Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Then I guessed she was a procuress, and wanted to talk to her more, but the next time I passed their compartment the door was shut.

Darkness dropped quickly, as it does on the equator, and in the morning I woke to golden clouds, a pinky blue sky, and jungle interspersed with rice fields like water meadows—the deep south of Thailand, near the Malaysian border, lush, deep green, thinly populated, and some of it under siege.

At Hat Yai Junction I got out and was directed to a booth to buy an onward ticket, then I reboarded; only the front half of the train would go to Butterworth and the border. I looked for the procuress and her two girls but couldn't see them anywhere. Most of the seats were empty. I chose one in the open compartment and dozed. I woke twenty minutes later when the train got under way, passing among sudden boulder-shaped hills.

Two young women—English, from their voices—each with an enormous bulging backpack, sat across the aisle from me. Both were engrossed in books, the dark one reading a John Irving, the skinny head-scratching one The Mosquito Coast. For a pleasant hour or so I watched this second one, rapt—or nearly so—chewing her lips as she read.

From time to time they looked up and spoke.

"Seen the bog?" the first one said.

"Toilets are rank!"

"Should we wait till later?"

"Wrong question!"

"Bound to be loos at the border."

"Tidy loos? Here? I don't think so!"

They went back to their reading. After a while the first one yawned and twisted the John Irving in her hands and said, "This book is so dense!"

I waited for a response, but the second one didn't volunteer anything about me. She was near the end. I waited until she finished the book, and when she did, she placed it on her lap and took a deep breath.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"The book?" She made a face. "Wasn't what I was expecting."

She handled the paperback as if to grasp at a thought. "All the bugs. All the jungle. It reminded me of when we were in Vietnam."

"But the family in it," I said, "did they convince you, or is it just another story?"

She nodded hard and said, "I'm like way convinced. Way, way."

Satisfied, I revealed myself as the author.

"Was this a trip you took?" she said, tapping the book.

"No. It's a novel. It's a story. It's, um, fiction."

She was smiling, as though she'd learned my secret. She said, "So I guess—what?—writing's your hobby?"

This threw me, but I was also smiling.

She said, "What do you do the rest of the time?"

"That's pretty much it. Scribble, scribble."

The other girl said, "Were you influenced by The Poisonwood Bible?"

"No. See, my book was published in 1981."

"I wasn't even born then," the first one said.

"I can't believe you're sitting right there," the second one said. "Hey, Doug!"

A young man a few seats away turned around and then came over. He was short, compact, and looked portable and somewhat satirical, being introduced by the pretty girls to this guy who wrote this book he had never heard of. She waved the beat-up paperback she said she'd stolen from a shelf in a youth hostel in Phuket. Doug had a small bag and wore sun-faded clothes and sandals. He said he had been traveling for three months. Apart from that he was noncommittal.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. He looked me in the eye. "Going nowhere."

I liked him for his vagueness. The pen in his shirt pocket said something. He reminded me of the person I had been all those years ago, on this train from Bangkok to Penang.

He wasn't talking, and the backpackers just had questions, so I excused myself, and passing down the car saw Lily, the procuress, and her two girls in the last seat. The girls, on her right and left, were asleep, and she slumped to pillow their heads as if they were a pair of kittens.

"Baw," Lily said and gestured for me to take the seat opposite. "Sit here." After I sat down she said, "What kind business?"

"Book business."

"That good!" She smiled. She had gold teeth to match her jewelry. "What you country, Baw?"

I told her.

"America good!" She hugged the girls. "You like them?"

"Yes," I said.

"They sleep so much!"

It was true. I had seen them awake only once, the night before, in the train's corridor.

"Pretty, huh? Cue, huh?"

"Very cute."

One of them stirred and yawned. The woman squeezed the girl's cheeks affectionately, and her eyes briefly opened.

"He business," Lily said. The girl wrinkled her nose and went back to sleep. Then she winked at me. "Penang nice place. Baw, you come visit me?"

Later in the morning we halted at the frontier station. It was the ideal border post, a long platform, Thailand at one end, Malaysia at the other. About twenty passengers entered, presented their passports to be stamped at each country's desk, and went through the last turnstile.