Station to Station
Station to Station
Eric Scott
“By its very nature, theology tends- and under certain conditions, must always tend- to become demonology."
-Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus
I do not often take the el in America. Odd, perhaps, as in London I took the tube every day; but then, the tube mirrors London considerably better than the el mirrors Chicago. And perhaps I'm merely playing into the long Jungian memory of the English; while studying Anglo-Saxon at university, I recall being told that many of those formative English words indicated a sort of agoraphobia, a fear of the open spaces. Perhaps it's merely that, just a preference for the dark, enclosed brick of the underground instead of the expanse of city I see from an elevated train. My route, sadly, avoids most of the underground sections of the el’s track.
Yet one still has to get to work on time, whether one's automobile is working or not, and so today, I took the el.
It is late November, and through the train’s windows I can see (when the view is not crowded with buildings, whose brick and glass facades I find oddly comforting) a long sheet of clouds, the gray of good wool slacks. It may snow today, or perhaps tomorrow; I have not yet picked up my daily paper to check the weather. (I read the Tribune, which I admit finds most of its usefulness for me in the crossword.) I intend to occupy my time with thoughts of Marcus and Elizabeth, assuming I can find a seat. It is hard to concentrate while packed in like a tin of sardines.
The el is crowded, as it has been every time I have ridden on it. As always, there is a strange mixture of people: men in suits, adolescents in baggy trousers and leather jackets, and occasionally, someone like me: a man in a long coat and a sweater that could only be described as "sensible." I thankfully do not require a suit for my career, but it would be unwise to lack a bit of tie poking from the v-neck of one's sweater or waistcoat in my industry.
Most of them ignore me, excepting a group of several young people- two girls and a boy, perhaps seventeen, perhaps eighteen. Their mohawks spiked leather jackets mark them as punks, and they give my thinning hair and spectacled mole’s eyes a rebellious sneer. This does not bother me. I remember being seventeen in London in 1982, doing my hair up with school glue and piercing my ear with a safety pin. More to the point, I remember getting over it.
I finally spy an open seat, perhaps the last one in the train, and I push my way through to it (though I do my best not to hit anyone with my briefcase.) I manage to get to it and sit down, slightly out of breath. I am rather pleased with myself for obtaining the seat. Really, it was a wonder that nobody had noticed it.
The man seated next to me is staring out the window at the gray heavens. If I had to guess, I'd call him a professor, some humanity or another; they're the only ones these days who can still get away with tweed. His hair, the colour auburn, sweeps past his ears, nearly to his shoulders; and now that I am looking at him, I notice smoke rising up from the front of his face. A quick glance in the glass confirms it; beneath his widow's peak, his sharp nose and full moon shaped glasses, is a pipe. The smoke gently rises from it. I grimace and tap him on the shoulder.
"Sir?" I say, a little timidly.
"Ja?" he says, and I am taken aback slightly by the German.
"Sir, you aren't supposed to smoke on the el."
"No?" He shrugs and looks around. "Nobody else has said anything, and I know the conductor has passed by at least twice." His voice has the hard edges of German, and it is at once pleasant- a more poetic man might call it musical- and intimidating, though again, perhaps it's merely the Jungian recollection of bombs over London. "But I apologize," he says. "Is it disturbing you?"
And I realize, just as he mentions it, that it does not, and I tell him so.
"Of course not," he says. "A pipe of good tobacco is far more pleasant than a filthy cigarette. One can understand why they ban those." He took a puff. "Do you smoke?"
The train slowed as we approached the Garfield station.
"Not in many years, I'm afraid," I say. "Perhaps not at all since I have lived in America." I pause, and then add, "British by birth."
"Mm, yes, the accent," says the man with full moon glasses. "As you may have guessed, I am German, myself." He extends his hand to me. "Doctor Marianus."
I accept it and introduce myself in turn. "Funny, meeting someone from the Continent like this. Are you visiting?"
"Not on a holiday, exactly, no. I teach at a university in Saint Louis. I am here for a conference at the University of Chicago."
I smile, pleased to have my suspicions confirmed. "Really? I work there, actually. What field are you in?"
He holds his pipe by the stem. "Divinity."
"Fascinating. Are you presenting?"
He nods. "The German monastic tradition in the 16th century." He took a puff, held it in his mouth, and then slowly blew it out. It seemed to dissipate faster than normal smoke. "And yourself?"
"I'm an editor- acquisitions, actually, for the press. Relatively low on the totem pole, I'm afraid, but I'm working on it."
He smiles, and I do not think that I like it; there's something vaguely unsettling about the curve of his lips, something predatory. “That sounds like a nice job. Secure.”
“Well, yes, it certainly is that.” I give him a pleasant smile and turn towards the front of the train, expecting that our conversation has ended.
Doctor Marianus speaks again. "Working on what, if I may ask?"
“Beg pardon?”
He gestures with his pipe. “You said that you were working on something. On what?”
The thought had never really occurred to me, to be truthful. ‘Working on it’ merely seemed like the appropriate thing to say. "A... Well, a promotion, I suppose. Or perhaps just a move into another field... I handle social sciences now, but my study was in literature."
"Yes," he says. "Theatre, wasn't it? Your thesis was on Ibsen's 'Doll's House,' as I recall."
At first I do not comprehend what he has said, but then it comes to me, and I can feel the blood draining from my face. "I- I’m sorry?"
"Yes. You were to be a great playwright. At least, that is what I recall you told all of your friends as you did the dramaturgy and the stage managing and, occasionally, when you could muster the requisite arrogance, the acting. And then you graduated and forgot." He takes a long drag on the pipe, and his following words are full of smoke. "You are such a far cry from what you imagined you would be." There is a dark, almost whispered laughter which follows this, and I do not like it at all.
I hesitate, and then ask, "How could you know any of that?"
"I know because I am what I am, though I am perhaps as fallen in my destiny as you." He leans in, conspiratorially, and his eyes- I had not noticed how thin they are, how like the eyes of a snake, somehow- narrow. "Supposing I told you that I have done nothing to you today but lie, that there is no conference, no professor in Saint Louis. Suppose that I told you that I could let you take it all back, let you pursue that life you believed you would lead, give you your Marcus and Elizabeth. Suppose I told you that right now, all you would have to do is not get off at 63rd to walk to your sweater-vest and tie job. Instead, you simply follow me.” The smoke curls through his nostrils. “What would you say?"
63rd is the next station. We will be there in only a moment. I can feel myself sweating, despite the chill. “I... I am not sure I take your meaning.”
“Of course, you will have your bad years,” muses the German doctor. His eyes close as he speaks. “Your spells where it seems every line you put to paper is rubbish, where the critics will claim your career has peaked. There will be long nights where you wonder where the next scene will come from. Yes. You will.” He opens his eyes again and turns to face me fully. “But you will also have your fevered moments of genius. You remember those, I am sure. Those times when you cannot eat, cannot sleep, because there is too much brilliance spilling from you.”
“I think it best if we...”
“It will not be safe, my friend. It will not be secure. You will not wear your sweater vest to work each day like the other sheep.”
I can only blink at that, and for a moment, there is silence between us.
“I do not even ask you for your soul. Only for your security. Suppose I made you this deal. What would you say?”
I swallow, my throat dry. "I would... I would say that I don't know how you could possibly know those things, unless you just by lucky chance recalled seeing my name attached to that thesis many years ago. And I would say that you sound like a madman."
His eyes do not waver, do not flicker; a shiver runs through me, and though I feel an urge to get up and leave, I know that somehow, I cannot. "So given a choice between the dreams you once promised yourself and this thing you wake up to every morning, mildly satisfying but so far from what you were meant for- you would call me a madman?"
I blink, and apparently, that is all the answer he needs.
"Of course," he says. "Once upon a time, my kind would meet with your kind, and we would make the ancient trade: brilliance for salvation, genius for redemption, songs for souls. But those days are long past. So have we fallen. So have you, as well." He slowly pours the smoke out into my face, and suddenly it turns acrid and harsh. I break out into coughs; I brush the man standing next to my seat in my coughing, and for the first time since Doctor Marianus began speaking, I become conscious of the train, of the windows, of everyone that surrounds us. "Once, we would have given you the crown. Now, you, who should have belonged to us, settle for the kingdom."
The train slows.
"63rd," says Doctor Marianus. "You had better go."
And so I do.
It is only a few blocks to the University of Chicago Press building, and from there only a short walk to my desk, piled high with the manuscripts that haunt my days. My briefcase is full of even more. My job, my life, is to pick through them, to find a mere two dozen for a year; and yet I never get to read them during my work day, finding myself, as always, in meeting after meeting, conference after conference, making plans, discussing things which have nothing to do with the ideas we ostensibly support.
It is a typical morning, neither unpleasant nor especially pleasing; and soon it is lunch. I do not feel hungry.
I consider thumbing through another manuscript, something about linguistics and modernism, but the memory of Doctor Marianus haunts me slightly. Perhaps it is because on some level, I felt that he knew that I wanted to accept his offer. Because despite the comfort of my situation, my respectable salary, my small part in shaping the course of a field’s literature...
Because somehow, even I know that there could have been more to my life than this. But surely this is merely a bit of midday angst, something I will have long forgotten by supper.
He was just a madman on a train. Nothing more than that.
Hoping to shake off these feelings, I open a document on my desk computer that I have not touched in over a year, in a simple folder marked "Israfel."
It is a play, one I began a year and a half ago, after a break of at least a decade from any kind of script writing at all. I managed to get through the first act and two scenes of act two, but there I stalled, the excuse of work allowing me to forget it.
Today I shall start a new regimen. I’ll write every day. I allow myself a self-righteous smile. I certainly do not need any madman’s demonic pact to write a bloody play.
I bring my lips together, pondering, and then begin to type.
ACT TWO, SCENE THREE.
Setting: Elizabeth's flat.
Enter Elizabeth and Marcus.
MARCUS:
I look at the line, knowing that Marcus is to bring news of the war to her, to explain how sour things have begun to turn, never admitting all that he wishes to. I know, because it is in my head, and in my heart, and I cannot sleep at night sometimes because of it.
And yet, I cannot find the words.
Eric Scott
“By its very nature, theology tends- and under certain conditions, must always tend- to become demonology."
-Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus
I do not often take the el in America. Odd, perhaps, as in London I took the tube every day; but then, the tube mirrors London considerably better than the el mirrors Chicago. And perhaps I'm merely playing into the long Jungian memory of the English; while studying Anglo-Saxon at university, I recall being told that many of those formative English words indicated a sort of agoraphobia, a fear of the open spaces. Perhaps it's merely that, just a preference for the dark, enclosed brick of the underground instead of the expanse of city I see from an elevated train. My route, sadly, avoids most of the underground sections of the el’s track.
Yet one still has to get to work on time, whether one's automobile is working or not, and so today, I took the el.
It is late November, and through the train’s windows I can see (when the view is not crowded with buildings, whose brick and glass facades I find oddly comforting) a long sheet of clouds, the gray of good wool slacks. It may snow today, or perhaps tomorrow; I have not yet picked up my daily paper to check the weather. (I read the Tribune, which I admit finds most of its usefulness for me in the crossword.) I intend to occupy my time with thoughts of Marcus and Elizabeth, assuming I can find a seat. It is hard to concentrate while packed in like a tin of sardines.
The el is crowded, as it has been every time I have ridden on it. As always, there is a strange mixture of people: men in suits, adolescents in baggy trousers and leather jackets, and occasionally, someone like me: a man in a long coat and a sweater that could only be described as "sensible." I thankfully do not require a suit for my career, but it would be unwise to lack a bit of tie poking from the v-neck of one's sweater or waistcoat in my industry.
Most of them ignore me, excepting a group of several young people- two girls and a boy, perhaps seventeen, perhaps eighteen. Their mohawks spiked leather jackets mark them as punks, and they give my thinning hair and spectacled mole’s eyes a rebellious sneer. This does not bother me. I remember being seventeen in London in 1982, doing my hair up with school glue and piercing my ear with a safety pin. More to the point, I remember getting over it.
I finally spy an open seat, perhaps the last one in the train, and I push my way through to it (though I do my best not to hit anyone with my briefcase.) I manage to get to it and sit down, slightly out of breath. I am rather pleased with myself for obtaining the seat. Really, it was a wonder that nobody had noticed it.
The man seated next to me is staring out the window at the gray heavens. If I had to guess, I'd call him a professor, some humanity or another; they're the only ones these days who can still get away with tweed. His hair, the colour auburn, sweeps past his ears, nearly to his shoulders; and now that I am looking at him, I notice smoke rising up from the front of his face. A quick glance in the glass confirms it; beneath his widow's peak, his sharp nose and full moon shaped glasses, is a pipe. The smoke gently rises from it. I grimace and tap him on the shoulder.
"Sir?" I say, a little timidly.
"Ja?" he says, and I am taken aback slightly by the German.
"Sir, you aren't supposed to smoke on the el."
"No?" He shrugs and looks around. "Nobody else has said anything, and I know the conductor has passed by at least twice." His voice has the hard edges of German, and it is at once pleasant- a more poetic man might call it musical- and intimidating, though again, perhaps it's merely the Jungian recollection of bombs over London. "But I apologize," he says. "Is it disturbing you?"
And I realize, just as he mentions it, that it does not, and I tell him so.
"Of course not," he says. "A pipe of good tobacco is far more pleasant than a filthy cigarette. One can understand why they ban those." He took a puff. "Do you smoke?"
The train slowed as we approached the Garfield station.
"Not in many years, I'm afraid," I say. "Perhaps not at all since I have lived in America." I pause, and then add, "British by birth."
"Mm, yes, the accent," says the man with full moon glasses. "As you may have guessed, I am German, myself." He extends his hand to me. "Doctor Marianus."
I accept it and introduce myself in turn. "Funny, meeting someone from the Continent like this. Are you visiting?"
"Not on a holiday, exactly, no. I teach at a university in Saint Louis. I am here for a conference at the University of Chicago."
I smile, pleased to have my suspicions confirmed. "Really? I work there, actually. What field are you in?"
He holds his pipe by the stem. "Divinity."
"Fascinating. Are you presenting?"
He nods. "The German monastic tradition in the 16th century." He took a puff, held it in his mouth, and then slowly blew it out. It seemed to dissipate faster than normal smoke. "And yourself?"
"I'm an editor- acquisitions, actually, for the press. Relatively low on the totem pole, I'm afraid, but I'm working on it."
He smiles, and I do not think that I like it; there's something vaguely unsettling about the curve of his lips, something predatory. “That sounds like a nice job. Secure.”
“Well, yes, it certainly is that.” I give him a pleasant smile and turn towards the front of the train, expecting that our conversation has ended.
Doctor Marianus speaks again. "Working on what, if I may ask?"
“Beg pardon?”
He gestures with his pipe. “You said that you were working on something. On what?”
The thought had never really occurred to me, to be truthful. ‘Working on it’ merely seemed like the appropriate thing to say. "A... Well, a promotion, I suppose. Or perhaps just a move into another field... I handle social sciences now, but my study was in literature."
"Yes," he says. "Theatre, wasn't it? Your thesis was on Ibsen's 'Doll's House,' as I recall."
At first I do not comprehend what he has said, but then it comes to me, and I can feel the blood draining from my face. "I- I’m sorry?"
"Yes. You were to be a great playwright. At least, that is what I recall you told all of your friends as you did the dramaturgy and the stage managing and, occasionally, when you could muster the requisite arrogance, the acting. And then you graduated and forgot." He takes a long drag on the pipe, and his following words are full of smoke. "You are such a far cry from what you imagined you would be." There is a dark, almost whispered laughter which follows this, and I do not like it at all.
I hesitate, and then ask, "How could you know any of that?"
"I know because I am what I am, though I am perhaps as fallen in my destiny as you." He leans in, conspiratorially, and his eyes- I had not noticed how thin they are, how like the eyes of a snake, somehow- narrow. "Supposing I told you that I have done nothing to you today but lie, that there is no conference, no professor in Saint Louis. Suppose that I told you that I could let you take it all back, let you pursue that life you believed you would lead, give you your Marcus and Elizabeth. Suppose I told you that right now, all you would have to do is not get off at 63rd to walk to your sweater-vest and tie job. Instead, you simply follow me.” The smoke curls through his nostrils. “What would you say?"
63rd is the next station. We will be there in only a moment. I can feel myself sweating, despite the chill. “I... I am not sure I take your meaning.”
“Of course, you will have your bad years,” muses the German doctor. His eyes close as he speaks. “Your spells where it seems every line you put to paper is rubbish, where the critics will claim your career has peaked. There will be long nights where you wonder where the next scene will come from. Yes. You will.” He opens his eyes again and turns to face me fully. “But you will also have your fevered moments of genius. You remember those, I am sure. Those times when you cannot eat, cannot sleep, because there is too much brilliance spilling from you.”
“I think it best if we...”
“It will not be safe, my friend. It will not be secure. You will not wear your sweater vest to work each day like the other sheep.”
I can only blink at that, and for a moment, there is silence between us.
“I do not even ask you for your soul. Only for your security. Suppose I made you this deal. What would you say?”
I swallow, my throat dry. "I would... I would say that I don't know how you could possibly know those things, unless you just by lucky chance recalled seeing my name attached to that thesis many years ago. And I would say that you sound like a madman."
His eyes do not waver, do not flicker; a shiver runs through me, and though I feel an urge to get up and leave, I know that somehow, I cannot. "So given a choice between the dreams you once promised yourself and this thing you wake up to every morning, mildly satisfying but so far from what you were meant for- you would call me a madman?"
I blink, and apparently, that is all the answer he needs.
"Of course," he says. "Once upon a time, my kind would meet with your kind, and we would make the ancient trade: brilliance for salvation, genius for redemption, songs for souls. But those days are long past. So have we fallen. So have you, as well." He slowly pours the smoke out into my face, and suddenly it turns acrid and harsh. I break out into coughs; I brush the man standing next to my seat in my coughing, and for the first time since Doctor Marianus began speaking, I become conscious of the train, of the windows, of everyone that surrounds us. "Once, we would have given you the crown. Now, you, who should have belonged to us, settle for the kingdom."
The train slows.
"63rd," says Doctor Marianus. "You had better go."
And so I do.
It is only a few blocks to the University of Chicago Press building, and from there only a short walk to my desk, piled high with the manuscripts that haunt my days. My briefcase is full of even more. My job, my life, is to pick through them, to find a mere two dozen for a year; and yet I never get to read them during my work day, finding myself, as always, in meeting after meeting, conference after conference, making plans, discussing things which have nothing to do with the ideas we ostensibly support.
It is a typical morning, neither unpleasant nor especially pleasing; and soon it is lunch. I do not feel hungry.
I consider thumbing through another manuscript, something about linguistics and modernism, but the memory of Doctor Marianus haunts me slightly. Perhaps it is because on some level, I felt that he knew that I wanted to accept his offer. Because despite the comfort of my situation, my respectable salary, my small part in shaping the course of a field’s literature...
Because somehow, even I know that there could have been more to my life than this. But surely this is merely a bit of midday angst, something I will have long forgotten by supper.
He was just a madman on a train. Nothing more than that.
Hoping to shake off these feelings, I open a document on my desk computer that I have not touched in over a year, in a simple folder marked "Israfel."
It is a play, one I began a year and a half ago, after a break of at least a decade from any kind of script writing at all. I managed to get through the first act and two scenes of act two, but there I stalled, the excuse of work allowing me to forget it.
Today I shall start a new regimen. I’ll write every day. I allow myself a self-righteous smile. I certainly do not need any madman’s demonic pact to write a bloody play.
I bring my lips together, pondering, and then begin to type.
ACT TWO, SCENE THREE.
Setting: Elizabeth's flat.
Enter Elizabeth and Marcus.
MARCUS:
I look at the line, knowing that Marcus is to bring news of the war to her, to explain how sour things have begun to turn, never admitting all that he wishes to. I know, because it is in my head, and in my heart, and I cannot sleep at night sometimes because of it.
And yet, I cannot find the words.