Esmé Wang - The Border of Paradise

“Yes,” I say, even though I know that the seat is not free. I had to pay for mine with money I took from Ma’s room, counting the bills aloud as though I’d done it all my life.

“Thanks.” He lifts his rucksack to the shelf above our heads and sits beside me.

So you leave because you want to sit next to morons like this fellow, sneers William. Xiao mei, you leave me here alone. You ignore the commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother.” On my journey to the train station I thought I saw William everywhere, which is an odd thing to think of a uniquely created young man such as my brother — but still I thought I saw him in the shadows of buildings and amorphous in the darkness of alleys, waiting to punish me. What, William asks, do you mean by all of this? What in God’s name do you think you are doing?

“Hey, I’m Randy,” the young man says, and reaches his hand out to me.

I say, “Sarah.”

He retracts his hand. If Randy’s face were a sculpture, I’d show William its image in a book. I’d say, This is well made, although I wouldn’t be able to express objectively what makes it so. Perhaps this is attraction, as I would be curious to know the gut-wrench of attraction for myself. I listen for any unusual tones from my heart and hear only blood ringing and ax striking wood. Randy asks me where I’m headed, and I tell him Sacramento, Sacramento being the only other place I’ve been, Sacramento being home to the Kucharskis. Mrs. Kucharski is dead, but perhaps I can find her husband, although I have never met him, and during our lessons I never even saw a photograph on display. But I am grasping at all possibilities. I must find a way to make a life for myself away from my upbringing, and a heroine’s journey is both the only and the grandest gesture I can think to make. Randy says that he’s going home to Vacaville from St. Christopher’s, where he’s a student. I nod, recognizing the saint. “Just started this year,” he adds. “You’re a student, too?”

I nod again.

“Where,” he asks, “do you go?”

What a strange question. Where do I go? Well, I go into the woods, and I go into the shed sometimes, and I go into my bedroom, and I go into the kitchen, and I go into the living room.

“I go wherever I please” is my answer.

Randy laughs. He has a pleasant laugh that sounds not quite grown. If his laugh were a tree it would be a sapling and years from bearing fruit, and I like it, but I know that he is years older than me. The way he carries himself is self-assured. He is not quite clean-shaven.

I ask, “How long will we be on this train?”

“To Sacramento? One hour. Maybe a little more or a little less, depending.”

“I’ll have to sit with you for one hour?”

“Unfortunately for you, yes. Although,” he says, “we may have to go more slowly than usual. Weather man says storms. So you could be trapped here with me till Christmas.”

The train cries out. We lurch forward, which causes me to grab at the arms of my chair, and I let out a small, hysterical laugh. Randy laughs, too, although I’m wondering, Who is this weather man, and are there people born to know the weather before anyone else does?

In the dining car we drink sour coffee from paper cups and eat sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. He asks if the topic of religion makes me nervous. One unpalatable triangle of my egg salad sandwich, complete with wilting parsley, comes in and out of shadow on a plate in front of me as the lights sway and sway and sway.

“Why do you ask?”

“When I said grace before eating my sandwich. It was the look on your face — the averted gaze. Don’t worry, you won’t offend me. At this point it’s more out of habit than anything else. Sometimes I find myself thanking the Lord before I open a bag of sunflower seeds. So, no hard feelings.”

“You’re very observant.”

“I know. My ex told me it was creepy.”

“Ex?”

“Ex-girlfriend. From high school. You’re good at changing the subject. Are you going to eat the rest of that sandwich?”

I shake my head. He takes the remainder and bites from one point, causing the filling to plop out from the other side. He gestures at me: Keep talking.

“My father was religious,” I say. “He was brilliant. He died when I was a kid.”

Randy makes an apologetic face but says nothing because of his full mouth, which he’s covering with one hand. I keep talking about my father, though I’m not sure why this stranger needs to know about him — better not to tell the stranger anything, just as I’ve stayed quiet around strangers all my life. Yet there’s something exhilarating about speaking to Randy beyond the violation of a taboo or commandment. Perhaps it’s being able to tell a complete unknown about my father that’s liberating; if I can watch someone else have a reaction, I’ll see what kind of response I ought to have. I can’t say everything, but I can say some things, so I tell him, “He used to disappear for days at a time. I was very small when this happened, but he would come to me in the early morning, in the dark. I shared a room with my brother then. My father would be quiet about it — he would come to me with a rucksack, and he’d say, ‘I’ll be leaving for a few days.’ He called me Flopsy sometimes. ‘Flopsy,’ he’d say, ‘I’m going to go talk to Jesus.’ I don’t know what he carried in that rucksack, but it would last him for however long he was gone, and then he’d come back and just pray for hours, he’d pray all day with the shades drawn, in the dark, and when he was done he’d find me and say that Jesus had found him and made him invisible. He’d only become visible again because he left the woods. When I was older my mother told me that it was his mind that was talking to him, and not God.”

“You believed him, though.”

“I didn’t have any reason not to believe him. He was so brilliant about everything. He taught my brother and me all kinds of things, so of course I felt like he knew everything. It wasn’t until my mother started acting like things were wrong that things felt wrong. He was in the hospital a number of times.”

“A mental hospital.”

“Yes. It was in Sacramento, actually. It was a terrifying place.”

“And were you terrified of him?”

“No. Never. I loved him.”

“Sure, sure you loved him. But I’m curious as to why your father chose you to be the one he revealed his — whatever you want to call it. His mystical plans. Why it was you he chose to reveal them to, when you were so small. It seems rather unkind, or, at the very least, irresponsible of him.”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? And how dare you judge a man you’ve never met?” I stop. Randy looks pained, and I immediately regret my actions for causing that pain. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to talking about my father.”

“We don’t have to talk about him. We were talking about religion. Although religion is probably the worst topic for strangers to start with, second only to dead fathers. There I go again, being awkward.”

There is lightning and thunder and still no rain. The dining car is nearly empty except for three others: a dark-skinned couple two rows back and diagonal to us, their skin the color of mink, with the man’s hair curiously fluffed around his head; the lady has her hair in tight and tiny braids. He laughs, huh-huh-huh. A white-haired woman sits by the door alone, picking from a paper boat of french fries. What an unusual sensation, to be housed in a place with unknowns.