Two Trains Running

I checked on Annie—she was still asleep—and then scrambled up the slope of the hollow. When I reached the top I saw a city sprawling across the hills below, surrounded by forest on every side. On the edges of the city were new shacks and cabins carpentered from raw unpainted boards and logs. The buildings farther away were older, weathered, but not many were larger than the buildings on the outskirts, and they were only two- and three-stories tall. It was like a frontier town with dirt streets, but much bigger than any I’d ever heard of. A shanty metropolis. People were moving along the streets, and I made out animals pulling carts…whether oxen or horses or something else, I could not say. But the city was not the dominant feature of the view. Rising from its center, vanishing into the depths of an overcast sky, was an opaque tube that must have been a hundred yards in diameter, and along it were passing charges of violet light. It was half-obscured in mist—perhaps the mist was some sort of exhaust or discharge—and this caused it to appear not quite real, only partially materialized from its actual setting. I knew, in the same way I had known all else, that the violet lights were men and women going off on journeys even more unimaginable than the one I had taken, traveling through the branching structure I had glimpsed back in the valley (the tube was merely a small visible section of the structure); and that the city was the place to which they returned once they accomplished their tasks. Knowing this did not alarm or perturb me, but the implication it bred—that we were still inside the thing that had snatched us from our old lives—was depressing. Understanding had become important to me, and I had believed I would eventually come to an understanding that would satisfy my need for it. Now it was clear that I would always be in the midst of something too big to understand, be it God or cosmic animal or a circumstance that my mind rendered into a comprehensible simplicity…like God or a cosmic animal. I would never be able to climb up top of any situation and say, “Oh, yeah! I got it!” For all I knew, we could be dead.

I heard a noise, saw Annie scaling the slope toward me. She gave me a hug and took in the view. “Well,” she said. “I was right.”

“I never doubted it.”

She put an arm about my waist and squeezed. “You lie.”

We stood looking across our new home, calm as house buyers checking out a property, and I was actually starting to think where it was we might settle—would it be better on the edge or downtown close to the tube?—when our three companions came to join us atop the rise. The Mexican couple glanced at Annie and me timidly. They stared impassively at the vista; the woman crossed herself. I was surprised that she retained the traditions of her faith after having traveled so far and learned so much. Maybe it was a reflex.

“English?” the bearded man asked, and Annie said, “American.”

“I am Azerbaijani.” He squinted at me and scowled. “You take my bullets?”

I admitted that I had.

“Very smart.” He smiled, a clever, charming smile accompanied by an amused nod. “But rifle is broken. Bullets no good.”

He gazed out at the city with its central strangeness of opacity and violet fire. I wanted to ask if he had ridden a black train to some Azerbaijani halfway house and how he had traveled the rest of the way, and what he thought was going on; but none of it was pressing, so I joined him in silent observance. Considering the five of us, the variance of our origins, I thought I was beginning to have a grasp of the mutability of the unknowable, of the complexity and contrariness of the creature god machine or universal dynamic that had snatched us up. And this led me to recognize that the knowable, even the most familiar articles of your life, could be turned on their sides, shifted, examined in new light, and seen in relation to every other thing, and thus were possessed of a universality that made them, ultimately, unknowable. Annie would have scoffed at this, deemed all my speculation impractical woolgathering; but when I looked at the tube I reckoned it might be exactly the kind of thinking we would need wherever we were going.

The sun, or something like a sun, was trying to break through the clouds, shedding a nickel-colored glare. The Mexican woman peered at each of us, nodded toward the city, and said, “Nos vamos?” Annie said, “Yeah, let’s go check this out.” But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.

“These places,” he said musingly, then gave a slight, dry laugh as if dismissive of the concern that had inspired him to speak. “I don’t know these places.”

Jailbait