THE TRAIN RATTLED and shook me from my half coma. I hadn’t been sleeping, because my eyes were open, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d moved. It had probably been hours. It might have been the entire night.
From a kiosk in the Denver Amtrak station, I’d purchased a topographical map of the United States that spread the country in front of me in soft blues and greens, fading into oranges where the plains gave way to mountains and black-dotting every city serviced by a cross-country Amtrak train. I’d drawn lines connecting all the cities I’d been to so far, measured their distances with the inside of my thumb, and then charted a course forward, circling stops that might make sense. The train was reaching the end of my next circled section, and I’d stared at the map long enough to decide that there was nothing significant to be observed from it. I might have been able to figure it out if I’d had the clue he left in Denver, but that clue, and all the others, were gone.
We were edging farther and farther into the enormous patch of sapphire blue in the center of the map—the Great Plains, as it was affectionately known. I don’t know if people in the Midwest ever appreciated the supreme irony of calling their region “the Great Plains,” like there was something great and significant about their mundanity. I don’t know if people in the Midwest appreciated irony at all. The sign outside the approaching station read MCCOOK, NE, but it could have been ANYWHERE, NE; it was all the same: long, slow-sloping hills of corn underneath the same hopelessly wide sky.
For all the terrible, twisting, irreconcilable confusion, I felt strangely content watching the world pass, arriving east and departing west out of the tiny window in the back of the train where I’d sat. I’d heard a Buddhist monk on a daytime talk show once describe the work he did with death-row inmates, and how they were actually more peaceful than most people he knew who weren’t awaiting their imminent death. “We’re all on death row,” he’d said. “They just have a schedule.” I imagine it felt something like this. When you can see death in front of you; when you have a relationship with your mortality, not as a stranger, but as an acquaintance with an appointment, you can be content in whatever direction you’re taking to get there.
At least I knew that this was the direction my grandfather had gone. At least I knew that I was doing what he wanted me to do. He told me himself to keep going, so I did. I watched the sky outside, hoping a burning planet would go streaking by.
As the train screeched and slowed to its final resting position, I saw a man outside the window, only there long enough to be a single image as we flew by. He was standing alone in a wide field of grass, visible in the low light of morning under patches of slowly melting snow, wearing faded blue jeans, a winter jacket, and an expression that I’d seen a thousand times before: mostly blank, but haunting and hopeful.
His arms were open, his hands pointed toward the track, as if he was looking for me, reaching into the train to find me. Every process in my body froze, my breathing and my blood.
It was my grandfather.
He was alive.
I sat motionless, petrified. By the time I put my face to the glass, he had disappeared into the morning mist.
I sat staring, ripped cushion and Amtrak logo where his body had just been. Where I thought his body had just been.
It was a hallucination. Of course it was a hallucination. He couldn’t have actually been there, in a field in Nebraska.
I shook the image from my head.
But still, from the resting train, the world outside looked like a world I’d seen before. The station was wooden and unimpressive. The horizon behind it was gray-purple, punctured by stalks of light green corn, swaying together in the wind. The breaks between colors blurred and softened, almost like they were drawn in . . . in colored pencil.
I had seen this image before. And the light red text around it.
It was the cover of his book.
This was A World Away.
The mirage became real.
I threw my backpack over my shoulder and tumbled down the stairs, past where the Amtrak attendant was preparing to close the door.
“Hey, buddy!” he shouted, snatching at my backpack as I ran past him. “We’re closing the door! You can’t smoke here!”
“I know!” I was already off the train and onto the platform.
“Well, this ain’t your stop! And next train’s not till tomorrow.”
Without my commanding them, my feet moved west, back up the track.
“Do you at least have someone to pick you up?” he shouted at my back. “There’s nothing here! You’re headed toward a bunch of nothing right now.”
I leapt off the wooden platform and onto the grass, avoiding piles of leftover snow. I was too far away to even hear the door slam.
The mist was thicker than it appeared on the train, but I pushed myself into it, faster and faster, the inner thigh threads of my jeans ripping at each other.
The train began to move, following the track east, our paths in opposite directions, and soon, it was gone.
Still I ran, mist closing around, flying in and out of my chest in breaths that became slower and slower, my legs starting to hesitate. I couldn’t see directions in the mist; had I veered off? I spun, edging my way forward until—
One hundred feet ahead of me, a figure broke the fog. His outline appeared first: arms wide-open toward where the train had just been. He was real.
“Grandpa!” I called, unable to stop myself. The outline of his head turned to me, frozen; a ghost suddenly realizing mortal eyes could see him. I threw my arms out.
But he didn’t move toward me. Instead, he turned his head back over his shoulder and walked in the opposite direction. “Grandpa, it’s me, Arthur,” I said, the words pouring out with five years’ worth of force. His walk became a run, plowing forward, faster away from me. “Grandpa! What are you doing?! It’s Arth—”
Without warning, he dove off into the field to his left, leaving a few shivering stalks where his brown coat had just been. I didn’t hesitate, launching myself in after him.
As soon as I entered the cornfield, the world shifted dramatically. There was no mist. High leaves blocked most of the morning sun, the only light fighting its way through in tiny rays. It was cooler, and silent. Evidently cornfields felt the wind but didn’t hear it, as none of the whistling could permeate their fortress. The only sound was the occasional chirp of an insect.
I inched forward. Every time I pushed a stalk out of my way, it recoiled, sharp leaves biting at my skin like the edges of paper. My eyes began to sting, and I remembered my father telling me about the pesticides used to treat the corn that rested on its leaves. My face and hands swelled. It was almost unbearable, but still I wandered, deeper and deeper into the maze.
I couldn’t tell if it had been five minutes or thirty. Every direction I looked, I saw nothing, just stalks and leaves and darkness on an infinite loop.
“Arthur, what you’re talking about is a hallucination,” Dr. Sandoval said, sitting atop his high-backed orange chair in a clearing. “When you’re fixated on someone, you project them into the world. Those conversations you’re having, they’re not real.”
“This one was real.” I stopped moving. “I saw him.” Dr. Sandoval shook his head and wrote something on the pad in front of him. “What are you writing?”
“You see people exactly as you remember them. You don’t think it’s strange that they’re always wearing the same clothes? Or that they always say the same things in conversation?”
“He was here,” I panted, turning in circles. “I saw him. Hallucinations don’t run away from me.”
“You have to ask yourself, Arthur. This false remembering, these dreams—what are they protecting you from? What is it you’re running from?”
“This one wasn’t false, I saw him standing—”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“You’re avoiding the question. You’re hiding from yourself. You’re using cynicism as a means of forgetting—”
“No, I’m not!” I twisted again, hurling dirt in his direction, and it fell softly to the ground.
Next to where he had just been sitting, ten feet from me, several stalks rustled. I took off after the noise, leaping over low, fallen stalks and throwing my elbows in front of my face to guard it from the assault of leaves. More stalks were moving; someone was in front of me, a trail I could follow, a person shoving their way through the corn.
The sounds of crashing got louder as he moved faster ahead of me. I watched the corn movement take an abrupt turn and I dove to my left to head him off. But the turn was too violent, my movement too sharp, and my feet caught a discarded stalk on the ground, yanked it out from under me. I flew forward, and as I fell, a brown coat appeared out of the mess of stalks and leaves. Without intending to, my body struck its side and we tumbled to the ground, stalks falling with us.
And again, the world was silent.
“Grandpa?” I whispered. Neither of us moved.
In the soft streaks of light that fought their way through the corn, his face appeared for the first time. It was firmly wrinkled, more than it ever had been, the skin having fought five more years of gravity. His hair, full when he’d left, was now gone entirely. His lips were cracked and caked with dirt.
But his eyes were shining like mirrors, just as they always had been.
Tears hit my eyes before I could stop them. I squeezed my face and choked the words out. “Why did, you, why didn’t, anybody, tell me . . . Why are you alive?”
“Arthur.” His voice was higher than I expected.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
When I opened my eyes, he was blurry in front of me, and the image started to change. It wasn’t his skin. It wasn’t his hair. It wasn’t his voice.
“Tell you what?” He nursed his right arm. “Why are you here?”
I trembled. “You’re not him.” I couldn’t stop staring at him like he was a ghost, even though I now realized he wasn’t. “You’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Henry.” He nodded.
And again, the mirage became real.