THe Last Ones Off

Brian Gibson | Spring 2022

Now that the train was off to a start, grinding steadily along, Alice could finally relax. She slipped off her coat and folded it into her lap. “Ned, you ought to make yourself comfortable,” she said, seeing that he still had not yet removed his hat. He was hardly even sitting, wound up as tightly as always and looking like he was ready to spring up at any moment sputtering epithets. Some for her, for booking for the two of them this godforsaken trip; some for the young man in charge of issuing tickets, who admittedly had been rather bad at his job; some for the train itself, which had no doubt found some way to annoy him. She guessed that it was aggravating his hearing aids. She thought about asking if it would be possible to run the train any quieter, but guessed it would not and dismissed the possibility.
“I’ll keep it on,” he said curtly.
“All right, then, if that’s what you want,” she replied. “Did you see that dessert cart they were pushing around when we got on? It had all sorts of sweets. I didn’t recognize half of them!”
“Right. I hardly noticed.”
Alice waited hopefully for any further reply, and when it was not given, continued, “Oh, I hope they get us something to eat soon. Maybe they keep a menu in the car.”
She shuffled through a shelf of magazines beside her for a menu but found nothing, so she settled for a years-old Good Cooking magazine. Not that it mattered that it was years old: if one thing never changed, it was mealtime. Cheesecake was good centuries ago, it was good today, and it would still be good in another five hundred years, assuming people still cared about cheesecake in the future. She basked in the images of fruit tarts for every shade of the rainbow, golden pies with peaks of whipped cream in their centers, croissants torn into a cross-section to present to her the interior folds and flakes of their dough.
For his part, Ned had picked up his place in a novel he brought from home, a whodunnit which had found its way onto their coffee table from somewhere or other. Alice gave it a try, but it was too grisly for her. She had stopped after the murder scene was described, with innards and intestines hanging out of the poor girl’s abdomen and her blood seeped into the carpet and all sorts of other horrible things. It was perverted; she had lost any interest in it. Ned began reading it at once when Alice told him that she was giving it up. When she asked him why, he said that it would be wasteful not to, and of course, wastefulness was the honorary eighth cardinal sin in Ned’s estimation. He smiled at the book, hardly registering her interest in him. Maybe he had figured out who murdered that girl before the detectives did.
“Well, hello folks!” a booming, jovial voice crackled through a speaker overhead. Ned swore and ripped out one of his hearing aids, handing the greasy thing to Alice for safekeeping. She folded it in a handkerchief. “Let me be the first to welcome you to the Andromeda Express. Just a few announcements before we get our afternoon started. The meet-and-greet luncheon will end in ten minutes, so I hope you’ve all eaten your fill. After that, we’ll have blackjack in Car 13-F, and dinner at seven. Thank you for choosing Andromeda for your vacation.”
Alice and Ned rushed out of their car. “I swear I never heard a thing about any luncheon,” Alice said.
“You probably just missed it,” he said.
“Why did you not say anything then?”
“Wasn’t hungry.”
Alice did not believe that. He looked just as pained as she felt at the prospect of going hungry. They passed through dozens of the same train car: rich oak with gold accents that stopped feeling luxurious after about fifteen times of seeing them replicated. It was like a hotel themed after a train, a copy of a copy. But the tickets had been on sale and she did not particularly mind the tackiness of the décor. She found it far more charming, anyway, than any marble and velvet ballroom could have been.
When they entered the dining car where the luncheon was, hardly any food remained in the line of chrome tins bisecting the room. There were a few cold chicken breasts rolled in herbs, a pudding thoroughly mangled by everybody scooping out sections seemingly at random, a nearly full tray of empanadas, a Mexican delicacy which was apparently coming into fashion but which nobody was yet brave enough to try. A few staff members picked at what was left, along with another couple: a balding, portly man in a red Hawaiian shirt and his wife, a professional-looking woman who was bouncing a fat baby on her shoulder.
“Hello!” Alice called over at them. “Your baby is adorable.”
They traded a worried glance. Alice worried that they thought she was one of those crazed kidnappers, driven to extremes by her own infertility–what a first impression! But the woman only said, “Sorry, he’s asleep now. We’re trying to keep him quiet.”
“Right, go to a public space to keep your baby asleep,” Ned grumbled. “Parents these days are something else.”
The other three of them laughed nervously. “What are your names?” Alice asked, more quietly now.
They were Charlie and Marina, from Boston. He was an auditor; she was an accountant. “A match made in corporate hell,” according to Charlie, “but we made it work.” The baby’s name was Linda, their youngest.
“How wonderful,” said Alice. Ned had wandered off somewhere in the middle of a sentence—maybe it was when Charlie had been telling her about how they had come to live in Boston. He was repeatedly trying the shutter on a window now, but it wouldn’t stay open. She thanked Charlie and Marina for their time, making an apologetic nod in Ned’s direction. They nodded back; they had reached an understanding. Marina tried her best to look sympathetic but only succeeded in contorting her face into some strange grimace. Alice said her goodbyes as quickly as was possible without causing offense. They were very polite about it as well, not even remarking on it, and everything went quite smoothly.

* * *

Ned peeled open a third caramel that he had brought from home, one of the great mound of them bumping around in his pocket. He had made sure they would last, with the logic that if it came to living on candy or resorting to cannibalism, he would take the candy. At least, his blood sugar wouldn’t suffer. The train’s conditions were atrocious, though no worse than he had planned for. When he had brought out a cigarette and begun to light it, one of the attendants had practically sprinted to him and asked him to put it out, as if they were both misbehaving children in danger of being caught by the conductor and thrown out the back by the seats of their pants. She had talked to him like all overly eager-to-please young people did. They always thought they were speaking softly, even when they were practically yelling. “SIR, I DON’T THINK YOU’RE ALLOWED TO SMOKE ON THE TRAIN,” she said kindly.
“Why didn’t anybody say anything about this before?” he asked.
“YOU’LL HAVE TO ASK THE CAPTAIN THAT, SIR. I’M NOT IN CHARGE OF THE ANNOUNCEMENTS.” She smiled apologetically, and Ned considered offering her a cigarette to make her go away. By the looks of her, she needed one. She was terribly pale, pulsating with nervous energy.
Alice had apologized for him, snatching the partially lit cigarette out of his hand, and stuffing it into her purse; that was the end of that, although a tiny wisp of smoke still rose out of her bag. He had to tell her to be careful before she caught herself on fire. She looked up at him unfazed, like it had been obvious to her that the cigarette was still smoking and she was getting around to putting it out. Now, it was half past six. He and Alice were reclined in their seats: she, flipping through her magazines and he, trying to doze off.
But there was a knock on the car door and then it slid open. “We’re sorry to bother you,” said the man from the luncheon, still wearing the same shirt. Evidently, he was not sorry enough not to do the bothering in the first place. “We were wondering if you were going to blackjack tonight. If you are, we’d love to go with you.”
Had Alice really made such an impression on them? Then again, he should not have been surprised. She was magnetic when she decided to be.
“I don’t think we’ve decided at all,” Alice said, turning her stare onto him. Truthfully, he had no idea whether she wanted to go whatsoever, whether she wished for him to let her have her fun with her new friends or to rescue her from an awkward night of listening to stories and jokes that did not interest her.
“I was about to go to sleep,” he said. “If you go, just don’t bet too much.”
Marina interrupted, “I actually thought that you could go with Charlie. I’ve been dying to meet your wife and Charlie’s been wanting to get to know you, too.”
“Perfect,” Alice said politely. He glared at her, not for sending him out on his own, but for withholding some crucial piece of information that would explain why. But still, he heaved himself out of the seat. Charlie tried to help him through the corridors, but he did not need or want it, and Charlie retreated, slightly sheepish now.
The blackjack car was already full of people and yelling and a cocktail of bold odors when they arrived. Smoke twisted almost into a solid, though he could hardly tell where it was coming from. He felt like gagging and, as he entered behind Charlie, he slid up a window to fumigate the car to non-toxic levels. Charlie introduced them, though it was hardly necessary. Not a moment later and they were already dealt into the round and drinks were poured for both of them. Good-quality bourbon, too. Not even close to what was served at dinner, which raised questions about priorities and the appropriate order of them. Ned had two glasses and asked them for another card. He went over 21 and handed over his twenty dollars. Charlie had three glasses in the same span of time, saying something indistinct to the dealer in the torrent of senses. He lost money too.
Charlie leaned over to him. “So, what’s your story?”
Ned huffed. “Feeling subtle tonight, aren’t we? Why did you invite me here, just to interrogate me and my wife?”
Charlie laughed. “I guess you could put it that way,” he said, which surprised Ned. He had not expected honesty, even from the drunken man. “The best way I can explain it is that my wife is worried and I’m worried because she’s worried. She’s even thought about a divorce. We were just wondering how you made it this far, whether there was any big secret you’ve been keeping from us.” The weight and embarrassment of his sincerity seemed to catch up to him immediately, and he quickly downed another glass.
“There’s no secret that I know of,” Ned said. “But there will always be change, which is fine as long as you never forget that.” He would have stopped there, but something in him or outside of him urged him on. In the thick of the smoke, he could hardly see Charlie’s face looking at him.
“Alice and I met in college. We were classmates in Latin. She was one of the only girls in the entire college, and certainly the only girl in our class. I don’t know why she sat next to me. I’d like to think it was God or fate or destiny, that there was some reason that she did, but no matter how it happened, we got along well. Soon, I asked her out for milkshakes and burgers and we began dating. She was so pretty back then, unbelievable. She still is, if you know where to look. She got into the jazz scene and she was a great dancer too; she used to take me dancing at bars and famous people’s parties, though I never got very good. Back in those days, every day with her felt like the end of the world, some cataclysmic event, like the rapture had finally come. It was silly. I can’t imagine how I could have felt that way, but I remember that I did. Then, one day, about two years after I started dating her, I found out from one of my friends that she had slept with another man. A friend of mine, no less. He had done it and then come in all puffed and proud of it, bragging to anyone who would listen. I knew that if we fought, he would have beaten me and that only would have puffed out his feathers more. So I had my friends do it with me. They all hated him too after that display. We told him we were going to get drunk at this creek we all went to, out in the middle of the forest, and then when he showed up, we did it and dumped him miles outside of town. I didn’t even know if he would come back, but he managed it all right. When he did, he knew it was me who had done it—I mean, planned it all—but he couldn’t do anything because he knew he was outnumbered. He tried to pick a few fights with me after that, but by the time he did, I had been exercising fairly regularly and the fight was even enough that it wasn’t worth it for either of us.
“After that, Alice and I made up, but I don’t think either of us ever forgot what had happened. She told me that it was a mistake and I believed her, but things were more intense after that. Straight out of college, we ran off to Canada and got married in the middle of the night, bought a house in Ohio. We both worked at the time: I was a manager at a publishing house, and she held all sorts of jobs. Factory work making shoelaces, teaching, running a fruit stand. She did it all. She always had some project she was working on, something to perk people’s interest if conversations ever got dull. By our forties, we were living two different lives. I felt I hardly knew her at all, even though she told me everything. We were just too careful with each other; too much went unsaid. I retired at 65. She kept working. Always working. Like if she stopped, she’d drop dead. Sometimes I think that she hates me. No, sometimes I know. I gave her everything she asked for and everything she didn’t, because I think I stole her from her life all those years ago.” Ned remembered that Charlie was listening. “I have no idea if that’s anything like what you’re going through. I sure hope it isn’t.”
Charlie looked like a deer in the headlights, desperately searching out his escape. Ned, finally remembering why he didn’t much care for sharing, set down his glass and asked for another card.

* * *

Marina was awfully pretty, in Alice’s opinion. She hadn’t seen it in the dining car. But in the glow of the moonlight giving her skin a silver hue, making her features strong and sharp, she looked how Alice had always wanted to look. They were standing in a car that Alice had not visited yet, a greenhouse overrun with plant life and fallen into disuse. Weeds and vines tangled together upon the sheet metal, up the walls and just onto the underside of the glass roof, and wilted cabbages demarcated a walkway across the car. Marina was telling Alice about her marriage, which Alice felt she had no right to be discussing. She hated talking about marriage with other women. It felt like a sin.
“I mean, it’s just like he doesn’t even see me anymore,” she told Alice. “Like all he wants is a wife, not me. I could be anybody else and it would be okay with him, as long as dinner was still hot and our kids were still taken care of.”
Alice nodded solemnly. “That’s horrible,” she said.
“And then he doesn’t ever want to do anything himself. I’m the one who cooks, cleans, does laundry, picks up Will from kindergarten, gets groceries, never mind that I have a job too!”
Alice truly felt horrible for Marina. “That’s awful,” she said.
“How did you do it with Ned?” Marina asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind me saying, you seem very different. How do you make it work all those years?”
Alice was unprepared to answer such a question. She noticed how beautiful Marina’s eyes were, a clear aquarium green. How could she stay in such a marriage with Charlie when she was so beautiful and young? And she was an accountant? For a moment, Alice almost hated her, envying her everything she did not know she had. Green is not your color, Alice told herself, which did well enough to ease her nerves. She was sure that Charlie loved Marina, probably more than anything. He was a polite man, and charming, from her encounters with him. He surely entertained her with stories of his day, of the people he liked and the ones that had offended him; he must have told jokes, played gently with his children. As for his flaws, every man had some and every woman came to love them anyway for their sharp edges, given enough time. It was quite the arrangement.
“Oh, I didn’t do anything,” Alice finally said. “It was always Ned and I. Parts of a whole. We made it work together. We tried our best to make it worth it for each other.”

* * *

Ned slid open their sliding door as quietly as he could, as not to wake Alice. He sat next to Alice, lowering himself gingerly. She was taking shallow sighs: in, out, in. She looked content; she was having a good dream. Soon, she would be awake and the train would have to come to a stop, just as quickly as it began.