M Train

Memorial Day approaches, and Smith goes to Rockaway Beach to see how the renovations on the bungalow are going. She gets a coffee from a taco stand and learns that Zak made it. She recalls a past Memorial Day weekend when her son, Jackson, was almost four. On that day, Fred flew a plane above Lake Michigan while Smith and Jackson spent time at the beach, writing and thinking. Jackson asked Smith if she thought that Fred could see them from his plane, and Smith replied that Fred could always see them. At her bungalow, Smith sees that progress is being made and feels optimistic. 

Fred’s memorial was held in the church where he married Smith. Smith’s brother, Todd, drove her to the church when she did not want to go. On the radio, “What a Wonderful World” played. Fred always insisted that it was Smith’s song, so she decided to sing it at his memorial. She did not understand why Fred associated it with her and chose to pass it on to him. Now, it is his song.

Todd helped her through the days that followed Fred’s funeral and promised her children that he would always be there for them. He died just a month later, though, after a stroke. Smith was a wreck after losing both her husband and her brother so close together and soon moved back to New York with her children. Todd and Fred continued to haunt her, and she thought of them often. She wrote about Fred but found that it was so painful that she burned the words in “the fire in [her] heart” (241). It is unclear if she means this literally or metaphorically.

Smith describes the final episode of her favorite show, The Killing, where Detective Linden learns that her lover, Skinner, is the serial killer she has been searching for. She murders him in retaliation for his betrayal. Smith is devastated to learn that this is the final episode of the show; she does not want to lose Linden or move on to other detective shows. Everything feels like it is in limbo. Smith imagines a spin-off show of The Killing, wherein Linden and her partner, Holder, sit vigil and find the bodies of the murdered women. Smith thinks that Linden is trying to stress that the lost must be found.

Smith describes a toy that Fred had when he was a child: a cowboy figurine. It was Fred’s favorite of all his toy models, but one day, it fell off the bookshelf and disappeared. Fred found it years later under one of his floorboards. Smith reflects that some lost things eventually come back. She imagines that instead of losing her coat, she absorbed it.

Smith dreams of the cowpoke. The cowpoke leaves abruptly, and Smith calls out to him, asking how he can abandon her. In the dream, she falls and then finds herself talking to some young men. They tell her that they saw that she was in danger and called out to Fred, who intervened and saved her. Smith does not know how this is possible since Fred is dead. The men ask for payment for saving her, and to her surprise, she finds that her pockets are overflowing with money. Before she can pay, the dream changes, and she looks out at a highway. She sees Fred chasing after a “wheel with the face of a clock with no hands” (250). The wheel collides with a “massive cornucopia of lost things” (250).

Smith reflects on “the mystery of the eternal recurrence of all things” (253). In the past, with Fred and her children, she did not try to capture simple moments in her photographs. Now, she takes long journeys to photograph things like the “straw hat of Robert Graves, [the] typewriter of Hesse, [the] spectacles of Beckett, [or the] sickbed of Keats” (254). She remembers all that she has lost. She recalls visiting the grave of Arthur Rimbaud as a young woman and leaving a string of beads in an urn next to the grave. She returned to the grave years later to find that the urn was gone.

Smith believes in everything, nothing, and “in life, which one day each of us shall lose” (255). She wonders how she got so old and realizes that she is older than Fred and all of her dead friends. She dreams of the cowpoke one last time. He places a lasso on the ground, and the rope takes on the shape of an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Then, it spells out words, but Smith does not read them in time. The cowpoke tells her that “some things…we save for ourselves” (258).

In the dream, Smith explores a café. There are travel brochures depicting far-off locations, but otherwise, the café is abandoned. There is no sign of the cowpoke. Smith whispers, “I love you,” and hears the cowpoke reply, from out of sight, “love not lightly” (259). Smith looks out at the desert twilight and resolves to remember everything and write it all down.