It's too early in the morning and I’m on a train that is not moving. When it will start up again it will move northbound. Or westbound, southbound, eastbound. I don’t have a clue, actually. I just like to use such words. When you’re in a directionbound train, you feel like you’re really going somewhere, you know? It's more whimsical and dreamy than simply going to 'Amsterdam'.
We’re in the snow season, and in train terms that is known as the time in which humanity is put right back in its place. For all our wonderful technical advancements, it only takes a single snowflake for the machine to break down.
And speaking of snowflakes: a drop of water pesters me every now and then. I am in the process of locating it. I am seated on the outside of the two seats, even though the other one is empty. This is due to my fear of pairs, my intuitive wariness towards things that come in twos. I can't have someone join me, sit next to me, force me to consider myself as part of a duo.
Which is why I don’t mind the drops of water: they come one at a time. I look up to the roof of the train, to see if there might be a hole or leak where the melting snow drips into, but find no marks of this. Then, a little further down, I find the culprit: the suitcase of the man in front of me must have brushed the snow-covered grounds, and is now transferring its burden to me through the slow yet unstoppable laws of chemistry.
I find myself faced with a conundrum: I either tell the man, and feel incredibly silly and petulant for bringing such an infinitely trifling thing up, or suffer the feeling of the onset of rain for the rest of the journey. A third option, that I had to invent (and now have to mention) because of the aforementioned duophobia, is to move the suitcase myself. Would that be considered a breach of conduct? Can I handle the split-second moment where the man might think that I’m going to steal his suitcase? I suspect that he would confront me about it, make me explain and be petulant anyway.
I finally settle the argument, in typical fashion, by cheating myself into a fourth option: moving somewhere else. I wonder what I’d say if someone bothers to ask why I’m suddenly changing seats. “I felt a drop of water.”
After briefly being annoyed by myself, I realize the value of this anecdote as a potential scene in a story, and this perks me right up. The fictional taking priority over the real.
I am SIMUVAC in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, using a real-life disaster as a model for the simulated evacuation. I am Spencer Krug who, as I’ve mentioned here before, responds to his girl’s cry for help with “can I use that in a song?”
The snowflake - reality - melts and leaks into me like water - fiction. The point being that the difference between the two is often arbitrary and overstated. They are not a scary, complementary duo, but two overlapping autonomous systems.
SIMUVAC:
“But this evacuation isn't simulated. It's real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right into the streets.”
“How is it going,” I said.
“The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we have to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything you see tonight is real. There's a lot of polishing we still have to do. But that's what this exercise is all about.”
