I HELD MY breath as the cab sped across town. The train was scheduled to depart in eighteen minutes, and the next train for Green River wouldn’t be for another day, which meant twenty-four more hours in Elko. I couldn’t keep up with my lie to my auntie Karen.
I tried to piece my grandfather’s story together, but it felt like I knew less than I had before, and I couldn’t fully form the questions in my head; they were clouded by the image of Sue Kopek crying on her living room floor.
There’s a popular thought experiment called Schrödinger’s cat, where a physicist—who was probably also a sociopath—put a regular cat into a box, treated it with radiation, then showed people and said that until the box was opened, the cat was both alive and dead.
We hit four red lights, one after another. Nine minutes until the train left.
His point was, if you don’t see it, then you can’t know, and if you can’t know, then nothing is true, so everything is true. It makes sense—truth is subjective; there’s no such thing as “reality,” only what we think we know to be reality.
But the real value of any thought experiment, the real question he was asking, I think, is: What if it was your cat? Would you open the box? If you don’t, you maintain the possibility that the cat could still be alive. If you do, and you confirm the cat’s dead, then you’re the one who killed the cat. Would you rather live with miserable truth, or blissful ignorance?
I asked if the cab could go faster, and the driver told me I didn’t want to fuck with the cops in Elko, boss. Seven minutes to the train.
My brain went back to the still frame of Sue, collapsed on the floor of her abandoned home, her life in ruins around her. When I arrived in Elko, she was waiting happily, certain that her husband and son would be home soon. I was the one who had made her painfully aware they wouldn’t be. Whether she would forget it soon or not, I had forced her to remember that she was all alone. I opened the box. I killed her cat.
The train became visible, resting on the tracks, as we crested the hill before the station. It was scheduled to leave in two minutes.
I imagined it was me. Would I want to know? I wouldn’t, I decided. I’m okay with feeling unresolved, or confused, because there’s no way that’s as bad as feeling miserable. I’d frame the box and eat breakfast every day with my maybe-cat. Even if it was fake, I’d want to live in the world that I made for myself.
We entered the parking lot the moment my phone switched over to 7:45 p.m.
The train began to shake with activity. “Fuck! Just drop me here!” I shouted at the driver, a hundred yards from the doors, where the attendants were pulling in the stepping stools. I launched myself from the cab but my shirt was jerked backward.
“Hey!” the driver shouted. “You’ve gotta pay me, asshole.”
I fumbled with my card, the whistle of the train blowing, my fingers shaking, the world spinning dangerously fast. “Alright,” he said to the authorizing screen. “Go.”
I sprinted recklessly across the open concrete toward the platform, my backpack swinging clumsily behind me and slamming against my back with every step. I tore across the asphalt to where the train whistle was sounding.
“Wait!” I tried to shout, but it was too late. No one was listening. The coach door slammed in front of me.
I reached the concrete as the brakes released, the train settling backward before starting to move. Amtrak had a strict policy of never reopening the doors once they’d shut. I knew it because they reminded us every time we stepped out of the train.
I pounded the window in front of me, hoping the impact would jar it loose or pop the handle. It didn’t. “Wait! Open the door!” My reflection in the window disappeared as the train moved forward.
I kept up with it, pounding the glass all along the way. It started with a walk, the train lazily dragging itself out of the station at five miles per hour. I leapt from the platform to keep up, weeds and brush whipping against my legs as my jog became a run, the train picking up speed too quickly. The window was just above my eye level and I had to jump to see inside. Still I pounded, cast and hand against the glass, screaming from outside the train, “Someone open this! Don’t leave me here!”
Out of the bathroom door, the girl with the beanie from last night’s train passed in front of the window. Either I was imagining her, or she’d somehow changed trains on the same schedule I had. I gave the window one hard smack to grab her attention, and she turned and leapt backward, panic on her face. I jumped and motioned toward the window release, my eyes begging her to open it.
She stood for a moment, still. “Please,” I mouthed as I jumped again, fatigue beginning to push down on me. I must have looked adequately desperate, because when I jumped again, she was throwing her body into the bright red emergency lever that released the window.
Her tiny frame was pushing upward as hard as she could, but the lever wouldn’t budge. I waved, but she couldn’t see me; the train moved too quickly, fifteen, twenty miles per hour. I pounded and jumped, and the girl looked up at me, her face froze in confusion. Frantically, I motioned, Down! Down!
The realization hit her, squarely, like a cast against a window. In one motion, she grabbed the red lever and yanked it down toward the floor. The window swung open, warm air from inside the train rushing out. A surge of adrenaline burned hot in my blood and shot through my body. I launched myself at the train, clutching the metal bar above the window with my right hand and pulling upward into the square frame. From the shoulder, I swung my useless left arm around into it and felt the nerve endings explode with pain as she grabbed it and pulled. I ran my legs up the side, transferring my weight over the window ledge, and with one final push off the siding, my balance shifted, and I toppled into the train car, landing with a thud.