The thing about overnight trains is that for a time while you’re on the road, you’re home. Your apartment is yours for the night, a little room with a view.
It was chilly on the November evening we left Gare de Lyon in Paris’ south end, our train sliding out of the station toward morning in Florence. We slowed for rows of evening-lit houses and headlights, stopping briefly in cities where people up late were there to catch the train.
I undressed and climbed into the top bunk between tightly stretched sheets. Carolyn was still reading in the bottom bunk when I fell asleep.
“You awake?” She was sitting on the edge of her bunk. “You have to see this.”
It was faintly light through the window below me. I looked at my watch, the luminous hands showing midnight.
Crawling over the edge of the bunk and letting myself to the floor, I peered out the window.
Snow, about a foot, fresh.
Everything went black. I sat next to her on the bed. She hunched closer. Her shoulder was cold.
“Just wait.”
After the tunnel, we ascended a snowfield patterned with farmhouses, muffled lumps in the silvery light.
To our left, above the crest of the Alps, rode a perfectly full moon the color of a Camembert wheel. We huddled on the edge of her bunk, holding hands, absorbing the immense silence.
Lately, we have begun to experience what Carolyn calls “subatomic network communication.”
She read about this somewhere.
Physicists, she says, are aware of the existence of this phenomenon but loath to discuss it. There is no way it fits into the calculations of matter, energy and other things with which physicists concern themselves.
What happens is this:
We’ll be in one of those protracted pauses of conversation that happen on trips, especially while driving through long stretches of landscape.
One of us will re-start the conversation on a different subject from where we ended. The other, not replying at first, looks over.
“I was about to say the same thing.”
We put it down to each of us having observed something along the road, triggering a mutual memory. I still think that’s mainly it, or trains of thought rolling around in both our heads until they arrive at logical ends about the same time.
Carolyn doesn’t think it’s that simple. Mystical, maybe; difficult to explain, certainly, unless our thoughts have grown closer by proximity.
I suppose our personal spaces have fluid boundaries now, natural riverbanks separating us as persons within a single landscape. Our tectonic plates may have softened a little at the edges, our borders harder to patrol the longer we live together. Maybe it’s just an intolerance of boundaries that happened to us that midnight, holding each other and watching the moon from the edge of a bed in a French train, crossing the Alps in our underwear.