The End of Track by Nicholas Maistros
It’s a field trip day, and there they are, a hundred or so of them. Maybe fourth grade, maybe fifth, sixth. They heave with unrestrained laughter, silent from this side of the glass. They swat each other’s groins. A girl squeezes all the muscles of her face and flails her wrists about. A boy with crossed arms cranes his neck as if trying to remember whether he’d worn deodorant. They scroll and swipe; their eyes shine. They don’t notice, while they wait for the eleven o’clock screening at the doors of the OMNIMAX, the skinny young man behind the glass.
I’d thought the job would help with film school applications. I wrote in my statement of purpose how captivating it was, projecting movies of such scale, each frame of film the size of a small postcard, several thousand feet of those postcard-frames funneled into tight circles and laid flat on platters so wide I could drape myself across them without having to dangle anything over the edge. It didn’t convince the first five schools, but I have two more decisions pending. I check my email constantly.
Older people watch me sometimes. One will point a jittery finger and tell their grand- or great-grandchild, too small to understand or see far enough, how the pins and sprockets work, how fast those machines have to crank those frames through, hold one in place, let the light in, one imperceptible moment before spitting it right back out and on to the next, twenty-four frames a second—how marvelous the miracle of simulated motion.
Other than that, the glass remains empty.
These kids should be interested, I think still, if not fascinated, their small sweaty hands on the glass as they watch, entranced by the swirl of these inner workings, the celluloid tracks, the skill of the projectionist, or magician rather, made miniature by his surroundings, setting to rhythm this blown-up, clockwork world. Maybe they’ve already been through the natural history wing, the excitement of getting out of school left somewhere with the trilobites and stalactites. They’re not seeing the Pompeii one either; posters of bursting volcanoes hang all over the museum with captions that read COMING IN JULY. It’s still June, so they’ll see the one about trains.
While I work, Alicia talks about the schoolkids she saw outside, having snuck away with nowhere to go except the side of the building. They asked her for cigarettes. “I get it,” she says. “I could care even less than they do what goes on in this building. Life’s tough. When I said no, they looked at me like I was another one of their teachers, which devastated me, so I told them to scram. One of them said something about my hair, right to my face, the little shit.”
I pull the leader along like rope to reach the projector atop a ten-foot stairway. My hands do their work, flipping open gates, feeding the film. Then I notice him. A boy, at the smaller side window, watching.
He’s so close to the glass that a fog of breath covers his nose and mouth. His eyes, though, are there and working. The others can only see far enough to measure their own immediate effects, like the lizards in the reptile room, just enough to know food, big face, other lizard, nothing but their world, the glass. This boy sees more than that. He sees the mechanics. The way the film travels, how it spins away from one platter, works its way around the room and back to the other. I hear his questions. What if it snaps along the way or gets tied in a knot? Is there a backup? Where does the sound come from?
He raises a palm in a flat wave, then goes back to ripping at his movie ticket. My hands thread the film as the movie of this boy’s life plays itself before me. Lonely, but the kind of loneliness that makes for more thoughtful living—like a hermit philosopher, or those early surveyors of the Canadian Rockies in the film they are about to see, trekking across that landscape, treacherous and transcendent, searching out that impossible mountain pass.
I remember sitting in the basement of our old house, watching you assemble your trains, replicating as close as you could an impossible mountain pass with its high bridges and cliff-sides and glaciers. Painting with a tiny brush a glistening, glacial river. You, surrounded by track, your big bald head and scruff of beard, your shoulders like the rocks that threatened to crush the pass, the smoke from your pipe standing in for the steam of the trains, your big God hands righting a fallen crossing sign, putting the thing back with slow care, a needle between your fingers. And the roar, I remember, of that little engine, the smell of pipe smoke.
From the projector window, I search the crowd for the boy, scanning the backs of heads, those I can see from the angle––stadium seating surrounds the window on all sides. I settle on one I am sure is his, mostly because it’s the only head not bobbing and turning about between neighbors. He’s in the fourth row, staring straight up into the dome, engrossed, just as I’d been when I sat there as a kid.
I lower the lights in the house. This is after Alicia gave the preliminaries about silence and cell phones—even still, little screens float and dash about, keeping the room from complete darkness; dark enough, though, to give them something to chatter about.
I crank the projector into motion, and there they are. The Rockies, from so high up, the whole room lifted and moving overtop snow-covered peaks, and the valleys, impossibly deep, dissolving into misty greens and purples. It makes you feel you’re hanging there, the blood rushing to your head. The boy’s stomach zings.
The kids are on their feet the moment the credits roll, all except for the boy who feels, as the final stretch of film rattles through the projector—I can’t see him anymore in the crowd, but I know he feels it—a loss.
It’s too late now to be a pioneer. The tracks have all been laid.
I start to move before I’ve even made the decision. I hurry down the stairway. I should be preparing the film for the next screening, which starts in twenty minutes. There are a few people waiting out there now, on the other side of the glass, having stumbled upon the OMNIMAX and thought it a nice break. The mob of schoolkids exits behind them.
I should be preparing the film, but instead I go to the platter where the film has rewound itself. I pull at the leader until I reach the first frames. There’s nothing on them—the actual movie doesn’t start for many yards—but that doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s better this way. This way, the frames could mean anything.
I take a pair of scissors from the repair table and cut out five black frames, a souvenir for the boy in the fourth row. I hope Alicia doesn’t see me leave and ask why I’m not spooling the film. If she does, I’ll say I had to go to the bathroom. I have eighteen minutes.
The buses are lined up out front, and one of their engines is going, but there are no kids. A couple bus drivers are sitting on the bottom step of the first bus. I ask them where the kids are. They don’t know. “Anything in there,” one of them asks, pointing her sandwich toward the front doors, “besides a bunch of old shit?”
Twelve minutes left. I run through the Natural History wing, past Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit and on through the Cave of Wonders, its plastered darkness and fountain-feature stalactites, its aquariums of cave spiders and its soundtrack of squealing bats. Past a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by a younger woman through the glowing blue tunnels of the Ice Age, running and someone yelling at me not to run through the Hall of Early Vertebrates, the next room’s blueprints of 18th century opera houses, the Wright brothers’ first bicycle, all of this progress, or at least, from room to room, the appearance of it.
Seven minutes.
I make my way to the gift shop, imagining the boy’s hands flipping through a book about trains, newly obsessed. But before I get there, I hear it, that echoey barricade of sound—voices bright, rising above the click-claps of trays against tables. They’re in the cafeteria next door.
My phone buzzes. I know before I open the email.
Four and a half minutes.
I broke one of your trains. I was there—eight? nine?—in the middle of your tracks, the hills and mountains and toy towns, little trees, little people. I’d laid down an obstruction. I powered the train, watched as it came around, pretended to scream for its passengers as it approached the blockage. The train derailed, car after car pushing forward into the wreckage and snaking farther off the track until the final car, the caboose, had nowhere to go but off the display entirely, falling from its world of small people and into mine of tiny breakable machines. I collected the pieces and hid them in a low drawer.
Next, all I have is an image, and I have no way of knowing where it goes in the timeline. Or if it happened—happens—only in my mind, from guilt, from fear of being found out. You, where I’d been, at your perch among the tracks and mountain towns, head in hands, sobbing. Not angry sobbing, not passionate. A dismantling. I watched from the door, if only a door in my mind.
Though they are joined together there, my breaking the train and your crying, I know they are not related. An accidental juxtaposition of filmstrip. Cutting from a bowl of soup to a man’s stern face to conjure, magically, hunger. But I’m stubborn. I want the magic. Close-up of the low drawer being opened, the broken pieces of train, me cowering, guilty at the door, and the first notes of my father-aria.
Two minutes. I’m running now, up and down the aisles between tables. I think of what the boy will say when I hand him the celluloid strip. But then, maybe he won’t say anything. He’ll just give that foggy look I saw through the window, and we’ll have that moment, and that will be it. He’ll go back to being a tortured, lonely kid, and I’ll go back to my trains.
Most of the kids are turned away, facing other kids. I hear some of them talking about the penguin exhibit.
“Why does everyone like penguins so much?” one girl says.
“They make me sick,” says another. “Are they even birds? Did they say?”
The first girl shrugs. She’s about to say something else when she sees me walk by. Then she starts telling her friends to look up.
Other kids’ faces turn up too, from other tables here and there, or in front of me as they walk with their trays, and we almost collide. They are alarmed, but smiley, amused, like they know one of them has done something bad and is about to get it. I ask one group if they’ve seen him, the boy. I start to describe him, but I realize I don’t know what he looks like. I just see fog.
One minute left. There are too many of them, and the room is too loud. I know I won’t find the boy, but where else can I go? Alicia is probably looking for me. The doors would be open, and the next group would be filing in, and there would be no film, no trains, no mountain pass.
I leave the building. There is a scaffold to my left—work being done on the awning lights, but not now; the scaffold is unattended. I climb it, maybe fifteen feet, maybe twenty. At the top I reach and pull myself onto the museum’s wide, flat concrete awning. No one notices as I walk along the museum’s towering Art Deco windows, the skinny young man sitting beneath the great face of its Art Deco clock. I dangle my legs over the edge and hold my strip of film as I look out, past the buses and the gardens, beyond the fountain and the pools, the highway. I make my plan.
What I will do.
I will stop checking my email. I’ll climb down the scaffold and leave this museum for good. I’ll get in my car. I’ll go home and pack. Or I won’t. There’s nothing there that I need. I’ll head west.
I’ll make a few stops along the way. I’ll strike up conversations with people I meet at the bars of charming little towns with old train depots and haunted hotels. I’ll learn how to strike up conversations.
On the third day, or maybe the fourth, I’ll stop in Golden, Colorado. I’ve seen pictures of Golden online, but it won’t compare. I imagine speckled sunlight and breezy treetops, joggers and cyclists and the smell of hops in the air from the brewery, where you work. I imagine the jagged lines of the mountains.
Your house will crest a large plot of land. You’ll be there on the porch as I make my way from the car. We won’t hug.
There will be dinner, wide French doors opened up. I’ll feel chilly, despite the summer heat, and your wife or girlfriend or partner will find me a windbreaker. You’ll smoke your pipe and talk my ear off about your work at the brewery. You’ll want to take me on a tour in the morning, but I’ll say I have to get back on the road. You’ll say you can get me some free samples. I’ll say I have to beat the light.
I won’t say why I have to beat the light. Partly because of what your wife or girlfriend or partner will say, at dinner, about the mountains. She doesn’t care for them. “They all think I’m crazy, all these outdoor types, hiking and riding horseback. I tried to fake an interest for a while, and maybe it even seemed romantic early on. But nope. Not me. Just where I am.”
I’ll notice the train tracks running along a shelf just below the ceiling. In the middle of dinner, the train will wind its way through, and I’ll follow it, and you’ll follow me chuckling. The train will whistle about your kitchen, disappear through a hole carved into the side of the cabinetry. I’ll open the cabinet doors to watch the tiny engine weave around your plates and mugs and out the other side, on into the living room, across the fireplace, struggling a bit as it climbs the bannister. We will follow it up the stairs and into the bathroom; the thing will narrowly dodge the pipes below the sink and behind the toilet and escape through a window. You’ll wave your hand for me to follow you, and we’ll find a study whose window the train will enter. Your house will grow rooms to accommodate its endless track. I’ll give up in the attic, and we’ll stoop there among dusty boxes.
“So Hollywood,” you will say. “Sounds awful to me. But go. You should go. Why not.”
I’ll apologize for breaking your train when I was eight or nine. You’ll apologize for leaving. Or you won’t. We’ll stoop there among the boxes until the train comes back around.
I will leave late. Maybe I’ll have planned it this way. I won’t reach the continental divide until just past magic hour. I’ll follow those winding roads up and up, and the dusk-glow will fade so that only the edges of those great rocks will catch in the periphery of my headlights, these tunnels blasted away, by someone else, long ago.
And when I reach the top, even though I won’t be able to see a thing, I’ll get out of the car, I’ll look out into the dome, and I’ll say…
Nicholas Maistros has published stories in Best Small Fictions, Boston Review, The Baltimore Review, Witness, Washington Square Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. More of his writing can be found at nicholasmaistros.com.
22 December 2023
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