On one side of the rusty train track is a dense strip of vividly green shrubbery, the packed, dried-out dirt below it barely visible. Then, on the other side, running parallel to the track, is a street covered in deep black, recently paved, egg-fryingly hot asphalt that shimmers and glows. The track reflects the bright haze of summer’s dying plea. The sky is so blue it hurts your eyes to look at.
The track will be hot, and also lumpy, is Pete’s main concern. Also, the crossties may cause splinters, which makes him wish he’d worn slacks. Railroad tracks are not exactly designed with supine comfort in mind.
However, they do have one advantage: the average train’s stopping distance is over a quarter mile, rendering spontaneous decisions on the part of engine drivers near-impossible. Pete learned this datum in drivers’ ed and took it to serious heart, which tells him that there must have been some part of him, even back then, that was already dead. After all, every useful thing he learned in driver’s ed has been forgotten—how many miles over the speed limit one can reliably drive without getting pulled over, the maximum legally-permitted blood alcohol content, how to fake a BAC test (okay, this last one wasn’t acquired in driver’s ed, but he did know it at some point—it involves either hyperventilating or holding your breath; he can’t remember which), etc.
The instant Pete hears a distant train whistle, he lies down. Places his head on one of the rails and his ass on the other. The steel’s heat can be uncomfortably felt, even through his shaggy hair and basketball shorts. His knees point toward the excruciatingly blue sky.
It’s at this juncture that he remembers that this track is actually one of two parallel diverging tracks, the other of which can be seen across the road. Pete is too far away from the fork-off point to know which track the oncoming train is headed down, and he considers standing up to go check and maybe pull the little lever that switches the tracks if it turns out he’s picked the wrong one, but he’s got such an intricate position going on—not quite comfortable but not painful either, which is pretty much the best he can hope for. Not to be in pain, that is. And anyway, if the train misses him, he can just wait for the next one, and if that one misses him too, the one after that, etc., until his position on the tracks and the given train’s respective course coincide. He quite literally has all day.
Across the road, on the other track, a family is setting up shop—a mom and three little kids. The reason they’re doing this, which Pete isn’t aware of and which isn’t really relevant for our purposes, is that the mom is carrying out some kind of murder-suicide mission sparked by a recently-concluded legal battle in which her ex-husband received full custody of her children. She’s supervising them for just the afternoon—her priceless, once-monthly afternoon—and in her mentally unstable and in the words of one court referee “not fit to have custody of a goldfish” state, she’s decided that Well okay then, if she can’t have the kids, she guesses no one can. A petty cutting-in-half of Solomon’s baby. As Pete watches the family stoically assume their positions, the kids squirming the way kids squirm when forced to sit in desks for too long, he’s hit by his first full-fledged thought of the day, which essentially amounts to a serious contemplation of whether he should temporarily abandon his own suicide mission and instead make a convincing case to the mother that she not let herself and her three healthy children be killed. He tries to meet her gaze from his own optimal and not-worth-changing position, but she’s too far away.
What is becoming less far away by the second, however, is the train, which has nearly reached the fork-off point and the aforementioned lever, and there’s even some schmuck standing at the lever now, having an ethical dilemma, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between Pete’s track and the track with the family, which latter track it turns out the train is headed toward, unless the schmuck takes some sort of action. The schmuck is a philosophy major at a really small college nobody has heard of but that he avers is nearly impossible to get into, so he’s positively delighting in what may be his life’s first and only opportunity to use what’s smugly been called “useless metaknowledge with no real-world applications” by those around him. He imagines arriving at his parents’ mansion this Thanksgiving and proudly declaiming that there’s this really particular normatively-ethical question that’s been intellectually labored over by him and his peers for going on two years now, and—get this—he just so happened to stumble into a situation in which the answer to that question was directly applicable, and not even in a metaphorical way but a, like, literal one, making the question really more of an applied ethical question than a normative one, but his mother would be welcome to debate him on that. On what specific brand of ethical question this is. But his central point would still stand, which would be that while moral philosophy is viewed by most people as merely a set of useless theoretical investigations into what one hypothetically ought to do, here’s a situation right smack dab in front of him that’s just demanding to have something truly done about it. No more absolving himself of responsibility by bearing passive witness to events’ natural unfoldings—now, as he thinks about maybe moving his hand toward loosely and noncommittally grabbing the lever, he’s finally a doer. Someone who makes things happen rather than letting things happen to him. And by (probably-nonexistent-or-else-definitely-deistic) god is something of some sort going to happen now. To be done, I mean.
