Planes, Trains, and Attempted Suicide – an Obsession short by Eric Esquivel

Planes, Trains, and Attempted Suicide
by

Eric Esquivel

My snarling pug of a brother-in-law likes to whisper in my sister’s ear that my interest in locomotives isn’t even genuine, that I just Googled “traits of people with Autism” because I wanted to be cool, like one of the characters from The Big Bang Theory.

Which is insane. I don’t even like The Big Bang Theory. The people on that show are supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime super-geniuses, but they write them like infantilized stroke survivors who can’t understand what’s being said to them unless it’s explained to them in the context of a back issue of Green Lantern.

I hate The Big Bang Theory.

I hate my sister’s husband, Greg.

But I fucking LOVE trains.

And I always have. I remember the first time I had the privilege of riding one. It was the Spring after my twelfth birthday. My older brother, René, had moved to Chicago to study sculpture at The American Academy of Art.

School was on break for a couple of weeks and our mother had guilt-tripped René into letting us visit. He was thrilled that his mom and his preteen little reads-at-a-high-school-level-but-still-wets-the-bed-and-has-trouble-holding-eye-contact brother were going to be cramping his style. And I, for the record, wasn’t happy about being pulled away from my Super Nintendo to watch my mother fawn all over my sibling’s weird, abstract, clay monstrosities for hours.

But my shitty attitude changed the moment I saw “The California Zephyr”—the bilevel intercity superliner that runs thrice weekly through Waukegan’s Fountain Square, on the way to Union Station in Chicago.

I’ve heard near-death-survivors on YouTube describe the soul-shaking awe that they felt, seeing the face of God as they approached The Gates of Heaven. I’ve read accounts of alien abductees recalling how they could feel their consciousness expanding as their brains struggled to perceive technology that was light years more advanced and elegant than anything they had seen before on Earth. My experience seeing that train was like a mixture of both experiences. Only much, much more profound.

I spent that weekend in Chicago in a trance, thinking of nothing except that glorious, ten-car, matte chrome beauty. I barely spoke, or even blinked as I stole my brother’s clay and tried—in vain—to mash it into a crude approximation of the Holy relic of unearthly beauty whose vibrations I could still feel buried in the marrow of my bones.

To be honest, these two decades later, my life isn’t much different. I still love that train. And not in the soft, casual way that people mean when they say that they “love the smell after it rains”, or that they “love” their pet hermit crab. I have organized my life around not just my love of “trains” as a concept, but of that particular train. My performance in school wasn’t conducive with me becoming a conductor. And my neurodivergence, frustratingly, keeps me from acing my impassioned interviews with The City to become an operator. But I have still found genuine joy working as a custodian at Fountain Square. I imagine myself not as a janitor in a train station, but as a dutiful priest in a cathedral to my God.

And I don’t feel jealous as I watch other people admire, appreciate, and board her. As a lover, I experience what The Internet refers to as “compersion”—I derive pleasure from watching others enjoy my lover.

Because my love is real. My love is pure. Even if it is unconsummated.

Or, rather, it was. Until tonight.

Of course I’ve touched her. Ridden her. Been inside of her. But tonight … that double-decker GSI-G70 superliner will be inside of me.

Standing here on the train tracks, naked except for my contacts, I shiver in anticipation of finally feeling my long-time lover’s 100 mph kiss upon my cheek.

Off in the distance, I can hear her hum. Under my feet, I can feel the rails quiver as she draws close. Beneath my ribs, my heart pounds so loudly I get scared that I’m going to pass out before I can feel our bodies collide.

I woke up in the Lake Forrest Hospital’s psychiatric wing, with hard leather restraints keeping me bound to an uncomfortably firm, starchy mattress by my wrists and ankles.

“You’re lucky they found you when they did, son,” a voice said to me, condescending with a two-pack-a-day raspiness.

I tried to respond, but quickly found that the switch connecting my brain to my mouth had been turned off. Through the corner of my eye, I could see that an I.V. bag full of morphine was steadily dripping into my left arm.

The nurse saw me struggle to speak and misinterpreted my writhing and incoherent mumblings and took pity on me.

I watched her as she rocked back and forth in her chair until she was able to get up on her swollen ankles and waddle over to the television set that was mounted on the wall.

“Don’t wear yourself out, baby,” she cooed. “It’s time to rest. Here, I’ll put on the T.V. for ya …”

The crackle of the television set gave way to the cloying cacophony of The Barenaked Ladies.

Oh.

Oh, no.

She put on an episode of The Big Bang Theory. And, from the look of the text scrawl on the bottom of the screen, it looked like we were halfway through a Holiday weekend rerun marathon. Kill me.