Reaction

by Seth M. Baker

  “Well, valedictorian, we need to figure out which line goes to Colorado. Easy enough, right? Maybe San Francisco via Denver, something like that. Denver won’t be the final destination.”

  “What are there, like four lines going west? Let’s ask somebody.” Amadeus took off across the room, past a coffee shop where men in suits worked on their computers. A man in a uniform was emptying a trash can. When Amadeus saw the uniform he started to turn around and walk away, but he forced himself forward, reminding himself the only people in uniform he should worry about were police, not janitors. “Excuse me, do you know which train goes to Denver?” Amadeus asked him. The janitor looked up from the trash can.

  “Do I look like a ticket machine?” he said, not removing the headphones from his ears. He pointed to a cluster of machines. “Over there, over there.”

  At the ticket machines, Amadeus said: “you see any cameras on those things?”

  “Not on the machines, but they’re everywhere else. But it doesn’t matter, right? The fuzzers should make us invisible to the image recognition and iris scanners right?”

  “I guess they should, but even if they don’t, the million other people here are pretty good cover.”

  Using the money from the sale of the bike, Amadeus keyed in instructions on the touch-screen terminal to purchase two seats in a sleeper car on the next train, departing in twenty minutes, estimated time to Denver, twelve hours, with stops in St. Louis and Kansas City. Tickets in hand, Amadeus went to an internet terminal and searched for news on the Brunmeier murder. Nothing new, only that police were still searching for the suspects. The police spokeswoman had said they believed they were headed to Mexico on a stolen motorcycle and that the FBI was now involved in the search. Amadeus felt relief, but only a little, and in the open of the station, he also felt exposed and vulnerable. As people passed him by, Amadeus thought their eyes lingered on him just a moment too long, as if they knew him, his face, his crimes, and were scrutinizing, judging, and remembering his every move. Near the gates, a security guard spoke into a radio, looking directly at Amadeus as he did. Amadeus tore off a bit of the ticket, popped it in his mouth, and started chewing on it, as if the chewing could relieve the constrictions in his chest.

  “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s only a few more minutes.”

  “You don’t understand. They’re all staring at me. I’m freaking out. Look at my hand.” Amadeus held up his hand. It shook like a frightened sparrow. “They know, man, they know.”

  “Amadeus, calm down. Relax.”

  A buzzer went off. Amadeus hopped out of his seat and ran towards the bathrooms, bumping into people in his haste. Some of them cried out words like “hey” or “careful.”Amadeus wasn’t careful, though, and it didn’t matter, because he needed to hide so he could breathe again. In the bathroom, he locked himself in a stall, sat on the toilet, and gasped for breath. From the toilet paper roll, he pulled several sheets and tore them into little strips, balled them up in between his fingers. Some he let fall to the floor, some he put in his mouth. When his head had begun to spin from all the oxygen, a familiar voice spoke to him from the stall next to his.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re going to get on that train, and we’re going to go to Denver, and there everything will be fine,” Grassal said, his voice resonating in the tile of the bathroom.

  “It’s not okay. It’s not fine. I can’t do anything about what happened.”

  “It’s not your fault, Amadeus, it’s not. You didn’t bring this on us any more than a rain man brings rain, okay? Just come on out, we’re going to go to Denver and everything will be okay.”

  “Get a room you two,” a man’s voice said from nearby. Amadeus hated his voice. He wanted to bash its owner’s head against some porcelain like Davy had done to him.

  “Do you know what it feels like to have a knife stuck into your scrotum?” Amadeus said. A gasp, then hurried footsteps shuffling out the door. Grassal brayed with laughter.

  “Jesus, where did that come from?” Grassal said. “You should’ve heard yourself. You sound like a mad man.”

  “Maybe I am,” Amadeus said.

  They left the bathroom and found their train rumbling at platform seven. The platform stretched ahead almost five hundred meters. At the end, the station opened up into the grey of the city. Amadeus looked up and down the train, a long, sleek metal and steel contraption. They stood in line and, with some help from a disinterested porter, found their plastic-walled cabin. When Amadeus sat down he felt he was sinking, becoming one with the comfortable faux-leather chair. For the first time since the night everything started, the tension in his shoulders eased. He didn’t have to drive, run, or hide; he could just sink into the seat and enjoy the ride. He hoped their cabin remained empty. As he closed his eyes, the train began its smooth crawl forward, rolling out of Indianapolis and onto the prairie, leaving the east behind.

  8

  Amadeus awoke to see two girls sleeping in the seat across from him. They wore white dresses. One had her head on the other’s shoulder. Grassal slept with his head against the window, his mouth hanging open. Out the window, the dark landscape stretched for miles, a great black void. Time passed, and though he was tired, sleep eluded him. He got up and walked down the dim train, past the sleeping compartments full of sleeping passengers, and down the hall to the dining car. The lights were a little brighter, but still dark enough to allow a good view of the night sky through the windows. He grabbed a paper from the rack, bought a cup of tea from the vending machine, and took a seat facing the window. He sipped the lukewarm tea and tried to read but couldn’t focus.

  The first night, he thought, life divided into the time before and the time after. Every round of thought made his muscles tense a little, and after a few minutes of this his muscles felt like coiled pressed springs. He put his head in his hands, thought he might cry. Then he felt a shift around him, a presence in the room. “What is it?” he said. When he looked up, a taut man sat in the chair beside him. He had close-cut grey hair and deep age lines on his face, lines that could’ve been cut with a scalpel. His shoulders were broad, his eyes brown and energetic. “What do you want?”

  The man smiled, flashed a mouth full of white teeth. “You look like a troubled boy,” he said. He held an imported beer in his hand. “I thought you could use some company. “My name is Claudius, but people call me Gravity.” Gravity stuck out his thick hand. Amadeus shook it without enthusiasm. Gravity’s hand was smooth, dry, and warm, a rock worn and warmed by the desert sun, his face the shade of mahogany.

  “Charlie Mankowski,” Amadeus said. Gravity smiled a little at this. “Why do people call you Gravity?”

  “Because I keep things down-to-earth. Sometimes, Charlie Mankowski,” Gravity said after a deep breath, “things don’t make sense. It’s like the world tilts on its axis and begins to shake, and everything turns upside down. You’ve got to fight just to hang on, to keep from falling away.” Gravity patted the table for emphasis. “You either learn to hang on…or you don’t. I’ve seen men survive against unimaginable odds, and I’ve seen ones that had it much easier fall away. You know what the difference is? The ones who fall away, they give up just a little too early.”

  Amadeus looked at him, wondered if he was drunk or insane. He didn’t seem drunk. In fact, something about him, or maybe his speech, seemed familiar. “So they fall away because they gave up. And why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you look like a man who’s about to fall away.” His voice was slow, deliberate, but he seemed on the edge of chuckling. “The nature of your troubles I don’t pretend to know. But I promise you other people have survived worse.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  The man wished Amadeus luck, took one last drink of his beer, and left as quietly as he arrived, melting into the darkness of the sleeping train. Except for a young couple at the end, following the train’s route on a dimmed flexscree
n, Amadeus was alone in the dining car. He gazed out at a city that reminded him of chemical crystals growing on a rock, the way the buildings just rose out of the dark, jagged and almost random while still adhering to some predetermined, underlying structure. Spotlights darted across the cloudy night sky.

  A man dressed in porter garb, vest and hat, passed through the lounge pushing a little cart. As he rolled through, he stared at Amadeus through narrow eyes. Amadeus felt his face flush. He looked at the floor. The porter rolled on by, but out of the corner of his eye Amadeus could see his head turning as he walked by. The porter left the car, and Amadeus decided it was time that he, too, return to his car and try for sleep.

  When Amadeus opened the door to his compartment, he was greeted by three simultaneous, hushed “hellos.” Grassal sat between the two girls, now awake and smiling. They had set up the table between the seats and were playing cards. A green bottle of liquor sat on the table. Amadeus greeted the girls and plopped onto the seat across from them.

  “Girls, this is Amadeus, my best friend. He’s the one I told you was going to work for Stanford, just after we visit his uncle in Colorado,” Grassal said. Amadeus scowled at Grassal. He thought he should shout him down for using their real names, for making friends when they should be keeping their heads down. Amadeus nodded to the girls.

  “Hello, Amadeus. I’m Zella.” She had a thin face with high cheekbones and violet eyes.

  “And I’m Lucretia,” the other girl said. Lucretia had the same cheekbones but she wore tinted glasses and dreadlocks. “We’re on our way to San Francisco to sing at Mephisto.” Amadeus asked about Mephisto.

  “Just the nicest hashish bar in the city,” Zella said. “You’re a cute one, even if you look like a boy who just lost his puppy. Amadeus, my new friend, have a drink, see if that don’t warm you.”

  “It’s absinthe,” Lucretia said, holding up the green bottle. Amadeus looked from the bottle to Grassal and back. Grassal inclined his head slightly, as if giving Amadeus permission to drink.

  “Um.”

  “It’s okay, it won’t turn you into a green monster, unless you’re freakishly jealous,” Zella said. Amadeus shrugged and took a drink from the bottle. The drink burned from his throat to his stomach, as if he had swallowed a mouthful of boiling water. The aftertaste reminded him of the smell of rubbing alcohol. He coughed. The girls both smiled. Amadeus returned the smile but he knew it looked forced.

  “You boys like to play cards? Rummy?” Lucretia asked. Amadeus and Grassal nodded. She pulled a beat-up pack from her purse and started dealing. After four rounds, Zella was in first, Amadeus second, Grassal last. The bottle was half empty. Amadeus, feeling warm and almost happy, accidentally burped.

  “So rude,” Zella said, “doing filthy things like that in the company of ladies. That’s fine when you’re with your buddy here.”

  “Sorry,” Amadeus said, looking ashamed. Zella grinned.

  “You’re so easy to pick on,” Zella said. “You just roll over and take it. Do you always do what people tell you?”

  “Not always.”

  “Let’s find out. Kiss me, young Amadeus,” Zella said.

  “Um,” Amadeus said. He looked at her, then across at Grassal and Lucretia. They were waiting, watching. Amadeus shrugged and kissed her. She put her hand on his cheek and leaned against him, her soft lips tasting like licorice and alcohol, all heat but no burn. Amadeus heard a catcall from Grassal. His face was red but he didn’t care. They stopped kissing and pressed their foreheads together.

  “Mmm, that was nice,” Zella said.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “You haven’t kissed many girls.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I had to tell you to kiss me. Either you’re really dim or woefully inexperienced. I’m going to guess the latter. The college boy who learned about everything but girls.”

  “A toast, then,” Lucretia said, filling their shot glasses. “To the end of innocence.”

  “To the end of innocence,” Amadeus said. “My innocence ended a long time ago.” Grassal raised one eyebrow. Amadeus pointed his finger at Grassal. “You know what I mean.” They played a few more rounds of cards, laughing and drinking as the flat dark land rolled by. Between hands, Amadeus leaned on Zella, eventually falling asleep on her shoulder.

  9

  He woke with a start, his head on a strange girl’s shoulder. As he remembered her name and what had happened last night, he became aware of a throbbing headache. He massaged his temples and gazed at the approaching city. Unlike the others, with their uniform burnt sienna glow, this city was awash in a rainbow of colors, neon, argon, krypton, each shade promising a different variety of excitement and fortune to anyone who entered. The train slowed, waking Grassal.

  “Where are we?” Amadeus said. “St. Louis? Kansas City? What time is it?”

  “Late in the night, early in the morning,” Grassal said. “It’s got to be Kansas City. We’ve been on this train for what, four hours? Five? I have no idea. If a train leaves Indianapolis at seven p.m. and travels west at…”

  “Grassal, buddy, stop. It’s too early for math problems. Or is it still late? My brain is melting.”

  The train pulled into the station, brakes hissing and whooshing as it came to a stop. A reflective green sign read “Kansas City, City of Fountains.” Like the new Indianapolis station, this one was all glass and steel, but unlike that station, this one sprawled across the plain, taking advantage of the great horizontal spaces. On the platform flanking their train, families waited on loved ones, businesspeople waited on regional trains, and young people on holiday sat on backpacks. A crowd of people bottlenecked around a door from the waiting area, trying to reach the arriving train. The crowd writhed, tensed, then scurried apart, making way for six police officers.

  Dressed in body armor, holding assault weapons at the ready, the officers looked like a paramilitary attack squad intent on overthrowing a foreign government. Two of them wrangled German shepherds through the fearful crowd. The dogs strained against their leashes, slobbering and barking, strangling themselves with enthusiasm. Their handlers gave them no slack.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Amadeus said. The sickness in his stomach grew worse, and he thought he might vomit on Zella. He struggled to keep it down. Grassal threw the blanket off and stood up.

  “That’s a hell of a welcoming committee.”

  “Think they’re here for us?” Amadeus asked. Grassal rolled his eyes.

  “How many wanted men you think are on this train? Apply Occam’s razor to this situation.”

  “Um.”

  “Occam’s razor tells me they’re here to haul us off to some Midwestern prison for a party with Bubba.” As he spoke he squinted against the lights of the station.

  “It’s brutal early to be talking about a prison rape, isn’t it?” Zella said, rubbing her eyes.

  “This isn’t the kind of party you want to go to. Ladies, it’s been fun, but we have to leave now,” Grassal said. “Amadeus, you think we can slip away from them?”

  “Don’t have much choice, do we?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to leave. We’re not in Denver yet. Besides, we were just getting to know each other.” She spoke with a voice still raspy from sleep and recycled air. “But if you really got to go, then look us up in San Francisco. We’ll be performing under the name The Interstellar Sisters.”

  “Easy to remember, cause you ladies are out of this world,” Grassal said.

  “That’s awful,” Lucretia said. “So obvious.”

  “At least he tries,” Zella said.

  Amadeus stood, then staggered and stumbled. He felt like someone had pummeled his neck and back with a mace. Grassal started out the door. Amadeus followed. They stepped out into the hallway, peered up and down the hallway, and ducked back inside the compartment.

  “Shit,” Amadeus said, pulling Grassal back in.

  “Back so soon? I was just
starting to miss you,” Zella said. “You two seem too innocent to be running from the cops. What’s this all about?”

  “Later,” Amadeus said. “What do we do? They’re at the exits.”

  “No place to hide, not on the train,” Grassal said.

  “We could climb out through the windows.” Amadeus said, then remembered how many cameras he had seen at the last train station. “No, that won’t work. Hide in the bathroom?”

  “They always check the bathrooms first,” Zella said.

  “We could just make a run for it,” Amadeus said.

  “You guys are obviously not criminals. I’ve known a few in my time.”

  “No we’re not, but the police think we are. It’s a long, sad story,” Amadeus said.

  “Aren’t they all,” Lucretia said.

  “Come on, Grassal, think, man, think,” Amadeus said.

  Lucretia went into the hallway and reported back. “They’re in the next car checking IDs.”

  “The overhead beds!” Zella said. “You guys lay in them. We’ll fold them up and let you out after they pass. It’ll be tight but you can fit. Then we distract the police. Lucretia, take your shirt off.” Zella motioned for Grassal and Amadeus to climb onto the upper beds. Zella closed the curtain over the door. Grassal and Amadeus looked at each other, shrugged, and climbed onto the upper beds.

  “What?” Lucretia said. Grassal raised one eyebrow, smiling as he leaned over the bed. Amadeus, already on the upper bed, blushed. Zella stripped her shirt off. Lucretia pulled her shirt off as well. They wore matching black bras covered in red orchids.

  “A distraction. We act like we’re still sleeping. Help me with this big fucker first,” Zella said. They stood on the lower seat and, with both hands, strained to push Grassal’s bunk up. They pushed until the latch snapped. From inside the bunk, some muffled words from Grassal. “He’s a heavy one.”

  “Too many cheeseburgers,” Lucretia said. “Now for the little one.”