A Familiar Story
by Owen Torrey
In the book the train left the station, but I was still waiting by the tracks. By the time I noticed, the scene had moved on. It was without me. It followed a young boy to a city where he was welcomed by two people described as his parents. I spent that night alone in the station, sleeping near a window that looked over low trees and a lake. Though I did not know it yet, I would come to know this view well. Somewhere in the world the boy attended a school where he showed a special aptitude for geography. He seemed to always know where things were. Where others saw a shape, he saw a continent. Where others saw green, he saw Moldova. This is a bildungsroman, I thought to myself as the boy passed from year to year. Most nights I cooked the same meal of French eggs in the station restaurant. At this point, I realized I had been left behind. I had no illusion the story would find me again. Though I was grateful for what was here. The violin music that played overhead through hidden speakers. The big fountain where water flowed from a lion’s mouth. There are worse lives. After a few years, the boy received some accolades for his abilities. He worked hard. He spent hours looking at photos of landscapes around the world, trying to locate himself. Sometimes I knew the answer before he did, and I wished I could whisper him a hint. But over time I began to forget about the boy. I read my way through the other books in the train station bookshop. I lay down on the train tracks at night. This was safe because nothing ever came. I felt the cool metal beneath me and watched the glass dome above through which the stars never moved. I did this so many nights I got older. So did the boy. At the encouragement of his friends, he applied to participate in a TV show. Contestants watch a video from the perspective of a train and try to guess where it is in the world. Whoever answers first wins. I remembered this show. I had watched it once when I was in Sweden, stuck all day in a hotel room with a terrible cold. This is a novel that draws from life, I thought. This is a Swedish-language novel, I considered. I had stopped checking on the boy much, but this part began to interest me again. The boy, who was now a young man, dressed in his best suit and stood on the stage below a video of green fields. Occasionally, a fence. Argentina, the boy whispered. This was correct. He advanced to the next round and the next. In the final round, the screen showed a landscape with a large lake on one side and a tall escarpment on the other. There was silence in the studio. Everyone was thinking hard. The track stretched further until a clutter of low buildings appeared. The noise of the train grew louder and louder. At a certain point I realized the sound was coming, not only from the book, but from the distance. I watched as a train arrived in the station and looked into its wide glass eye. I saw myself sitting on the tracks. The boy looked at me for the first time. His eyes were exactly like I remembered, and almost like they were described. I had missed him, though he did not know who I was. I wished I could give him a hint. But nothing I could say would help. We both did not know where we had arrived.
Owen Torrey’s work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Maisonneuve, Geist, Gulf Coast, The Malahat Review, Best Canadian Poetry, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Unseasonal, is forthcoming from Signal Editions/Véhicule Press. Owen lives in Providence, RI, where he is an MFA candidate at Brown University.