by Mark Helprin
“Are we Buddhists now?” she asked.
TRAMPS
FREDDY HAD SEEN goods trains rumbling across bridges over the Potomac. “Americans leap upon them and travel west,” he told Fredericka. “What’s his name, the comedian who married his mother, or his daughter—or was it his sister?—Woody something, sings songs about it. They have so many goods trains because they have so many goods.”
His heart had fastened upon the idea of leaping onto a train to ride into the mountains. It was as if he knew already the nature and character of the railway sidings, the colour of the walnut trees, and the feel of heat from the rock that covered the stony ridges over tunnels that pierced the hills, that then spread out to the open plains. And it was as if he knew what he was going to encounter there, and that it was good—or at least Hemingwayesque.
They went to a train yard, where Freddy taught Fredericka to vault into a goods wagon, to climb the ladder at the corner, and to run along the catwalks, leaping over gaps and couplings. Fredericka was unaccustomed to this, but as the athletic descendant of fifty generations of stag hunters, she learned quickly. So trained, they retrieved their packs from the Salvation Army and went to lunch at a restaurant on Capitol Hill. They ate unsparingly, convinced that they would have to rely for a long time on the stores they carried, from which they assumed they would have to draw lightly. The restaurant was expensive, but they had earned this money and were confident that they could earn more.
After brushing their teeth in the fountain grotto near the Capitol, they made their way to a sunken rail siding near the Potomac. A train came through at about three. The light above the engine was yellow like the sun, and formations of wavy air rose behind it like a waterfall recoiling backward. The thundering goods wagons, which Freddy had learned at his job to call freight cars, or boxcars, were almost all empty, each an essay in colours—pumpkin-orange, green, yellow on black, maroon, teal, and blue—and in names of far places like Santa Fe and the Pacific, and of some that were close, such as Norfolk, Richmond, and the Chesapeake.
Four engines and fifty cars had passed, and the train was still coming without an end in sight when Freddy asked, like a coxswain on the Isis, “Are you ready?” He knew Fredericka appreciated the query, as she had rowed, and he frequently said it to her. She had a knot in her stomach, never having jumped onto a moving freight train—which is as much like one that is still as a picture of a lightning bolt is like the lightning bolt itself—but she lowered her head and concentrated upon the thing to be conquered, in a demure but absolutely determined way that caused Freddy to delay their spring, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She seemed so vulnerable and yet so strong and admirable. He felt something deep within him at the sight of her and her expression at this moment, although he did not know what it was.
“Now,” Freddy commanded. They ran for an open door in a clean steel-red car that said Union Pacific. Freddy placed his palms on the wooden floor and pushed himself up so vigorously that he almost rolled out the opening on the other side. Fredericka was still running. She hadn’t the arm strength to vault in as Freddy had, so he held the doorpost with his right hand and reached toward her with his left.
“Wrist to wrist,” he ordered. Even as she ran along the stones, she smoothly extended her left arm toward his. He grasped her wrist in his hand, closing about it completely. She grasped his, getting a grip, though not circling it. And then, in synchrony with the rhythm of her steps and her breathing, Freddy bent down, she leapt, and he stood and stepped back, pulling her in.
“That was wonderful,” she said.
Leaning against their packs, they sat on the clean oak floor of the goods wagon, the blood rushing through them after their sprints and vaults, and they were taken up in the booming of steel on steel as the bridge that spanned the Potomac rumbled below them. The water was a colour somewhere between saddle-brown, café au lait, and gunmetal blue. The sky was what Royal Delft was made of, and all the monuments that they were leaving were as white as the whitest ruins of antiquity.
THEY ROLLED PAST the Pentagon and clusters of cheaply built little skyscrapers until, soon after they had recovered their pulse, they began to see forest and field dovetailing with airports and shopping malls. And then even the rapidly balding outskirts were left behind as the train wound through real woods, over fields blond with sun-bleached grass, and past springs, cabins, and hills. The sound of the train moving through the Virginia countryside was like a song.
“Keep an eye out for the live ash circle,” Freddy told Fredericka.
“You look on that side, and I’ll look on this one,” she said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know, but it must be a circle, it must either be made of ash or be ashen in colour, and perhaps it moves or undulates in some way, as if it were alive.”
Fredericka looked intently for five minutes, with the expression of someone in the Underground waiting for a train to take her to an appointment for which she was already late. “Why didn’t Mr Neil tell us what it was?”
“Because he’s a lunatic, and when a lunatic sends you out to look for something, he doesn’t always tell you what it is.”
At four o’clock, with the sun still hot and high, the train swung left to the south-west and picked up speed. Now they were rushing through glades of rhododendron and forsythia, then forests of pine, and half the time they broke out onto fields the size of prairies that nonetheless were fenced for horses or cows or farmed for hay and grain. Rivers ran between the green foothills, and to the west the Blue Ridge rose abruptly in a very long line that never faltered no matter how many hours passed, its pale blue like that of the mist on the Thames on a clear morning in June.
The land was beautiful, and other than when the smell of diesel smoke came in through the open doors, one could not escape the fragrant air of newly mown hay and of flowers growing in the shade of the woods. Now completely disconnected from their former life and alone in a broad and colourful landscape, Freddy and Fredericka sat together shoulder to shoulder. To his surprise, he embraced her. It was not merely that her statuesque form, which he held close, was speaking to him sexually, as almost always it did, but that he thought she was beautiful, though not because she was but rather because of something else. Despite his many doubts about her, and the way she irritated him so often and sometimes drove him mad, despite their troubles and their history, to be with her now, on a freight train, riding free en plein air, was just what he wanted, and he wanted nothing more. She looked up at him, doubting herself, doubting him, having always been rejected, and then she looked down sadly. Her expression was as hopeless as that of a prisoner, a refugee, or a child in a cruel orphanage.
This moved him deeply. “Fredericka,” he said. And then he touched her face, and kissed her.
THEY WERE AWAKENED by silence. Outside, a congress of gnats was riding on the remnants of the afternoon’s heated air. The train had been stopped at a siding for an hour or two. They heard birds, and an unfamiliar, whirring noise. To the right was a white wall that completely filled the door of the goods wagon. They looked out and saw that across a ditch and a fence was an enormous building a hundred feet high and perhaps a quarter of a mile long on the side they could see. Written on the wall that faced them, in immense blue letters, was Gemeischen Pipsfindert Haubrecht Gesellschaft Virginia Abflangen Ochsteif.
“I thought we won the war,” Fredericka said.
“We did. Just because there’s a big building in front of us on which is written Gemeischen Pipsfindert Haubrecht Gesellschaft Virginia Abflangen Ochsteif doesn’t mean we didn’t win the war. After we finished with it, there was nothing left of Berlin.”
“There is now.”
Freddy leaned slightly outward and looked up the track. Twenty or thirty wagons away, a uniformed guard was being pulled toward them by a dog on a lead. “Let’s get to the factory side,” Freddy said. With packs in hand they jumped from the train. On the other side, the guard dog began to bark. Leaping th
e ditch and pushing through honeysuckle and brambles, they found themselves up against a waist-high wire fence. Fredericka asked if they had to go over it. “No,” the more experienced Freddy answered. “It’s held up by these splintered posts. That means that the wood in contact with the ground has been there long enough to rot. A fence like this is like our last government: it stands merely out of habit. Look.” He walked to a post, grasped the top in both hands, and put his weight forward. It broke at the ground and the fence leaned over, compressing the brambles on its other side, which they then crossed with ease.
Now they were on the grounds of the factory, where people were coming out and getting into their cars. A little traffic jam formed as these people headed home for dinner. “What shall we do?” Fredericka asked. Freddy led her to the main entrance, where a line of people was waiting to enter. There they stood as if they knew why. A woman who had come up behind them asked, “Y’all here for a job?” and then they did know why.
“Indeed,” Freddy told her. “We always wanted to work at Gemeischen Pipsfindert Haubrecht Gesellschaft Virginia Abflangen Ochsteif.”
“You’ll probably get the job,” she said, “if you can say that. No one else can.”
“Freddy,” Fredericka whispered, “we don’t want to work here, do we? We’ve just started out, and it was so lovely a train.”
“I want to see what’s inside.”
The lobby was ultra-modern and full of potted trees. The royals looked impressive and self-possessed, and the instant the interviewer stepped into the cubicle in which they had been seated he wanted to hire them, but he had to follow procedure. A friendly man with a hippotine face, he shook hands with them, bade them sit down, and said, “I’ll get to your applications in a moment, but first tell me why you want to work at Gemeischen Pipsfindert Haubrecht Gesellschaft Virginia Abflangen Ochsteif, or, as we say, GPHGVAO,” which he pronounced Gippy Hog Vow.
“As you will see on my application,” Freddy said gravely, not having even seen an application, “I’m an electrical engineer. My wife, too, is an electrical engineer.”
“I thought we were dentists,” Fredericka protested.
“No, Popeel, we’re electrical engineers.”
“Oh,” she said, as if she didn’t really know what an electrical engineer was, which she didn’t.
“If your wife is an electrical engineer,” the interviewer asked, “why did she think she was a dentist? And why did she think you were a dentist?”
“We used to be dentists,” Fredericka said.
“The positions we advertised have nothing to do with either dentistry or electrical engineering.”
“We’ll change professions,” said Fredericka. “We’ve done it before. We’re very flexible.”
Freddy took up the challenge as well. “We’re extremely interested in what you do here—in boosting productivity, rationalising systems and sub-systems, strengthening morale, and increasing the synergistic networking potentiality of employee clusters and nodes of action. It’s an exciting time.”
“It is, but these are entry-level jobs for which you seem vastly overqualified.”
“Ah,” said Freddy, like his father about to throw a logical dart at something Freddy had said without thinking. “That’s just the point. Love of an operation starts at the bottom, with the fundamentals. You know, face in the dirt, eating stones, chewing rocks. We need a comprehensive view. What about a summary tour?”
“I suppose if you’ve got half an hour I can give you a tour. I don’t know if I can hire you, though.”
“We’re very grateful,” Freddy said.
“There is electrical equipment that you’ll find fascinating, and if the second shift is in, perhaps you can glance at their teeth.”
“Good idea,” Freddy told him, “although, without bite-wings, I can’t speak with authority. No one can.”
“What makes you so interested in fulfilment?” the interviewer asked as they walked down a corridor.
“The very name,” Freddy answered, “is perfectly expressive. Every man, and every woman, wants fulfilment. Don’t you, Popeel?”
Fredericka blushed, and said, “Oh, Freddy.”
“Oh, who?”
“I mean, ‘Oh, Moofoomooach.’ No, I mean, ‘Oh, Desi.’ ”
“What are your names?” the executive asked, having stopped before a huge set of double doors.
“Popeel and Desi Moofoomooach,” Fredericka said, holding out her hand to be kissed.
“Popeel and Desi Moffat,” Freddy corrected.
“That’s right,” said Fredericka.
“Which is it, Moffat or Moofoomooach?”
“Moffat is the short form of Moofoomooach,” Freddy offered.
“And what kind of name is Moofoomooach?”
“I don’t know,” said Freddy, “but there are lots of Moofoomooachs where I come from. The telephone registers are stuffed with them. I went to university with a bunch of Moofoomooachs, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Come to think of it, they were a bunch of Moofoomooachs.”
When the doors opened, Freddy and Fredericka found themselves looking down a corridor a quarter of a mile in extent and a hundred feet high beneath a ceiling covered in dim golden lights. The place was almost dark, but saved by golden lamps as if on some malicious winter afternoon the dying sun had peeked beneath a lid of black cloud and briefly gilded the world.
Now and then a little cart with a flashing light upon its roof would appear, darting into the corridor from one of the many aisles that branched out from it, and then darting away into one of the others, like a fish penetrating the refuges and crevices of a reef. In each row, platforms that moved on tracks could swiftly take an operator a hundred feet up and five hundred feet along the line, or in any combination on the fifty-thousand-square-foot grid. Each platform had a fork-lift system that could reach into the many levels of shelves and retrieve pallets or cartons.
“What’s in the boxes?” Freddy asked.
“Books, of course. We have fifty million books in this building, and it’s possible to get a box of ten or twenty of any one of them in less than twenty seconds.”
Freddy was sceptical. That was a great many more books than were in the British Museum. How could so many be in this building in the middle of the Virginia countryside, surrounded by horse and cattle farms, rotting fences, red earth, and honeysuckle?
“In this one building, Mr Moofoomooach, there are five times as many books as in the Library of Congress, but we have only sixty thousand titles. In some sections, we have more than a million copies of a single title.”
“The Bible,” Freddy said. “The Oxford Shakespeare.”
“No. We don’t have that many of those, but we do have a million two hundred thousand copies of Melinda Harridan’s Makeup and Self-Esteem.”
“I read that!” Fredericka said, her enthusiastic declaration rising in the vastness like a tiny spacecraft shot beyond the solar system. “It was wonderful.”
“We’re drawn down now, but recently we had eight million copies of Wesley Joshua’s Nantucket Orgasm. The next one should be coming soon—he does about three a year; books, that is—and the trucks will be pulling in night and day. Then we’ve got the first lady’s book about the president’s pet snail.”
“I remember him,” Freddy said. “But I don’t remember his name.”
“Sidney. He passed away quietly.”
“No he didn’t,” Freddy said. “I was there. I met him. That was no accident. Dixie Self, the president’s daughter, wanted to take him on a campaign trip, but Evita would hear of no such thing so she flushed him down the loo. It was murder.”
The Gippy Hog Vow executive continued, not sure of what Freddy had meant. “The other part of the facility is for grouping returns. There we keep books on shelves individually. As they come in we pack them in cartons of ten, but sometimes we have to wait for the right number. So, if we cover a hundred and twenty thousand titles for what we are currentl
y shipping and what we shipped within the return limit period, we might have, in theory, up to a million and eighty thousand individual copies waiting to be boxed. But the actuaries looked at our records and told us we need never have more than the space required to shelve a few hundred thousand individual volumes. That’s not exclusively because of probability, but be-cause of the groupings. If you get a hundred thousand returns of one book, the maximum number of loose copies is nine, but the average number will be five. You see?”
“Yes,” said Freddy. “Take me to the Melinda Harridan section, if you will, and then to the Shakespeare section.”
“This way.”
As they walked they looked up at the many rows of shelves disappearing toward the golden ceiling. Each little box of ten books had the author’s name stencilled upon it. It was like being in an Italian cemetery, in the narrow marble alleys with the little garage doors behind which bones were stacked, like books, in hope of eternity.
“Here’s the Harridan aisle.” A hundred thousand brown boxes with Harridan stencilled on them were stacked to the ceiling. They stretched to the ends of the aisle in both directions, their mass overwhelming. “That’s thirty million dollars, retail,” the executive said, “for a penny’s worth of bad advice. A lot of money. You’d think that with between a hundred and fifty and two hundred fifty million dollars’ worth of inventory in this building at any one time we’d have remarkable security. We don’t. We have a ten-redundancy fire system and a watchman. Masses of books are very hard to steal. By the time anyone broke in and started to move even a few hundred dollars’ worth, the entire Virginia State Police would be here.”