ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Hollander
Midnight and the railroad crossing is down at the corner of Route 101 and Montauk Highway. I watch the train pull in to the North Bellport station; it groans to an agonized halt, blows out a phlegm-choked sigh for this brief respite. The windows are a checkerboard of light and darkness. The windows are the electric midnight ports of a hundred lives. They stretch in a rigid line, hugging the steel of the Long Island Railroad, televising the static unreality of the souls on board. I know who’s on this train . . .
I flip on the interior light in my Chevy Chevette. I light a cigarette. I watch myself, first in the rear-view mirror, where I am David Hollander, where I recognize the long face, the thin nose, the eyes scared and squinting. And then on the train, where I come alive in various guises, where I literally dream this dream to life. You see, I amthe little boy with the bandana wrapped around his skull, crying—I am his mother, nerves worn thin by this long night of travel; that’s me slapping the boy’s hand as he reaches for my purse, trying for another stick of gum when I’ve told him a dozen times “no” already. I’m the old woman drooling on herself, head pinned against the window as if to escape this menagerie. I’m the guy in the suit with the receding hairline, tie pushed over my shoulder, dozing in and out of consciousness beneath the spell of a Michael Crichton novel. And I’m also the trainman, only two hours into my night shift, hanging from the back railing, shouting into the black chill, “North Bellport! Next stop Patchogue!”
I am all these things, but I am also none of them. I am the dead pitch void where space is meaningless. I am the still tide of timelessness. I am Death’s master and the thing from which God cringes, the breath of doom and the stealer of dignity. I am that first fish, breaking through the ocean’s ceiling, gasping in the mud, eyes shrivelling up like peach pits. And I’m also something like a speck of flyshit on the bathroom mirror.
They’re looking at me. I’m looking back. In my Chevy Chevette. I’ve got the interior light on, you know. I’m a character too. I’m an invention too, here in this ten watt glow, here in this glass box. In the rear-view I watch myself, Hollander, operate; I watch his cigarette glow, watch his lips curl into a smirk. I wonder which one of us is the genuine article, which one of us orchestrates this fugue. Is it the conductor, in his grey suit, his arm hanging from the window, his eyes screwed up in careless fatigue? Is he the one responsible for this monologue? Is it David Hollander, here in his car, thinking about the time when he was thirteen, when he was still simply his parents’ child, and he set a handful of quarters on these very same tracks and waited for the wheels to come and sandwich them in a rush of steel?
Yes and yes and no; the question is badly phrased. We’re all the same ghost. We’re all going the same way, drifting from one brightened port to the next, carousing through hollowed-out night, running down as all systems do. I slip back inside Hollander’s body, into his lungs. I sponge up a cloud of tobacco. I exhale as the locomotive lurches forward with a resigned hiss, and leaves me there alone, where I pull a napkin from the glove compartment and write: Midnight and the railroad crossing is down at the corner of Route 101 and Montauk Highway.
Or somebody writes it anyway. Somebody just wrote that.