The 15:17 to Paris

by Anthony Sadler

  “Yeah, he thinks he can get the time off. He’s just trying to get a credit card now.” That was random. Of all the people to invite. Alek hadn’t seen Anthony in what, five years, seven years? What was Anthony like now; would they all still get along?

  It was good though; Spencer would have someone to travel with on his speed-of-light tour of Europe, and Alek felt okay letting them do their own thing while he went to trace his roots. He’d catch up with them for a city or two, then go back to his own spirit quest.

  By the time his deployment was over, he had it pretty much figured it out: Germany, then Paris with Spencer and Anthony. Maybe Barcelona. He wasn’t quite as high on Spain as they were; mostly he wanted to get back to Germany where he could continue tracking down his own history. When he’d see the eastern side. Austria to see where his father was born. Cross the border, see Switzerland. Then Prague, where he had a cousin, and finally he’d fly out of Frankfurt. He wanted Spencer to go with him; he felt it was something important about him he wanted Spencer to see, but didn’t want to pressure Spencer to do something he didn’t want to do, but might end up doing out of duty.

  So Alek decided to tell a little lie, “I actually want to do some of that EuroRail stuff too,” he wrote. That way he’d get to see Spencer, without taking Spencer off his path. Alek would go back to Germany afterward, to finish his journey on his own.

  So the plan was set. He closed his computer and went to the gym. Just another month of his boring deployment, idly hoping, wishing, for some action before his adventure could begin.

  FINALLY, AFTER WHAT FELT like a decade, he was done. Sitting in the belly of a C-17 Globemaster rumbling down the runway at Bagram Airfield and lifting up into the cloud cover. Someone said something about a sandstorm in Kuwait, which explained why the plane was diverted to Qatar to wait it out. Before the long flight from the Middle East to Texas for demobilization, they had to stop in Germany to refuel. Such a roundabout way, he thought. He was on his way to see his roots, and there they were, right out the window, almost close enough to touch, but the path took him all the way back to the US first before he was free.

  24.

  HE PUT THE RECEIVER on the vise block, then threaded the magazine catch into its hole. Then he flipped it around and slid a spring over the magazine catch, and tested the movement. It had to be smooth, because this was the mechanism that would drop the magazine out of the rifle so you could reload. He tested it. He stuck an empty magazine into the receiver and it locked in place. Good. He pressed the button and the magazine slid right out. Good.

  Next he attached the bolt catch into the receiver, so that after firing the last round the bolt would stay back. That way if you sprayed a whole magazine at a bunch of targets, you could stick in another magazine and the bolt would already be back, poised to fire another round.

  He lubed up the roll pin and tapped it into the hole for the bolt catch. He threaded on the safety selector, slid the grip onto the receiver and screwed it down, watching closely to make sure he didn’t kink the spring. The safety had to move smoothly too, so that when he was ready to shoot it would snap easily and definitively to “fire.” So far so good.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and stretched his neck.

  Next the trigger spring over the trigger, the hammer spring over the hammer. He flicked the safety to “fire” and stuck the trigger into the opening in the bottom of the receiver, the disconnector on top, put the hammer down, and tapped a pin in place to secure the whole assembly.

  Now the weapon had a trigger. He attached a trigger guard, the barrel, gas bolt, and a flash suppressor. Then a scope.

  After four hours of careful work, he was done.

  He lifted it up and inspected it. He flicked the safety on and off, pulled the trigger back a few times, ejected and reloaded empty magazines. Everything worked. He carried it over to the table in the rec room and set it with the others; he’d assembled an arsenal. He had assembled weapons for long-range, AR-10s equipped with scopes, and AR-15s with red dots for closer range, the red dots being lighter and quicker at acquiring targets in close quarters. Urban environments; vehicles.

  He was doing this mostly from boredom. Also he wanted to earn a few extra dollars while waiting for his journey to begin. He’d asked friends in Afghanistan if they wanted weapons, and if they did, he offered to build the weapons for them, customizing the guns for whatever their needs were. All they had to do was the background check for the lower receiver, the part the government considered a firearm, and the rest Alek could handle. He liked working on weapons anyway; it was quiet meditative work, time by himself with his thoughts, and it was positive, constructive work, bringing something into being. It was like painting, which he used to love, and anyway he had a month after his deployment before he was due to meet Lea in Germany. By the time he left, he’d made a dozen semiautomatic weapons for his friends.

  25.

  ALEK LANDED IN FRANKFURT, flush with money from his deployment and the little extra from the guns he’d made. Lea picked him up at the airport, and together they drove the hour to her home in Heidelberg. Alek was struck by how pretty it was, green and scenic, and everything seemed organized. He met Lea’s family; he met other people in their town.

  Lea’s family had an extra room set up for him, so he put his bags down, and his dip into history began immediately. Lea took him to the castle in Heidelberg, rich with competing legacies, having changed hands over the course of almost a millennium, and which was somehow almost miraculously preserved despite all the destruction to so many other German cities during World War II. It had been the headquarters of the American forces in Europe when America was helping to fight Nazism. It was a place where much of the destruction was done by the Germans themselves. During Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” two synagogues were burned down, Jews were killed, and afterward they were deported en masse, but the Americans did no damage. The city, somehow, never fell victim to the strategic bombing the Allies visited upon so many others.

  Alek found his own way to make his mark. He had Lea take a picture of him holding a miniature American flag, just in the right place, so that it looked like it was one of the heralds flying from the high turret of the castle. Claiming Heidelberg castle for America. A perfect way to start.

  Lea took him to Rothenberg, to see buildings older than Alek’s country, another perfectly preserved medieval town that escaped the bombings in World War II. It was a city along the Romantic Road, and nearly unchanged since the Middle Ages. He bought a stupid-looking German hat, but he thought it was funny. That night when Spencer wrote to check in:

  In Munich, So much history

  Alek thought, you have no idea.

  It was a funny thought, now that he stood there: his mom’s father coming from America to Germany, just as his dad’s dad was doing the opposite. The next day he took Lea to help him find the café where Heidi’s dad had gone after getting his stripes, halfway through 1953, and Alek bought Lea a beer there, at the very place Nicholas Neuberger, Grandpa Nick, had celebrated becoming a sergeant, sixty-two years before.

  It was a café next to the old Heidelberg bridge over the Neckar, and being there put Alek in a pensive mood, thinking about the other things Grandpa Nick had told him. He told Lea how Grandpa Nick was raised in poverty in upstate New York during World War II, and the military was his chance to satisfy his wanderlust. He’d come to Germany, as a mechanic based in the Rhineland during the Korean War, but his furloughs took him farther; he’d told Alek about his favorite trip while stationed in Germany, down to Spanish Morocco.

  It was the summer of 1953. Nicholas Neuburger had time off and money to burn. He wanted to see Africa, so he went down to Gibraltar with some other GIs and caught a ferry to Morocco. It was there that he’d had one of the most bizarre, inexplicable experiences in his life, a thing so out of context that he’d written it down and placed it in a scrapbook, because he didn’t think anyone would believe him otherwise. He didn’t e
ven tell the story until two generations later, when his grandchildren went up to his ranch and asked about his time in the service.

  Sitting where his grandfather got his stripes, Alek remembered that weird old story. The summer of ’53, Grandpa Nick riding on a train across French Morocco with other GIs on the way to Casablanca. Most of the passengers were sleeping, but Grandpa Nick was awake. He couldn’t sleep because there was a group of Frenchmen—or at least he figured they were French because they were wearing suits and had pale skin—laughing and carrying on, so every time he dozed off a shriek of laughter and rapid-fire French woke him up. He sat looking out the window, watching the passing countryside. At 2 A.M.—and he knew it was 2 A.M.; on this matter he was certain—he saw a band of men on galloping horses, wearing robes and swords with blades as big as butchers’ knives, ride up beside the train. The horses kept picking up speed, galloped ahead of his car, then the train slowed, stopped, the horsemen boarded, and they moved into Nick’s car, waving their blades like they might just tomahawk anyone in their way. It all happened in what felt like an instant. Before Nick knew what was happening they were in his car, right next to him, grabbing a man in a suit who, now that Nick looked at him closely, seemed by his complexion to be Middle Eastern. The bandits, or whatever they were, grabbed the man by the hair, and as they yanked his head his eyes met Nick’s with a look of pleading, of terror.

  A look not just of surprise; it was as if some terrible but not wholly unexpected thing was happening to him, something he might have been worried about, might have been running from.

  The horsemen dragged him off the train, and the French revelers who’d kept Nick awake now looked directly at him, and spoke to him in English that was so crystal clear it alarmed him, like their bodies had suddenly been possessed. “Do not move. Do not say a thing.”

  They stared right at him.

  Out the window, he saw the Middle Eastern man in Western clothes slumped crosswise over a saddle. His body was limp. Nick couldn’t tell if he was dead, or bound, or unconscious. And then the horses galloped off. The train started again. He never learned what happened. So it stuck with him; he wrote down the story with the date and time and put it in that scrapbook. He never forgot about it, even in his old age, because it was a story that didn’t yet have an end.

  “WOW, THAT IS A CRAZY STORY.” Lea seemed impressed by Alek’s lineage, and Alek began to feel proud of it. He felt his own journey echoed Grandpa Nick’s, the military providing the means to finally find his own history, and he was falling into a comfortable rhythm here. Each night he slept at Lea’s house; each day she drove him to another site in southern Germany.

  She took him to Phantasialand, a theme park in Cologne for a familiar kind of fun, riding roller coasters and wandering through the huge parts of the park designed as world neighborhoods: Chinatown, Mexico, and the one Alek found the most interesting, Deep in Africa. There they rode the one everyone seemed to be talking about, the Black Mamba, an inverted coaster that passed through towers meant to mimic the mud-brick walls and jutting crossbeams of North African mosques. They banked through near misses, the whole ride designed to make you think you were going to run into some great danger, but then at the last minute, you’d bank hard off your course and be diverted to safety.

  He was most taken with how everything in that section of the park all the way down to the bathrooms had the pointed arches he recognized from photographs of mosques. Everything was adjusted for history, for place and time. Walking through that part of the park was like walking through the souks of North Africa. The attention to detail amazed him. Stalls with thatched wood roofs, red dirt paths—he felt like he could be walking through a city in Tunisia, or in Morocco.

  Each night he slept at Lea’s house, and each day she showed him something new.

  He wanted to get soccer jerseys, so she took him to a huge sporting goods store in Mannheim, where he bought two for his brother Solon, the biggest fan in the family. Solon had been desperate to come on the trip, so Alek figured he’d take a few jerseys back for him. For himself, Alek bought a blue-and-red-striped Bayern Munich jersey, and had Lea ask the store to screen-print his favorite player’s name on the back. He liked it so much he decided to try and wear it every day. He would be wearing it four days later when the entire European press corps descended on him.

  He was supposed to be with Lea for just a week, but it felt so good with her family, and they were so kind, and he was saving so much money, he couldn’t think of a good reason to leave. On his eighth day he heard from Spencer that he and Anthony were in Germany too, but up in Munich, and Alek was having too good of a time down south to leave.

  On his tenth day, after coming back from a hike with Lea, he had a Facebook message from Spencer:

  Headed to Berlin!

  Alek still didn’t feel like leaving.

  After his eleventh day:

  Just met this weird rocker dude at a bar. We’ve changed plans.

  We’re going to Amsterdam! Will keep you posted.

  By then Alek figured he’d put Lea’s family out long enough; might as well start the reunion now. So on his twelfth day in Heidelberg, Lea drove him back to Mannheim. He caught a bus to Amsterdam but got off at the wrong stop and had to catch a cab the last twenty-five miles.

  * * *

  On board the 15:17, Alek looks out the window from his first-class seat as the last of the Netherlands passes by. He’s bored, and a little antsy. He’s eager to squeeze the last bit of fun out of this trip because now that his tour in Afghanistan is over, the most interesting part of his life is over too, and that turned out to not even be very interesting. All he’s had is a few weeks in Europe, and then in a week or two he’ll be back in Oregon, working at Costco, taking night classes at community college, sleepwalking toward some degree he doesn’t care all that much about.

  Spencer sleeps to his right, sealed into his own world by noise-canceling headphones. Across the aisle, Anthony sleeps too. Why hasn’t he been closer to Anthony? In hindsight, Anthony is the kind of person Alek likes being around. Laid back, unaffected. Genuine. And yet he hadn’t talked to Anthony in seven years. Not since junior high. They’d been a handful, the three of them, in seventh, eighth grade, tearing through the neighborhood with paintball masks, BBs welting each other’s skin and plinking off doors and windows. Leaping over downed trees in the forest behind the old elementary school, imaginary infantry charges, piling into the basketball coach’s living room to play Call of Duty until their eyes watered and their thumbs ached. Acting up in class, the three of them, their own civil disobedience against the family who ran their school. It was Spencer who had pulled Anthony into their friendship when Anthony arrived at the school, wide-eyed and friendless. Alek remembers being fine with it, liking Anthony even then—Anthony, who seemed dumbstruck by every aspect of suburbia. It was almost like having a little brother, a plebe to indoctrinate into their way of life, except that Anthony was actually a grade ahead.

  Alek gazes out the window at rolling fields, burnt straw-brown by late summer heat. He looks down at his phone, just in time to see the pulsing blue dot cross the line. We’re in Belgium! he thinks. FN Herstal is here. Fabrique Nationale d’Herstal, one of his favorite gun makers. All those rifles for the US military are made somewhere out there. Is Steyr from here? No, Steyr’s Austrian. It was in Oregon that he got his first real gun. He had time on his own, and he began to find solace in weapons. Not just the paintball and airsoft guns he and Spencer and Anthony had battled each other with in junior high; when he got to Oregon, his dad bought him a real 12 gauge, and Alek found purpose. He had something to share with his younger brother. How to fire it, how to clean it, how to take it apart and put it back together. Each weapon was a sophisticated machine, but also simple, and elegant, and sexy, and just fucking cool. They had histories. Firearms manufacturers changed ownership, armed the Allies, armed the Nazis—what kind of weapons did the Vietcong use, the Sandinistas? It was a hobby that folded int
o the one subject he’d always felt most at home with, since he and the two friends next to him had bonded back in their middle school history class.

  * * *

  26.

  THEY STUMBLED OUT onto the street in Amsterdam, drunk and giddy. They’d found a club, drunk too much, danced too much. Alek woke up in a heap on the floor of the hostel room, head throbbing, but content. He’d get his own room tomorrow night; he was desperate for a bed. On Friday they were supposed to catch the 15:17 for Paris, but already he was thinking they’d skip it, catch a later one. Amsterdam had exceeded his expectations, and they all wanted more time here.

  “Oh, man, how crazy is this?” he’d said when he first caught up with them at the hostel. “The first time we’re all together after, what, seven years? And it’s in Europe!”

  Of course, he’d thought it strange at first, random, that Spencer invited Anthony on their European trip. His bonding with his best friend, this last hurrah before a boring pedestrian life, it felt altered at first. Now that they were all together again, though, it felt right. Old friends, a new place. A city none had explored, opening itself up before them. The place itself was old meeting new, gleaming space-age structures rising out of cobblestone streets with centuries of history.

  They went out at night, went to a soccer game during the day. They drank beer while the sun was still up, they made friends easily here. There was a chemistry to this place where the three had finally come together after so many years. Was it just him, or did the place buzz with its own energy? Alek didn’t want to leave.

  That was his style; he was beginning to understand that about himself, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. To stay in a place, get to know it, get to know the people, maybe find a girl. Spencer and Anthony, they still seemed to want to see as many places as possible, burning through Europe like the whole continent was on a limited-time offer. Alek wanted to take it slow, soak it in. In Amsterdam, for the first time, Spencer and Anthony agreed.