SYNOPSIS

THE TRAIN is a story of loss. We are traveling with a man on a train bound from Toronto north through the frozen Canadian landscape to Winnipeg, where he is going to collect the body of his father to bring him back to New York for the funeral. Of course he is thinking of his father, going over in his mind conversations they have had over the years of his life, and importantly, conversations they have never had. In this he is imagining both sides and partly fueled by the intensity of emotions he feels at the loss of his father, he comes to believe he is really listening to his father's own words.

By the time we join him on the train, he has come to believe his father is traveling with him and the conversations they are having are happening within the time and space of the train he travels on. The conversations have become audible and this has attracted the attention of the staff and other passengers, who perceive the man to be talking to himself. We see the father just as the man sees him when they are alone and we may be beginning to forget the father is not really there too, but when anyone else is present the father vanishes and we are left seeing the man as the others do, merely talking, sometimes quite animatedly, to himself.

In the end he does on some level understand that the whole thing is his creation, but this does nothing to diminish the enormous effect it has on the emotional life of the man, or the intense reality of his experience.