E is for Electric Train
Introduction to “E is for Electric Train”
I think this was the first story I wrote for this collection. When I started this ‘alphabet’ business, my plan was to do random association; what’s the first word or phrase I thought of when I thought of “E”? And then I would write a story based on that.
I abandoned that motif pretty quickly, but not before I wrote this story, so it’s a bit of an exercise in form; that is, there are lots of E’s in it. But I kept it because, though it’s a bit stiff, it still works for me. Like most of these stories, it didn’t end quite where I expected it to; after you expose these ideas to the light, they kind of go where they want to go, and you just type fast enough to keep up.
And the political overtones; yeah, well, it’s hard not to. Believe it or not, it’s more sympathetic than some might like.
When he was seven, his parents had given him an electric train for Christmas. It was long after electric trains were the thing you wanted for Christmas; he was a child in an age when children wanted game platforms and laptops. But he longed for an electric train; it made him think of places far away, places other-than…places where-maybe-when. And when he tore off the wrapping paper that wintery morning and saw it, it was as if he had been handed the key to a distant place, maybe a distant kingdom, a place that would take a lifetime to reach… but he knew he would go.
When he was seventeen, he met Eleanor. Eleanor was kind of an old-fashioned name for a girl, in a time when girls were named Ashley and Brooke and Mackenzie, but that was okay; he liked Eleanor. She liked simple things, and she smiled a lot and liked to laugh, and it seemed as if he was the center of her world, and he liked that. He liked that a lot. Eleanor could give him things he needed, even if she didn’t understand that he couldn’t stay. He hated himself for taking things from Eleanor, hated hurting her when she said she loved him … but he was on the way to another place. No room for Eleanor on the train.
When he was twenty-seven, he met Edward. Edward was a decent fellow, a good bit older than he was, one of the ‘mentors’ that Dad regularly sent his way to make sure that he was making his way up in the company. It wouldn’t do for Dad to take too much direct interest; that would be in poor taste. So Dad sent down men like Edward, who were well-seasoned but not very ambitious, the kind of men that Dad could trust, but could also do without. Edward could give him things he needed, wisdom about rules and laws and how to get around them. He didn’t like betraying Edward, didn’t like leaving him with the blame… but that was part of Edward’s job, he reasoned. Any plan had costs, of course, and Edward was well-compensated, and his pension would still be there after his parole. But the train would leave without Edward.
When he was thirty-seven, he had an epiphany. He had always loved gold on everything; gold bathroom fixtures, gold golf clubs, gold limousines. He also loved silk; silk pajamas, silk sheets, silk wallpaper, silk seat covers for his gold toilets. And now he realized that his lifelong preoccupation with elegance was something that could be marketed; he could build hotels and resorts and clubs and offer all this to the…well, not to the rich, but to the ones who wanted to be rich. Not real gold or real silk, of course, not for them, but that didn’t matter; it was the appearance of it all. His name; they could stay at a place that had his name, affluence by association. As their money poured into his tills, he could almost hear the sound of the train picking up speed; he was finally on the way.
When he was forty-seven, he met Eliza. Eliza was exotic and foreign and beautiful, nearly as tall as he was, and God she looked perfect on his arm when they walked into parties together. Everybody turned to look… everybody! Her English wasn’t great but he wasn’t with her for the conversation. He often lay awake at night alone in his kingsize bed (they had separate bedrooms), listening to the sounds of far-off trains, wondering why she had come, and why she stayed.
When he was fifty-seven, he became envious. The money was up and down; there were booms and busts and bankruptcies, and though he was a rich guy, there were lots of rich guys. Lots of “new” rich, too…guys who had more than he did, through technology and the internet and other things he didn’t understand. But he did understand some important things: It didn’t matter if you really were the richest as long as you acted as if you were; it didn’t matter if you were a real leader as long as you acted as if you were; it didn’t matter if you were really important as long as you acted as if you were. And so he went to television, where all this made sense. And the sound of the wheels on the track became indiscernible from his own heartbeat.
When he was sixty-seven, there was talk of an election. He had flirted with the thought before, but now it seemed like destiny; like everything had been pointing this way his entire life. He had been groomed for this; no, he had groomed himself for this. He was fuzzy on the details of the job, but they seemed unimportant. This was an chance to make the really big deals, to make a bigger mark than any of them… Christ, they might even put his face on some money! This would take better fixers than Edward, better insider-info than he’d had before, more bullshit than he’d every dished before. But there was anger out there to be tapped; a good slogan and some rough talk… that kind of posing had worked on TV, and this was just a different kind of TV. His people had some odd suggestions, including who he should pick as a running mate, but that was way down on the list of what was important. His train was finally pulling into the station; he had reached his distant kingdom.
When he was sixty-eight, it ended, six months after inauguration. He should’ve made sure he had someone he could trust with the details. He should’ve had someone who knew about his running mate’s Russian connections. He should’ve had someone who knew just what exactly those fixers expected. Most important, he should’ve had someone who knew about Eliza’s two years in Israel. Once, when he found the name Mossad on her cellphone, she told him it was a modeling agency.
They took his body home to New York on a train.
