III. (The Migration)
Emma is on the train;
After watching the annual truck migration with a friend.
Emma had met her friend at a restaurant with tables outside. Emma smiled when they sat and her friend Susie sat across from her smiling back as Emma said, “It’s a nice day. It’s supposed to rain this weekend.”
Susie said, “Yes, it is a good thing there is no rain today.” Susie coughed into a fist. The sidewalk separating the outside seating area and the road was thin; people walked by in a single file line when they passed. There was a low partition sealing off the seating area and Susie rested her elbow on the metal top. The restaurant was on a quiet side street where Emma and Susie liked to have lunch between shifts at the movie theater. As they sat, there were big trucks hulking down the street in steady, two minute intervals. As they passed, their exhaust billowed behind them. It lingered slowly on the air, spreading over the seating area where Susie sat coughing politely into her hand, smiling thinly in an attempt to mask her uneasiness.
Susie said, “Unfortunately, those trucks keep coming by. I wonder why there are so many.” Susie’s looked annoyed and she turned toward the street as another truck, a red two-door with wheels almost as big as the partition, went by. Susie watched as the exhaust pipe blew smoke then turned to Emma and said, “Too bad.”
Emma felt bad that the trucks were ruining their meal so she grabbed Susie’s hand on the table. “Hey, let’s take a walk. I have to meet Thomas in twenty minutes, we can head towards the train station.” Thomas and Emma meet every now and then to talk as friends about the things that interested them. The two met when they took the same class in college and they continued to see one another after graduation. It was a casual relationship, though, and they never saw one another more than once every week for about forty-five minutes.
Susie stood, collecting her things and said, “Can we walk down through the park?”
Emma smiled, “Of course, that’s why I suggested we walk.”
The two paid and left the outside seating area after saying goodbye to their waiter who had been very kind to them. They walked along the side street, out towards the avenue. More trucks passed them, each seemed bigger than the last. The avenue was lined with trucks by the time they reached it and Susie made a sound of surprise, a gasp. She had never seen so many trucks in one place before. For her, a crowded avenue is chocked full of Colombians out on their balconies and spilling from their front doors onto the skinny sidewalks. And the attraction in the streets are the people inside of vehicles, not the vehicles themselves. Emma took one look at Susie’s face and reached into her purse for her camera. She watched from the corners of her eyes as more trucks came growling onto the avenue. Some parked, other’s just kept driving through. People walking by covered their noses and mouths, trying not to inhale the fumes from the hundreds of trucks gathered there on the street. Susie looked around at the other people on the street who were obviously inconvenienced by the trucks, but moved about their day, aware that they could do nothing about them. Susie had only moved to the city recently and had never witnessed the truck migration. Emma had completely forgotten that today was the day when all the trucks from upstate came charging over the bridges and through the city, on to wherever this year’s migration would take them. The first year it happened, engineers and scientists explained that the trucks, all a specific model implanted with GPS navigation and tracking technology for truck drivers in the snowy northeast to avoid tragedies during heavy snow, had been programmed to drive it’s owner to safety in the event that the driver was unable to drive themselves. Though the feature is remotely controlled by emergency dispatchers, the migration was the result of a design flaw where every year, each truck was randomly assigned the same location by the master computer and given the same route in order to reach that location. Not everyone in the country had witnessed this migration, but those in the city were guaranteed a show every year. Usually by the time the trucks were all sent back home, the truck company’s software designers were out making promises that the kinks would be worked out so the migration would never happen again. And about a month later there were announcements that the problem had been fixed completely. But no one doubted that they’d see it again.
More trucks gathered and Emma wondered why some stopped. They all seemed to want to head down the same side street where Susie and Emma had been eating. Sadly, the street could only handle the trucks in a single file line; in the meantime, more trucks came driving up and parking or drove around the block waiting for their turn to take the street. Emma’s camera was fixed on Susie’s face. Susie looked surprised and despondent. On the avenue, the day felt much hotter and sweat was beginning to bead on Susie’s face.
“It’s the migration, Susie.” Emma said.
Susie looked towards Emma’s camera lens and said, “You are always taking pictures.”
Emma took the camera from her face and smiled at Susie who coughed again. “Why does New York allow this to happen?” Susie’s body went tense and Emma did not know what to say. “I mean, couldn’t someone stop this from happening?” Susie remembered watching a story about this phenomena on the news before deciding to study in America. It was a long time ago and then it was too weird to be a real threat to her desire to experience life in New York City. Witnessing it today, though, she knew that she had underestimated the severity of the situation.”We should keep walking. It’s only going to get worse.” Emma said and the two covered their mouths, walking faster towards the train station. When they were underground, they hugged, said goodbye and headed towards their trains in different parts of the station.
When Emma is on the train, she looks over the images of Susie on the street at the migration. There are four shots that capture Susie reacting to the migration in different ways, but each way feels negative or unpleasant. And Susie holds it on her face so well, her disappointment, her anger, her terror, her exasperation.
Emma sits across from a homeless man who seems to have made this train car his bedroom and, when he wakes up pretty soon, his bathroom.
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