Tate found a window seat toward the rear of the nearly empty train, but held no expectation of privacy in the car. His wife used to remark on his knack for drawing to himself unsolicited the most spirited of fellow travelers on such trips as this. Perhaps he invited it subconsciously. He rightly maintained that bad fortune finds those who reject friendly overtures on the road.
With his mouth slightly opened, his tongue suspended between his thin lips, he looked about the empty car unable to find a comfortable position. He’d herniated discs a L4-5 and C5-6 in his work on the railroad. He received some FELA comp, but refused surgical intervention. Now it was too late. He fumbled with the bead in his pocket idly until the side effect of the pills he’d downed in the train station men’s room and the clack of the familiar rails lullabied him into a stupendous unconsciousness.
When he awoke, a man, older than Tate himself, wearing a green trucker’s cap with a Red Man Tobacco patch sat motionless in the seat across the aisle. The rod and reel which sat across his lap was suspicious, but it was the old straw creel on the seat next to him which gave him away as a narcotic-induced hallucination. The man turned to Tate and put his hand up to the brim of his cap in a pleasant salutation. The fisherman then returned to his previous posture staring straight ahead, rocking back and forth subtly with the train’s forward motion until the locomotive plowed across an old suspension bridge overlooking a picturesque creek at which time he vanished in a slow fade.
“May your lines stay heavy, Big Red,” Tate whispered to the phantom. His initial scrutiny of the tiny typeset which accompanied his medication referenced no side effects which fell into this category, but this was not unprecedented. Most of the time Tate just ignored ‘the people’ as he called them. If irritable, he would upbraid them. If in good temper, he’d engage them, or possibly offer them a snack. Generally, it seemed the best course to pay them no mind. Usually they went about their own business until, after a spell, they’d quietly take leave of his society as the old angler had done.
Tate was reluctant to take any of this up with his doctor for fear that he’d be prescribed yet another pill, or sent to some ‘head doctor’ whom he’d find unbearable. Instead, he kept it all to himself, except for that time he’d ventured to call an outlandish late night radio show broadcast all over the country all night from some undisclosed location, described only as, ‘high in the desert.’ The show trafficked in conspiracy theories and the unknown, but was decent company when he couldn’t sleep.
“Walter in Springfield,” the famous host said, inviting him into the ether, after a long wait on hold.
When Tate then told his story about his experiences with the people over the air, the host confessed that he had found their appearance most chilling. A multitude of peculiar theories were subsequently expressed by subsequent callers from all over the nation and its territories. The host and callers steered Tate away from his own mundane notion of a pharmaceutical explanation as inadequately dramatic and in keeping with the broadcast’s supernatural themes.
One caller, Ed from Phoenix, almost surely a crackpot, was certain the sightings resulted from alien visitation and went on about what he referred to as ‘the grays.’ Tate, listening in his modest room shook his head ruling this out. Didn’t ring true. Not that he’d altogether barred the general idea of life somewhere out there– he imagined there were such space characters given all the room and the imagination of the Almighty– but these folks that’d show up before him, to a person, all seemed grounded, familiar, and friendly. He felt they were probably all Americans.
“Or may be Canadians,” Tate said quietly into the hum of radio then laughed at himself for this whole endeavor. Some of the people he saw in these little fogs were a bit salty, but so was he. He figured the most likely explanation was they were sourced ultimately from deep in his own mind and spirit.
Another caller, Doug from Lansing, suggested mysterious mis-folds in time, which sporadically arose, explaining he too had endured similar visits from such shadow-folk. He went on about multiverses and time bubbles. While perhaps plausible, Tate felt an intuitive resistance to batching himself with this Doug from Lansing as his peculiar theories on physics were too conveniently conformed to his prior theories about the shadow-folk. Also Tate had gotten snowed in at a motel in Lansing once for the good part of the week several years ago. He hated to hold this against old Doug, but the motel’s manager had been needlessly ornery, as well.
The next caller, a quiet spoken young woman, Allison from Indianapolis, who professed to be a school teacher and an insomniac, called the phenomenon an encounter with what she called, ‘the midway place,’ where she posited that this world and the next bumped up against one another on occasion.
This, Tate thought, was far-fetched and could probably be the case. Truth be told, he seemed to have been residing in a place that fit this description full time since his wife had unexpectedly died almost ten years ago. Tate had figured he’d go first. So did she. When she asked him which hymns they ought to sing at his funeral, he’d say, “I don’t know, Mollie. Surprise me.”
As the train lurched ahead, Tate took out his wife’s picture from his wallet, considering wistfully her casual loveliness.
“Midway place,” Tate sniffed.
“Are you alright, sir?” the train’s steward asked. The young man had approached slowly so as not to startle his passenger.
“Pardon me?” Tate asked. He wasn’t prone to startle, but could no longer hear very good.
“Are you alright, sir?”
“Gaining ground,” he answered slowly. “Gaining ground, son. Thank you.”