August 3rd, 2010 by Jeff Simmermon

I was riding the Acela from New York to DC last week on a fairly ordinary commute — then the train came to a stop about a mile past the Hamilton, NJ station. The conductor said that there had been some debris on the tracks that the train ran over, and it would be a short wait before we were back on our way. Then the smell of burning flesh filled the train, telling an altogether different story.

About forty-five minutes later, the conductor announced that we had, in fact, had an accident. We’d struck a passenger back at the train platform in Hamilton. There was a fatality. We didn’t even feel a bump back where I was seated.

Artificially hushed chatter filled the train.

Then the conductor announced that we would probably be there for a few hours while they inspected the train, switched out the crew and dealt with emergency personnel. There would be free snacks and water in the cafe car, he went on to say, to apologize for the inconvenience.

You’ve never seen such an exodus. Everyone jumped up out of their seats and made a beeline for the cafe car, cramming crappy cookies in a plastic sack into all of their available pockets. People were lined up the length of two train cars just to buy food and booze. The train ran out of beer and wine in half an hour.

It was a low-budget, plastic-wrapped business-travel bacchanal.



I sat behind the line cramming a dispirited imitation of an Italian cold-cut trio into my throat, imagining my parents, my girlfriend, my sister stumbling their way onto the tracks and twisting an ankle at the last possible second.

I pictured my 96 year old grandmother slipping in front of the train, nauseated firemen hosing clots of my father’s hair off the train’s windshield and just kept pushing wads of industrial-grade Genoa salami and bread past the back of my tongue.

I imagined stepping in front of a speeding train on purpose. I’ve had no shortage of depression issues myself, but never that badly. I tried to imagine my worst day ever, multiply that by ten and imagine feeling that way every morning before getting out of bed — and then detonating into a red spray one summer afternoon. Would you even feel it?

It turns out that our train accident was a suicide. Someone posted the link to a news story about it to my Facebook profile a few moments after I asked if anyone had any news. From the Trentonian:

Another apparent “suicide by train” occurred late yesterday afternoon at the Sloan Avenue train station when a 30-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., woman “trespasser” stepped off the westbound express track into the path of the Acela Express speeding by at between 110 and 135 mph. The impact left a pronounced dent in the front of the train, and body parts were strewn down the track. One piece wound up on the platform.

I showed the story to my neighbor who looked it up herself, and passed it on. This wave of silence spread over the train as people dropped their heads to read the same link off a neighbor’s laptop, or emailed to them by a coworker in another car.

Right about then, someone next to me complained, announcing to noone in particular “Sheesh — this sucks, man, now my commute’s all screwed up and I’m gonna miss dinner. Man, I tell you, I have the worst luck.”

For a moment, I thought about that scene in The Fly when Jeff Goldblum drools all over a guy’s hand, melting it into a gooey nub and thought about imitating it with my mouthful of crappy sandwich. Instead, I swallowed and told the guy “you know, I really do not think that you are having the worst day of anyone involved in this situation. I think you’re probably going to be just fine, actually.”

He glared at me for a second, then got up and left. He probably stayed on the train, even though I had mentally banished him into the woods to forage for his own fucking dinner.

Someone from that train also started leaving comments on the news story from above decrying the woman’s selfishness in choosing to end her life that way. He felt that she was very inconsiderate, messing up all these people’s commutes and dinnertimes. He even went so far as to suggest alternative suicide methods that would presumably affect fewer people’s plans for the evening, either not thinking or not caring that eventually, the victim’s family might read what he had to say about their daughter/mother/girlfriend’s situation.

All I could think was that someone, somewhere, had loved that poor sick woman and she had no way of understanding it. She was likely in a tremendous amount of pain with an illness that cut her off from the people that loved her the most and she’d gone and kicked a hole in her family as an escape route. They’re going to have to deal with that for the rest of their lives. The train’s engineer may never work again, at least not for Amtrak. He’s sure to be haunted by this for a long, long time.

If that impotent commuter were sitting across the table from this woman’s family, I really doubt he’d have said that. If anyone knew what he looked like, or what his real name was, he’d have to move. It’s a sad old story, but it keeps getting more and more true: when people have a little technology to hide behind, they’re a bunch of sick creeps. Sure, there’s good out there, too. But it’s a peculiar wrinkle in our brains that ten good comments, a couple hundred kind words get undone by one faceless bozo with a tiny axe to grind against the entire world.

Something about our culture of glowing rectangles makes this sort of veil that we can all hide behind and do a nasty little dance — we can just be as thoughtless and ghoulish as we want, and nobody’s the wiser.

We finally pulled into DC at about ten o’clock, three hours after we were supposed to arrive. Everyone hurried off to get in the cab line, as though shoving for a cab would bring back those three lost hours, or reassemble the woman from the front of the train. I was the last one off, and I couldn’t help myself — I turned back to look at the front of the train. There was a large, human-sized dent in the train’s aerodynamic nose cone and the entire front of the engine was spattered with a crusty, brownish gore. I couldn’t stop looking at it, thinking again that that mess on the front of the train used to be somebody’s daughter, used to be someone who had been held by someone who loved her. And again, I just wanted to cram something down into my throat to diffuse and distract that awful feeling in my stomach.

I know that this was ghoulish. I know it’s a gross and inborn habit born out of my sick relationship with my iPhone, but I just couldn’t help myself. I pulled out my iPhone camera and took several pictures, making sure to get the light and the composition just right and then showed them to my friend once I got to his house.

I don’t think I’ll ever completely understand why.