On December 27th my sister and I boarded the train at Wilmington, Delaware after a Christmas Family Spectacular filled with the kinds of craziness that only people related to one another by blood could possibly be expected to create. Going home for Christmas at my parents house is similar to being a diamond miner. You come out of both situations with some pretty nice material shit but it takes quite a toll on the old psyche, and on several occasions you come face to face with the reality that you might not make it out alive.
Anyway, make it out alive we did, but no sooner had we escaped emotional purgatory by boarding the 4:56 Regional to Boston, than a new, fresh hell revealed itself to us. For reasons unfathomable to anyone I have ever met, Amtrak overbooks virtually every single train that they run from the period of Thanksgiving through New Year’s. At Wilmington we boarded the train only to be confronted with other passengers who had been standing since the previous stop, and absolutely no available seats. One would think that in this day and age of Twitter, iphone’s and all other manner of technology that the people at Amtrak could figure out how many seats they have, and find some sort of system for ONLY SELLING THAT NUMBER OF SEATS, yet somehow, inexplicably, the formula continues to elude them. However Amtrak and it’s many, many (overpriced!) shortcomings are a tale for another time.
Forced to stand sardinelike, pressed between the foul-smelling train bathroom and a humorless-looking Ukrainian family, I passed the seemingly interminable journey from Wilmington to Philadelphia. After departing Philadelphia we were told that seats would open up “soon.” Wedged into my crevice I wondered how that would be managed as the train had not yielded up any vacancies at Philadelphia and barring a group-suicide-by-defenestration it was unlikely that any seats would make themselves available while the train hurtled along the tracks. Somebody up there must like me though, because shortly after my sister was body checked into the side of the train car by a 300 pound man wielding a duffel bag, an Amtrak employee waved us over to the cafe car.
“Sit here” she said gesturing at the ends of two of the benches at a table in the cafe car.
We sat wedged in with the two other people already inhabiting the cafe table. On my side was a young, heavyset girl in a bright pink cat sweater reading a Glenn Beck book.
Next to my sister was….a terrorist.
Yes. It’s true. I thought that. I was that white lady who looked at a dark skinned man travelling alone and thought: SHOE BOMB!. My second thought, of course was “wow, I’m a racist!”. But my third thought was that he was probably maybe definitely sporting a dynamite stick vest underneath that hoodie.
In my defense I was in the eye of the perfect anxiety-storm. To wit: Only a few hours prior, I drank a latte with an extra shot of espresso which more than once has pushed the needle on my sane-ometer from its regular notch between “slightly nervous” to “panic”. Also, I had just come from my parents house, quite possibly the tensest most anxiety inducing place on the planet these days, where the TV is constantly blaring. The big news, of course, was about the guy who tried to ignite his own leg on a US bound flight from Amsterdam. “It is unclear whether or not this gentleman has acted alone, or whether there are more such attacks in the works,” The ruddy, ham-faced reporter had said, looking straight into the camera. “Fuck you,” I had thought at the time. “Don’t try to intimidate me into watching your “news coverage” with this bullshit fearmongering.
But it totally worked. Because the MINUTE I saw that guys face on the train sitting next to my sister, that anchorperson’s voice was the only thing I could hear. The guy fit the description of absolutely every terrorist-suspects face you’ve ever seen on TV or splashed across the front of The New York Post. He looked to be in his twenties, of Middle Eastern or African ethnicity, was dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and had no luggage to speak of. He had no book to read, no computer, nothing. Just a cell phone, his train ticket reciept and a folded piece of paper that he opened and closed repeatedly when he wasn’t looking around the train car with a bored and disgusted expression on his face.
There’s another reason that I was convinced he was a terrorist and that we were all about to die and it has to do with the other people in our car: an adorable talkative little girl at the table behind us. An attractive African American family on the bench across the aisle from me , an Indian girl with a nose ring and bunch of science textbooks across the aisle from my sister, three drunk guys in hoodies arguing about sports in the rear of a car and a kindly old man with a red scarf and faraway eyes gazing out the window. If you’ve ever watched a movie or television in your entire life I don’t need to tell you that that’s pretty much the exact demographic recipe of people that need to be in the same place for a terrorist attack to happen. A casting director couldn’t have culled a more stereotypically appropriate population. All that was missing was the hot/slutty single mom and her precocious glasses-wearing toddler.
My Terrorist kept checking his watch, looking out the window, fidgeting with his cell phone and then checking his watch again.
“Holy shit”, I thought “He’s waiting for the bomb to go off.”
I looked, terrified at my sweet sister, playing Scrabble on her iPhone and pleaded at her with my eyes. She finally looked up and I mouthed “Terrorist” to her, indicating with my head in the direction of the man in question. She looked at him, and then back at me. She rolled her eyes. She continued with her Scrabble game.
“Let’s move seats.” I said.
“Ashley. There are no seats. Remember? These are the only seats.”
“Well then, let’s go stand back by the bathroom like before.”
“No. We’re not doing that.”
“But… Well I think…”
“No. And besides, if you’re right it doesn’t matter where we go, right?. So sit down”
She had a point, grim though it was. The train stopped at Metropark and My Terrorist looked out the window, craning his neck.
What? What’s he looking for? I thought. Surely he was awaiting the signal. All of the sudden, the train lights went dark and the engine turned off. I froze. My sister calmly tapped away at her iPhone as I sat and waited for the appointed time when lunatic zealots would race through the train stabbing us all with boxcutters and screaming about the jihad.
But of course, nothing of the sort happened and the train regained its electrical faculties and we went chugging off towards scenic industrial New Jersey. But I was not convinced that we were out of danger yet. Sure enough, not two minutes later, My Terrorist reached into his pocket and pulled out…a boarding pass, for a Continental Airlines flight. Okay, I thought. We’re safe, but those poor people on the airplane!!! My mind raced. I felt like I was in The Pelican Brief! Or one of those other types of movies where people have to run really fast and commandeer the cars of passing motorists in order to prevent something terrible from happening. I was going to be one of those people. I had seen something and now I was going to say something! But I didn’t. Because the guy, instead of stabbing my sister in the neck with a penknife, very kindly asked her if she would let him know when they got to Newark Airport because he was worried he’d miss his connecting flight and would she like him to help her put her bag above the seat in that little crate? She didn’t but thanked him and he smiled and she smiled and then we pulled into the station and he got off and wished us both a very Happy New Year.
No attempted bombings were reported.
