Free Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka

let it expand into metaphor, and you have as good a trope as any for the other America, the one living (below the embankment, behind the Lucky’s supermarket) in the very shadow of our prosperity.
    I went to Connecticut expecting neither revelation nor redemption. I did not go hoping to experience that frisson of tragedy that can help the emotionally stunted feel alive. Hardly a member of the overclass, I had no specific sin for which I felt the need to atone. I went, I suppose, because certain odd details—the red, white, and blue logo of the Amtrak locomotive, spattered with blood, or the red, white, and blue lettering of the Memorial Day edition of the
Connecticut Post
that reported Toledo’s death—seemed to suggest some wider meaning. I went, at least in part, to conduct a kind of inquest, not of the dead but of the land they had died in, to report on what I sensed to be our many sins of omission, committed daily, from sea to shining sea.
    I was not unfamiliar with the dark side of American exceptionalism. In the California I had left, entire towns constructed of plastic sheeting and cardboard could be found hidden in canyons only a quick walk from some of the priciest real estate in the Western Hemisphere. Julia Toledo, I realized, had more in common with the migrants who somehow daily emerged from the mud and the manzanita brush, miraculously shaved and cleaned, than she did with the people she worked for. Like them, she had lived in the shadow. Only her death—and that only for a short time—had made her visible.
    After midnight the area between Clinton Avenue and the tracks in Bridgeport is not a good place. There is little light. Plywood boards cover broken windows, shattered walls. I walked quickly past a group of men standing by a brick building, then took a right onto Railroad Avenue, a narrow, buckled road with weeds coming through the cracks that runs tight and dark against the brownstone wall of the raised rail bed. I was halfway down Railroad Avenue when the full reality dawned on me: they had walked through this wasteland of abandoned warehouses and vacant lots at almost the same time. I could see them, stepping around the piles of moldering furniture and broken brick and crushed Styrofoam boxes, walking past the papers and trash glued to the wall like seaweed by a tide.
    They had been afraid—I knew that now—and their fear frightened me. Back beyond the razor wire I could make out odd, bristling shapes (hills of twisted pipe and scrap lumber) and wondered, for a moment, how they must have looked to children no older than my own. I didn’t like Railroad Avenue—the darkness of it, the glass and gravel crunching underfoot—and I knew in my bones they’d been glad to leave it. Compared with what lay behind, the yellow billboard advertising McDonald’s bagel sandwiches for breakfast, even the blue railroad trestle in the dark overhead, must have seemed almost welcoming.
    I climbed the stonelike steps of the bridgework to the trestle, squeezed through the foot-wide gap between the fencing and the bridge (the three bagels, huge and yellow, now only an arm’s length away), and entered the tracks. The traprock embankment made for difficult walking. About a mile down, tired of stumbling, I moved up to the track, and, thoroughly spooked, glancing continually over my shoulder like a man afraid of ghosts, I walked onto the North Benson Road overpass where the accident had occurred.
    There was nothing there. Like everyone else, I suppose, I’d wanted a narrative, an explanation. I’d found none. Some measure of guilt—vast, disembodied, cultural—yes. But nothing to explain the magnitude of what had occurred over the North Benson Road overpass on the night of May 24. I picked up a couple of railroad spikes, heavy and crude as Roman nails. The ground seemed to charge with current, and suddenly the train was there, already flying by, gone. I stood for a while in the silence it left behind, then began the