Meaning of Life

Meaning of Life
by Arkady Gershteyn
August 31, 2014- December 25, 2014

The tick was in a most contented mood, having just found a new host with resplendent fat whose sugary juices gave it an instant high. This was  certainly better than some mythical and rather flimsy construction of heaven, the land of milk and honey, or the lure of exotic islands with their palm trees, beaches, and blinding sun -all images that come from the shallow imagination of administrative bosses (religion), the exaggeration of poor immigrants for whom any place without persecution is a blessing requiring no additional opportunities, and the dreams of over-fed complacent upper middle class that sees no greater joy that to lie on their behind in immobile passivity with a fatuous smile. No, here was the fruit of life, fat, protein, sinews, skin, all the wonders that have befallen Janusz who wasn’t even realizing their unmatched glory.  Janusz, a 30 year old train-station switchboard operator, who had always considered himself mediocre in just about everything, with a body of medium height, a small shuffling step and small, questioning, grey eyes that seemed to always scan their surroundings but were really merely crossed eye.

He lived in on the third floor of a ten-story apartment building in the outskirts or Lodz, Poland. The studio was furnished with only the necessities - a bed, a kitchen table, sofa and a TV set that stood on the top of a cherry stand whose drawer was littered with old cable schedule magazines.
On Monday morning, at exactly 6:30 AM his alarm clock interrupted his tumultuous and convoluted dreams with the pop music radio station that this time happened to elicit a rather benign jingle about “her gait as poised as a wandering albatross”. Once he opened his eyes the whiteness of the three walls struck him as idiotic. He quickly dressed, brushed his teeth, and took the elevator down. It was only a five minute walk to the bus station, and he was surprised to find the bus there on time, 6:50 AM even though it was usually late by at least 7 minutes. Staring out of the window, he noted the gray, abandoned, high rise apartment building recede in the drizzle and haze and be replaced by the city center’s three story stone buildings colored in shades of white, grey and light yellow, with long windows; the white cobblestone street, lamplights hanging off of spirals, a monument of a man on a horse, and a few scattered dome-capped cathedrals.

At 7:15 AM Janusz entered the switchboard operating room 2B of the railroad station. His shift was until 4 PM, at what time he would be replaced by Karol. Janusz had held this job for the last three years, and because trains are now modernized the rails were moved by computer program that synced the path with the schedule automatically. In short, in all these roughly 1,000 days, Janusz had never touched any of the switches. He worried sometimes that the Chief Engineer would get rid of the position altogether and claim that modernization had reached Lodz railroad and streamlined operation to such an extent that manual switchboard operators were now obsolete and redundant. But the Chief Engineer was very punctual about lunch, where Janusz would nod at him, and receive a smile in exchange. And the Chief Engineer was also worried about modernization making his job obsolete, and so tried to make as little changes and noise as possible…
After all the railroad employees remembered the inspection they had last summer. The inspector being a rather pedantic fellow had found fault with the sanitation conditions, the poor condition of the rails themselves including discovering rust in spots, three loose screws, and a number of other minor safety violations. Chief Engineer had to spend an entire week with the Inspector, taking him out to dinner to “Chez Anna”, followed by cabaret “Blonde liberties”  in the Theatre district, and heavy drinking at the hip bar “Alpha”. As a result the Chief Engineer had spent all his monthly disposable income and had to abstain from all the above mentioned destinations for two weeks. They had agreed to tighten the screws, clean off the rust, and impose a policy of strict trash removal to improve sanitation and that the inspector would only mention the sanitation violations in his official report, and conclude safety conditions as adequate. The Inspector parted quite content, and promised to check up on them in a year, and was answered by the Chief Engineer’s hearty invitation which was quickly replaced by a hard-set clenched mouth that had trouble opening to pronounce the obligatory farewell. 

But let us return to Janusz’s narrative. This morning, like most, he was planning to sit at his desk and listen to the radio, review his dreams, try to make sense of them, observe the clouds, the drizzle, the fog, and ruminate on the inevitability of the passage of time, on the state of disarray and stagnation that his life seemed to be permanently submerged in. Further, he had grown completely dejected over the fiasco with Agnieska. From the first time he had entered the train station, three years ago, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. She worked in as administrative assistant to the Chief Engineer and would typically escort him into the cafeteria during lunchtime. Agnieska was 26, blonde, with pale blue eyes, long well-shaped legs, a graceful gait as “the wandering Albatross in flight”, always visible cleavage accentuating her immaculately white breasts, that beckoned like sirens to the restless sailors of ancient days. Her skirt went just above the knee, and her laughter, often unprovoked, would shatter the monotony like fireworks the night sky. Janusz had tried to speak to her, but her replies though polite were completely disinterested and soon degraded to monosyllables. In short, she did not notice him at all, and had eyes only for the Chief Engineer, and for the Chief Engineer’s superiors, with whom she would flirt whenever they came down from city hall for the quarterly meetings.

Another tick, in fact the first tick’s distant cousin, had just managed to get into the hair of a dachshund on train 312 going from Warsaw to Lodz. A six year old boy in a blue rain jacket, held the dog by a leash and was on his way to visit his grandparents for two weeks. A third tick has getting into the fur coat of a middle aged red-haired women on train 467 going from Radom to Lodz. And a fourth tick was getting into the carpet of the Chief Engineer’s apartment, as the Chief Engineer was oversleeping after a rather busy night with trips to the Cabaret, and a quite taxing night with Agnieska. 

At 11:17 AM, Janusz saw on the monitor cameras that train 312 and train 467 where approaching the same intersection. Train 467 should have been at the intersection at 11:20 and then train 312 was supposed to pass only at 11:40, but it appears that train 312 had a head start and the two would arrive in the same place simultaneously. Janusz said nothing. His lip began to twitch, heart pound, and hands became damp. He starred at the control levers. There were five levers, each labeled with the intersection number. The trains would collide on intersection number 4. Train 312 could be off routed by changing an earlier switch, number 2. Janusz carefully grasped control lever labeled “2”. He switched it from Right to Left. The corresponding monitor camera showed train 312 change course. In two more minutes, train 467 passed intersection number 4. Then Janusz telephoned the Chief Engineer, no answer. The Chief Engineer had not come in yet. He was slowly making his way through town in his car, with Agnieska to his right, complaining about some waitress who had given her a dirty look at the Cabaret last night, and how the Chief Engineer should have put the impudent waitress in her place.
Janusz would have to decide what to do with train 312 on his own. He studied the map of intersection points and noticed that if he switches point 3 then train 312 will reach point 4. He waited five minutes, timing them on his wrist watch. Then he pushed lever 3. Train 312 was on course to point 4. At 11:42 it reached point 4, only two minutes off schedule. At noon, Janusz left the post, though he didn’t smoke and was not allowed to leave the office by policy. The day had cleared up, the air was fresh and full of the smells of burning bread, brewing coffee, and some spice of unknown make added sweetness to the aroma. He took a brisk walk around the fountain, and went back in to finish his shift.

At 4 pm, Janusz left for home, as Karol replaced him. Janusz did not tell anybody about the incident. On next year’s annual inspection, the pedantic inspector would note that there was two different copies for the schedule of train 312, off by 20 minutes start time, and different officials saw different copies. The wrong version, the early one, was only seen by one of many officials, so almost always train 312 left on time, but rarely, when the official with the wrong schedule was the only one in Warsaw, the train 312 left early by exactly 20 minutes. The Chief Engineer promised to fix this discrepancy, and maybe he did. Janusz certainly did not find out, because in less than two weeks after the incident he resigned the position of Shift 1 Switchboard Operator.

Janusz suddenly received everything he had always wanted – a girlfriend, employment as a tour guide for tourists that allowed him a lot more liberty and exposed him to bright cheerful faces, acquired friends from the chess club he began to frequent, and even started a modest personal library of detective novels. And on the wall, opposite his bed he put up a poster, ordered from the print shop in the city centre. It was a 12 by 18 inch canvas and in large bold newspaper-style print it said “Train 312. Train 467. –Janusz.”