Train Thoughts

by Jay Sigler

  Between intoxicated flashes of consciousness, I vaguely remembered asking random people for directions. The rest of the time was spent in blackness where I remember nothing, though I somehow stumbled my way back to the train station. I threw up in the handicapped stall in the bathroom and briefly passed out. There were no dreams. I woke up a short time later, rinsed out my mouth, and got on the train.

  Chapter 17

  Another week passed by and as I had anticipated, Neil was my lone remaining friend. He sat by himself on the first level of the train with no one to impress with his boating stories. I felt bad for him. But it was nothing compared to how bad I felt for myself, knowing I’d sat across the aisle from my wife's killer for months, and that it had taken the murder of four other people before I finally realized it. I was fueled by only alcohol and revenge. I lost my grip on everything else in my life that was not Shawn.

  “These equations were supposed to be finished last week. Is everything okay?” Mr. Stark had chosen to take a personal interest in me. I was impressed he made it down here on his own. Julie must have reported the results of her psychobabble bullshit analysis. I would have expected this kind of pseudo concern immediately following Vicky’s death, but at that time my performance was at its finest so there was no need for it.

  But now work wasn’t as important. My new single goal was to find Shawn and make him pay. It was my motivation to board that train every day. And since I had to go somewhere after studying him during the commute, I ended up at work. Nowhere in that plan did it say anything about doing quality work.

  I told Mr. Stark that I was just a little distracted. What he didn’t know was that by “distracted” I meant not giving a fuck about solving equations. He walked out of the room at about the same time I reached into my desk to grab my flask. The alcohol helped me focus and plan. It allowed me to get creative about what I was going to do about Shawn. I built a new routine. After the flask came the notebook. My suicide attempts and all other meaningless shit was scratched off and replaced with things I wanted to do to Shawn.

  1. Swing a sock full of rocks at his face.

  2. Slice off his ears and feed them to him.

  3. Remove his teeth with a rusty nail and hammer.

  4. Rip out his heart with my own hands.

  5. Murder his soul.

  Then I jotted down a note: “Remember, waste the fucker’s life that killed your wife.”

  I was contemplating the correct spelling of “electrocution” before adding it to the list when Julie popped her head in the door.

  “Whatcha doin’?” she asked. It was apparently a day full of caring.

  “Not a whole lot. Trying to plan out a few things,” I told her, palming the flask and putting it back into the drawer. I hoped that the move was sly enough to not get caught, but it didn’t really matter anymore. I reeked like alcohol anyway and I could feel the muscles in my mouth not forming the words the way I intended.

  “Oh! That’s great! Is there anything I can do? Anything I can help you plan out? I’m pretty good with that stuff.”

  I didn’t really think this was her type of ordeal, but maybe she could be useful.

  “Um… I’m actually trying to get in touch with some… uh... old friends, but not sure how to get hold of them… I want to tell them about, you know.”

  “Oh…” her mouth turned down into a frown. She looked around like the answer was in the air somewhere. She really wanted to help me. The way she was programmed, helping me justified herself. Mission accomplished. “Well, have you tried the Internet? They have a ton of sites dedicated to getting back in touch with people, you know?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about but I said yes anyway.

  “Hmm…. Also, what about common friends? Is there anyone you know that would know these people?”

  “I doubt it.” I thought it would sound crazy if I told her my only friends were being murdered one by one, just like my wife had been. Something tugged at me with this thought. In a brief instant I felt two wires almost touch each other but failing to make a connection. It must have been because I had electricity on my mind.

  “Oh, that’s too bad.” Her mouth twisted with a final attempt to think of anything. “You’re sure there’s no one you know that could get in touch with this group of people?”

  Another tug. It was that phrase she used, “group of people,” combined with something I had thought about: “my only friends” or “only my friends.”

  The connection was finally made and a light bulb burned brightly in my head. There were hundreds of random people on the train every day, but Shawn had only gone after those that I had labeled my friends: the specific people I grew to know by watching them. That meant Shawn had watched me watching them before I watched him watching them. What did he want? Was he trying to send me a message since I had figured out that he killed Vicky? That didn't make sense. He could have just come after me. There was another problem to solve. I put it on hold for now as I realized that Shawn was probably still watching me. How he was doing it, I had no idea. He hadn’t been on the train lately and I knew nothing about him. It wasn’t as if I could just go over to his house, knock on the door, and ask him to come out so I could kick his ass.

  “Hello? Hello? You there?” Julie waved a hand in front of my eyes. I shook my head, clearing out the cobwebs. “Thought I lost ya. Your eyes kinda glazed over for a minute. You think of something?” she asked with hopeful excitement on her face.

  I had thought of something. I couldn’t go over to his house because I didn’t know where he lived. But if what I thought was true, then he knew where I lived. He had been there to kill Vicky. If he had been watching me on the train, there was a good chance he was still watching me at home too.

  “Yeah, Julie. I did.” And just to make her feel better, I added, “I think I just thought of someone. Thanks!”

  Her smile beamed from ear to ear. Mission accomplished.

  Chapter 18

  More alcohol. More hate. More paranoia. Every sound, every squeak, every creak of my house caused my heart to speed up as I expected to confront my wife’s killer. It usually turned out to be nothing. But Shawn was out there. I knew he was watching.

  The night before, I had been eating another frozen dinner, or maybe it was a sandwich. Suddenly a muffled tapping sound came from the living room behind me. I ignored it for a while and poured another drink. It had been a long day of no significance and I celebrated by getting smashed.

  I heard the noise again. It was him. It had to be him this time. The noise was drumming on the window, like someone was bored or impatient. Muffled patterns of four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  The rapid successions of taps had to be fingers. I could almost see it - pinky, ring, middle, and pointer.

  One, two, three, four. (Pinky, ring, middle, pointer.)

  One, two, three, four. (Pinky, ring, middle, pointer.)

  I fought the urge to get up. The last three hundred noises weren’t him, why would this time be any different?

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  One, two, three, four.

  It was probably just a branch hitting the glass, caught in a breeze. But the sound got louder, more insistent, more impatient.

  Quicker. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four…

  Over and over it repeated, begging me to check it out. I grabbed my bottle and walked to the living room, keeping the lights off so I could see the outside through the window instead of my own reflection. The darkness would also allow me to sneak up on Shawn and catch him in the act. It turned out that being drunk and being sneaky didn’t work well together. This was demonstrated when I kicked an empty vodka bottle I had thrown on the floor sometime the day before. Or maybe it had been the previous week. I couldn’t remember.

  I used every curse word in the book as the bottle spun end over end ahead of me. I le
aned over to grab my stubbed toe with my hands, but in my drunken state all I managed to do was hit the wall with my face. Stars spun as I keeled over. The blow had been hard enough to make my head swim and my vision blur even more. The kicked bottle ended its journey with a thud under the window from where I had thought I heard the noise. I sat on the living room couch, holding my stubbed toe in one hand and my swelling face in the other. All the commotion had surely scared Shawn off. I punched the couch, angry about having missed the chance to get my proof. I looked out the window anyway. Sitting on the ledge was a McDonald’s bag, its grease stains black under the florescent street lights. The image pulsated in and out of focus, syncing with my throbbing head. I saw that the bag was weighed down, kept it in its place on the ledge. Whatever it was, the weight was heavy enough to refute the gusts of wind blowing the rest of the trash in my lawn around in miniature funnels.

  I grabbed my bottle and, taking care not to hurt my swollen toe while I put my slippers on, walked outside to get the bag. I knew I was supposed to look into it; it had been left there for me on purpose. I took a huge gulp from the bottle and slowly uncurled the top of the bag. I looked in and saw one charred green eye looking up at me. I dropped the greasy bag and looked at my hands. I had just enough time to register that the stains were not grease before the world whirled around me like the cyclones of trash and I passed out.

  Chapter 19

  The next day I awoke on the floor next to my bed, with both the bottle and the bag gone. I wondered for an instant if the previous night had even happened; the whole event had a surreal dreamlike quality to it. The throbbing goose egg on my temple convinced me that it had been real. I was only able to remember what had happened after evoking random photographs of reality, snapshots of certain points in time.

  Flash - I saw myself screaming into the air, daring Shawn to show himself.

  Flash - I was inside, crawling upstairs on my belly.

  Flash - I was in the basement, getting more booze.

  Flash - I was outside, ripping the paper bag to shreds.

  Flash - I was beating a kitchen chair.

  If nothing else, I thought as I made my way out of my memories and into the shower, the bag proved that Shawn was still watching me.

  When I boarded the train, Neil was already there and staring out of the window, still alone. Shawn was also there, five rows ahead of him, acting like nothing had happened. My initial instinct to go down there and pummel his face in was trumped by logic. There was no need to rush into something that would most likely get broken up as soon as it started. I would get arrested, Shawn would know I was onto him, and I would never get my chance to make him suffer. If I followed him after the train ride, I would possibly get to impose my revenge on him in a more discreet manner. I reflected on how poorly my last attempt to follow him had gone, but the desire to make him pay without interruptions outweighed it. This was the man that had ruined my life in every way possible, and I wanted him to get everything that he deserved. I moved to a seat on the top row, where he would not be able to see me, but I could still keep an eye on him. I watched Shawn watch Neil for the entire length of the trip. I left a message for Julie to let her know I wasn’t going to be in today. This time, when Shawn got off of the train, I was right behind him.

  He exited the train and headed in the opposite direction of where I normally went. Seemingly oblivious to anything happening around him he cut through an alley, pausing for a moment to admire some graffiti on the walls. The painted image was a circle of children surrounding two adults, one male and one female, in a courtyard enclosed by buildings. They all were smiling and it appeared that the adults were telling a story or reenacting a play for the children. The alley opened up to a street, and Shawn walked two more blocks north and three blocks west. Then a quick right and then two more blocks north. I kept a very accurate mental note of his exact path so I wouldn’t get lost in unfamiliar territory again; my last adventure to an unknown place replayed in my mind like a TV show. I shuddered when I thought about the dull thud that had knocked out that woman. I couldn’t believe I had been so out of my mind, so drunk that I had actually hurt someone.

  Shawn finally stopped at a strip of offices all in a row. The particular office he stood in front of was plain, consisting of only a single glass door and walls that were floor to ceiling glass panels. The glass door had some words spelled out in white letters but I was too far away to see what they said. The giant glass windows had heavy, white curtains preventing those outside from seeing in. I was very cautious. This office could be the place he had taken Rob, Gina, Frank, and Sheila to do whatever he had done to them in real life. Knowing what this monster was capable of in my dreams, I imagined it was a shop full of prison rehabs selling chainsaws and guns. I waited until the door completely shut behind him before I went up for a closer look. The letters spelled out “Dr. Griffin, Dentist.” Either Shawn was a dentist or he had been taking the train to one every day for the last three months. And his teeth didn’t look that bad. I rolled this new information around in my head, impressed by the genius of it. It was the perfect cover-up. No one would ever suspect a prestigious man such as a dentist to be a murderer. With all of the drilling and teeth pulling, he obviously wouldn’t have an aversion to the blood he spilled while killing.

  I opened the door, careful to palm the little golden bell tied to the handle to prevent it from ringing as I entered. I looked around. Shawn had already gone to the exam rooms in back. I was in a waiting room with two other patients. A dark-skinned receptionist sat at a desk behind a sliding glass window. No one looked up at me when I entered the office. Like the front of the building, the room itself was plain. On the walls, there were only the generic pictures of fields, old trees, and dirty flowers that seem to hang in every dentist’s office. The faded browns, yellows, and pinks suggested that they had been hanging there for quite some time. The television in the corner silently predicted the parental status of promiscuous men, but no one was watching. Personally, I had already seen this episode. Magazines were scattered on tables that separated uncomfortable chairs from more uncomfortable chairs. All the pieces of a waiting room. It was all too predictable. I took a seat.

  “Can I help you?” a muffled voice called out to someone from behind the sliding glass window. “Excuse me, sir, do you have an appointment?” The voice was talking to me. Quite uncomfortably, I told her I did not.

  “Well, you need to fill out these forms before you can see the dentist.” She said this without looking at me, like she’d done it a million times before.

  I took the forms clasped to a clipboard with a pen and walked to an uncomfortable chair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to fill out these forms. I wasn’t sure I was ready to confront Shawn yet. I wasn’t sure what I was even doing here. But I had to act cool, so I started writing anything down, just to look like I was writing something.

  Name: Sock full of rocks

  Address: Slice off ears

  Reason for visit: Pull out teeth

  As I regurgitated my latest notebook entries onto the form, I thought about what I was really here for – information on this sick fucker.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I asked, suddenly very friendly.

  “Mmm-hmm?” she asked, still not looking at me, writing something more important that required far more attention.

  “I was wondering if you can tell me if… Sh... um… Dr… uh… Griffin has any other offices aside from this location?”

  “Nope.”

  “Uh… okay. Do you, um, have a card with his information? I’m actually just researching dentists right now so I don’t really need to see him yet.” I thought my answer was pretty convincing until I saw her stop writing.

  She made a point of putting down her pen very gently and folded her hands. Her head still pointed down to whatever she had been writing and only her eyes looked up at me with a blink. Mouth closed, she inhaled through her nose as she ran her tongue over the front of her teeth. Her upper lip rippled
from right to left and it looked like a caterpillar was crawling over them. Her eyes shifted to the right with a slight nod of her head. I saw that there was an oversized white wooden tooth holding an entire stack of business cards on the counter. Written across the tooth was the word “Information.”

  “Oh, right.” I said and took a card. “Thanks.”

  Her eyes widened, her forehead crinkled, and she tilted her head back as if to say, “Yep. Sure.” Then she went back to her business, picking up her pen as carefully as she had set it down.

  The card didn’t have all of the information I needed. “Does... Dr. Griffin have a home or emergency number? I don’t live around here and I would need a way to get hold of him during non-business hours… in case of a… tooth emergency. I live a couple hours north of here in… well, you probably never heard of it, but it’s by that giant new marina they’re building.”

  The pen barely made a sound as she set it down again. This time her entire head pointed at me as she interlocked her fingers and balanced her elbows on the table. I had her full attention now. “You don’t say. What is it with you people all the way up there wanting to travel all the way into the city?” The monotonous tone was void of any excitement.

  “What do you mean by 'you people'?” I asked.

  “Well. Not that it’s any of your business, but Dr. Griffin moved up that way about six months ago.”

  “Is that so?” Now I was getting somewhere.

  “He's also by that marina, and he’s always complaining that whatever they're doing causes his water to stop working, despite living right by some giant water tower. Serves him right though, living that far away. That's what I say. Anyway, any more questions?” She picked up her pen and I knew there would not be any more questions, despite her not answering my original one. But I did know the water tower she was talking about, and I now knew part of Shawn's real name. It was time to get to know Dr. Griffin.