Last Train to Limbo

There was the Smell of Urine, the smell of violets, the wind of the dairy farms floating toward the city. Along about, perhaps just before, certainly after Newark, across the marsh, came the green stink of sewage gases and gas gases and sulphur from our great industries. Seated alone, riding backward, secretly fingering a proximate erection and smudging his tan permanent-press pants with The New York Times newsprint off his tan fingers, his golfer's fingers, his once baseball-batting, cub-scouting, now account-counting fingers, Avery read and felt grief.

Oops. Grief? De profundis?

Well, not Wailing Wall grief. He didn't like him that much. Now, today, of course, you couldn't say that. Not for a while, not until it was back to business for everyone. But life goes on, he sighed; tempus fidgets.

Tempus fidgets?

It do, it do, at 42. Perhaps before (although Avery could not directly testify to that, having lost no one at all except a Princeton roommate killed in a glider crash off the California coast--and he was South American).

Violence, violence, where would it end? Why can't people get along? Avery got along. Really. Oh, he had a temper--manly, vigorous, quick to rise and quick to forgive--and once he had hit his wife, and more than once he had wanted to. His son, a three-year-old thumb-sucker, lived in friendly terror of his spankings. His dog, a three-year-old boxer, appreciated any time that Avery found to spend with him. Avery was not violent. Pressured, yes, but violent?

Never. That much he knew. He lived and let live. He tried to do his job, and it wasn't easy. You try it sometime, counseling the greedy, the clever, the smelly. Sitting next to Stein, who ate onion sandwiches and yoghurt for lunch, ate at his desk, so as not to miss an inch of ticker, not a symbol in lights, but Stein didn't gulp it up.

T.G.I.F. That's what Avery said. T.G.I.F. End of the week. There was just so much a man could take, and this one had been a lulu (a "woo-woo," according to his son; it was one of their jokes). His wife, for example, waking him up early, before dawn, not once but twice, two mornings running. First, "He's shot"; then, "He's dead." His wife, the plump romantic, who took care to cry below the noise level of the air conditioner, so that Avery could get back to sleep.

So the previous two mornings had been rough. She didn't help by standing in the kitchen doorway and watching the television, all the while pretending to create his breakfast out of fresh-frozen, boxed, dehydrated and price-reduced materials. Avery threw his shoe across the living room and yelled at her and set the boy to crying (a fake cry, Avery suspected, the cry of the actor or the pansy, able to produce tears at any time, at any goddamn moment). What did it profit a man? To work hard, to protect his family, and all he receives are tears, burned bacon and a black scar on the newly painted beige wall. Oh, the mornings. Tomorrow of his mornings would be worse. He would be home all day.

"Kenny shot?"

"What, tiger?"

"Kenny shot?"

"Naaaw." He turns to his wife. "You've had him in front of the tube all day?" She nods and almost cries. "Jesus Christ." And it is the end of the day, when all souls need a drink, but Avery rises with an effort of the will that he sees as gallant, puts on his happy face and picks the boy up for a cuddle. Reverses his field, too. "Yes, he's shot." A big hug and rib tickles. The dog sheds on his pants leg, waiting for their sometime evening fight, in which Avery slaps him on his slobbery jowls and laughs and laughs.

"Kenny shot. Will I get shot?"

"Naaaw."

The boy becomes cute, all-knowing (well, then, he's forgotten it, hasn't he?). "Someday I might get shot. Yes, sir." Said with a righteousness that is endearing. Avery pulls his wife to him, the dog squeezed out of the family hug; and for a moment, they are as still as death, each holding to each, the sound of the stove fan almost drowning out the voice of Roger Mudd.

The train crosses the marshland. Avery could tell by his nose where he was any step of the way along the railroad bed from Princeton Junction to Penn Station. A jingle came to him: You can tell by the smell that you won't be going to hell. He would have made a good advertising writer and he knew it.

For a reason unknown (as usual), the train stopped, hanging in limbo over the New Jersey flatland. Avery read hard, to keep from worrying about the appointment that he might miss. Biographies, pictures, editorials, remembrances, official statements of grief. This affliction, this teen and tine of the "national spirit" (whatever that was, he thought). It was Russian, almost, or, to bring it closer, Negro, say; all these expressions of sorrow. Eat your dinner of horrors, absorb the suffering felt, but don't build it to a requiem of boohoos. He had left his wife practically keening on the hassock. "This will never do," he had said stiffly in that prudish tone that crept into his voice, always surprising him. The pitch of the puritan headmaster.

I hope she cries like that for me, he thought, in a gesture of jealousy; and then: Go, train, go, goddamn it.

He took out his appointment book (Brooks Brothers, pigskin, gold pencil; a luxury, but what the hell?). He was late now and Stein already had the first of his clients. Avery felt sure that Stein was at this moment offering to buy oils, consider aircraft, engage mutual funds, sell short, plow into city bonds and experiment in soybean futures. Stein was becoming for Avery the essence of all the minorities setting up to threaten him. Minorities! Minorities? There was no more picked-on minority in the United States and all its possessions than the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Knock the WASP. Everybody was doing it. I'm the minority and all the other minorities form the majority; so thought Avery, alone above the wasteland.

Time for another cigarette. He allowed himself four an hour. Filter-tipped. Hazardous. It said so right on the pack. See? We all run risks. Some are more dramatic than others. That's the only difference. Inhales deeply, holds it, exhales in a sigh, belches quietly.

It was this feeling of being cheated that churned his stomach acids. Cheated in this particular instance by the railroad that had promised to deliver him from one given point to another in a certain time period. Today this was not happening. Cheated in a grander sense by all the irresponsible people who got in his way, cut into line, ignored rules, undercut, undersold, outyelled, muscled past, tripped on his heels. Cheated further by his own bosses and potentates who liked him and congratulated him and predicted great things for him but seldom seemed to really know him. And this on top of the fact that Avery did almost everything right.

Take, for example, the common view in Avery's world of the lately slain late-beloved-by-some. The man was, among other things, a troublemaker, a stirrer upper, a tax-loophole-closer and a nigger lover. He was long-haired and a friend of the longhairs. It was difficult to find a business leader (Avery was liberal; he would add labor leader) who backed the man politically. And yet, and yet, sensing that the attacks in the trade magazines had been too strong, and aware that no one was totally bad, Avery had defended the kid only three days ago at a business luncheon. At the time, he had wondered if his pose of sweet reason would offend his superiors; and at the time, perhaps it did. But now, only a few hours later in terms of life lived, the deed had been done and there was some shared sense of guilt and Avery hoped, in the back of his mind, that his own defense of the candidate would be remembered now.

In the strangely empty car that rocked occasionally in the wind, Avery read the clothing ads, the market reports, the shipping schedules, the weather map, times and names of satellites, the sports page and, having nothing else to do, he reread the exequies and obits in three other newspapers--Washington, Trenton and a New York rag.

Thank God for the air conditioning, he thought along about noontime; if I have to wait here much longer, I'll get out and walk. Having muttered that, he immediately regretted it. Not only was it unsafe; it provoked the terrible image he had often grappled with, that claustrophobic conception of trying desperately in some crisis or other to make his way under the river, through the train tunnel, flattening his body against the dirty damp walls each time a train roared through, hoping that by making himself thin and curved, he would not be cut in half by an open door or dragged under the wheels to be buffeted and cut into pulp. Subways brought this picture to him, too. No, he would not get out and walk. Better to stay put and let the railroad take care of him.

He did three crossword puzzles (finding, by coincidence, "pariah dog" used in all three of them). In a fit of humor and rebellion, he drew mustaches on the pictures of the debutantes. He tore out a theater review of a play that would interest one of the secretaries at work. He crumpled various pages of the want ads and molded them into balls, which he tossed up at the coatrack, but he tired of this game, because he could dunk a shot without rising from his seat.

Along about three o'clock, his concern was evidenced by his frequent use of the toilet. This was a car with a small room marked Ladies, and Avery would not have violated any principles, except he was bursting, his teeth almost floating, and there was no one else in the car. Just to be certain, he locked the door carefully behind himself each time he entered the territory and he sang while he urinated, to advertise his presence.

In his spare time, he outlined his argument for the continuation of the oil-depletion allowance. His rage, his fury, his impatience with all things not in homeostasis poured into his note-taking and he found himself losing control, talking out loud, kicking at the seat in front of him. He jabbed his pencil at the paper time and time again and discovered that he had piled through to his leg, puncturing his thigh with tiny bloodmarks. Now angry at ruining his (concluded on page 194)Last Train to Limbo(continued from page 116) suit, he limped up and down the aisle and gave a lecture against the ghetto riots that were destroying the cities he didn't live in.

His training, his education, his self-control soon came back to him and he returned to his seat to take a nap (he had actually spread out, placing his newspapers in the seats across the aisle).

It was just past five o'clock, there-abouts, when he woke. Stein had all his business now, he figured. The sun was still strong but sinking. For the first time, Avery realized that no other trains had been by all day. The intense quiet, the buzzing silence, soothed him. He yawned. A gentle throbbing of the right mastoid bone made him fidget. An aspirin would have helped, a drink even more. But let that pass.

Bored, and with what he took to be an artistic urge for a view, he raised his window shade to study the New York skyline. It wasn't there. Confused only for a moment, Avery slowly raised the shade opposite to look at Newark. It wasn't there, either. The Turnpike rose on its tall columns, but Avery could see no traffic of any kind. It did not seem foggy, but Avery supposed that fog was the reason his vision was blocked. Or perhaps clouds--although fog is clouds; that's right; he'd forgotten that.

Anyway, he thought as he returned to his seat and folded a sheet of newspaper into a complicated pattern that, when cut properly and opened, would spring into an artificial Christmas tree, anyway, it's a hell of a way to run a railroad.

Leave him there, hanging there, no journey completed, full-circleless, stewing in his own juices, plumped with his beliefs, ready for whatever.