looked up to meet the disapproving gaze of a cop. His mustache clung to his upper lip like a furry caterpillar. Later, you will think about this man. You will worry that you got him sick. You did. It didn’t matter. In nine days, mere hours before his symptoms would’ve begun to appear, a rioter with a baseball bat will deliver a crushing blow to his head. He will die before he can be rushed to one of the city’s overcrowded hospitals.

The cop said something, but I chose that moment to speak. I drowned out his words and the rest of the noise, but I still sounded to you like a distorted announcement or a swarm of angry wasps. You thought the cop could hear me, but he couldn’t. He folded his arms across his chest and said something else. You didn’t understand why he didn’t bother to make himself heard over the noise.

“I can’t hear you,” you wanted to say, but your words didn’t come out right. There was no order to them, no logic, nothing that would make sense to you let alone him and, to your horror, you couldn’t make yourself stop. The words just kept going on and on until finally you ran out of breath and couldn’t continue.

The cop wasn’t impressed. He hauled you up by your arm and pulled you along. He spoke into his radio, but you couldn’t hear him with my words now so impossibly loud that they reverberated in your bones. Black spots ate away at the edges of your vision. Soon you would collapse.

At that moment, you could finally hear me. You could recognize my words for what they were. Not an announcement, but a single word repeated over and over. A command. You must understand. I couldn’t let you go home. Too many people would’ve died because of you. So I ordered you to STAY.

I’m sorry.