The Wrong Train

James had taken the wrong train seventeen times in his life. He had catalogued each one the way some people catalogue disasters — as evidence that he was fundamentally, constitutionally bad at paying attention to where he was going. He was a brilliant structural analyst whose mind was always three problems ahead of his body, which meant his body frequently ended up somewhere unexpected.

The train heading north was the wrong one. He realized this eleven minutes after boarding, somewhere between stations, when the landscape outside the window became entirely unfamiliar.

He sat back with a controlled sigh and assessed his options. He would get off at the next station and find his way back. Simple enough. He had done this before.

What he had not done before was sit down across from a woman reading a book upside down.

He noticed it first in the way you notice a mathematical error — an immediate, involuntary recognition that something was wrong. The book was upside down, and she was turning pages at a perfectly normal pace, completely absorbed.

He watched for two full minutes before he could stop himself. "Your book is upside down."

She looked up. She was somewhere in her early thirties, with dark hair pinned loosely and the kind of composure that suggested she was not easily rattled. She looked at the book, then back at him.

"I know," she said pleasantly.

He waited for elaboration. None came. She returned to reading.

"You're reading it upside down deliberately?"

"It helps me slow down," she said without looking up. "I read too fast normally. I skip things. Reading upside down forces me to look at each word individually." She turned a page. "I get more out of it this way."

James stared at her. In seventeen years of taking wrong trains, he had never met anyone who made a wrong thing into a better method.

"That is either brilliant or deeply strange," he said.

"Why not both?" she replied, and looked up properly this time. She had dark eyes and a direct gaze that he found slightly unnerving in the best possible way. "You look like a man who took the wrong train."

"Is it obvious?"

"You've checked your watch four times and the window twice in the last two minutes."

He introduced himself. Her name was Priya. She was a translator — seven languages, with an eighth in progress — and she took the train north every Thursday to visit her mother and used the two-hour journey to read things she would normally rush through.

They talked for the entire ride. About translation, about whether meaning survives the crossing from one language to another, about structural analysis and whether a bridge is ultimately a question or an answer. About the seventeen wrong trains and what they might say about a person.

"You're not bad at directions," Priya said, when his stop came up. "You're just someone whose mind is always going somewhere your body hasn't left yet."

James stood, holding the overhead bar, looking at her. "I think that's the most generous interpretation anyone has ever offered of my chronic incompetence."

She smiled. "I'm a translator. Finding the most generous interpretation is the whole job."

He got off the train. He stood on the platform and watched it pull away, then immediately regretted not asking for her number with a force so specific and physical that it surprised him.

He took the same train the following Thursday. And the one after that. It took him three Thursdays to work up the nerve to bring his own book and sit down across from her again — held carefully, deliberately, upside down.

Priya looked at it, then looked at him, and laughed the kind of laugh that sounded like something beginning.