He switched schools. He fought more. His foster parents beat him because they thought it would help. He hardened the shell around himself. He realized that in America, school was very much like a prison or refugee camp, and he began to live his life as though he was back in Nepal, as every day turned into a game of waiting: waiting for the bell to ring, waiting for the bus to drop him off, waiting for dinner, for night, for sleep, until another day of waiting could begin.
This was not his city, not home.
#
After a bowl of fried rice, he stayed at his table, sipping tea. Through the door of the restaurant, he could see snow falling in thick drifts, though the wind hadn’t picked up yet. Businesses all around were shuttering their doors and the street was filled with crowds streaming home. One by one, the customers around him got up and left.
He imagined the city in an hour or two: an empty metropolis in the storm. He smiled at the vision—suddenly, the people who normally filled these streets, never doubting their right to strut through them, were fleeing as refugees. If he stayed behind, he would, for once, not feel out of place.
The idea seemed so compelling that his face flushed.
When the owner of the restaurant left for a moment to check on the kitchen, he got up, left his money on the table, and went into the basement, where the restrooms were. He opened the broom closet and stepped in, pulling the door shut behind him.
In the darkness, he waited. Overhead, he could hear the owner and his staff moving the tables and chairs about, cleaning the floors. Someone came down and used the toilet, and then went back upstairs. Tired from standing, he sat down on the floor and tried not to take deep breaths as the air was saturated with the odor of musty rags.
He fell asleep.
#
By the time he woke up, total silence engulfed him. Heart pounding, he pulled open the closet door. The darkness was broken by a few green LEDs at the top of the stairs—the cheap stereo system that the owner used to pipe Cantopop into the restaurant.
He climbed up the stairs, and he could now hear the howling of the wind outside, like some great beast, and he felt the walls of the building tremble.
The glass panes on the front door were completely blocked by ice and snow and only the faintest rays of light made their way through. He tried the door but saw that it was guarded by an elaborate series of locks. He didn’t see a way to open it from the inside without a key.
Undaunted, he felt his way towards the kitchen, bumping into tables and knocking over chairs. The back door, which opened onto an alleyway, was much simpler, and he unlocked it without much trouble.
He pushed against the door, and it refused to budge—the snow accumulated outside was too thick. He leaned his body against the door and strained, and felt the door give way. A crack opened, and cold air streamed in and sliced at his neck like a knife; he regretted not wearing a thicker coat.
A sudden gust of wind slammed against the door and knocked him off his feet. He laughed at himself, got up and tried again. This time, when the door opened he did not let up but continued to strain against it, ignoring the cold wind, until the door opened enough for him to squeeze out.
A dense snowy blanket smothered the straight highways that followed the route of colonial postal riders, the twisty city streets that inherited the paths taken by grazing cows centuries ago, the parks of the Emerald Necklace, the red bricks of Cambridge sidewalks, the frozen harbor, and the Charles River. Boston was a city in the grip of winter, a construction of ice and snow.
Exhilaration filled his heart. He was alone in the city, sole master of this inhospitable domain.
He wanted to shout his joy, but as soon as he opened his mouth, an icy blast of wind punched into his throat, and he tumbled back into the snow. Darkness; then the cold seeped in from every gap and opening in his clothing. Panicked, he struggled to get up, but it was like swimming in quicksand. By the time he finally managed to get up, he could feel the snow and ice that had gotten into his clothes against his skin, tingling, and then numbing.
He was truly alone in the city. He imagined families huddled inside their houses and apartments, praying that the heat would not fail. He imagined the homeless being shepherded to shelters earlier. The wind, like a mighty river flooding over an obstreperous pile of rocks, angrily divided around the skyscrapers of Boston proper and turned into tributaries, channels, vortexes of sub-zero air. Snow, whipped up by the moaning wind, filled the space between buildings until it was impossible to see even a few feet ahead.
The thrill in his heart cooled, and fear precipitated like growing icicles. He realized that he was in trouble.
Thigh-deep in snow, he plodded ahead, stumbling with every step. The swirling flurries assaulted his face, and he couldn’t see any lit windows around him. Would strangers hear him if he pled for help? Almost by instinct, he made his way towards the T stop, hoping against hope that the trains were still running.
His feet, soaked through, felt numb inside the shoes. Wind pried open his collar and forced itself between the gap in his lapels. A strange hush filled his ears between gusts of wind, a foreboding silence that made his heart race, like the stillness of the transfixed crowd in the camp as they waited to hear their destination.
He felt guilty that his foster mother was going to worry, not knowing where he was—she might not have been terribly warm to him, but she had always tried to keep him safe, and he knew that was not a trivial thing in this world. He pulled the coat tighter around himself and pushed on. When did the governor say was the last T train? He couldn’t remember.
Finally, he was at the T stop. The grille was open, and the inside of the station was lit. Grateful, he pushed the doors open and stumbled inside.
The escalator wasn’t running, but that didn’t always mean the trains weren’t. The stairs were muddy and slippery from melted snow, and he carefully made his way down, glad of the warmth.
The platforms were empty. He glanced at the LED display that was supposed to show the expected arrival time of the next train: blank, as barren as the platforms.
He had missed the last train.
The silence in the vast underground space seemed to gain weight and substance. He told his racing heart to slow down, to not panic.
He sat down on the bench. He would have to sleep here tonight. He closed his eyes and waited—he was good at waiting. This was not very different from being in class or being at home.
Now that he was no longer moving, the temperature in the place seemed to drop. Was the heat turned off? How cold would it get down in here? Perhaps it would have been better to stay inside the restaurant, where he might have figured out how to keep the heat on overnight?
Then the station lights went out. And he was plunged into complete darkness. Blood rushed to his head, making him dizzy.
He heard skittering noises. Rats live down in the tracks! He climbed onto the bench and sat on the back, straining his eyes. Fear and cold seized his heart, and he could not tell which was which.
A rumbling came in the distance, a grinding, clanging noise that echoed off the walls. He strained in the direction it came from, and a dim light, like dawn, appeared around the curve in the narrow tunnel.
He got off the bench and went up to the edge of the platform. A breeze from the tunnel—warm like the heat of an opened oven—brushed against his face. The light grew brighter, the clanging louder. Abruptly, like a sunrise, a brilliant glow appeared from around the bend in the tunnel, and sparks lit up the tracks underneath.
He was saved. He had been in time for the last train after all.
Afraid that the operator might not see him and fail to stop, he jumped up and down on the platform, waving his arms and screaming. “I’m here! I’m here!” And then he stopped, too stunned to continue to shout.
A metallic behemoth, like some steam-powered monstrous engine that could only exist in imagination, puff-puff-puffed its way out of the tunnel. A great, blari
ng light, a miniature sun, shone from its forehead like a cyclopean eye and lit up the platform, bright as day. In front of the machine, hovering close to the rails, was an elephantine ground-sniffing snout that resembled an oversized vacuum cleaner’s nozzle. It roared like the engine of an airplane, and pumped out torrents of hot air that made it almost impossible for him to remain standing near the edge of the platform. The locomotive—nothing like the clean, electric T cars—belched acrid smoke that smelled of kerosene and made Manoj cough and his eyes tear up.
Abruptly, the roaring of the engine ceased, and with a long, clanging, scraping sigh, the machine slowed down, stopped, and revealed a train of T cars behind it. The doors slid open with a light thud.
He stared at the empty interior of the car in front of him: the same plastic bucket seats lit by fluorescent light; the same mottled pattern on the floor designed to hide stains; the same T map with red, green, orange, blue, and purple lines radiating away from Boston proper like the twisted strands of a web or the collapsed spokes around a hub. It looked just like a normal T train but for the hulking monster that pulled it. He was dumbfounded.
“Are you going to get in?” asked a deep voice from the front of the train.
Manoj looked over and saw a man’s head, topped with a fedora with a crimson hatband, poking out of the window in the locomotive. In the harsh light that reflected from the tiled walls, Manoj could not tell his age: one moment, he seemed to be as old as the decades that seeped from the cracks in the tunnel walls, the next, he seemed as young as the fresh paint on the train car.
“Come on,” the man said again. “The snow train needs to keep moving.”
#
“Who are you?” Manoj managed to ask.
He was standing inside the operator’s compartment, which looked to him like the cockpit of some fantastic plane cobbled together with parts from different eras. There were rusty valves, jointed metal levers, and gauges with swinging needles and glass covers that looked yellow and brittle; LED lights arrayed in grids blinking madly and rhythmically like a vision of the future imagined in the sixties; subdued, flat computer screens that displayed maps, crawling lines, and scrolling text and numbers; even a roll of paper tape where a clacking printing head picked out faint letters formed with dots.
Hot air blasted from a grill overhead, keeping at bay the cold wind coming in through the open windows.
“You don’t recognize me?” asked the man, smiling. “I thought they did a pretty good job on those T passes.”
There was another seat next to the man, but Manoj didn’t feel comfortable enough to sit. He was afraid to touch the wrong lever or button, and so he remained standing.
Manoj took out his wallet. The credit card sized “CharlieCard” depicted the side of a subway train with a man in a suit jacket leaning out. The wind whipped his crimson tie up and back like the tail of a kite, and he was trying to hold onto his fedora with one hand while holding up a green rectangle—cash, a pass, a little green book?
The face in the portrait was indistinct: a swirl, a dab, a quarter of an arc; perhaps intended to represent an eyebrow, an eye, and some kind of mustache. Manoj had never noticed how eerie the portrait was.
The train operator continued to smile as he glanced over at Manoj. His hands deftly played over the instrument panel, pulling at a lever here, punching a button there, spinning a dial on the other side.
Manoj looked at the man again, at his fedora with its crimson hatband, his white shirt with buttoned collar, his grey suit and crimson tie.
“You’re Charlie?” Manoj asked, feeling absurd. “You’re real?”
The man laughed. “You see me, don’t you?”
“That’s not what I meant. They hired you to dress up like this—like a mascot or something?”
“Not exactly,” said Charlie. “But enough about me. What do you call yourself?”
“The King of America, obviously,” said Manoj.
Chalie laughed, tipped his hat, and went back to driving the train.
“What kind of weird train is this?” asked Manoj.
“A snow train,” said Charlie. “Whenever there’s a big snow storm, the MBTA has to run snow trains overnight, after everyone’s gone home, to keep the tracks free of ice and snow. But my train is used only for the biggest storms, the kind that regular snow trains can’t clear. You saw the contraption up front? It’s made from the engine of an old jet fighter from the Korean War. The engine may have been with the T for almost as long as me, but it can still melt through the toughest ice.”
“You are working on a night like this?” Manoj was impressed, though he couldn’t take the man’s preposterous claim to be driving a train with a jet engine up front seriously.
“I have to,” said Charlie. “The storm is so bad that none of the regular MBTA operators can do the job. If I don’t run the snow train, by the time the storm is over, the T will be completely paralyzed.”
“I didn’t realize the MBTA made their mascot work so hard.” Manoj muttered. “So what’s your real story? Are you one of those guys whose whole life revolves around the job?” As a matter of fact, Manoj suspected that he was looking at a homeless man who happened to find the keys to the train and was now joyriding the T to stay warm.
Charlie turned to give him an appraising look. “You’re not from Boston?”
There it was again, the question about where he was from. “No.”
“Seems like most people in the city these days aren’t from Boston.”
“So what?” For a people who claimed to be welcoming to strangers, Americans sure cared about the distinction between born here and from away a lot.
Charlie looked at him, smiled, and continued on in his calm tone, “Well, if you had been born here, you would have heard this song while you grew up.”
Did he ever return?
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn’d
He may ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned.
“What are you singing?”
“It’s called Charlie on the M.T.A.”
“The song’s about you?”
Charlie nodded. “It started back in 1949, when Walter O’Brien was running for mayor of Boston. He couldn’t afford radio advertising, and so he drove around in a truck and played campaign songs from a loudspeaker.”
“That must have made him popular.”
Charlie chuckled. “The citizens of Boston fined him ten dollars.”
“So how did you get to be in this song?”
“One day, I got on the M.T.A.—that’s the old name for the T—at Kendall Square heading for Jamaica Plain. When I tried to get off, the conductor told me that I owed a nickel.”
“Wait, you didn’t pay when you got on?”
“Of course I did.”
“So why did you need to pay again?”
“Oh, the fare on the trains was a mess back then. They had all sorts of complicated rules and schedules and it filled up a whole booklet. They had just had a fare hike that made you pay an extra nickel if you wanted to get out at a station that was above ground.”
“That’s dumb.”
“If you knew why they’d hiked the fare, you’d think it worse than dumb.”
“Why?”
“The subway was owned privately back then, but the owners couldn’t make enough money. So they managed to get the city to buy them out with a huge bag of cash to be paid by the people of Boston. The M.T.A. then raised the fare so the poor could pay the rich.”
“That’s unfair.”
“I thought so, too. Since I didn’t give him the nickel, the conductor wouldn’t let me off.”
“So what did you do?”
“What could I do? I just stayed on the train.”
“For how long?”
“I never got off.”
“That’s absurd,” scoffed Manoj.
&
nbsp; “Didn’t you hear my song? That’s what it said. My wife Libby had to come to Scollay Square at quarter past two every day to hand me my lunch through an open window as my train rumbled by her.”
“Why couldn’t she give you a nickel?”
“I didn’t want one; it was the principle of the thing.”
“And you really never got out?”
“That’s right. I just stuck around.”
Manoj was about to protest how the logistics of this story couldn’t possibly have worked when Charlie gestured at him to wait. “Hold on. We’re about to come out from underground.”
They emerged from the tunnel, and the rumbling of the train turned hollow and dissipated in the open air. It was impossible to see far beyond the windows obscured by the swirling patterns of the snow.
Charlie pulled on a lever and the train slowed down. Manoj peered through the windshield, kept barely clear by heated wipers moving in a frenzy, and saw a wall of packed snow looming ahead, almost half as tall as the train itself. The tracks disappeared under it. Instead of a train, it was like they were sailing through the Arctic and had come upon an iceberg that blocked the way.
“Now you get to see my old friend in action,” said Charlie. “She guzzles fuel like crazy, but they don’t call her Snowzilla for nothing.”
Charlie pushed some buttons, spun some dials, pulled back on a lever slowly, and a deep, bone-quaking roar began to build inside the train. The entire engine shook like a rocket about to be launched.
Manoj had never heard anything so loud. He wanted to cover his ears but realized that it would be useless: he was hearing, no, feeling the roar in his bones. He was defenseless. So he relaxed his body and gave in to the noise and motion, grabbing onto a section of vertical piping that ran near him. As he looked through his trembling field of vision towards the front, he saw the air shimmering above the giant vacuum cleaner nozzle, and the swirling snowflakes, like a swarm of moths diving towards a flame, vanished in the hot, shimmery air. The wall of snow in front reflected a bright, red glow.
Charlie had not lied. The train really did have a jet engine strapped to the front.
Genius Loci Page 38