by Peter Besson
But on occasion, when the trains ran at night, or budget concerns flared up, or nothing else was on hand, open containers were used. Whatever the reason this time, the train that clattered down the tracks was almost exclusively open railcars, stacked high with bodies, a jumble of arms and legs and milky eyes, shimmying with the rhythm of the rails.
The body on top belonged to Ansel. Eyes closed, he shook along with the rest of his fellow travelers, back and forth, back and forth, clickety-clack, clickety-clack—
Ansel’s eyes opened.
Clickety-clack.
They stayed open. He stared up at the sky, the brightening day throwing a blanket of blue over the dark of night.
Clickety-clack.
Ansel blinked.
He was alive. Staring uncomprehendingly into the air. He blinked again, but the world wouldn’t go away.
He was alive!
He lifted his head to take stock of his surroundings. Then he saw all the bodies around him, the ones he was lying on top of. The whole railroad car was nothing but corpses. Ansel wasn’t sure if he was having a nightmare or if he’d just woken up in hell. Or, as he turned and looked back to see where this car full of death was heading, and he saw the thick columns of black smoke rising from the massive chimneys on the horizon, if he hadn’t quite gotten to hell yet but was certainly on his way.
Ansel stared at his own body. It was caked in blood and filth. He did a quick check. Wasn’t his blood. Maybe his filth. He wore nothing but a pair of underwear. Not his either. Looked like government-issue regulation coverings. All the bodies had them, which made it all the more horrifying. Someone had taken the care to dress the corpses, to make them appear more decent, then simply dumped them into this large container.
Ansel retched.
Too much death. Too much stench.
He clambered over the bodies, first placing his hands and feet carefully, avoiding the most sensitive parts of the human body, dead or not, but there was nothing but dead flesh—dead eyes, dead mouths, dead groins, no matter how much he tried to avoid them—so in the end he scrambled across the dead matter like a swimmer about to drown, flailing, groping, stomping, until he reached the side of the container, threw his arms over it and heaved himself up.
The train was clipping along at a good pace across a sparse landscape. There was the occasional clump of brush, a sad tree here or there, but otherwise wide open, empty space, a wash of reddish-brown dust-choked wilderness.
The dry wind, combined with the speed of the train, drove tears into Ansel’s eyes. He rubbed them, but only managed to smear his vision with dried blood and muck, and so he almost missed the lone figure standing by the tracks, a car parked nearby. Ansel squinted, then wiped furiously at his eyes again.
Impossible.
It couldn’t be.
Yet it was.
Nikki.
She stood by the train as it rattled by, scanning the containers hurtling along the rails with growing desperation. Then she spotted him, his head, caked with grime and blood, sticking out over the top of a car, and her heart stopped. A breathless moment where the earth ceased revolving, and eternity opened like a blossoming flower. She’d seen him die, and her heart had broken as he’d breathed his last breath on her shoulder, but here he was again—dazed, filthy, but alive, breathing again—and her heart mended itself and it hurt almost worse for it, the wound still raw, and buried in the shadows somewhere inside her was the knowledge that she had lost him once, and that she would lose him again—all too soon, she knew—but she pushed it all aside; here he was.
Her love.
As he hurtled by, the only living thing on a train of corpses, she remembered what Huntley had said to Ansel before he had injected him with poison. It hadn’t made sense at the time, so she hadn’t given it much thought. She reasoned Huntley must have been talking about the transition into the next life in a metaphorical way. To give Ansel the courage to die.
“All you have to do is take the leap,” Huntley had said, “no matter how frightening.”
No, not the courage to die.
The courage to live.
“Jump,” Nikki whispered.
***
Huntley wasn’t sure when he had decided to do what he’d done. He’d felt surprised by himself in Port City, but he’d since realized that the decision to spare Mr. Grayson’s life must have been made at a much earlier time. He’d known what he was about to do as soon as he packed his bags to chase down Mr. Grayson. There had been no need for the lethal injection kit; a gun would have done equally well, and would have turned out to be much less of a hassle. Somehow he must have made up his mind beforehand, and he’d simply followed along with the script his unconscious had written for him.
When he’d asked him for his weight, he was praying Mr. Grayson would remember it correctly, or, even better, that he would have weighed himself that very morning, perhaps out of a strange curiosity to learn how heavy he was the day he would die. As much as Huntley knew about death and how to bring it about, the boundary between death and near-death was a gray, rarely-trodden territory, and a pound of body weight under, a few cubic centimeters less blood volume, a milligram too much tetrodotoxin, and Mr. Grayson would not have woken up in the railroad car bound for the crematorium, but would have ridden it all the way to the incinerators.
Everything after the injection became a precise dance with the machinery of state-sanctioned suicide. The transport of the body back to the hotel for proper certification; the issuance of the death certificate without which a check-out from a Last Resort was impossible; the transfer of the body to the next scheduled cargo train; the assurances Huntley obtained that Mr. Grayson would be placed in one of the few open containers; his delay to make sure Mr. Grayson would be loaded last—all seemed to be done by someone other than himself. Huntley gave no thought to why he was doing what he did. He’d never done it before, nor would he ever do it again. If it was a gesture for the girl in room 516, it was a decade too late, and it failed to relieve that particular pain.
Maybe, he thought to himself, he’d been uncertain what he would do all along, and he’d only made the final decision when he saw Ms. Forlan hold on to Mr. Grayson as they were standing next to the shot-up and—Huntley was sure—stolen car, and she wouldn’t let go, her whole body shaking, unable to believe this would be the end of it all, the death of the one and only thing she’d found in this world worth living for, or at least worth living with.
Or maybe he had done it all for himself, and the son he was raising, in the hope that he might be able to talk to him about what kind of man his father was; that his father could still, even after countless check-outs, even after years of unrelenting death, recognize the merit in life.
Whatever the reason, he had told Nikki precisely where, if he was to wake at all, Ansel would open his eyes on the long train ride out to the fires, and that it would be best to stand next to the track and wait, wait for her love to roll by and catch sight of her, lest he forget what Huntley had told him right before he killed him: “All you have to do is take the leap. No matter how frightening.”
***
Ansel closed his eyes. The ground was rushing by way too fast, the container car was too high up, he was certain he’d break his neck—but still, he knew he had to. No matter how frightening. He’d have to if he wanted to see Nikki again. He’d have to if he wanted one more chance at this thing called life.
And so he jumped.
The fall didn’t take long. He barely had time to note the sensation of weightlessness, the tingling somewhere in his groin as if he were about to piss himself, the rush of air hitting him full force, before he crashed through bushes that cut his skin with surprising viciousness, then hit the ground hard. It was a bone-jarring impact that almost knocked him out and filled his mouth with the taste of blood. He rolled in the dirt, limbs flailing, until he came to a stop in a dusty heap.
The train clattered on, carrying its now
fully dead cargo to the horizon.
Silence settled.
Ansel took a deep rattling breath. His whole body was a wound. His mouth was filled with blood and muck. He grimaced. Even that hurt. He propped himself up—he was surprised he could. He bled from various cuts. His skin was chafed raw. One eye was swelling shut as if he’d run into a brutal left hook by a heavy-handed middleweight. He was sure he would find a couple of teeth in the dirt if he searched for them. But none of that mattered.
What mattered was that he could hurt. That he was able to feel pain in places he hadn’t known could hurt. He spat out grit and blood and he screamed. He screamed with pain and pleasure and that pleasure was pain and he whooped and hollered and laughed as though he’d gone mad.
He fell back, breathless. Ecstatic.
Then he heard the low whine of an engine, far in the distance, but growing louder. He rolled onto his elbows and peered down the road that ran parallel to the train track.
A car, kicking up a cloud of dust, raced toward him, closing fast.
Ansel clambered to his feet, every last inch of his body hurting or bleeding or both. His right leg wouldn’t cooperate, so he grabbed it with his hands, lifted it up and planted it on the ground. Nothing seemed broken, and he was able to stand, but the leg simply wouldn’t move, or if it did, only sluggishly.
The car came closer. He waved. It swerved off the road and headed straight for him. For a disconcerting moment Ansel thought it might run him over and he had to laugh at the absurdity of having survived his own death and the fall from a fast-moving train only to be mowed down by a stray vehicle in the wilderness, but then the car skidded to a stop a few feet before him, the driver’s-side door was kicked open, and Nikki jumped out and flew into his arms, almost knocking him down in the process.
Here he was. Almost naked. Filthy. Bleeding. But here. In her arms. She squeezed, trying to gather all of him into her embrace, feel him as close as possible without crushing him to death. The dust cloud kicked up by the car settled around them.
Finally, the last car of the seemingly endless train of corpses rumbled by, and then they were all alone in the wild expanse of wilderness.
***
She couldn’t keep her eyes on the road as she drove back. She had to constantly check on Ansel, to make sure he was still there, next to her, breathing.
Living.
It felt like a dream, but one of the good ones, not the gray, sticky ones that clung like plastic wrap and wouldn’t let her move or breathe but ensnared her, condemned her to stillness; no, this dream had all the colors of the real world, so bright they made her soul ache, and she drank in every last detail of the man next to her in the stolen car.
He wore a business suit she’d rescued from the pile of his belongings about to be incinerated. After each check-out, unclaimed items went straight into the hotel furnace; a dead person, the logic went, didn’t have any use for physical possessions anymore. Huntley told her she could only pick one thing, and had to do it quickly. The rest would have to go into the fire so as not to rouse suspicion. Her tears only just dry from losing Ansel on the beach, his head so heavy on her shoulder, she’d cried again when she rushed into his old room and rifled through his admittedly meager belongings. She’d found the blue suit in the back of the closet, stiff from hanging for over a decade, but still a beautiful set of clothing, and she’d thought nothing would be more fitting for someone newly woken from the dead than to re-enter the world of the living in an expensive ensemble. To come back with style.
She’d grabbed it, a shirt, a pair of underwear and had fled before room service showed up to throw every last thing left in the room into a black bin, which would be taken down to the basement and dumped into the fire—everything that used to belong to the person Ansel Grayson, recently deceased, would end up in the flames.
Huntley had escorted her out of the hotel, through the service entrance, to the back at the delivery dock where he’d seen her off, imploring her to hurry—the window for Ansel’s resurrection had been narrow. He’d handed her Ansel’s necklace, the gold chain with the delicate V; he’d been able to pocket it when the morgue personnel weren’t looking. He remembered he hadn’t seen Mr. Grayson a single day without it during his time at Hotel Terminus, and he’d probably want it back.
Nikki thought she had cried herself dry by then, but no, the tears fell again, and she’d hugged Huntley, held his stiff frame until he softened, ever so slightly, as much as he was capable of doing, and then she let him go and without another look back, she’d hurried off, in search of another car to steal.
And now Ansel was here. Beside her. In that magnificent blue suit, which seemed a bit loose on him. He was filthy, one eye almost swollen shut, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, crusted blood all over him, but he was beautiful. Because he existed.
He had his eyes closed, sunlight playing on his eyelids, a warm smile on his face. He felt himself sink back into his body, filling it out, re-inhabiting it. This was his, this was now, and he felt as if he’d come home.
Without opening his eyes, he reached across and put his hand on Nikki’s thigh. He felt her flesh, the muscles underneath, her warmth, and he realized he’d never been happier in his entire life, this one or the one before.
***
Romer’s suitcase still stood in the middle of the entrance hall when they broke in through the front door. Ansel felt bad smashing the window and unlatching the door through the broken glass, but he knew the owner would forgive him.
They’d pulled the car around back, deep into the overgrown driveway—not that anyone would be looking for them; he was dead after all, and Nikki was free to be gone from the Hotel Terminus as long as she pleased, provided she paid her bills, which her father grudgingly did. She hadn’t told him where she was going, but the last time she’d seen him, with the stolen car idling in his driveway to indicate she had no time to waste, she’d thanked him. Douglas Forlan III had looked stunned, as if she’d slapped him, but she’d meant it. She thanked him for not giving up on her, for coming to her rescue, yet again, and even if they didn’t see eye to eye on, well, anything—here he’d laughed, which had given him the opportunity to wipe at his eyes before she saw he was about to cry, but she did notice anyway—but even if they didn’t agree on anything, she wanted him to know she was grateful for his help. Then she’d kissed him fleetingly on his cheek, bounded into the car, cranked it into gear and peeled out of the driveway. In the rearview mirror she saw her dad waving after her, all pretense at being the master of his universe gone, but simply a regular dad, waving after his daughter as she drove off to live her own life, and she surprised herself by sticking her arm out and waving back, and when she glanced again in the mirror, her dad was still standing there, arm up, and even at the distance between them by now, she saw he was crying, tears streaking freely down his cheeks.
They left the suitcase in the center of the entrance hall, and they would leave it there for a long time, as if they were only guests, waiting for the arrival of the real owner. Ansel just pocketed the key he’d left on top of the suitcase, so he wouldn’t have to break any more windows.
Nikki had to help Ansel through the mansion as they opened blinds and threw windows and doors wide open to wake the place from its slumber. Ansel’s right leg remained stubborn and uncooperative, and he never would regain full control over it. Huntley was a master of death, but some of it lingered in Ansel. Huntley had put Ansel’s whole body into paralysis, but it never left his right leg completely—death, dogged as it was, hung on, seemingly unwilling to forgo what it had just had in its grip. There was no pain, only a feeling as if his leg had fallen asleep, and Ansel, cautious, found himself waiting for the tingling twinge that never came.
Overall, it was a small price to pay for living.
Nikki led Ansel upstairs, into the master bathroom. It was a large room with a wall of windows, all opened, a breeze wafting through, carrying the scent of the garden be
low. Motes of dust danced in the sun as she filled the free-standing bathtub while Ansel stood, watching her as much as she was watching him.
They didn’t speak; didn’t feel the need to.
The bathtub full, Nikki took Ansel’s clothes off as if unwrapping a delicate present. Every inch of his body was a new revelation, a gift given back to her.
She had to help him into the tub. He slid in, inch by inch, savoring the sensation of warm water rising on cold skin, welcoming him, and then, as he sat, her hand in his, little by little, the warmth of the water drove out the chill of death.
He closed his eyes again, knowing he could open them at any time, and she would be there with him.
Later, after his body had been scrubbed clean of dirt and blood, and his head wound had been dressed, they lay on the bed, both naked, each an affirmation of beingness to the other. Two bodies. Hands on skin. And nothing but time.
***
The room hadn’t changed. Not that Huntley had expected it to—there was no reason to think it would have—but somehow he’d thought it would be different.
It wasn’t.
Room 516 was still in the same suspended dream state. A perfectly clean hotel room. Immaculate. Every picture frame at a precise angle. The bed made with military precision. The bathroom sparkling. The tub a blinding white. Every surface spotless.