But time has passed and now I am alone again. Shadows leer and I hear laughter from some dark place. I close my eyes and dream in orange and purple. Once I was the Chemical Prince; tonight I am pale and depressed. At the end of my journey will be comfort and dim lighting. Between here and there I will love nothing but oxygen. In time there will be electric piano and the blood in my head and I’ll wish I could vanish into steam.

The only way I can tolerate it here anymore is to speed up and slow down the electricity in my brain. I pass a dead sparrow and hear a woman cough. No funeral for the sparrow. By morning it will rot under the sun unless some hungry thing finds it first.

A mile away there are oranges bleeding out in my yard. I had thrown them over the roof just to experience the joy of gravity. And the woman passing by with her baby had looked at me with hatred, saying, “You’re a danger to yourself.”

Across the street a family is watching a young girl play violin. Someone is seated at a grand piano. Boys are in the driveway tossing a ball around. They are outside experiencing a childhood while I am inside experiencing an adulthood. Weirdo of the neighborhood, I think; weirdo of the world.

Yes, and my mind whirls back to the Chemical Prince and his twelve hours of existence. Dead the next morning, awaiting resurrection. But then death is gone and I am no longer afraid of it. It had been conquered in my dreams.

Presently the room swirls and the ceiling lowers. Green walls and yellow lights. There is a creeping sensation in my throat and I remember the sweet smell of the rosemary bushes and how I had almost crawled inside of them. And then my mind flashes and I remember the night when we stood on the stump and watched the moon quiver in the sky. I wonder aloud if what had been was now a dead tree or a new log.

Someone nearby is talking but I can’t focus on the words. A guitar screams and the sound is light and silvery like a supersonic bullet to the brain. Earthworms in my heart and red in my eyes. I gaze out the window and the sky is black and dead. I wonder if I am tired of human voices and human faces or just plain tired. The moment passes and my vision darkens. In some quiet place a memory is born, but I burn it before it has a chance to breathe.

Shivering hours passed. Her schizophrenia seeped into me and sweat crawled down my neck. When she finally slipped away I felt the terror drain from me to follow her into places I could not go. So feeble now, enervated by long proximity to the demons of another. I was afraid that when I woke up the angel would speak through her again, or the angry child for whom time had frozen in that one frenzied moment when her father forced himself on her.

The fading room is a blessing. In the morning she will mutter into my ear dreams of California, the sky, caged animals. But for now I am a stone, sinking into the murk of the lake, twitching to the music of phantom currents. Bubbles rise past me, brushing a gentle torque into my descent, willing my downward slippage into a spiral. The sludge below wants to smother me. I remember being loosed from the grip of a child. I skipped like a discus across the water’s surface. Then I sank, and now I am sinking still. I forget the pebbled beach from which I was chosen, how the sun embraced my roundness, the joy of spasmodic dance atop the water. I forget and forget and I am sinking still. My final rumination: is it better to have flown once, or to have been sinking since the beginning of time? But I forget everything and these fates become one. Curses erupt from my design, aimed into the dark on all sides, and the sludge consumes me, and the need to be vanishes like a strand of steam, and time is a pinpoint, and I am a stone.

I dream of many ghosts congregating in our room, watching us sleep without eyes. They are blurred depthful shadows clinging to vaguely human forms. One by one they wade into the bed, legs moving with the slightest friction through mattress and frame and sheets. We lie there, clutching one another, and each time one of the ghosts passes through us we shiver. They mean us no harm. They only want to feel warmth again. And for the split second they pass through our flesh they do, their vaporous heads filled for an instant with memories of life, while ours are filled with dreams of solemn visitors and one green field spotted with doors.

It was halfway through the set before I began to feel a surge of those feelings In the Aeroplane Over the Sea always conjures in me. Probably during the first high-pitched verse end of “Two-Headed Boy Part 1″: “I am listening to hear where you are. . . .” All at once I was struck by the beauty of the man’s voice. He sings like a full horn section, a mighty operatic wailing that dips in and out of the darkest corners of every chord, filling vast harmonic spaces with his wavering tenor.

Jeff Mangum’s songs have permeated our culture, have been passed and passed on from one amateur guitarist to another. Everyone plays them, everyone loves to sing them. These are true folk songs. A friend once told me: Guitarists, shit man, you can spit and knock three down. He was right. There are many guitarists. But so few bards.

Things have been quiet around here—but only on the surface. John tells me he has finished his novel, and has been spending every night hunched over his laptop editing the damn thing (with a cup of straight whisky to aid him along, no doubt). As for me: I have been battling my own novel for some time now. The thing is, whenever I go to edit or change something, I end up writing two or three thousand more words. Injury & Aftermath is quite long at this point. I’m going to spend the next week chopping it down and we’ll see what I end up with.

As far as publication goes, we’re aiming for March—probably later in the month. I have been spending my lunch breaks at work pricing various printers, so that will be decided soon. It is important to me that the book itself be a nice thing to own. A creamy matte cover, nice paper, good ink . . . all of this will be carefully considered! Too many no-budget, self-published books are complete crap—and that’s before you even read a single sentence. Rest assured, I will not sleep until this book is as close to perfect as possible. (I’m already not sleeping on account of this book, actually. . . .)

In other news: Please welcome photographer Tom Wolff to the list of People Who Do Things at VIII Nothing. Wolff is a longtime chum of John’s—the two go to school together, for God’s sake. I had the pleasure of meeting him in Boston last month, where he showed me around and even walked me to a Deer Tick show in Cambridge. He’s a swell guy. Welcome, brother!

I will put up the second part of my Providence story tomorrow. As for Boston, well: That’s the next Starsailor Newsletter. Look out!

“The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.”

Adeline Virginia Woolf was born 47,847 days ago today. She would have been 131 years old.

Woolf was a prominent writer of the twentieth century, and one of the leading voices in modernist literature. During her lifetime, she produced nine novels, nearly four-dozen short stories, five short story collections, three book-length essays (notably, the seminal feminist text A Room of One’s Own), three biographies (including Orlando) and countless other essays and essay collections.

I, Ryan, became enamored by Virginia Woolf during my senior year of college—when I took an entire seminar on her. During those four months, I read every one of her novels, most of her longer essays and a good portion of her various diaries. To the Lighthouse is still one of my favorite novels. Every other day it seems like passages from it still float through my head. . . .

Happy birthday, Virginia.

In Providence the wind was harsher than it had been that morning in Baltimore—and even earlier in the darkness of Annandale, where dear cousin John Blacksher dropped me off at the Metro station. The night before had been a mirthful one, and I had met many people who knew of my existence by reputation alone. They called me “Mr. Starsailor.” I thought about this as I stepped out of the airport and into that glacial New England air, scanning the sidewalk for a bus that would take me into the city.

A kindly bus driver waved me aboard his vessel and told me where to catch the 99, which, he said, would take me to Hope Street. That was where I needed to be. I had booked a room with a kindergarten teacher and a postdoctoral research associate a little ways north of the downtown area. I knew there would be a warm bed waiting for me when I got there. I was badly in need of a safe place to rest for a little while.

When we arrived at Kennedy Plaza, the driver tipped his hat and said I needed to change bus routes. He wished me well into the new year, which was a little over a day and a half away (I had almost forgotten), and I departed from him and found my place in the Plaza. There was a foot of snow on the ground from a winter storm I had unintentionally avoided from the day before. The trees were still loaded down with the stuff and I knew it hadn’t been there long; the wind had not yet had a chance to blow it away. I huddled inside my heather pea coat and awaited the 99, resolved to go wherever it took me.

I got off at Hope and 8th and walked a half mile to my bed and breakfast. Little had been done to clear the road of ice, and with my enormous military-style pack slung over my shoulders, I feared a quick and painful route downward—I could only helplessly envision broken tail bones and twisted ankles. But I carried on, weak for want of sleep, hungry for want of food, until I found the number on the mailbox that matched the number in my brain. Outside I saw a man in a baseball cap who at once resembled both Wes Anderson and Jeff Mangum. His name was Ben. In Ben’s hands was a large square box. He saw my face and knew who it belonged to.

Ben lead me into his charming little home, showed me where the bathroom was, and, once we were inside my room, he briefly explained the amenities and told me to take a load off. I thanked him when he left and shut the door. A little caramel chocolate was on my pillow and I ate it. Once my clothes were stripped from my pale skeletal frame, I burrowed beneath the comforter and closed my eyes. I could hear the creaking of the radiator and trusted it would keep me warm. I slept like the dead.

In the evening I braved the cold and took the 99 bus into downtown Providence. Most everything was closed, but I pressed on until I found an open Indian restaurant near Brown University. I stayed for an hour and ate enough food, my server told me, “to satisfy three average-sized humans.” I left him a $10 tip and explored the dark snowy streets surrounding the school. A homeless man approached me shivering, asking if I had any change. I gave him a folded Lincoln note and wished him well. He hurried off into the blackness of an alley and I was alone again.

Walking down those ice-slicked streets, I couldn’t help but feel as though my being there was absurd. I could scarcely explain to the server at the Indian place why I was in Providence (“If you don’t know, then you should come back for a few beers!” he had said). I dismissed these thoughts after an “a-ha” moment. The answer was obvious, and consisted of three syllables: “ad-ven-ture”. Once I knew that, what did it matter? I was having a good old time there alone, and I was going to see my favorite band at the end of that cold night.

Yes, Deer Tick was playing at a place called Fête. I figured that was why I was there, too. Months before I had bought a ticket fearing the show would sell out (it did), and Providence being Deer Tick’s hometown, it wasn’t all that surprising to me that the place would be packed to the gills when I got there. Rather than wait around for the bus, which wouldn’t come to the Plaza again for another hour, I decided to walk. One foot in front of the other, I made my way through the slush until I got there. In total I walked three miles with minimal discomfort. After a half mile, my face was completely frozen and numb, and so the dull pain of the frost hardly registered in my brain.

Standing outside of Fête, flurries gently falling from the sky, I saw the enormous line snaking around the building and knew it would be some time before I got in. I studied the crowd and deduced that no one else had come without a friend. Men and women held hands, some people were huddled into small groups, rubbing their arms for warmth, talking about the night to come. In some sense I felt as though I was in my element: alone in a strange city, on what I kept telling myself was an “adventure”—hoping to talk to new people and have them talk to me. And if they didn’t, there was always the warm comfort of my brain. I crossed a great patch of ice and took my place in line, watching my breath as it escaped my body and turned to nothing against the black sky. . . .

To be continued in part II: “I AM PROVIDENCE“.

Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable.

In this way he states (some four decades before its emergence in the writings of Sartre) the ethical responsibility inherent in every individual existence to the race as a whole. Human Energy is to Tesla the impetus of our ascension, the variable that will determine whether we burn or blossom. His is a simple philosophy: discipline, morality, balance of mind and body, moderation, creativity, ingenuity, and empathy.

Allow this disillusioned romantic a humble invocation of Wordsworth:

Tesla! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
The world hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters. . .

The album is a poignant, yet scatterbrained narrative dealing in emotional damage, psychological aberration, drinking problems, women catching fire, demons climbing out of ocean trenches, women flying into brick walls, and broken people with nowhere to go. We therefore love it unconditionally on principle.

Eric is an artist of the best kind: experienced, expressive, subtle, and (this is a stretch, we’ve never met the guy) nauseated by the world and yet still firmly in love with it. Keep your ears open, and his words and melodies are sure to drag from your depths long-buried joy and sadness. Here’s to all men and women of eloquence, may they keep telling us all the things we can’t tell ourselves.

Ronan rubbed his eyes and looked. He was slouched in an armchair, still half asleep, and a gray-haired bulbous figure stood above him, complete with beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and a suit of some quality.

“Who are you?”

“Call me Carter.” The man performed a clumsy bow. Ronan stood and stretched his back with a deep yawn. He was in a small room heavy with the scent of pine. Curtains were drawn across the windows. In one corner was a bed adorned with iron latticework. A writing desk and chair were placed against one wall, and a small coffee table sat in the middle of the room near the armchair. A cup of coffee steamed on the table, the liquid vibrating with a rhythm that originated in the floor.

“Fell asleep reading?” asked Carter, holding up a newspaper. Ronan snatched it out of his hands and tossed it onto the desk.

“Sorry. That paper is. . . Well, wait, a train you said?”

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

“When did we depart?” asked Ronan.

“Quite some time ago,” said Carter, a wide smile on his face.

“Are you in charge here?”

“In a way. I’ve come to offer you a job.”

“When is the next stop?”

“Stop, Mr. Ronan?”

“The next stop. When and where, if you would.”

“Mr. Ronan,” said Carter, his face contorted with amusement. “You don’t seem to understand.”

Ronan waited for more information. None was given.

“What?”

Carter laughed, and began to walk away. Ronan let him leave, but the old stranger stopped just before reaching the sliding wooden door, and turned to speak. “If you take this job offer, then perhaps it can be arranged for you to be deposited at the nearest plausible location. Are you interested?”

“If I don’t take this job?”

“You will be executed.”

“Excuse me?”

“You will be killed, Mr. Ronan. In a matter of hours.”

“What sort of job?”

“Executioner.”

“What?”

“Killing human beings, Mr. Ronan. Are you interested?”

Ronan hesitated. Carter laughed again, and turned away. The door was halfway shut when Ronan called out: “Alright.”

“Good,” said Carter, still facing out the door. “Good.” Carnal satisfaction in that voice, a low purr. “Instructions will be sent to your room in the evening. Until then your meals will be brought to you. Good day, Mr. Ronan.”

The round man in the suit took his leave. Ronan ran over to the bed, and lifted the mattress. There was a knife underneath. He pocketed it. He walked over to the door and tried the knob. It was locked, and by the feel of it in more places than one. He opened the curtains. It was black outside, if there was an outside. Darkness accompanied by a faint rumbling in the floor. Something was moving. Maybe this was a train, but there was no reason to trust the old man. It could be a building with a roaring elevator shaft, or the basement of a churning factory. The window could be painted over, or not be a window at all. It didn’t matter. He grabbed the nearest chair and threw it at the window from across the room. It bounced off with a cold thud, and hit the carpeted floor with the same.

Ronan laughed, took his newspaper from the desk, fell back into the armchair, and began to sip the coffee. He read the same article over and over again, just as he always had. It was about a man who worked as a waiter in a local restaurant, who walked into a store across the street, produced a revolver, and procured five hundred dollars from the clerk. He got into his car and threw the money in the back and then, by all accounts, shot himself. The police investigated, gasped in mock surprise when the clerk pointed out that the money was still missing, shrugged at the shattered glass doorway of the restaurant, refused to allow would-be witnesses to, quote, complicate the story, unquote, then retired to the local watering hole.

A note was slipped under the door. Ronan waited until he finished the article, along with the coffee. A well-timed ritual of his. Then he rose to retrieve the note. In neat flowing script, it read:

Ronan,

I want to help you.

            —Diana

He laughed and tossed the note onto the table. He sat down to read the article again, the only news article that had ever interested him. It was about a man who worked as a highway sign-painter. His girlfriend left him one night, and so he drove his motorcycle through the glass door of a restaurant and threatened the waiter on duty with an ice pick if he didn’t get him five hundred dollars in cash by the end of the hour. Once the cash was received, he opened the nearest manhole and threw the money in. Then he got on his motorcycle, drove to a nearby apartment building and took the elevator to the roof. Eyewitness reports claim he exited the elevator, spray-painted a vulgar phrase on the air conditioning unit in neon green, then jumped off the ten story complex either just after or while stabbing himself in the stomach with the aforementioned ice pick.

After his second reading of the newspaper article he picked up the note again, seeking motive or meaning in the spaces between the ink. Ronan shrugged and placed it in his breast pocket.

“Diana?” He posed the question breathlessly.

Ronan was torn from his thoughts by the odor of black smoke. It was leaking in from under his door. He walked up to the door, tilted his head in consideration, then kicked it with all his weight. It fell to the floor in a neatly carpeted train-car hallway, where the taste of ash entered his head through his nostrils and coated his tongue. The black vapors were leaking into the hall from the door across from his own. He ran to it, and tested the knob. Unlocked. He entered. The door rolled shut behind him.

The room was identical to his own. A stranger dressed in black, ski-mask stuffed over his head, was torching the curtains with a lighter and a can of hair spray. Ronan ran up behind him and drew the knife. It slipped into the stranger’s side with incredible ease—finding by chance a space between two ribs—and was retracted with the same. The man fell to the carpet clutching his stomach. As the room continued to burn, a loudspeaker, hung from one ceiling corner, tripped its way into Ronan’s ear.

“Good,” said Carter’s voice. “Good.”

There was a click, and the hum of the loudspeaker was gone.

Over the crackling fire Ronan heard the door open behind him. He ran to the closet and shut himself in. Through the wooden blinds he watched as a woman walked into room. Her features were obscured by smoke and fiery haze, yet he could not help but notice her graceful poise, her fine contours as she tiptoed through the chaos. He heard her cry out, and she danced toward the stranger convulsing on the carpeted floor. She removed his mask. Ronan could not see his face. She picked him up with surprising strength and, walking through flames that seemed to part before her, laid his body on the bed. He was sobbing, clutching at himself, losing his mind.

“Tell me I’m alright,” he said.

“You’re alright,” she cooed.

The stranger spat blood in her face. “Mom?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“It’s alright.”

“Can I have a bedtime story?”

“Of course.” She cleared her throat through tears. “Once upon a time, there was a store clerk. He was given five hundred dollars by a customer in sunglasses and a leather jacket, and told he would receive two thousand more if he killed the next man who came into the store. He waited, hand on the gun in his pocket, and another customer entered. He thought about the two thousand dollars. He thought about the innocent man, who might not be so innocent. He thought about wives and daughters and sons. . .”

The man sputtered and died.

Ronan stepped from the closet. “Did he fire?”

She turned, tears in her eyes, mingling with the stranger’s blood that ran down her cheeks, the same blood that stained the knife tucked away in Ronan’s jacket. She stood, and looked Ronan square in the face, her brown eyes tinted with yellow venom, the reflection of the surrounding flames.

“He was robbed first.”

Ronan busied himself with suffocating the flames. He decided to use the blanket from the bed, so he lifted the body one limb at a time to slide the fabric from underneath. It was awkward, undignified. She watched him in silence from the middle of the room, standing with arms at her sides, sharp face twitching, dark hair wafting in the smoke. When the fire was gone to embers and blackened carpet, she approached him and laid her head on his chest.

Ronan felt his arms, beyond his control, lift to embrace her, and a cold, neuralgic serpent made three passes through his heart.

They stood in silent dirge as some ventilation mechanism purified the air. Seconds after the smoke was gone the scent of pine returned, and with it came two priestly men in white robes chanting shibboleths in a dead language, wearing gold chain necklaces that bore the mandala of two interlocked gears. They lifted the empty shell of the dearly departed, and flowed out of the room with the swift indifference of a natural force.

When their embrace was broken she looked into his eyes, and he wiped her face with the left sleeve of his jacket, his right hand still tucked in its pocket, keeping the knife from clattering out to the floor.

“Diana?”

“Ronan,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to see that. It must have been one of Carter’s murderers. Did you see the killer? Often they wear white suits with red ties, and carry knives.”

“I don’t know who he is, or where he is. Who was the victim?”

“Just another good man gone insane. They each have their own style of expressing the turmoil. This one was trying to burn his way out. His name was Jeff, or Jake, or Jeremy.”

“We should talk. My room is across the hall.”

He walked her into the room, through the sliding door, somehow repaired in his brief absence. Two mugs of steaming coffee were waiting on the table. He led her into the armchair, and pulled the chair from the writing desk up to the table. He opened the curtains—closed in his absence, perhaps by the bearer of the coffee—only to find the same appalling darkness. He slid them back into place.

Nonchalant, he ambled toward the bed, then slipped the knife under the pillow while his body blocked her view. He cringed as the blood smeared over the white sheets, and adjusted the pillow to conceal the gruesome abstraction, and turned to see Diana reading the newspaper. He crossed the room in two strides and snatched it from her hands, then took his seat in the desk chair.

“I’ve heard that story before,” she said.

“Not as many times as I have. Take a drink while it’s hot, and gather yourself. I have questions.”

“I have some of my own,” she said, angry now and letting it show. “You’ve been so far away. How long has it been? How can I tell? The clocks run both ways and the windows are always black. I never thought I’d see you again. And now here you are, waiting with a mouthful of questions. I have no answers, Ronan, and if you have any for me you may as well keep them to yourself.”

The polyphonic rumble of the train, or factory, or void-crossing motorized reference frame, sank into his bones, and Ronan felt a sudden wave of nausea. He was bent over himself now, trying to pass it off as the leaning-toward of a sincere conversationalist, when all he needed was the pressure on his stomach.

“Just tell me where the train is going, if it’s a train. What Carter wants. Where I can find him.”

She scoffed. “You are playing the newcomer, aren’t you? And the savior at that.”

At this she produced out of air an elegant cigarette case, and lit one with a match of equally mysterious origin. Did she enjoy the taste, he wondered, or was it all for effect? Aware of the strategy or not, he couldn’t help now noticing her legs. “Well, graceful avenger, let me set you straight. The train goes, but it does not go to, and it does not go from. Carter doesn’t want anything. He’s a schemer, a voyeur, a myopic scientist. As to finding him, no one has ever seen him and he’s probably a spook story.”

“You said yourself, his murderers are everywhere.”

“A figure of speech,” she said, but she hadn’t quite convinced herself. A series of smoke rings sprouted from her rounded lips. Had she had lipstick on before now? And her eyes had the same yellow glaze they had gleaned from the flames, this time from some inner conflagration.

The nausea lifted, and Ronan leaned back in his chair.

“Is there a war going on here?”

The last ring in the chain curled into a formless cloud as she cracked a sad smile. “I wouldn’t call it a war. It’s just strange people in close proximity, everyone trying to make their own nothing out of the big nothing.”

The metamorphosis was complete. The motherly figure who had leaned over a dying man to whisper a mournful story and sob through blood and fire had become the ruthless femme fatale, spouting noir aphorisms into the nebulous haze trapped in the gravity well of her eyes.

“Well,” said Ronan. “That’s the most sensible thing I’ve heard all day.”

•     •     •

Breakfast for one on white ceramic was steaming on the coffee table. The staff, whoever they were, had placed two mugs of coffee when Ronan and Diana returned from the torched room on the other side of the hall. So they must have known she left before the morning. What could Ronan learn from this? That Carter was literally the voyeur she had called him? More disturbing still was the prospect that the staff, whoever they were, had known she would leave before morning. Assuming it was morning. The only indication of the time of day was the food selection on the plate.

Ronan peeled himself from the tousled sheets. He sighted the bloody stain that had been hidden beneath the pillow before the madness began, now dry and brown, and recalled the terrifying moment when Diana had seen the incriminating patch of color. Interpreting the artwork as her own design, she had thrown together a hasty apology, having forgotten to tell him it was her first time. The day before smoldered in the back of his mind like a nightmare, and he was ready to believe that she was right concerning the origin of the blood. Not to mention, he couldn’t find the knife.

Yet chastity didn’t fit her character, nor the style of her physical expressions once they had collapsed into each other. It could have been a story invented to divert his suspicions. Ronan promised himself that if she came to him again, he would disguise the frantic search for the knife as the desire to feel every tract of her flesh. Nonetheless, that desire would be very real.

He read over the same newspaper article as he ate his breakfast. It was the harrowing tale of a plumber stalked by his demons, who found a bag stuffed with five hundred dollars in the sewer and used it to purchase a shotgun, a power saw, and a box of shells containing pellets that would, in the weeks to come, find themselves buried in the flesh of four bystanders, the walls of a law office, and in the skull of the troubled plumber himself.

Glancing up after the final sentence, his eyes drifted to a diabolical instrument clicking away on the wall over the bed. He knew now what Diana had meant when she accused the clocks of running both ways. As he watched, the second hand tripped four ticks clockwise, then six counterclockwise, then twelve clockwise, then five counter, and so on.

He watched its movements for an illegible length of time, just long enough to discern that there was no pattern, imagining all the while the elaborate triple-escapement system that had to be at work: one spring wound in the clockwise direction, another wound in its opposite, and a third mechanism switching between sources of motion, transforming the potential momentums into a stochastic element. Was succinct randomization even possible within an analog machine? If not, it was certainly possible that the clockmaker, himself twisted and confused, had sought to express his chasmic psychological aberrations through a labyrinth of gears so intricate that the pattern beneath became invisible to any observer.

His daze was broken by receding footsteps in the hall. Another note had been slipped under his door. He retrieved it and took it back with him to the armchair, expecting either a terse declaration of hatred or a carnal declaration of love from his ambiguous mistress. When he reclined and unfolded the paper, he found instead a message from his dubious employer.

Mr. Ronan,

Your first mission was a fantastic success. And without any written order! Under normal circumstances this would justify an expedient dishonorable discharge. However, following your impressive display of cold precision, coupled with a tendency toward secrecy and even infiltration, I have decided that you are to be immediately promoted to such a rank as befits your ability and independence. You are hereby cleared to act, in our service, at your own discretion.

This noble privilege comes with heightened responsibility. Do not forget your allegiance, and in turn we will not forget what was promised. The train will make its next stop in roughly two days.

Yours, so long as you are ours,

            —Carter

Ronan folded the note and tore it to shreds. He spent what might have been several minutes—twenty clockwise, eight counter, seven clockwise, thirty-six counter, one clockwise, fourteen counter, seven again clockwise, thirty-three counter—avoiding sexual interpretations of infiltration and contemplating the meaning of allegiance.

He felt a glow of pride from being drafted into a secret cause. Nevertheless, the cause itself remained obscure, and the players were still crouched in their trenches, chessboard lying black, white, and forgotten out in the midst of no-man’s land. Were there sides? Divisive issues? Intended means and ends? Ronan felt, despite his blossoming distrust of her, that there was truth in Diana’s imprecation: that each man and woman in this place, bound into nowhere from nowhere, bore their own agenda within, hidden and sacred—that the number of loyalties matched the number of individuals. How then to serve Carter’s cause, if he was to do so?

Then he laughed, long and loud, as the brutal, joyful other side of the coin came into focus. How then would he not serve Carter’s cause, and how then would he not win the prize and escape this rumbling purgatory? He would follow the orders that told him to follow his whims. There was no other possibility.

Yet, in his examination of this fact, Ronan was all too aware of the clever trap the letter had set for him. Every decision he made could be pressed under the categorical alignment of allegiance to Carter. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, but it left too his freedom intact.

And so Ronan hit upon the brilliant decision to do nothing at all.

He shook the scraps of the torn letter from the newspaper article and gave it another close reading. It told of a lawyer of respected intellect, who went about his business in common humility, until one day a deranged plumber ransacked his office demanding seven virgin brides and a handle of single malt scotch. Possessing only three daughters, and unwilling to relinquish his most treasured beverage, the lawyer leapt from his desk in an act of uncharacteristic heroism, pinning the assailant to the ground, wrestling the sawed-off from his hands, and blowing the man’s brains all over the freshly-waxed hardwood floor. When the police arrived, they found the lawyer had taken to the bottle in celebration of his triumph, consuming the entire handle of aforementioned scotch in minutes and then proceeding to fire the shotgun at random, involuntarily ending the lives of several interns doling out coffee in the neighboring office. Prosecuted by his rival from the other side of town, he was sentenced to a number of years in jail that exceeded his age, and shortly hung himself with strips of orange prison fabric suspended from a pipe that served no purpose, the removal of which had been postponed when prison management lost contact with the plumber assigned to the task.

The reading must have taken longer than usual. Shortly after he let the newspaper fall to the table a knock came at the door. Before Ronan could call out, a man in a white suit and red tie was already entering.

Ronan was on his feet in a flash, turning his head in all directions, seeking a weapon. Then he took a closer look at the intruder. He was dressed just as Diana had described Carter’s assassins, but he was old and whiskered, his back bent slightly under its own weight, and he shuffled across the floor toward Ronan, who was still on his guard. The old man set an elegant platter of sandwiches on the table, complete with a fresh pot of coffee, then smiled with averted eyes. He crafted a deep bow into the same motion as the placing of the tray, which caused his spine to groan. The old man winced and, still imitating a ninety-degree angle at the hip, shuffled to the door and let himself out.

So there was Ronan’s illustrious server, who had been sneaking in and out of his room at all hours. He certainly did not have the look of a killer, and if he had wanted to murder Ronan he had passed on multiple opportunities.

Ronan shook his head in resignation, and lifted the pot of coffee to refill his mug. When it was half full and half empty a folded slip of paper loosed itself from the bottom of the coffee pot, and fell to rest on his sandwiches. He finished pouring, set down the pot, unfolded the paper, and raised it to his eyes just as he raised the cup to his lips.

Ronan,

The coffee is poison. Not the good kind.

            —Diana

Ronan immediately regretted spewing the coffee all over the sandwich tray. Now the stuff was in the food. Or was she playing mind games again? Assuming she had played them already. In any case it was better not to risk it. He set the coffee down, pushed it to a safe distance at which he would not pick it up as a reflex while reading, and raised the newspaper article to his eyes in the dusty light to which he was only now growing accustomed.

Before he could read the article again, another knock came at the door. Ronan shivered, his eyes went wide, and he cursed his nerves for being shot. But this time he would be ready.

He picked up the mug, and just as his mind was racing through the logistics of how an assassin could be further neutralized during the moments a steaming face-full of poisoned coffee would buy, a clown of a man waltzed into the room. His hair was sparse, his beard patchy, and he wore a tweed suit crowned by a massive red bow tie that flopped about like an involuted organ. He immediately dragged the chair from the writing desk to the table and sat down across from Ronan.

“Doesn’t anyone wait for an answer after knocking?”

“Sorry,” the clown said. “I was so excited to see you, Mr. Ronan.” He chirped out each syllable in a high-pitched and punctuated whine, nailing them down without mercy. “My name is Wolmsey.” At this he offered his left hand to shake, and displayed a set of teeth that might have been yanked from the jaws of a hamster and glued in place by hand.

“Apparently I need no introduction,” said Ronan, and shook the clown’s left hand with his right.

“Not after all I’ve heard. I have no doubt you’ll be a valuable asset to our cause.”

“Cause?” asked Ronan, with a hint of acid. Anything but another cause.

“Well, the truth is,” said Wolmsey, leaning in close over the table, teeth clinging to his gums for dear life as he cracked his I-shouldn’t-be-telling-you-this smile, “I’m only a low level informer, and I have no clearance to extend an invitation. I want to assure you, first of all, that I never tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

Wolmsey was shaking with anticipation. Ronan felt like he was watching a bad actor: empathic embarrassment, along with the yearning to see the hack dig his own grave.

“We are the resistance.” With that, Wolmsey leaned back in his chair and waited for his words to find their mark.

Ronan choked back a laugh. Someone had told this child an irrelevant secret, then told him he couldn’t repeat it. And yet, there was the possibility that he had been told on purpose, that they knew he would spill his secret, that they knew he would come here. And there was the further possibility that they knew Ronan would read between the lines and discover their intentions, hidden in the inanity of the clown. Or was the clown himself the mastermind, acting out with incredible skill the part of the bad actor? Possibilities played pinball in Ronan’s mind, and the laughter evaporated from his face.

Wolmsey read this shift in expression as disbelief to astonishment, and smiled in triumph. Or so it might have seemed to the untrained eye. Ronan was back on his guard, and no detail would escape him now.

“Yes, the resistance. We are the force in the shadows, countering every movement made by those in power. It’s difficult work we do, gathering information from the inside, keeping tabs on who’s who. As you might have guessed,” and here he leaned in again, demonstrating the skill of a thespian by generating no dramatic effect whatsoever, “things are not always what they seem on this train.”

“You oppose Carter?”

“And those in his employ. There are many, and they are crafty.”

“Surely they are. Why are you here? Has Diana spoken of me?”

“Diana?” Wolmsey was bewildered. “Don’t tell me you’ve seen her?”

“Well, no.”

“Of course not. No one believes in her. She’s just a bit a folklore, a nymph or something. Flitting around. Not anywhere.”

“Why are you here?”

“Squeeze my bow tie.” Wolmsey was leaning across the table, the twin sacks of red fabric drooping from his throat. “Go ahead.”

“I won’t. Answer my question.”

“Ah, forget it. Would have eased the tension though.” He winked. “I’m here because I want you to attend our meeting. It will be just down the hall.” He blathered a room number. “Midnight tonight. Come alone. You’ll be welcome. Ah, what’s this? I haven’t had my fix today.” Wolmsey lifted the coffee mug.

“To a long friendship between us,” he said. Ronan raised an imaginary glass in turn. Then the clown tilted the mug and took three heavy swallows.

“Now,” said Wolmsey. “Am I going to have to leave this room without you squeezing my bow tie?”

After what might have been a full minute of agony and vomiting—fourteen counter, six clockwise, seventeen counter, seventeen clockwise, eight counter—Wolmsey was dead, and Ronan had remembered Diana’s note. He knelt down beside the body and, respectful of the clown’s final wishes, squeezed one lobe of the hideous bow tie.

A stream of seltzer water caught him in the eyes. By the time his tear ducts had done their part, the robed priests had nearly done theirs. His vision returned just in time to see the second of them gliding out the door with Wolmsey’s feet in his hands. Then the door slid to, and Ronan was alone. The grainy loudspeaker clicked on, and from its depths oozed the voice of Carter once again.

“Good,” it said. “Good.”

Defiance, thought Ronan: a quiet revolt against this endless circus. If a touch of logic brings this whole train to ruin, at least the heap will gather on the solid ground.

 •     •     •

Ronan found a stash of brandy under his bed shortly after Wolmsey’s body had been removed, and proceeded to drink himself into such a stupor as would prevent him from indirectly murdering another stranger. His eyes clouded over, time slowed, and he laid naked on top of the sheets hoping Diana would return, reading his newspaper article.

It told of a prison guard who, sacked from the service of the state following the impromptu suicide of an incarcerated lawyer, walked out into the world a freer and poorer man looking for trouble. He found it in an alleyway late one night in the form of a psychotic cat-hoarder. She sat in a rocking chair, quaking and swaying among heaps of urban refuse, surrounded by slithering fur of all colors. She sold the man a mysterious substance which she claimed would lead him to his calling in life. Upon consumption of the substance, the former guard believed himself the herald of a new religion. The covenant: if you chew on the knuckles of every man you come across, you and your loved ones will be rewarded with never having to suffer an afterlife. Late at night in the bowels of an unforgiving city, it was inevitable that such a creed would end as it did. The man was beaten to death. Suspects were rounded up and questioned by the so-called authorities. Not one reported witnessing the man in any state of post-mortem transcendental existence, and so his religion remains to be disproven.

Upon finishing the reading Ronan set out for adventure, across the floor, noticing for the first time the tasteless yellow pattern on the carpet between his unsteady feet. He reached the door, wrenched it open, and stepped out of his room and into the hallway for the first time in thirty-six hours. He slunk forth, the floor shifting beneath him and the hallway bending. He decided to attribute these effects to inebriation, and not to the rumble of an engine and the arch of a locomotive rounding a bend in the track. It quieted his conscience to think that he had been lied to, manipulated: two unequal repertoires of sins balanced against each other in the scale, bringing all to justice in his vacant, misfiring brain.

It was perhaps one hour into the third day when Ronan stumbled into the resistance meeting with a head full of liquor. Upon his entrance into the dark, smoky room, the faceless men and women of the cause, seven of them crouched in the shadows around a casino-style card table, began to speak over one another layer upon layer in an elegant canon of nonsense.

“Ronan. . .”

“He’s here. . .”

“At last, Mr. Ronan, at long last. . .”

“With moonbeams at his stride. . .”

“By some divine providence. . .”

“A hero for the cause. . .”

“Make your way to the table, young man. . .”

“We’ve been waiting so long. . .”

“It’s late, not too late, but so late. . .”

“Join us here. . .”

“Stay a while. . .”

“Hear us. . .”

“And some false light about him. . .”

Soon the overlapping vociferations were unintelligible even to the speakers, and without any other means to express themselves, all stood from their creaky folding chairs and applauded his timely arrival. Ronan felt like the star of a sitcom, rolling into the scene to canned applause, and in that spirit he felt the need to blurt out a fresh catch phrase, a vulgar joke, anything entertaining.

“Well here I am,” was all he could manage. He took the seat they had set out for him, at the head of the card table with its mahogany rim and brightly lit, soft green playing space, and the rest of them followed suit and took their chairs. A few cigar ends burned orange in the dark beyond the reach of the overhead lamp, flaring up and down through clouds of sweet smoke. At the other end of the table two huge, thick-veined hands came flat on the tabletop from out of the shadows, and the man they belonged to spoke in a raspy drawl.

“We have a job for you Ronan. But first. We must pay respects to our man Wolmsey.” Fists pounded on the table in agreement, all around. Ronan was silent.

“Wolmsey was young, passionate, zealous, full of love for the brothers and sisters of the cause. He was the embodiment, the incarnation, the very manifestation of all that we believe in. The courage and faith with which he faced this troubled world no doubt served him well as he encountered oblivion.”

Fists on the table again, pounding, and grunts came from the shadows behind the disembodied hands. Ronan’s head spun. He wanted to vomit all over the bright green tabletop and drown in his own bilious stew, right there under the gaze of invisible eyes.

“That settles the matter of Wolmsey’s death. As to the matter of his murder, our sources confirm that Carter’s assassins have struck again. This calls for direct and swift retaliation. All in favor?”

The fists came down again. The pounding echoed in Ronan’s skull, dull thuds against living bone.

“And here is where our guest comes in,” said the voice of the heavy hands. “Ronan. You’ve come to accept a job offer.” This sounded familiar, not just in phrasing. Ronan leaned into the light to squint across the table. The pair of hands to his left slid a flimsy wooden box toward him.

“You will deliver this package.” The voice told him a room number. “You will leave it at the door, knock, and then go. That is all that is required of you.”

The owner of the heavy hands leaned forward, and Ronan saw—steel-rimmed spectacles, graying hair, a wide smile full of yellowed teeth—Carter’s face loom out the dark.

“We know you are capable, Mr. Ronan.” And with that the whole company stood from their creaky folding chairs and marched out of the room, leaving Ronan alone with the box. He hefted it under one arm and hurried out of the room to catch Carter in the hall. But he stepped through the sliding door and found himself alone in the dimly lit hallway, glancing this way and that and feeling rather than seeing the presence of no one. He stumbled back toward his room in a nauseous daze. Inside the wooden box he felt movement, flopping and jumping. Something was alive in there, poisonous snakes more than likely. He wanted to rid himself of the thing.

I’ll find the engine room, he thought, and burn the creatures alive before they have the chance to kill any of us. Any of us. A weird sensation of camaraderie, just for a split second. But from somewhere unseen came a wave of mercy, and the sensation passed without doing much harm.

In this state, distracted and angry, he walked past his room. Then he heard Diana call out to him from behind. He recognized the voice instantly, he had been waiting to hear it all night. He attempted a graceful whirl to turn himself toward her voice, but his feet were clumsy with drink and could not enact his drunken whims. Ronan’s right leg tripped over his left and he fell forward to land before someone’s door, the package slipping from under his arm to break open on the floor.

Ronan raised his eyes and saw a dozen frogs hopping from the wreckage of the box, stunned and gulping air on the carpet before him. Their dark color was an odd match with the sickly yellow-green of the carpet pattern. The door nearby slid open and Ronan saw a red tie hanging almost to the floor swing its way across the threshold. Ronan clambered up to his knees and saw it was his quiet servant, shambling out of the room, still bent at ninety degrees. As such his face was close to the floor, a face gone nearly as white as his suit as he stared down into the flock of frogs, who were jostling with one another trying to be the first to enter the room.

The old man fell to the floor, on his back, and in the violence of his suffocation bashed his head against the door frame, again and again, his legs kicking straight up in the air, still bent at a right angle, until his final ecstatic spasm caused a sickening crack and brought his legs to the floor and righted his crooked spine once and for all.

The old man’s throat had swollen to horrific proportions. The frogs loitered and croaked on his lifeless body. The poor bastard, thought Ronan. He must have been allergic.

“Good,” from the corners of the ceiling, dripping with satisfaction. “Good.”

Watching these death throes sparked a rush of adrenaline, along with sudden and unwanted sobriety. Ronan got to his feet and whirled around to see Diana waiting at the door to his room, her eyes burning yellow, beckoning him inside. He followed her to bed as the robed priests chanted their way down the hall, spewing incense from a swaying lantern. They lifted the body of the old servant and carried it away. And even as he let himself drown in Diana’s kisses Ronan imagined the long journey of the priests from the passenger cars to the boiler, to cast the fresh body into the flames to replenish the impetus of the locomotive, that it might carry itself over the next mountain and far beyond.

•     •     •

Diana stood before him in a dream, her eyes wide with desire and her breasts moving up and down with her breath under a tight black dress. The fuse was lit and it was only a matter of time before Ronan pulled her against his chest and buried his face in her neck. But he stood paralyzed, admiring the tension of the moment that would soon give way to passionate, white-knuckled sex. Then, out of the shadows, a full wine bottle was smashed across his skull. The sound combined the throaty pop of a massive balloon with the shattering of a window. After a fleeting instant of agony, shock dulled the pain of the blow. He was flat on the ground in his own blood, his palms crusted with glass shards, that curious sound echoing over and over in his head, and he felt intense clarity. He realized that the hand wielding the bottle had been his own: somewhere inside he had known all along that specific noise, and this particular genre of pain, were exactly what was needed to wake up.

And he did wake up, there on the bed, to find Diana absent again and Carter relaxing in the armchair on the other side of the room. The dim light carved shadowy valleys in the old man’s face, and he seemed to Ronan in that moment of half-sleep to resemble a sage: misplaced in space and time, cruel and ambitious, but nonetheless an extraordinary man of wisdom and poise.

“Wake up, Mr. Ronan.”

“The time?” asked Ronan, and he glanced up at the clock, a habit he had yet to correct. Four clockwise, six counter.

“Call it afternoon, if you like,” said Carter, as he perused the newspaper article. His eyes hovered over a single sentence, retracing it from start to finish, and a scowl came upon his features.

“Such dark literature, this. I pity the man that fills his head with these stories. Then again, with proper scrutiny of the written word, one might construct an illusion about himself such that all his woes and guilts and pleasures become meaningful in narrative form, wherein all is consistent by way of a pervasive lack of explanation. And so a man might make his experience a poem. Pointless, flighty. Engraved in our hearts one moment and scrambling through the woodwork the next. But I talk of nothing, and how very long can I talk of it.”

Ronan rose and put on his clothes, then sauntered over to the coffee table. Carter placed the newspaper down on the hardwood surface, and handed Ronan a glass of cool water. Ronan drank it in four heavy gulps and felt his stomach begin to settle.

“A late night for both of us,” said Carter.

“You were at the meeting.”

Carter cracked a sour smile. “Ah yes, the resistance. Every man of the people must perform ritual acts of community service. Otherwise the heathens begin to question his value to them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of us do, Mr. Ronan. And that is the one secret, the only trick of the trade. Now, are you prepared to discuss business? Or will I be forced to lock your door when we reach the next stop?”

Ronan brought the chair from the writing desk to the table and sat across from Carter, the sleep still in his eyes. A persistent ache was lodged in his skull, a throbbing organ all its own.

“You do want to get off the train?” asked Carter.

“Yes. Damn it all yes. Hasn’t our agreement been. . . satisfied?”

“Sensing your skill and intuition, I allowed you to act on your own. But further action must be calculated, if the pieces are to fall where they have to fall. There is one last task I must ask of you. When it is done, you are free to get off at the next stop, tomorrow morning.”

Carter paused and rolled his eyes upward, brooding to himself. Ronan waited for his next words. They came slow, pungent.

“You will kill the engineer.”

“Kill him?”

“Yes Mr. Ronan. He has to die.”

“Why?”

“Because his corpse is your ticket off this train.”

“What was my ticket on this train?”

“That is your own business, and I would never gain to ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Remember the one secret. The trick of the trade. Remember it and you will always have as good an advantage over anyone as anyone can. Remember it, and you’re always in control. Make sure the engineer is dead by morning, and I will make sure you are escorted off the train tomorrow. Good hunting.”

With that Carter got to his feet and disappeared into the hallway. Ronan reclaimed the armchair and lifted the newspaper to his eyes, then let it slip from his hands. Now was not a time for idle reading. There was one last sin to perform to smooth over the rest, if he was to be freed of this vile carnival. He rose, and walked through the door and out into the hall, and began to move toward the front of the train, with only the momentum beneath to guide him in that direction.

He felt ready. But he could not shake one anxiety. What about Diana? Would she want to leave the train with him? Did she love him? Did she hate him? Had she used him? Would she come with him?

While grappling for answers, a limerick leapt into Ronan’s mind, and he spoke it aloud as he proceeded down the rumbling hallway.

Ronan chuckled to himself. The words struck an odd chord in him, but he could not understand the familiarity. Something he had read once.

Ronan had passed out of the passenger cars somehow, though he passed no divides, made no brief crossings into a windy outside. He stood now before a door at the end of the hallway. He gripped its heavy iron handle with both hands and pulled to the side. With great effort it gave way, grinding against a rusty frame, and slid into the side of the wall. The overhead bulbs flickered, went out, then ignited again, light growing from nothing into the familiar crepuscular haze. The scent of pine was expunged by sulphur, coal, rust, and rotting fruit, odors of the air rushing through the open door, and Ronan stepped into the engineer’s car.

Levers, knobs, gears, pressure locks, and pipes jutted out of the blackened iron walls. The space of the room was bristling with these sharp geometries. It felt confined, dangerous. There were no windows here, and the only light came from a bulb that dangled on an exposed copper wire from the ceiling. An omnipresent hum rose and fell like a tide. Two chairs, bolted to the metal floor, jagged and uninviting, were there before the control panel, which flashed with a chaotic variety of lights and switches and quivering gauges. One of the chairs was occupied.

Ronan approached slow on his toes, ducking under an array of piping, sneaking up from behind the chair. Then the engineer twisted around and showed himself. He bore the weathered face of an ancient man who had spent his life in the presence of unnatural forces, his hands black with soot, flakes of ash in his hair, and a pair of goggles lifted to rest on his forehead. He wore denim overalls and a fraying work shirt with sleeves rolled up nearly to the shoulder. He was bald, skinny, and short, but the muscles of his arms and neck were lithe with use, taught under leathery skin.

“Hello there,” said the engineer, in a warm, gruff voice. “Wanna join me?”

Ronan, guilty and tired, took the seat next to him. The engineer was still attending to his instruments with delicate fingers as he spoke.

“It’s been a fucking long time since I had company. What brings you to the belly of the beast?”

“I want to see what makes her tick,” said Ronan.

“Son, you came to the right place. See, here’s the speedometer, you gotta add twelve to whatever it tells you to get the truth, and the fuel pressure, there’s some dividing factor involved there, something between three point five and three point six, I’ve got it written down somewhere, and this goddamn lever feeds the steam from the two boilers, thing is broke as fuck but you can use it if you’ve got the magic touch, gotta kinda wiggle it to the side like that, and here’s the whistle chain, seems to work alright but once in a while it falls right out of the ceiling if you tug too hard, and over here’s the lubricating lever, and the fucking—ah shit hold on, fucker’s always jamming up, there we go, that’s the pressure valve for the first boiler. . .”

The engineer was listing off the instruments as he encountered them, darting from one to the next with beady eyes and twitching hands. He went on like this for some time, and then, without interrupting his handiwork, changed tone.

“Well that’s not what this is about, now is it? Man like me will just prattle the fuck on. You know how long it’s been since someone came up here? Used to be all the little boys would come here, sit in that chair and just stare and gawk and smile like they were watching fucking wizardry. But they stopped doing that. Now why is that? Kids these days don’t give two shits how the thing works, just that is goes. I swear this rate they’ll be no engineers left, oh they’ll be engineers alright but no hearty ones, no men, just slick fuckers with degrees thinking they can run a machine with one hand and jerk off with the other. They’ll miss me when I die, no man alive gonna get this heap running again. . .”

A loud clank resounded within the metallic walls, and the engineer leapt to his feet to find one of the pressure wheels on the pipes had been flung across the room, and a white-hot column of steam was whistling out of the aperture.

“Oh fuck.” He grabbed the wheel and jammed it back into its socket, turning and turning it, trying to find the grooves.

“You don’t think it stripped the—there it goes, thank God or whatever. And damn the horse that brought that piece of crap, it’s gonna nail me in the back of the head one of these days.” And he fit the wheel back in place, tightened it to a specific number of degrees, and took his seat again at the control panel. He seemed to have given up on conversation. Ronan just sat in the chair, feeling a subtler hue of the boyish astonishment the engineer described.

“What’s your name?” asked Ronan.

“Luke, not that it matters much to anybody.”

“Luke, what can you tell me about Carter?”

“Carter?” Luke spat on one of his gauges, rubbed off the grease, and peered into its broken secrets. “Remember those slick fuckers I was talking about? Yeah, thinks he can run a locomotive on politics and horse manure. Thinks he can control every damn thing. Brands every action with his own dirty name. You can’t control shit in this world, that’s what I say, and here I am wasting away trying to hold this hunk of scrap together, well that may seem hypocritical to you son but I tell you that’s not control. What I do is love.”

“He wants you dead.”

“Hell, he sure as shit does not. He may think he does. Oh yeah, he might—this fucking thing here, damn it all I need repairs like a whore needs a raise. He just wants to fuck with your head, son. If he had me dead this train would crumble and send us all to the hell we deserve. That fat aristocrat, if I ever get away from this room for five minutes I’ll kick his ass up down and sideways.”

“Luke, when’s the next stop?”

“Coming up fast. We’ll be there in fourteen hours. Some platform in the middle of the tundra. Don’t ask me why we’re stopping there, I don’t lay the fucking track I just ride it.”

“I need to get off there.”

“Well sure you can. Sure thing. I wouldn’t, no chance in hell. But I don’t tell a man his business. A man’s free to die wherever he wants, and that’s about as free as a man gets, what I say. Tell you what, I’ll come on down to the land of the living and knock on your door when we get there. And if that bastard Carter doesn’t want that he can just fuck right off. I’m the one with the master keyring and I keep a gun in these overalls.”

“Thanks Luke.”

Ronan stood and walked to the door. As he slid it shut behind him he heard an explosion from inside. He wrenched the door open again.

Luke was alive and well, patching up a blown-out pipe, wiping the sweat from his brow, cursing anything that may have had a hand in his making.

Ronan walked down the hall, feeling light for the first time in three days. The rumble beneath the floor crept up into his breast, and for a few precious seconds he felt his heart beating in sync with the tempo under his feet.

He returned to his room, and fell asleep waiting for Diana. He slept until what must have been the very early hours of the morning. He awoke in a frenzy, afraid that he had missed his stop, but something in the puzzling clock-face told him he had many hours yet to go. So he sat down in the armchair to read the article, the same one he had always read, for the final time.

It was the story of a woman who, upon the death of her husband of fifteen years—a prison guard who was beaten to death while in the throes of chemical strangeness—descended into a bitter dementia. With no family or friends she had no reason to remember the past or recognize the meaning of the present, and so she felt her seeping forgetfulness as a mercy, the currents of Lethe carrying her onward to a future without bondage, and the world was naked, empty of definitions, before her vacant eyes. She was beautiful, a dancer by heart and by trade, and every day she went out into the streets to wander through the hungry gazes of men. And she would forget where she had spent the night before, and some days she would make it home by the kindness of strangers and other days she would not. And one day when she had been away for two nights she found herself completely purged of memory, standing on a lonely platform waiting for a train, a ticket clasped in one hand. So when the train came and the door swung open and the porter waved her in, she did not resist the forces at work, and she climbed the three tarnished iron stairs and was led to her room. And she lived there, her presence unquestioned, for all the days of her life, until her forgetfulness became so complete as to erase the memory of her in the minds of others, and she lapsed into a quiet limbo and became myth.

Ronan finished and set the newspaper aside. He waited patiently in the armchair for Diana to come to him, so that he might ask her to come with him. After forty ticks counterclockwise, twelve clockwise, seventy counter, eighteen clockwise, nine counter, seven clockwise, and twenty-six counter, Ronan forgot who he was waiting for and why, forgot the origin of the passionate tension in his breast, and forgot what might have been a love forged in the midst of violence and transgression, and he crawled back into bed to sleep off the pain of loss that had gripped him from nowhere.

•     •     •

Old brakes squealed on the track, and a long black train, steaming in the wintry morning, slowed to a crawl as it approached the platform there in the midst of the stark white earth and the cold gray sky. Snow was falling. The soft white cast a spell of silence, and all echoes that engine and steel pistons might spew into the outside world were stifled and lost and became nothing. A single door slid open and Ronan stepped out into the cold without a jacket or gloves or a scarf, to descend from the platform and trudge through the snow. The road was obscured, but over the next hill he saw a few curls of chimney smoke twisting upward, a brighter shade than the gray of the sky.

Behind him the train began to strain and clench against the rails. Then with a mighty lurch the rolling abomination churned down the line, scaring crows off the telephone wires that paralleled the track as it went, shrinking toward a faraway vanishing point somewhere in the scumbled snowy distance.

The digit was bound, ceremoniously, in napkin and plastic. So future science could have a say.

It was then placed, unceremoniously, in the small nook of the freezer. Next to the austere ice tray, and away from the more impressionable inhabitants (that might adopt a dour perspective rooming with severed appendages).

And the matter was shoved to a cold and quiet back of all things.

And so went days.

He. Continued down a path confined to consecrated spaces. To dim lit academic compartments of ego and ambition. Only reading or listening to the words of others that would magnetically attach as his wheelhouse rolled over.

Only opening the door of his cramped office to ghosts and mists. To the fresh faces that came in droves to a baptism of sorts, inexperienced in the dazzle and charms his kind had habited to offer. Or to colleagues that had also chosen to wedge themselves into narrowing caverns. Inventing languages they could speak only to mirrors.

The kind of people that would breathe cool compliments across his face. But not move a hair.

And she marveled at his stubborn course.  As though it reflected some obscure noble soul of things. An endeavor to translate a single lynchpin phrase. A lifetime spent trying to prove the lack of a thing. A bite-sized grand design.

She. Spent her hours in the silver schools around the limitless reflections of sun. Dipping in and out of places. Towing new shiny people. Daily new dresses. Planting gardens and starting non-profits.  Forgetting where she put them. Packing things into each day like suitcases to exact opposite ends.

And he watched her movements as though they were the paint at some distant brush tip. Making shapes he couldn’t find the shapes in. But he marveled still.

Year after year, their concurrent vectors drifted past social landmarks, and they would celebrate in measured gestures.

(She found it difficult, though, to hold a hand with a nub, when she secretly believed that what was now gone, with a little more care, could have still been.)

And when the waters rose they dutifully bailed one another’s vessels. To keep their most cherished cargo dry, and their heads above the flood line.

(He found it difficult, though, to negotiate paddle and pail with insufficient membership for a decent grip.)

And as they floated down this thing, the vistas were sometimes stunning. But the occasional moments became less rare, when the successful navigation of debris-strewn waggles was no longer the assumption. And sinking seemed a possible, if not likely end.

All the while, the finger remained without blemish. Its only flaw detachment.

At times, she would be on the way to peas, and be struck by a glimpse. And she would find herself bathed by melodies of when.

Gently it would curl around a watch wind. Oblivious of eternal deadlines, hearing only its own cadence of time.

Or authoritatively pluck bills from worn shapeless wallet folds. To be thrown carefree at the worlds that round every bend.

And how it held steady the stem of the glass of sanguine wine. Poured by some up and comer paying his dues. Who couldn’t help but paint her with ocular asides. Of lust after. That the lovers stole and rolled through a red spun night.

Or how with a tap it would cap the words at his lips. When the bastards wanted to skip patient and go straight to scar.

But mostly, just how effortlessly. Simply. It would concert with the others. Gently tracing the contours of neck. Ear. Breast. Like all great talents, unassuming but firmly in lead.

And he, on the way to two cubes bourbon. Would remember when his first touch of something new wasn’t numb. Wasn’t muffled by a prosthetic of deaf fibers and turtle shell nerves.

The spaces he designed to cordon himself off, to make predictability the house bet, became the whale that swallowed his whale.

He became a ridiculous crab-like thing. Lugging around massive comfort zones. Rudiments of house strapped to too small a back. An astronaut playing horse for the ship.

And though no one noticed, he knew. The truth of it.  He was no longer a man who could manage the loss of even a finger.

And so, the long winters slipped between their many protective layers. And a glaze settled over every scene.

A stillness enveloped them. Their life together now a parcel to the bottom of some unmapped sea.

Bits of her cracked. Broke off and took up residence in the foreign lands she roamed. They would grow and culture. She would turn down lost avenues and find her laughter baked into the brick street plains. Moments from her childhood would play out in the bloom of some short-lived butterfly parade.

When she would return home. He would hum his same sum. Only, at the loss of an octave. And now every breath punctuated by pause.

And when she was off. He let what he thought was bottom drop out. Would wander about his small confines and collide with things. Would push himself off stairs and cliffs, just to see if the dent would take.

He set about the study of stone. And steel. Their construction and composure. He decided to no longer believe in pores. Until he would feel at core a dumb blunt projectile, aimed at no particular thing.

Yet even in dreams his punches would not land.

And he knew he was not. Unless she saw him do it.

So. When she finally left, she left to collect herself. To gather the harvest she had planted elsewhere. To hear something other than a single note decay. And leaving was not easy, but it also was not hard.

So. When he stayed. He managed a laugh when she packed the finger. And then just watched. The last face for his love. Drift off from some capsuled view.