Read Online Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka - Free Book Online Page A

it with her children.”
    Reconstructions of the event by the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the MTA police also spoke against suicide. Just before they were hit, Toledo and three of her sons were on the south side of Track 3. A fourth son was on the north side. He was crossing over to meet them when the Amtrak blew its horn. Julia Toledo, her three sons in tow, was lunging to save him when they died.
    The accident caused one-hour delays of westbound Metro-North commuter trains during rush hour that Tuesday morning and scattered delays that afternoon and evening. By Wednesday, Metro-North service had returned to normal. And yet, for a moment, the tragedy had touched a collective nerve, sent a quick spasm through the virtual community. There was no narrative here, no saving plot. We’d been given a deconstructed poem—all scattered nouns and slippery modifiers, meanings all provisional—held together by nothing more substantial than the fact of its existence and its claim on our attention. An effect without cause, in other words. An apocalypse, writ small. A nightmare of reason and faith alike. It didn’t sit well.
    The official explainers, trying to make sense of God’s purpose in the whole business, gave it a brave attempt, then retreated to safety. “He calls us into relationships with the dispossessed… with all those who cry out to God,” assayed the Reverend Andrew Garavel, apparently untroubled by the curious notion that the dispossessed should pay for our attention with their lives. Yet at some point even Reverend Garavel at the memorial Mass at Fairfield University, perhaps sensing the porousness of the shelter he offered, was forced to seek deeper cover. The ways of God are unknowable to man, he admitted: “There are things we cannot fully understand. We are a mystery to ourselves and a mystery to one another. If we are that complicated, can we expect God to be any less so?”
    To which we might respond, “No, indeed,” then counter with a not unreasonable question in return: What good is a God as inscrutable as ourselves, an author whose purpose we can no longer divine? Not much, unless, that is, the Almighty’s inscrutability were to conceal a cruelty, a whimsy, as profound as our own.
    Earlier in this century, wishing to explore the question of whether human beings could behave without cause, the French novelist André Gide came up with the notion of the
acte gratuit
—the gratuitous act, the motiveless crime. Gide’s concept, it seems to me, would have fit Reverend Garavel’s Mass perfectly. To dramatize his notion that a crime could be truly motiveless, Gide had a character, out of no malice and for no reason whatsoever, spontaneously push a businessman he’d never met off the train to Brindisi. Risk the analogy. On May 24, God pushed Julia Toledo and her four sons. It’s as good an explanation as any.
    III
    When I first heard Julia Toledo’s name, I lived in Leucadia, California—a town rich in bougainvillea and methamphetamine labs—less than a hundred feet from unprotected tracks that ran like a sutured cut from Ensenada to the bay. The trains were as much a part of my life as the eucalyptus trees and the Santa Ana winds. My son had lived with them for nine of his ten years; my daughter, seven, all her life. They’d make us jump—the whistle would blast and hold approaching the Leucadia Boulevard intersection, then bend, ever so slightly, sickeningly, down Christian Doppler’s scale—and sitting at the dinner table we could distinguish the deep, tectonic thrum of the big freights from the rapid chatter of the commuters. Sometimes late at night, walking out to the local store for milk, we’d see a double-decker fly by. Well lit and sad, it seemed filled with exiles from an Edward Hopper painting.
    Our trains were not the Guthries’, father’s or son’s. Not long after we arrived in California, my wife and I woke to a noise like the howling of a mastiff in a vise. I made