The rattling of the Chicago L is a familiar and typically comforting sound to me, having ridden it countless times during my daily commute.
This morning, I sat in a relatively empty car, gazing out at the waking city around me. I mainly thought a lot about the day ahead. I’m currently teaching what I consider the most challenging book of the semester from my list, The Brothers Karamazov. While Alyosha’s story is a beautiful, tragic tale… I find it can be a little overburdening for my seniors.
I know they’re busy getting ready for life, whether it be college or a job… so I try not to hold it against them if they haven’t read every chapter I’ve assigned. I can summarize it for them mostly and we can still have a great in-person discussion about the Karamazov family. I just love sharing my favorites with them… and today we would be talking about the Grand Inquisitor, my favorite part of the book.
But that is not what happened. Because I never made it to work today.
A couple stops into my commute, a mother and young boy boarded the train and sat across from me. The boy’s eyes sparkled with youthful curiosity.
“This is where I met him!” The boy exclaimed.
The mother laughed. But my ears perked up. There was something so passionate in the boy’s tone, that I couldn’t help but begin eavesdropping.
“I’m sure it was a very, very nice demon, right?”
The boy nodded enthusiastically, his words delivered with unwavering conviction.
“Yeah, mom, it was super tall, it had a mask-like face, plastic looking. Then these big black wings were just folded behind its back. Its nose was like, uh, I don’t know, a long flesh dagger thingy!”
And this is when my heart sank.
I like books, movies, and reason. I’m not one to spend any time considering the supernatural. But my heart was racing at this moment. Because I listened to the child describe the very same creature that had haunted my own childhood memory from a daydream I had while taking the L.
“We talked about a lot,” the boy continued. “He wanted me to bring him a set of -“
“Dice,” I uttered under my breath at the same time the boy said dice.
This was exactly how I remember my dream. But maybe it wasn’t a dream, after all.
I began to wonder if I had the same experience as this boy… and just repressed it so deeply that it became distant memory of a dream.
The mother’s brow furrowed, and she looked at her son. “You could see it, like really see it?”The boy nodded again, his eyes wide and earnest.
My mind raced as I relived that strange encounter from my past. Could it be that this child had experienced the same inexplicable phenomenon that I had all those years ago?
The mother leaned over to her son and spoke softly, “Honey, sometimes our imaginations can play tricks on us. There’s no such thing as demons.”
The boy’s excitement waned slightly, but he remained steadfast. “But it was real, mom, I promise! It told me about trains and dimensions and how they had accidentally joined our dimension but needed to leave. And he was going to shoot dice to win his ticket with the ferryman.”
“Now I know why you’ve been pulling out all of the Yahtzee games out of the closet,” his mom continued.
My heart ached as the child’s words mirrored my own experiences. The mother patted her son’s shoulder affectionately, attempting to reassure him.
“Alright, sweetheart,” she said, “maybe it was just a vivid dream or your imagination running wild. But we’re safe here on the L, and there are no demons here or anywhere, I promise.”
I, a 34-year-old man, tried to build up the courage to stand up and talk to this young boy… but I couldn’t find it. He and his mother got off at the next stop near Lincoln Park.
I had another three stops until I arrived at the stop near my school… but I decided to call out sick and take the L back home.
The enigma of that fateful encounter was too much for me, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were deeper, hidden truths lurking within the confines of the Chicago L—truths that defied explanation and comprehension.
I’ve been here at home since… wondering if I should try to find this boy and talk to him.
Because mainly I wondered if he also had a memory… it would be more recent and vivid than mine, of handing over a set of dice to the demon the next time he saw it.