Zephyr

JAMES

His hands reminded me of banana pudding. Not the color or the texture or the flavor. The feel of it. The feel beyond the senses. Beyond comprehensible vocabulary and syntax. His hands reminded me of home.

More than 36 hours on the train from California to a destination on the east coast, I saw him. In the observation car. The night was dark as pitch. Earlier that day the locomotive coursed through the parched land stretching along the Colorado River. The water danced and licked rock formations to its left and right. I watched from my cozy accommodations. An oversized personal closet complete with two facing chairs, a large window, an actual closet the width of your hand and a finally curtain for privacy. No one in their right mind would dare sleep on the bed latched to the ceiling. I converted the kissing chairs into nightly accommodations. While the wheels crunched on gravel and my body submitted to the steady hum of the beast, I cried for home.

San Francisco was home but my true home, the home that lives in a place deeper than bone marrow, was east. This would be a brief visit cut even shorter by the quest to see the land I call home on the ground floor. An epic four-day journey from California to Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland then DC. Leave Monday morning and arrive Thursday afternoon. Everything moved according to plan. I took great pains to document as much of the trip as humanly possibly, sacrificing naps and longed-for reading time. The photos were for my mother, a person worth sacrificing for.

Then I saw him. Tuesday’s daylight was fading fast and I took my first meal in the cafe car rather than having it deposited at my cubicle lodging. I was eating something that was supposed to resemble creola pasta but it came pre-prepared in an aluminum container so I couldn’t expect it to be authentic. What was authentic, what was realer than real was him.

Elliot.

Tall but not inaccessible. Broad shoulders, slender frame, caramel skin. But his eyes. They spoke to me most. The eyes tell all and he was writing a magnum opus on the pages of my skin. I was a rain storm and a blazing fire in one. He had come to the car from the same direction I did only 15 minutes earlier. The sleeper car section. How is it possible that I’d been careening across the country for nearly two days and never bumped into him once?

They sat him at a table opposite my direction. He faced me. I became entirely too enthused to inhale my creole pasta surprise at that moment. I ripped open a piece of bread and dipped it into a red sauce in the container. Was I supposed to be eating? Should I keep it casual and sip on the sparkling water? I didn’t even know this man, yet.

I looked up and nearly choked. He was looking directly at me. He raised a piece of bread, dipping it into the sauce on his container. He ordered the creole concoction too. I raised mine. He smiled. I melted.

ELLIOT

Are you supposed to fall in love at first sight or does that only happen in the movies? Who cares. The only truth I knew in that moment was that I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else in the world but with him on a moving train rolling me toward my biggest fear--the unknown.

I accepted a job teaching at the University of Chicago and this trip was a recommendation from my mother and friends. Take a train, they said. It’ll be different, new. Flying is so cramped and overrated anyway, right? I obliged mainly for their sake. I work in mathematics and without diving into technical jargon, I take pleasure in solving for x. Even if the answer is zero or infinity, you will always reach an answer. Needless to say, this train threw in many unexpected variables.

I boarded in Richmond, California. Oakland was nice but somehow it all felt empty. Letting loose in Jack London Square or at my favorite bar downtown, Make Westing, was fun but wholly unpredictable. Secure as the mundane was, it was stifling. Immediately after accepting the job in Chicago, I panicked. I was sure, 99.25 percent positive, that it was the right thing to do at the right time. I weighed pros and cons, cost of living, job elevation, even factored in the drastic shift in weather climates. The good outweighed the bad. Still, the unknown about the journey nearly stifled me. Too many things could go wrong.

I kept to myself in my sleeper car. I showered late at night the first so as to avoid any random encounters with chatty moms or disgruntled employees. I had great views from my chair-turned-bed, no one should sleep on that top bunk, so there was no need for an observation car. Meals were complimentary with the room and brought directly to you. Perfection, tried and true. No outliers, nothing extraneous to account or solve for.

Then I saw him. James. He was brighter than anything in the cafe car. Literal fragments of the fading sun and rising moon collected themselves at his table and refracted off the glass onto his forearms, his clavicle, his eyes. I’ve never seen eyes more inviting, delicate. This was not part of the plan. At all. I was growing restless and had to use the restroom after staring at a river for 2 hours. At the last minute, something beyond me told me to find the employee supervising my sleeper car and request a seat at a table in the dining car. There was an opening.

James is awkward in all the best ways. That cute, innate awkward that is neither coy nor debilitating. I raised my bread to make him more comfortable. Who does that? I’m a 32-year-old mathematics professor and here I am dunking a square chunk of white bread in a red sauce to connect with a stunningly beautiful man I’d never seen before that moment. He joined me. Solid frame, mocha skin, curly hair. I studied his geometry. If me, then him.

“Meet Cute?”

“Excuse me?” my eyes bugged. It was the cafe supervisor.

“You wanted wine right? We have a 2017 Merlot. Meet Cute.”

She presented the bottle. I nodded my agreement. She poured the dark liquid in a clear plastic makeshift wine glass appropriate to the train’s economizing theme. I made eye contact with him. We had both finished our meals by then. I requested a second glass before I took a sip of the first and made my way to the observation deck hoping he’d follow.

Who was I becoming?

JAMES AND ELLIOT

Neither slept on the second night. They sipped wine and talked about their mothers and solving for x. The observation car trickled with passerby incapable of sleep, with late-night snack fiends, with attendants stoic yet kind. As night slapped the day awake and states fell away from view, the pair never left each other’s side. There was a kinship, a camaraderie that was felt and dealt out in full laughs and even fuller glances that became gazes, mutually shared. Elliot spilled wine on his pants and didn’t care to change. James didn’t want him to. James, on the other hand, forgot all about documenting once the sun arose. He forgot about whatever it was that kept him tethered to the place he had traveled from, the place he knew was never really home. Home was moving across the country at 80 miles per hour.

“Are you real?” James asked. The two were back in his tiny room, chairs still made out into a bed. They held each other’s hands and peered into the distance, so vast and so present.

Elliot was silent but not absent from the conversation. He thought only for a moment.

“I want to be.” His breath carried the aroma of plum and black cherry.

“Is it weird that I knew you before I met you?” James asked. “Does that even make sense?”

“A known unknown.” Elliot whispered.

They held each other closer. Chicago was approaching. Chicago meant a three hour, 30 minute layover. Chicago meant a change of trains for James. Chicago meant a destination for Elliot.

Union Station had deceptively arrived much sooner than either of them expected. They gathered their belongings. Elliot felt knots in his chest, his stomach, his skull. James kept looking for something on the ground or in the sky that never appeared. Chicago captivated him though. They figured with James’ brief layover, they would have a few moments to themselves.

They walked the tourist spots--the Bean, a rushed tour of the Aquarium, the museum of art. James watched Elliot more than he did the exhibits. Time was slipping quite literally through and away from his fingers. He smiled and laughed harder than he intended, hoping the ring of his joy would linger on the ear after he boarded his second train. Elliot kept his phone on silent, knowing his mother would be ringing him about securing that apartment and updating her on his travels.

They went to Harolds and each ordered a two piece with the special sauce. They weren’t anxious about eating in front of the other. Each noted the ease, the familiarity, the comfort with the other. They both ate too much and breathed heavily. They walked past a rose garden toward the lake. Everything felt light and heavy. Three hours, 10 minutes had gone by in mere seconds. James couldn’t help but ask one more question.

“What do you want?”

Elliot watched the ducks march in synchronicity. He observed the angles of the boats docked and floating aimlessly. The sky was new and clear and inviting.

“I want infinity. I want the unknown.”

Twenty minutes later, the Capitol Limited screeched along the tracks toward the nation’s capital. James wasn’t the wiser. He was focused on his banana pudding whipped by the Chicago breeze. A first date had never been so sweet.