(draft) waiting room

fiction? prose? something like that

The announcement that the train was delayed again was first broadcast in whatever the language was of the country he was currently in, then repeated again in broken English. Hello … the next train to Berlin in two hours now … working hard to fix … we are sorry. The American could barely make out the announcement through the muffled loudspeaker but the two hours was all he needed to know. He sighed and laid his head back on the wall, staring up at the light fixture. Below the lights there were the voices of fed up people ranting in foreign tongues. He didn’t know the words but he understood what they were saying. He didn’t need to pull out google translate to understand the feelings of frustration and exhaustion of the other people here in this waiting room. The American was also frustrated but didn’t have the energy to join in their chorus.

He had been travelling for a long time now. The days had all blurred together, experiencing the continent through the windows of trains and buses. He didn’t know where he was or where he wanted to end up. Berlin would be another stop along the way. There was a flash deal on Trainline from here to there and that was the only reason he had booked this leg of the journey. He had never been to Berlin. Some people he used to know had moved to there from Brooklyn but the American had not heard from them since they migrated. He had considered reaching out to them but he wasn’t sure if he would recognize them, or if they would remember him.

As he started blankly at the lights he felt his phone vibrate. A notification from Trainline about the train being delayed by two hours. He felt like the app was mocking him, adding insult to injury. With his phone out he decided to check if he had any other notifications. It would be the darkest time of the night on the other side of the Atlantic so he figured there wouldn’t be anything to check on. As he looked he saw a missed call from his mother, a fake message saying WELLS FARGO ACCOUNT HACKED — ACT URGENTLY, and two texts from Kate. The first one said hey how are you? and the second, sent hours later, said i miss you. The American put his phone back in his pocket and went back to staring at the light fixture.

It was an ornate sculpture that was either made of gold or painted to look that way, he thought. It looked like a chandelier, drooping from the ceiling. From where each lightbult was placed there was what looked like an angel around it, wings stretched out and arms wide open, as if the give the appearance that each angel was blessing this bulb with light, with life. A third of the lightbulbs were burnt out and most of the others were dim. The paint was faded and the more intricate details on some of the angels looked like they had been washed out long before he had arrived. The American observed this moument of faded glory for a while, adjusting the grip on his bag every once in a while, almost as if it was reminding himself that it was still there and he was still here.

Not that there was anything else to do in this purgatory. Most of the shops were closed, their shutters used as graffiti canvases. The waiting room had a broken espresso vending machine and another that only had different variations of Fantas, but only took cash which he did not have. There was a newsstand but they had nothing in English, only short novels and tabloid rags in the native language. There was one of them on a table and he tried to read it, as if to at least try to pick up something from this country, to tell about to his family if he spoke to them again or to sound interesting at parties, but there was nothing there. Pictures of people in suits looking serious. Pararazzi photos of Timothee Chalamet. Advertisements featuring barely clothed women with alluring poses, inviting the reader to call a phone number. It felt like he was back home.

As he spent more time away from home the more the American had come to the understanding that people were the same everywhere. This revelation was both assuring and depressing to him. It was assuring in that he could go anywhere and not be totally lost. But it was depressing because that was what had been looking for on this journey, from station to station, hostel to hostel, city to city, country to country. He would wake up each day and feel lost and wanted to live in a life that reflected this feeling back, like a mirror. Yet despite being an ocean and a river from home he found he could not be lost. The ocean wasn’t a large impass, he found. It was more like stepping over a puddle.

**

The muffled voice from the loudspeaker woke him up but he didn’t remember falling asleep. The maintenance was fixed and the train was ready. A cry of relief echoed out across the waiting room. The American looked down, relieved that his bag was still between his hands.

The announcement had included the track line where the train was but he couldn’t hear it clearly over the chattering of people and moving of bags. He decided to follow the exodus from the waiting room, assuming they were all headed to the same place. As he walked with them his eyes wandered. He saw tired old men who looked like they were waiting for a train to purgatory. He saw a young backpacking couple, the woman with crossed arms and pointed eyebrows, the man bewildered and anxious. He saw groups of black migrants standing around trying to decide whether to continue their journey deeper into the continent or not. He saw bored kids scrolling on their phones. The American saw all these people and felt reflections of himself in them and for some reason this gave him a great sense of dread.

They passed through a tunnel on the way to the track platform. There appeared to be the remnants of murals on the walls but they were so faded that the American couldn’t tell what they originally were meant to illustrate. At the end of the tunnel was the train to Berlin waiting for them. He opened the Trainline app and showed the conductor the ticket and stepped aboard. He took a window seat. The trian was mostly empty so he had the booth to himself. As the doors shut and the train started up and exited the station he stared out of the window. He tried to think of something, anything, but his consciousness only returend the equivalent of radio static, and so he spent the entire ride staring out the window, looking at nothing in particular.