tumbldown stories

Die Nacht stillen

(originally published December 2016)

Generally speaking, there isn't ever a good time to connect from an intercontinental flight to the last train, but Christmas by far has to be the worst of all of them. The overflow of predictable easy-listening carols in the airports means that the constant drone of cable news that gives American airports their particular hellish cast to anyone who's ever been anywhere else in the world is finally silenced, so it's less maximally awful than it might be, but the lines are long, the terminals full of amateurs, and the staff are the overworked dregs, too incompetent to get a job anywhere else but the TSA and too bad at their job to jimmy themselves a holiday on schedule with the rest of the world. And then you bail out and pick up a second-rate driver who takes ten minutes to hook the bus onto the catenary wire, and there's nothing for it but the last train out from South Station, moving in its too-slow too-stolid processional out to the end of the line.

There are worse trains too, but they don't run at one in the damn morning, again, for people stark-stoned and cut into pieces on too much coffee, too much booze, awake too long and never a wink of sleep, nor sit with their doors open on a platform for five and ten minutes at a time to make sure all the dust of the subway system gets swept cleanly in, and nobody gets left stranded to call a cab and post screamy entitled rants on their social media pages as they get chauffeured home: those bad trains can be avoided, walked around, but this one can't. And while as someone who actually uses public transit on the regular you can't mind drunks cussing at each other over nothing as they sprawl over the handicapped seats, and while I don't normally have anything against babies at all, even the Salvadorean ones from Everett and Somerville who don't shut up, there is a time and a place and a saturation point, and when you have this, all of this, and half a car of student shitheads making intimations about which babies need to be punched, and all off that slathered over nine hours of airplane seat and three of layover, you get to the end, the very fucking end.

I closed my eyes. In a way, this was part and parcel: of all the things about travel, the one I like the least is coming home, because I'm run straight up against all the parts of my own giant and bullheaded and gloriously dumbfuck country that I hate to death, and was running away from overseas in the first place. There was a time and a place and a situation, and maybe this was it; you don't do something like that on public transit otherwise.

"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht," I began, barely more than a murmur: the tune of "Silent Night" was always calming and centering, and moreso that I could do it in German, for my own uses and not to become another elevator loudspeaker setting a seasonal backdrop. I am not of this and I am apart from it. If I could be, I would be, far and away from all this on another continent, in another timezone, looking at different stars with my feet pointed in a different direction on a different patch of ground. "Alles schläft; einsam wacht."

"Nur das traute hochheilige Paar ; Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar." There was another voice in harmony with my own, the very last thing I expected, a man's voice half a timbre higher than my bass rumble, fitting exactly in through notes that I'd never heard and wouldn't've thought of on my own. I raised my head and saw that the black guy in the Bayern away top opposite me had done the same; it was him who was singing along, someone else whose idea of "anywhere else but here" was on the same wavelength. I didn't try to catch his eye, nor he mine – there are still some things you don't do on the subway, regardless – but the song went on, and quite unexpectedly – at least, I certainly hadn't been planning on it – we chipped over to the second verse.

"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht ; Hirten erst kundgemacht" – and on top of the impossible interior German that nobody ever got off a songsheet in this country there was something even less expected, the high quiver of a soprano joining the choir. Out of the corner of my eye, on the next bank of seats, I could see the bent reed of an older woman, blonde hair fading out to gray, her mouth moving through the chunky syllables. If it was her singing, it was as inexplicable as any of the rest of us: no reason to want to start that I could pull out of thin air, no ability to continue that I could divine from the deepest abysses of my own self, but that was only if it was her singing, and not someone else I couldn't see, someone else who wasn't even physically in the train carriage maybe, someone who might or might not even exist at all. "Durch der Engel Halleluja ; Tönt es laut von fern und nah. Christ, der Retter ist da – Christ, der Retter ist da!" And on this, this hollow echo from a carriage like any other in Boston where maybe not even one in ten had the kind of actual, sincere belief in a god – any god – to make a declaration like that and actually mean it, there was another strain, an alto completing the chord, seeming to come from a slight East Asian girl leaning against one of the poles by the door; if her family had been in Dresden or Magdeburg via Hanoi from since the days of the DDR, this might well be a slice of home away from home for her as it was for me, as it had to be somehow for the others singing, but if they hadn't and it wasn't and she had come from Shanghai directly to go to school, then regardless that was where the sound was coming from and there was something else here, something out of all estimation.

Having gone on to the second verse, the third was kind of a foregone conclusion – determined completely by its priors – but the manner in which that happened was not. "Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht ; Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht" – and on the second line, the car fairly exploded with sound, like an organ sounding a twelve-finger fugue chord, not merely the old basic S-A-T-B split but mezzos and contras of every variety shading in between, as if each and every passenger from the two-year-old Salvadorean kid who didn't even speak English much less German to the poor grizzled old homeless guys to the meathead Harvard freshmen to the Dunkin's counter staff headed home from the nightshift was singing along at their own perfect pitch, picking the right notes for the right place in a forest of subject-inverted German poetry to match exactly with the tone that everyone else was going to sing next, as if it was planned, as if it was rehearsed, on rails from the start to the conclusion.

"Lieb' aus deinem göttlichen Mund ; Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund'. Christus, in seiner Geburt – Christus in seiner Geburt." As suddenly as it had begun, and exploded out to cover the whole of the scale, the song closed back down into a low and uncomplicated thrum in the coda, the bow drawn across the low strings at the end of the piece to show that peace and harmony has returned to the world. And after it died away, the car, the whole carriage from front to back, was silent, still and silent, as though nobody else had any idea of how to process what had just happened either, as though nobody dared to move first and break the spell.

There was something strange in the air, I noticed – and it seemed like others were marking it as well, turning quietly, furtively, looking for the source; even the bedraggled blond student with his luggage tagged in from Vancouver who'd been lying asleep across the seats was up and alert. There was a snap in the air that had nothing to do with the burrowing damp chill that you got in the Boston subway – this was a high, sharp, invigorating and penetrating cold that I'd felt before, once before, cutting through Switzerland in the dead of winter, on a roadside high up but still leagues below the tips of the raw wall of the Alps. The train shuddered to a stop – Central, Central – and the doors clunked open, sticking.

In through the doors, off the platform, fathoms below the street and around a turn of the staircase from the open air, out of the dead nothing of the dead tile walls blew a whisp – not even a dusting – of snow: pure, white, fine-grained powder.