"Lake View" by Lituo Huang
I had heard other trains on other nights—as a child in Indiana when the house our rented room was in abutted the track, I’d be jolted awake by the train passing by the open window until the child I was grew used to the sound and added it to a dream—a black crow overhead would open its beak and out came the shriek of the train, first louder and louder and then diminishing with a distorted pitch as it taxied away on the physics of the air. A few years later I had heard the horn from the inside of a shared sleeper cab on an overnight trip from Beijing to Harbin, waking up with a wet face (my top bunkmate had knocked over a pillow in his sleep, which in its turn knocked over a bowl of cold ramen on the side table squeezed next to my lower bunk) and stumbling past a nodding attendant strapped into her seat with her head dipping at a disturbing angle from her neck, to the squat toilet, a hole communicating directly with the outside. I squatted, heard the rattle of the wheels through the hole, the sound described by children as chugga chugga but which is nothing like that, and as I bent my ear closer to the hole, hypnotized, the train blew its horn. To me, in the rattling sarcophagus near the tail of that dragon, it was a human howl.
I was eighteen the night when I heard that long and lonely warble again. It was the night Andy and I tried to ride the rails.
Andy had backed away from the track and was inches from my hand. We crouched low where the big gravel sloped away from the track and grass had started to poke up between the rocks. The headlight grew in our view like a descending moon. Then we lay flat on our stomachs. The gravel was powdery beneath my lips. The train engine roared past much faster than I’d imagined it would, and it was instantly clear that we’d never be able to run fast enough to catch it. Still, after the engine had passed, we jumped up and ran alongside the loping cars as our backpacks jogged on our backs. In the darkness we could hardly see the white names painted on each shipping container. We reached our arms out for the cars that passed, one every few seconds, and in a minute the train was gone.
The final blinking red light disappeared. We stopped running and stood on the gravel track, breathing heavy. I felt foolish—I had never expected the train to move so fast. We hadn’t been able to catch the last car like I’d imagined so many times, latching onto a conveniently placed railing and executing a simian leap like something I’d once seen or imagined Wile E. Coyote doing, and then nestling in a bed of straw with our new hobo friends as we rode into a new life. Even my escape plans suffered from a poverty of imagination, traveled along well-worn lines.
Andy didn’t look disappointed though. He bent down and started unbuckling his sandals. I noticed he was wearing Birkenstocks. It struck me as remarkable that he’d been running in them. I started laughing. I’d like to say that my laughing made Andy laugh and then maybe grab and kiss me, but he didn’t. He took off his sandals and walked ahead of me on his bare feet over the sharp rocks and I followed along, perplexed but happy to be sharing this walk and hoping it was cementing our destiny. We walked until we reached an RTA stop. It was late. We sat waiting for the next train back to the dorms. His feet were bleeding.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
He lifted his feet and touched them like precious fossils and in touching them streaked the blood over his dusty skin until they looked like pieces of petrified wood. Now I know that stealing from the Petrified Forest brings you bad luck.
The lights at the station zapped and popped and cast light and dark, light and dark on us. When the RTA came, we sat next to each other.
#
“Life is like that,” Andy said.
“A box of choc-lates,” I drawled, trying to be funny.
“No,” he said, “anticlimactic.”
He picked through a bowl of raw mushrooms—he always ate raw vegetables in my presence, chewing on those cold, spongy cell walls until they slid down his throat, defeated. What would happen if he ever ate, for instance, lobster mac and cheese? Would his bowels reject the substrate, would he begin wearing Top-Siders without socks and a polo shirt over another polo shirt instead of his Grateful Dead t-shirts with neck holes so loose I could see his one prematurely white back hair?
I didn’t think our aborted cross-country tramp had been anticlimactic. It was the climax of the journey I’d been on in my head. On that RTA ride back to campus we had gotten off a few stops before University station because Andy had said he was thirsty, and it couldn’t wait. We’d wandered into a small convenience store, dim, with what I’d been convinced was an apparatus for smoking opium tucked in the corner with what I’d been convinced was opium scattered around a metal ring atop its vase-like body and three tentacles reaching out and looping around itself once, twice, for a triad of smokers to tongue. It was rational, I had known at once, for opium to be smoked in groups of three. A balanced configuration.
After looking through the coolers all stocked with single cans of beer, Andy had finally grabbed a can of Arizona iced tea, always ninety-nine cents. At the counter, one of the opium smokers eyed us with sleepy disdain after we confessed that neither of us had any money. Andy left the can on the counter and we slunk out of the store as the opium smoker yelled, “No shoes, no service!” Andy was barefoot again.
We’d gone around the back of the store and drank directly from a tap in the wall, whereupon we’d realized we were hungry too. With raccoon-like stealth, we reached into the dumpster and pulled a dried stalk half-hung with grapes (withered but still rotting—it disturbed me how something so dry could spoil). “Yum yum,” I had said, before biting the plumpest remaining one and peeling away its tannic skin. A peeled grape tastes nothing like grape.
I watched Andy chew the mushroom. I was bothered by how he’d missed our climax. How thoughtfully he chewed the darn mushroom after placing each slice on his tongue like a Communion wafer.
“Fine then,” I said, not responding to his remark about the anticlimax but summing up my own thoughts, “let’s do Lake View tonight.”
#
Lake View Cemetery, bordered by East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights, was so named for the view of Lake Erie from the balcony of the monument wherein Lucretia Garfield’s casket lies next to that of her husband and ex-President James. “Doing” meant climbing the fence and spending the night there, like in the episode of the cartoon where the plucky gang of children spends the night in a haunted house. They do an episode like that when they start running out of ideas. I had run out of ideas calculated to make Andy realize that through all his searching (he’d recently started wearing a long wooden necklace and quoting Ram Dass), I would be the one to offer up to him the everlasting truth. In the weeks since we’d missed jumping the train, we’d achieved only a temporary nirvana by getting high together, first after riding our bikes in the rain (another calculation on my part—years later I learned that bungee-jumping, rollercoaster-riding, or fighting off a mugger together were recommended first dates) to buy catnip in bulk from the co-op. According to the internet, you could get messed up drinking catnip tea. All we’d gotten were headaches, but it didn’t deter us from returning to the same co-op, this time on a dry day and by public bus, to purchase one gram each of powdered nutmeg for every ten of our combined pounds of young bodyweight, agitating the powder with lemonade, and chugging the mixture before the red dust settled to the bottom. That did mess us up. I heard “Over the Rainbow” in my left ear and was walking on a planet with greater than Earth’s gravity, before Andy led me to my lofted bed, which I only managed to reach the top of by climbing with hawk-like focus, and left me there unmolested.
The cemetery idea had been in my head for a while. It was my trump card. In the exact episode of the aforementioned cartoon, after the kids had shrunk and been transported into a man’s GI tract by way of tuna fish sandwich to understand digestion and had learned about the life cycle of the Atlantic salmon by morphing into kid-headed salmon and nearly dying after spawning, they had spent the night in a haunted house and learned about sound, or the dual wave and particle nature of light, or something—and had come out of it bound forever. Lake View would bind Andy to me.
We had planned to meet at the gate at eleven p.m. sharp. I thought that after we’d found the perfect stretch of fence to climb over and then walked through the grounds searching for a corner in which to bed down (beneath the obelisk of J.D. Rockefeller or the gravestone of the Untouchable Eliot Ness or folded under the wings of the Angel of Death Victorious, reputedly haunted or so a cassette recording taken overnight purported to prove by hissing cries indistinguishable from wind), that by midnight we’d be snug as bugs and maybe holding hands.
At eleven sharp I was at the gate. There was no need for light, the cemetery being surrounded by a stone wall taller than the tallest conceivable human, topped with a metal fence with arrowheads on every post. How many miles, I wondered, how many tons, how many masons had labored for how long on this perimeter between the dead and the living? I had plenty of time to think as I stood there waiting for Andy, already regretting that I hadn’t worn more clothes. It was in the low forties and the cold during my inactivity had bitten through every part of my body not covered by my coat. I remained, however, committed to the venture, even if I had to scrape a pit in the dirt and sleep curled up nose to anus like a dog—but after thirty minutes of it, the cold was enough to overpower my will.
After a hot shower back in my dorm and some vodka that I’d microwaved and then spiced with a Celestial Seasonings Christmas-flavored teabag, I pulled on the two pairs of pants I should have worn earlier. I intended to hobble over to Andy’s dorm to exchange my disappointment for his explanations, but the hot shower and drink after the cold made me tired. I fell asleep, nursing my resentment like a hot water bottle.
In the late morning, after I’d finished retching into the trash can strategically placed by my inexplicably wet mattress, I walked outside to the sun winking off a thin coat of snow. The lawn outside the dining hall was patched with white and the air smelled like grilling meat. I was hollowed out from the retching. The sun was healthy and warmed my face and the cold air was healthy and chapped it. I was an empty clay cup, freshly fired—clean and pure. Who knows what alchemy is worked in the mortar of sleep? When I saw Andy at our usual table, I saw him as an old friend returned from years overseas—wearing a different suit, a different smell, a different face.
I sat down with a bowl of Froot Loops. Never before had I eaten Froot Loops.
“I’m sorry,” Andy said, sniffling. His nose was running, a fact which I found neither repulsive nor deserving of sympathy. “I was caught up talking to Lynette—” and this normally would have induced in me sickening jealousy which I would have suppressed before responding with measured politeness, but today, as I crunched my Froot Loops, each color of which was equally tasteless, I found my detached interest genuine.
“Kyle—” (this was Lynette’s boyfriend) “started using again.” Andy cracked a celery stick. For breakfast.
“Oh.”
Andy told me that he’d finally arrived at Lake View Cemetery just before midnight. He had climbed the fence—I thought of the arrowheads—and hunted for me from darkness to darkness (his words), nearly stepping on a bundle by Wade Pond that he thought was my sleeping body but that had turned out to be a vagrant, before giving up. I could have told him how I’d waited, how disappointed I’d been, what a cosmic coincidence it was that we’d missed each other and what our next adventure should be, but I didn’t. I asked about Kyle and Lynette. How were they doing. Andy sniffled again and looked at me then the same way he would look at me years later when I was a guest at his wedding to a woman whose last name he appended to his own, that is to say, with a look that left no mark.
Lituo Huang lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of a chapbook of poetry and short fiction, This Long Clot of Love. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in JMWW, Hermine, the VIDA Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first novel. www.lituohuang.comTwitter: @LituoH