The Capitol Corridor

The seats on the Capitol Corridor are arranged differently than any other train I’ve been on. Instead of airplane-style rows, the seats are a series of cafe-like booths with a table in the middle, communal. And the attendants check your ticket as soon as you get on. I sat down and, over the intercom, the conductor announced that we had a full train and that our bags were to go in the overhead compartment and not on the seat beside us. I stood up and dutifully stowed away my backpack.

I sat back down and, presently, an enormous man in light-brown, high-heeled, snake-skin boots, cut-off jeans, Hawaiian shirt, and sunglasses like a mask came frantically lumbering down the aisle, bumping all and everyone with his gigantic Kelty backpack. He pointed at the seat across from me and groaned inquisitively.

“Be my guest,” I told him.

He flopped down, wheezing, pouring sweat, and began to unload his pack upon the table. A half-eaten, unwrapped burrito flopped out and leaked beans and rice on the plastic. Several beat-up paperbacks and magazines and other such pieces of ephemera joined it. Finally, a Nintendo Switch emerged and he began to game, still gasping for breath and blotting his face with his rayon shirt sleeve.

I relocated to the lounge car and found an isolated seat quietly adjacent to a reading girl. I got my Houellebecq out and set it on the table. But it sat there, unread, for the entire trip. Instead, I watched the rolling, golden foothills of the Sacramento Valley pass me by, interspersed with bright fields of blue from the deltas and flashes of green along the irrigation as the empty prairie transitioned to the industrial labyrinth of the bay.

I eavesdropped on a man as he harassed the cafe attendant. The man seemed homeless and on drugs. The homeless-looking man sounded confused and lazily agitated. I couldn’t quite make out what he was on about, but he asked things like: can I get that beer poured into a glass of ice? What about that drink? I’ll have a hot dog. Actually, what kind of hamburgers do you have? Give me a pack of mixed nuts. Never mind. Why can’t I have a cup of ice? And so on. The attendant seemed defeated.

“Sir,” he said, “I have tried to help you. Now can I get you anything?”

A security attendant appeared and asked what the deal was. The cafe attendant’s eyes locked on the security attendant desperately.

“Nothing,” the probably-on-drugs man said, glancing around the cabin, dumbfounded, “I just want to know what my options are.”

He then waded to a corner seat and eyed the storefront suspiciously. At intervals, he would get up, and the entire encounter repeated itself. This cycle went on uninterrupted for the entire two-hour trip.

Eventually, we got to Emeryville, and I caught my connecting bus to San Francisco. The bus was large, silver-plated, with black seats. I had an entire row to myself as we rode across the bay into the city. They dropped us off beneath the Salesforce tower and I strolled out into the tepid sunlight. I hadn’t been to the city since the lockdown. It was very different. Rather than a statuesque ghost town, it felt lively, crowded. My hotel was only a ten minute walk from the bus stop and I marched down Mission street and took a right at the City College.

The lobby of the hotel was completely modern: black tile, black marble, panel mirrors on every wall. But when I got checked in and walked up the creaky stairs, I found the hotel proper to be sort of worn in with worn-down wooden hand rails and aging carpet that groaned as I walked down the fourth-floor hallway to my room.