by Norman Lock
“The performances had been minutely described—by you—in the form of a story—in a book of stories attributed to you—before I ever saw them at the end of this train. You understand me, sir? The enactments follow your account of them.”
I think this strange and unlikely but say nothing.
“You did not, by chance, photograph the performances that you saw?” I ask instead.
“Why, yes.”
He takes from inside his coat a small album bound in morocco leather. He removes his wire-rim glasses, whose lenses are unusually thick, polishes them on a handkerchief, puts them on again, looping the wire parentheses about his ears. He opens the album. I lean over his shoulder the better to see the photographs.
“They’re blurry!” I complain. “I can’t make anything out!”
He is incensed. “I assure you they are not! Or if they are slightly out of focus, it is the fault of the subjects. Everything moved. It was beyond the shutter’s capacity to stop it.”
“This waxwork dummy?” I shout, incredulous. “This poor chained beast? Or this hanged man on a gallows? Surely, he did not move?”
He bangs the album shut; I listen to the volley of his displeasure inside the rocky defile engulfing us. “The whole earth moves,” he says drily, an ear cocked as if to hear it move.
I howl with laughter as the photographer gathers up his belongings and leaves. He goes behind the cairn—to sulk, I imagine. I glare at the typewriter, hating it, feeling in my fingertips a history of pain. The pain of words.
The train begins to move, the deafening roar of its engine drowning all other sounds.
Whether sheep or boulders, it matters not at all. In a geologic age, what might not anything become? The train advances as if nothing at all were there to arrest it. Or what might be, belonged to another time.
5.
We are hurrying through the night. The iron locomotive is cold to the touch, though the boiler blushes with the fury of combustion. The engineer is awake and companionable. He smokes a pipe, which is, in miniature, a firebox ardent with fragrant embers and dreams. Its smoke mimics the immense river of fume endlessly unwinding from out the locomotive’s stack—lost now, where all is blackness, in night’s vast ocean. The stack, too, resembles the gramophone’s tundish; and the rails by day and at night with the locomotive’s beam upon them are like a scar upon the body of the earth. It amuses me to consider the correspondences between the similar and the dissimilar by which the world is constituted and made whole.
“It’s all an illusion, you know,” the engineer says into his pipe, causing a shower of incandescence to erupt from its bowl, the bowl that I have seen him polish on the flanks of his broad nose when he is caught in a dream of who knows what—his other life in the trees, perhaps.
I cast upon him a cunning look of bewilderment; for I do not trust him, though sometimes—let me admit it now!—I love him. What else is there, here, for me to love?
Removing the pipe stem from between his teeth, he goes on: “What you were thinking just now, it isn’t true.”
Suddenly, I know what he says to be the case and feel as the condemned man must, hearing the lever yanked, which releases the trapdoor separating his boots from eternity.
The engineer knocks the dottle from his pipe as he gazes through the window at the night’s reeling sky. Pointing first to the one, then to the other with the stem, he says, “The Southern Cross and, there, the Great Bear—how is it possible,———?” (He said my name.) His voice is shaken by a profound emotion, which may be fear, or wonder, or something else.
I am moved nearly to tears to hear him say my name, so rarely do I hear it said at all. Except, from time to time, in a dream when a young woman in white speaks it from across the room, in a house between a river and an olive grove. It is always, in the dream, night, with not so much as a cricket to interrupt the stillness, or a firefly to lighten it.
He shovels coal into the firebox; the iron door rings once against the shovel’s blade as he roughly closes it. That ghastly sound seems to echo among night’s bastions, whose shadows swallow us all.
“A cold night,” he says, wiping his hand on his striped mechanic’s overalls.
“Do you have a theory of time?” I ask him shyly.
He taps with the toe of his heavy boot the bin in which his calendars accumulate, one year’s followed by the next. “Time is as iron and inexorable as this locomotive,” he says, “and as cold as tonight. Only in the bodies of women do I find consolation for having been born into it.”
“Is that what you find in the trees?” I ask.
In the moonlight streaming though the window, I see the old man blush. Old, though only yesterday, or the day before, he was no older than I am now.
“We will come soon to an immense desert,” he says, gazing sadly at night’s falling dominoes. “It will be a long time until we see trees again.”
“How do you know when there is no map and we’ve never before traveled this way?”
I pretend to be calm so that he may let slip some secret of our journey, which is, for me, aimless and obscure. But he says only that an engineer knows such things, that his instincts reveal what is hidden from sight. He uses the word foretold, which recalls for me the flagman’s theory of time, which I do not understand, though I have thought of it many times over the years.
“You can count them—the calendars …” This, my answer to the question of how many years he has been our train’s engineer, which once I asked him. The terrain was different from this—a plain, green and limitless, marred by clouds’ lumbering shadows. They made me think of buffalo herds slaughtered from a train, which I don’t think was this one, but some other. Some other track. Some other time. “You, who like so much to count provisions, could count the calendars in the bin and know then how long you’ve been here.”
He smiles at my innocence, says, “In the beginning, I had no need of calendars. I was happy to give myself completely to time. So counting them now would be inconclusive.”
“You never went into the trees then?”
“I tell you there was no need! Life aboard was sufficient. There was no need that was not provided for by the company.”
“The company might have had the foresight to include among the rolling stock a car of women—for the coupling of brakemen!” I laugh idiotically. “A rolling brothel.” I continue in a voice tinged with weariness and disgust. “We have everything else.”
“There is such a car; at least from time to time one appears that answers to its description.”
“And you never visited it?”
In spite of myself, I feel my pulse quicken with the voyeur’s wild agitation, as if seeing in the mind’s eye were enough. And perhaps, for one afflicted with imagination, it is enough.
“Once or twice, no more,” he says. “I did not wish to find my pleasure on a manifest among sardine tins, pachyderm, and instruments of torture. It was, as I recall, a performance in which desire was acted out. I left feeling anxious. And appalled.”
“What will you do when the desert comes?” I ask uneasily.
“What I have always done,” he says.
I study his face: It seems to be that of the moon itself—white, luminous, and cruel.
“Kill myself.”
6.
Only once have I seen another train. We arrived together in a narrow valley—our train and some other. The two parallel lines of tracks were forced close together by cliffs on either side of the river, which separated them and the rails. Ours, orange with rust; the other, silver—bright as mirrors in the sun, so that the eyes stared as if stuck open and only by shaking one’s head would they close. I looked at our train’s reflection in the river, hoping to see its end; but the cars pulled behind the locomotive and caboose were without number.
That train was crowded with passengers. For the space of time we traveled together, side by side, with only the narrow river between us, I could see men and women sitting in their seats, reading newspapers and m
agazines or sleeping, or else walking up and down the aisles—even passing between swaying cars on their way to their berths, or to dinner, or to the observation car at the end of the train. Although I waved and shouted, they seemed not to notice us. I was close enough to see their faces, their hands in their laps, or in their knitting, or clasped by other hands. These I took to be the hands of lovers, perhaps couples on their honeymoons. At no time in my life have I known anguish to equal this, when I saw those men and women holding hands. So that is love, I said to myself. And again, I tried unsuccessfully to attract their attention.
“They do not see us—not even from the observation car,” lay the engineer said. “We may be traveling side by side, with only a few meters separating us, but we occupy different times. Or if the same time, we are more aware than they of its qualities and aspects, dimensions and liabilities. It is that awareness and not those lovers that cause you anguish. Consciousness is the full awareness of time.”
“I would rather be on that other train,” I said bitterly.
The engineer said nothing; and in a little while, the mountains fell away behind us, the land broadened, the two tracks veered apart, and I saw neither the train nor its fortunate passengers again.
7.
Just as the engineer foretold, we have come to a desert. There are no trees now where he can take his ease, or practice his subversion, or immerse himself in time’s fullness—or escape from it. In the shimmering distance, I see tents, which appear to soar against the unending sands. The tents are colorful and moored by camels and horses, or so it seems from my remote and moving vantage.
Peering through binoculars, I can see Arab girls dancing at the center of intricate Arabic letters written with silken scarves on the still air. The scarves are rose-colored, pink, orange, blue, and green. At dusk, before night sweeps like a scimitar vanquishing day, the sand will borrow the colors of those numinous scarves; and tiny lights, as if at faraway depots, will mark the place of those mysterious encampments, lost in a vague and noiseless world. A world where time is marked only by the alternation of day and night.
The engineer keeps silent, shut away with his memories perhaps, while the train hurls itself against the desert at an impossible rate of speed, so that the duration of day and night is registered by no more than a flickering light against the never-ending rails ahead of us. Or behind us. Or above us, for sometimes we seem to be riding with the sun or moon under our feet, though it may be only the glimmer of the tracks. It must not be forgotten that we are traveling in the land of mirage.
In spite of our velocity, we spend years crossing the desert.
One day it is finished.
Limitless sand gives way to illimitable snow; gold becomes white by a perversion of alchemy. Flatland becomes tundra; and dune, tumulus as the train enters an ice age. The engineer cannot be wakened. It does not matter that he sleeps, except that I feel very much alone. I keep to the caboose, taking no interest in what can be seen through its windows. In London once, I heard Peary address the British Cartographic Society concerning his arctic expedition. He claimed a terrible beauty for the place, but I see only death in it.
I think I am slowly freezing to death.
I hear a clatter on the roof of the car next to mine—not a clatter, a measured, mincing tread amplified by the metal roof but dulled by cold, dead air. A girl climbs down the caboose’s ladder. I help her inside. She is wearing only slippers and a kind of corset such as I once saw at the Palais du Trocadero. I think she must be on the verge of extinction to be so scantily attired in this frigid place! I wonder she does not shiver, that her lips are not blue and her fingers black with frostbite.
“I’ve left my balancing pole on the roof,” she says. “Will it be all right, do you think?”
“Who are you?” I cry as one will, finally, who has seen quite enough marvels in his lifetime.
“The tightrope walker,” she replies, looking at me with alarm; for I was at that moment tearing at my eyes as if to have them out once and for all.
“Tightrope walker,” I say, adding mine to the echoes of what has come and gone or is still to be.
“From the circus. Why are you acting so strangely? Please stop before you hurt yourself!”
“This is, then, a circus train?” I ask, hoping to have found, at last, the ungainsayable truth.
“Yes. What else?”
“And has it always been so?”
“As far as I know.”
“How far is that?” I ask, searching her face for signs of treachery.
“For as long as I’ve lived,” she says, much annoyed. “My mother and father performed on the high wire. They fell to their deaths from it.”
“But aren’t you cold in that costume!” I shout, confused.
“A little, from the wind on the roof. The train’s going so fast!”
“You walked all the way from the rear of the train?”
I could love this woman, were there time enough. I could take her in my arms and stop time, though her eyes are not yet shadowed by sorrow.
“Yes, it was very exciting!” she said, clapping her hands like a child.
“Over so very many cars?” I say, amazed.
“Oh, there aren’t so many as all that!”
“And what season of the year is it?”
“Summer. July. What is the matter with you?”
“Summer. July. Did the impresario send you?”
“Impresario …if you mean the signore, owner of our little circus—yes. He’s very angry. Why hasn’t the train stopped?”
It has been many years since the train last stopped. Not since the desert—even before that, on a plain in a battle’s aftermath. Men lay in a muddy ditch, or hung on wire in attitudes of submission to history and its follies. The sun was eclipsed by cannon smoke. Unless it was the train’s own smoke spreading like a canopy overhead as it lost its inertia.
“We ought to have stopped two hours ago! The people were lined up on either side of the track, waiting to welcome us. The engineer did not even sound the whistle! The signore was very angry. He sent me over the roofs to see what was wrong.”
“Why didn’t he telegraph me?” I ask, turning to the telegraph key. But it is not there. The typewriter is also gone.
She looks at me as if I were something other than I am, or thought myself to be. A thing apart. She climbs into the locomotive to wake the engineer, who is dead. Or revolving through his fingers a tespyh while he sits before the Cilician Gates, in the Taurus Mountains, where the Euphrates begins its descent.
“You must stop the train!” she shouts, shaking me like one who is asleep.
“Me? I don’t know how!”
The train is hurtling toward destruction, an iconoclasm that will deliver me from all forms and performances, to a forgotten siding where I may rest and dream unmolested a theory of time. I stare, entranced—not afraid in the least that there are neither rails nor ties beneath me.
“But you are the brakeman!” she screams. But already she is fading, like a photograph improperly fixed to resist the seduction of obscurity. It is a great burden to be in time and to know that one is, just as it must be for those giddy ones, who feel always the earth’s turning beneath their feet.
Where my thumb was, I feel an itching prelude to growth. My hand is remembering. Soon I will remember myself as brakeman and, perhaps, even as once I was, before I unfolded like a paper flower into time—a young man not on a train and, perhaps, happy.
The Gaiety of Henry James
Dzim trou-la-la boum boum!
1.
Inspiration deserts him, deserts Henry James, by now well along in age, after so many novels, having lingered so long a time in the chaste arms of his muse, the chaste arms of a muse of marble, classically proportioned and cool to the touch. He has been seized by desire and, in his confusion, does not know where to turn to put an end to his suffering. Henry James stops writing. He closes the door to his writing room and, pulling on his gloves, goe
s out into the street, where he bumps—by a stroke of luck—into Florenz Ziegfeld, who is about to introduce the Follies to New York.
“Ziggy, I’m unhappy.”
“I’m hungry!” the impresario answers.
2.
Henry and Ziggy ride the trolley to the Blue Ox. Ziggy wants wurst and sauerkraut. He wants, he tells Henry, to sit in a place that smells like Germany. A young woman walks down the aisle, her left arm lifted so that its hand may take hold, one by one, of the swinging leather straps. Her hips sway beguilingly as the car clicks down the rails, listing left and right, right and left. Henry cannot take his eyes from the girl’s white cambric shirtwaist. He traces the curve of her breast with the end of his nose, while Ziggy talks about his latest discovery, a girl from Dubuque “with calves as perfect as if they’d been turned on a lathe.” Henry says nothing, his heart in turmoil.
3.
“She comes to me at night,” says Henry. “She whispers to me of la belle époque. She shows me drawings by Franz von Bayros and sings Mayol’s song: ‘Les mains de femme / Je le proclame Sont des bijoux Dont je suis fou.’ She reads to me from Story of O.”
“Who does?”
“A succubus.”
Ziggy considers the end of his cigar. “From time to time, I, too, enjoy the attentions of a succubus,” he says. “But they cannot compare with those paid by a woman of flesh and blood.” He plunges his cigar’s burning end into cold sauerkraut, where it hisses. (Like a fury, Henry thinks.) “Her name is Esmeralda.”
“Mine looks like Edith Wharton,” Henry says. “Au naturel.”
A barely perceptible shudder passes through Ziggy—less than a shudder: a twitch of an eyelid. He makes a pile of dollar bills on the table, pats his mustache, and pushes back his chair. “I have an audition at two. A girl from Canton.”
“China?”
“Ohio. Would you care to come?”
But Henry fears the mere sight of a girl in her shift may unhinge him entirely, sending him out onto Broadway, a lunatic in advance of a tightly laced “camisole.” (Who knows the power of suggestion on a man who has dreamed of Edith Wharton naked!)