A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  He watched me cautiously as I fell back into my booth.

  I distinctly remembered the same argument—“everyone says they would never, until they have the opportunity”—from Mason, on one of those afternoons when all three of us, Kaitlin included, were stuck inside the afternoon shift at Jesus Crust, the Christian-themed pizza place where we worked. For hours, we’d all stand there, trying to catch straws in each other’s mouths and trying to figure out why some people cheat and how they do it. I said I would never. Kaitlin said she would never. Mason said we just didn’t get it.

  How long had my grandfather been hiding his writing from us, just to send it to her? I thought harder about the journal—full speed to Elko, full speed to you. It would make too much sense. I had a sudden urge to rip the page from my pocket and tear it apart.

  3.

  INCOMING CALL: AUNTIE Karen.

  My phone buzzed hard against the table, inches from my head. I must have slept, because when my eyes opened, the doors of the train were open, the sound of rain blasting through the train like a stereo searching for a signal. The digital clock above the attendant’s booth read 8:30 a.m.

  “Auntie Karen—”

  “Arthur!” Her voice was like a smoke detector, short sentences coming in loud, intermittent blasts. “Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, I’m—”

  “Tim and I are worried sick, Arthur! Are you feeling okay? There’s broken glass everywhere up here. Did something go wrong? Where are you?”

  I pulled the flyer out of my backpack. “I’m, uh, I’m at the church.”

  “The church?”

  “They were having a camping trip, so I went down and signed up.” I heard the man in the corner laugh, so I whispered. “You guys weren’t awake yet, so . . . I just walked.”

  “Arthur! The church? That’s two miles!”

  “You don’t have to apologize, I like walking. It wasn’t that cold.”

  “Arthur, Tim makes that drive every morning! He could have dropped you off!”

  I slid the bulletin out of my backpack. “I know, but I had to get down there in time for the, uh, the camping trip. From the activities thing you left for me, remember?”

  “I thought you said— You decided to go on the camping trip?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She was silent for a moment, probably weighing the bullshit I’d given her to see if she was willing to buy it. “I wish you would have told us you were leaving.”

  I could barely hear her. The doors of the train were still open, and the rain seemed to get louder as we sat there. Above us, there were footsteps, loud ones, and voices moving through the observation car.

  “I’ll be back in a couple days—”

  “Arthur! A couple days? We’ve—”

  “I can’t really hear you—” The sounds upstairs intensified. I thought I heard something crash. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Arthur, we still haven’t—” I shoved the phone to my chest and ended the call as there was another shuffle of bags upstairs and a louder crackling sound, less like rain on the metallic siding of the train and more like an actual stereo. “What do you think is going on?” I asked, but the attendant didn’t seem to care. I sat up in my booth, and down the stairs came two pairs of wet, black boots.

  I hadn’t thought about the police. There was no way they could be here for me. There was no way Auntie Karen had told anyone I was missing already. There was no way the police would care. Still, I shrank as far back into my booth as I could.

  The policemen that entered the car looked more like soldiers. Bulletproof vests, extra belts for ammunition, and it looked like one of them had two Tasers—in case the first Taser wasn’t enough. One of them chewed gum methodically. We made eye contact, and I shriveled.

  But it wasn’t me they were interested in. The chewing gum officer tapped the booth in front of the homeless man and he slowly rolled his face up off his hands. His features were nearly indistinguishable from the gray hair around them. “How long you been on this train?” the officer asked.

  “Been on the train. San Francisco.” His S’s whistled.

  “Where’s your ticket?”

  The man didn’t move.

  “If you can’t produce a ticket or valid identification, I’m going to have to write you a ticket and ask you to exit the train.”

  The man’s eyes flickered out into the rain.

  “Twenty more seconds and you’re trespassing.”

  “I got my ID,” the man said.

  “Well, let’s see it.” The old man didn’t move, so the officer reached for his jacket, pulling it off his body and trying to locate the pockets. The old man tried to grab his jacket back, but the other officer swatted his hands away. He made a noise like a whimper.

  “Y’all seriously doing this?”

  The man in the corner had set his book down and was holding his place with his finger. He leaned forward, speaking directly to the officers. He couldn’t have been much older than me, maybe in his midtwenties, but there was no panic or smallness to his face. He looked relieved, almost smiling. He had pale brown skin and thick hair twisted into curls on the top of his head.

  “Jesus, alright. Tell them you don’t consent to a search.”

  The old man shook his head. “I—I don’t. No search.”

  The officer rolled his eyes. “We’re well past that point.”

  “Reasonable suspicion of what?” the man in the corner asked.

  “If he doesn’t have a ticket—”

  “State law doesn’t require an Amtrak ticket, they’re a private company. Did somebody ask y’all to search the train?”

  “It’s theft of—”

  “Not until Amtrak says it is. Right now, he hasn’t done anything.”

  I tried to stare at nothing, especially not the police officers. The man in the corner was fearless, but I couldn’t understand how. He was black, and he was speaking his mind to two fully armed white police officers in Nevada. I’d seen this viral video too many times to know how the story ended.

  With a conscious glance to the corner, the officer flipped the jacket and continued searching, but before he got his hand out of the first pocket, the man in the corner drew himself upward. “And now you’re searching him without consent.” He was tall—much taller than both officers. They turned to face him, but he didn’t give an inch, smiling down. This was already enough to be seen as aggressive. If the officers decided to hurt him, they would call it self-defense. I shrank farther back into my booth, praying he’d sit back down.

  But he didn’t. He reached to the table and lifted a physical ticket. “Oh, I found it. See, he’s on until Denver.”

  The officer didn’t even look at it. “Alright, where’s your ticket?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “We’ll need to see that.”

  This made him smile across his whole face. His teeth were bright white. “I don’t know. I don’t really feel like searching for it, and seeing as there’s no power of law to compel me to do so . . . I think I’ll stay.”

  The officer chewed at him a few times. I could see the restraint muscles working in his face and arms and throat, holding him to his spot on the ground and keeping him from ripping the man’s throat out. “Okay.” He rapped the table in front of the old man again. “You got an ID proving you’re . . . Jack Thompson?”

  “He already told you, he doesn’t consent to a search. You guys gonna pretend to be suspicious of a real law? Or you wanna maybe leave my man alone?”

  Twice, the officer chewing gum looked Jack Thompson up and down, and twice, they glanced back to the man in the booth, but eventually, they handed the ticket back. “Not worth it,” one mumbled, and they nodded to the attendant as they disappeared up the stairs. I breathed for the first time.

  Two minutes later, the doors closed out the sound of the rain, the old man curled back up on his booth, Jack reopened his book, and the train moved again, without a w
ord.

  “Jesus,” I offered, to no reaction. “Fucking cops, right? I thought for a second they were gonna . . .” No one even looked up.

  Mason would have gone crazy if he’d been there to see it. He loved watching people in charge get put in their place, especially white people. His entire Facebook feed was viral videos of conspiracy theories, or people getting told off on television. Mason acted like all forms of authority were somehow a direct affront to him. Teachers, politicians, parents, our bosses at Jesus Crust. Jesus Christ himself was probably a dictator in Mason’s anarcho-reality.

  But now I couldn’t even tell Mason about it. And if I did, he wouldn’t believe me.

  “What were they doing on the train, anyway?” I asked Jack more directly.

  “It’s late in the month,” Jack answered after a moment. He didn’t look up from his book. “They’ve gotta fill quotas, and they know they’ll find petty offenders on the train. Drug charges, theft of service, that kind of stuff.”

  “Fucking assholes.”

  “They’re just trying to keep their jobs.”

  I kept looking at Jack, even though he hadn’t once looked up. “Still . . . pretty inhuman.”

  “They treat people as inhuman because they’re forced to work for profit.” He flipped another page. “Cops are not the enemy.”

  “Who’s the enemy?”

  He shrugged. “Profit. Capital. Corporation. Oligarchy. Systems of power that serve inequality. American government, basically.”

  The train climbed upward out of Reno, toward the high desert, and the rain against the window got sparse. Mason would have really liked this guy, so matter-of-fact about his conspiracy that it almost sounded true. “Exactly, dude,” Mason would’ve added after every sentence. “This is exactly what I’ve been telling you about.” The problem with Mason was that he couldn’t understand his own existential contradiction—he lived in Palo Alto. His parents designed software. He wore Gucci shoes to prom and got a credit card when he was sixteen. If capitalism was an evil empire, Mason was going to school, driving his car, and buying his clothes on the Death Star.

  “I guess,” I said. “But those guys didn’t have to choose to be cops. Kinda everybody’s fault; they’re our government, and, you know, corporations.”

  Jack looked up at me. He nodded slowly. He set his book down on the table and smiled. Every movement he made was gentle. “What’s your name?”

  “Arthur,” I said.

  “Okay, Arthur. Let’s hear your logic.”

  “I mean, we decided to care about money. So we made them rich. Like . . . you still buy cheap T-shirts”—I motioned to his chest—“even though you probably understand the T-shirt’s only cheap because it’s basically made by a slave. If we wanted that kind of stuff to stop, we could just stop buying their shit. But we don’t. And we won’t.”

  Jack must have been surprised, because he smiled again, brighter and wider and more curiously. Just like with the police officers, as his expression got friendlier, he got more intimidating. The wider he smiled, the more he showed his teeth.

  “Spoken like someone privileged enough to be cynical. My friends and I”—he nodded vaguely up the stairs—“we don’t really have time to lick wounds, but I get it. Much easier to blame the oppressed than the oppressor. Tell me, though, where do you think we learned the love of money? And more importantly—maybe the only important question—how do we unlearn it?”

  I shook my head. “Good questions, I guess.”

  “Really, I wanna know what you think. You’ve clearly devoted some time to considering how dire the human situation is; I assume you’re just as interested as everyone else in keeping us alive and free. How do we fix it? How do we get better?”

  “We don’t. I think we accept it.”

  I expected a reaction, but Jack was measured. He nodded and looked down into his book for a few moments. “Wouldn’t change your life much, would it? You’d still get to ride your train. Buy your shoes”—he motioned to my Jordans—“have your dinner, your car, your family, your opportunities, your life.

  “Let me give you an alternative, though, for the sake of the other ninety-nine percent of people. Maybe, instead of things staying the way they are, the greater public consciousness unites over a desire for equality. A few small organizations and powerful individuals lead an awakened majority to seize their power. They exert their will over the existing structures. The system crumbles. The world rebuilds.”

  It was silent for a moment. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Fixing things. Getting better. Marx already wrote the script. Capitalism creates oligarchy, the system starts to collapse inward on itself, and the only option left is class warfare.”

  “Wait, what?”

  Jack smiled.

  “Are you insane? You think the lower class is gonna . . . go to war? That would never happen.”

  “It’s already happening.”

  “Except not literal warfare? You’re talking about petty crimes and T-shirt manufacturing; it’s not life and death, like real war.”

  Jack snorted, almost laughed.

  “What?”

  “Look, no offense. I’m sure you’re a really great guy. But the only people who think this isn’t as serious as life and death are the people who have the luxury of not seeing people dying. People are dying. Just not people who look like you.”

  “So we all get pitchforks, or—”

  “You’re saying it’s impossible. I’m telling you it’s inevitable. You don’t even have to care—I’m sure your life is really nice right now. I’m just telling you, we’re at the white-hot center of a revolution. You might want to consider whose side you’re on before the buildings start falling.”

  It sounded almost like a warning. Jack had again drawn himself to his full height, six terrifying feet and a few terrifying inches, and stared me into the corner of the booth. He threw a five-dollar bill onto the counter and nodded to the man sleeping. “Give him a coffee and a sandwich when he wakes up,” he said, and he turned up the stairs. He took them two at a time, not saying good-bye on his way out.

  “Jesus.” I turned to the snack car attendant, who was smiling down into the Snickers bars. “Did you hear all that?”

  “Oh, I sure did. Heard the same thing many, many times on this train.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  The attendant looked at me sideways. “His problem?”

  4.

  “ALRIGHTY, FOLKS, BAGS are packed, doors are closed, and we are pushing off for our next stop, Elko, Nevada.

  “Some of the crew has asked me to remind you that not every stop is an opportunity to step out of the train and stretch your—do I have to say stretch your legs? Or can we just be adults about this and point the finger at the smokers?

  “Look, I know how much you all love your cigarettes, trust me, but we can’t have violent rebellions starting at the exit doors at every stop just so you all can try to get a quick puff. And we can’t have you opening the windows while we’re moving, because that’s stupid for a hundred different reasons. Once we shut those doors, they are closed for good. These are nonnegotiable policies. We don’t make the rules, they’re handed down from the powers that be, and I’m not talking about God here, I’m talking about the Amtrak Oversight Committee, or as we like to call them, Satan.

  “You can smoke in Elko, ya filthy animals. That’s all, from your brilliant and loyal conductor.”

  5.

  IF I HADN’T broken my hand, and lost my scholarship, and ruined my chance to go to UCLA, I’d probably have been preparing at that exact moment. I’d be in the home furnishings section of Target with my dad, talking about which trash basket design would work best in a dorm room, or what towel set would make me look the most like a Bruin. I’d be working out with Coach Shelby, or falling into the rhythm of my reps from the Match Mate—the pop of the machine, the punishment of the racket, the recoil of the impact against my arm, the whiz of the ball
over the net, and the next ball immediately lining up for its chance. I’d feel strong and safe and at home.

  Instead, I was in the back of a cab in Elko, Nevada.

  “Gold,” the cabdriver responded when I asked what people in town were there for.

  “I didn’t know people were still looking for gold.”

  “Everyone’s looking for gold, boss. We just find more of it out here.”

  Elko itself was a mountain town. The downtown area was dominated by two enormous casino hotels, surrounded by a few local bars.

  The town thinned as we drove. Streetlights grew fewer and farther apart until there were none, and the casinos’ marquees disappeared below us as the road climbed. The only light came from an almost-full moon. “This part of town’s mostly abandoned,” he told me. “Everybody’s living over on the west side now. These houses aren’t really worth shit.” I felt the sudden need to reach for my seat belt, but it was broken, lying useless across the middle seat.

  A few moments later, he turned onto a lonely street that disappeared straight up the mountain. There was trash lining the gutters, and the broken street sign was half hidden behind a willow tree: Church Street.

  “Can you pull past it a bit?” I asked with bitter saliva in my mouth. The houses looked like they belonged to angry Nevada men with guns and dogs.

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  I watched house numbers go by, each more decrepit than the last: 27 Church Street . . . 21 Church Street . . .

  “You sure that’s where you wanna go, boss?”

  I swallowed.

  Seventeen Church Street was abandoned. There was no car outside, no light on the porch, and the grass in front had shriveled into patches of weeds and dirt. The house was large, on a huge plot of land, adorned with dead bushes and two enormous willow trees. Several massive pillars held up a balcony in the front of the house, above a wraparound deck. In its day, it might have been elegant, nearly a mansion, but its day was long gone.

  “That’s the address,” I said. “Can you keep the car running up here? If there’s no one home, I guess . . . I guess you can just take me back to the train station.”