Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  You shift and put your hands behind your back, flattened against the column. “It smelled like bacon.”

  You mime turning a badge upside down and pinning it to your chest. The train drowns out my lack of response.

  We step inside, along with several of the others standing on the platform. They move to empty seats as if prescribed, but we remain standing. It doesn’t occur to me until we’re aboard that the train, too, could be a hostile mechanism, an operative part of the defenses that I intuit around us. As it crawls out of the station, I see through the window, across the way, a drenched figure haul himself up from the tracks onto the platform, water splattering everywhere. The woman in the money-printed leggings struggles to her feet, screams silently, and falls.

  The train fills further at each stop, but never reaches capacity. I watch the passengers, but whatever their disguises are, they keep them. A man drums his knee impatiently whenever the doors open; a woman consults the map once, then again two stops later, using the same series of gestures each time. No one exits the train. At the last northern station on the island, we disembark alone. We have to surface outside and go west for a block, to the aboveground trains that travel north more broadly, to other cities and states; it’s been decided, somewhere, that we are leaving, that these are the steps we’re taking. As we walk, the pedestrians surrounding us break off the sidewalk and move determinedly as one group toward the other side of the street, clutching baggage and children, curving in a line and cutting off traffic, as if they’ve collectively decided to change direction, alerted by a signal we don’t have access to, that doesn’t choose us. The implication is always that the crowd knows something we do not, has some deeper, more fundamental knowledge about how to practice life, how to guarantee safety, but here we don’t listen—we go in the opposite direction while the rest funnel back, deeper into the city. Alone, we climb the stairs to the elevated outdoor tracks, and stand on the edge of the platform where the trains go north. The arrival and departure screens are all blank and dead. Again, we ignore the ticket machines, and again, we wait for the train we have no right to expect will ever come; this time, we’re the only people on the platform. I look down the track in both directions, at empty rails.

  A few minutes later the tracks illuminate and the train arrives from the south, shamelessly. We board. I pace the empty car up and down, looking for people lying down or slumped in the seats or crouched with a weapon where I wouldn’t see them at first glance, an abandoned child, but there’s no one. The speakers crackle in anticipation of an announcement, then fall silent. We finally slide into the plastic-lined seats. Regardless, the doors close, and the train begins to move. Regardless, we go north, approximately, exactly to where is neither profitable nor known.

  *

  Gradually, the city collapses and slides from view, and through the window the reddish glow fades, replaced in shades by real, heavy night. I’m unreasonably shocked when, what feels like half an hour later, the train pulls into a station and stops. The doors open, and I inhale sharply, pushing myself down in the seat—the feeling in my gut is that everything is over, they are about to storm the train, we’ll be exposed and forced out, interlopers that we are, that this is where it all ends. You put your hand on my arm, feeling my body tense. No one boards, no infantry arrive. I breathe hard until the doors close again. The train begins its slow acceleration. Forest appears on both sides, occasional stretches of gray water. The towns we pass—visible through the trees, armatured by streetlights—don’t look specifically unpopulated, but I don’t notice any movement within them either. After the first stop I stand and make a show of consulting the map printed on the wall, a mess of primary-colored squiggles spilling in every direction. I trace my finger up the red one and into reaches unknown. “Do you know which line we’re on?”

  “I don’t know, the main one.”

  Between each station, the panic builds, but as the stops continue, farther and farther apart, deeper and deeper into this endless night, and the train remains empty but for us, my physical reactions lessen. At intervals, we talk quietly about nothing, careful of disturbing the fragile complex of our existence here, of revealing our presence, as if we’re a technical flaw in the system, slipping by and getting out unnoticed.

  I lean my head against the window. At some unspecified point in the journey, a force pulses through the landscape outside, jostling everything to one side, a sudden ripple that I’ll only think I saw in retrospect.

  The train rolls into another station, without fanfare. The engine shudders to a stop, and the doors open automatically with an empty, metallic sound. There’s no light from the platform outside. I wait for the doors to close again. The lights inside the train blink once, and then go off, too. A new layer of silence pervades the car, an absence of anything mechanical, while the sound of insects slowly wafts through the open car doors. We wait, past the point at which it seems obvious that the train isn’t going to leave the station, that wherever the tracks go, this is the last stop. You clear your throat, uselessly—it’s so obviously a space-filler that I almost comment on it—and we wait a few minutes more. Eventually, we peel ourselves from the seats and stand, shakily, as if we’ve been asleep for a long time.

  We step out onto the unlit concrete platform and hear night sounds, air moving through trees. As we walk away from it, the train seems to become a husk—not something we ever rode in on or that ever traveled, but a static piece of the background, a painted-in part of the scenery. We feel our way to a staircase in the dark, your one hand at the back of my neck, the other in the air. I see a railing in the moonlight, and we follow it down.

  The train doors do not close behind us. The train does not move again.

  There was never any going home.

  III.

  NORTH

  THAT FIRST NIGHT IN NOVEMBER A YEAR AND A half ago, in Richmond, the kid, dead Casey, still sputtering in the field behind us, we walked back to campus together, toward the dorms. That was it—we’d stood next to each other in the gathering outside after the show, we decided we’d had enough at the same time, and we’d walked to the show from the same place—all it took was space and convenience.

  As we moved across the parking lot away from the crowd, you skipped into pace beside me, as if this was not your usual rhythm, you were used to moving faster—it was an obvious metaphor right out of the gate. “So…what did you think of the show?” you said.

  “It was good! It’s refreshing to hear punk rock with a Southern accent.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty great. I can’t believe we got them to drive up all the way from South Carolina for this dinky little show.” I’d gathered that you had something to do with the planning of the show, which wound up being one of the last either of us went to in Richmond proper—their performance had been in the works for a long time, but the turnout was bad, as it usually was those days, the few and the proud; it was clear by this point that the center of whatever flimsy scene once existed in Richmond had slumped away, everything had changed. Six months ago there had been shows every week, regular series, there were “up-and-comers” and “mainstays,” no longer.

  I was walking with my hands shoved into my pockets, empty except for my school ID and room key. I’d raked at the interior fabric until it was on the verge of disintegration. I was still in my ascetic phase, the aftermath of the gun—the weird impermanence, the sense that anyone or anything could disappear or materialize at any time—and it was comforting, the reassurance that I wasn’t carrying anything but my clothes, a head I shaved every day, and the devices necessary to gain access, generally, to the facilities where I was housed and fed. It was part of what kept me at the local punk shows despite the way the community was fizzling out, despite what I had done to expedite this—there were bands, or figures in bands, or had been bands in the past, who subscribed to the same kind of lifestyle, which felt like deprivation or abnegation but carried a moral weight. Proudest moments, I told myself I was aspiring to
some higher code, that my vision would be clearer and starker than anyone else’s.

  This was during your blue mohawk period, which I learned during our walk had been initiated a couple of weeks prior; it would stay this approximate color until summer break, when identifiers tended to change. Much later, on the bus to the city, maybe in the spirit of scrapping the past, you told me that during this year—and possibly the year or two preceding it, many eras ago—that you were trying to be “basically Tank Girl.” The delivery of the remark was casual, but was followed by a silence that gave it a peculiar gravity, the air of a deep and long-held secret, a confession of precedent, that you aspired to this kind of fantasy, maybe some part of you saw yourself plowing through apocalyptic deserts in war machines you fabricated yourself, a copied haircut and patches with British slogans. (If you’d asked me at the time, I would have called my student ID a “tag”—as with anything, it went both ways.)

  “You seem nervous,” you said, as we walked.

  I shrugged—the movement was probably imperceptible because we were in motion—and, to be sure, waited a few more steps before responding. “I like to make sure that everything is consistent,” I said, slowly and very deliberately, stupidly implying something vague that I hoped you’d question (yet which was impossible to question in its vagueness), as if I was some dark reservoir of mystery and sadness.

  You scoffed, laughed a little at me, which made sense, because it had been all of ten minutes and here I was in my melodrama making inscrutable and dire pronouncements at someone I was trying frantically to impress. “What does that mean?”

  A laugh sputtered out of me—a laugh!—acknowledging the ridiculousness of what I’d said (or maybe acknowledging that it might sound ridiculous to someone who wasn’t attuned to my deep inner torment), and I said, slightly shamed: “I don’t know.” I kicked the ground in a way I wanted to read “unconsciously frustrated” and almost tripped. I saw myself as if from a distance, acting this way: my self-involved tragedy seemed comic. The brick buildings of the college were coming into view—we’d changed from the gravel alongside the road to the sidewalk on the campus proper. I asked, “Does it ever burn you out, to be a part of the punk scene in a place like fucking Richmond, Indiana?” I was still implying a lot, but at least this time my sentence was answerable, had clear ramifications to respond to.

  “Constantly,” you said. “But I grew up here”—I’d insulted her town—“so I’m experienced with the burnout. You get used to the energy expense, you know what wears you down and what you can stand—it’s a pattern. You know when you just need to give up and go someplace else for a while. Indy’s not so far away. You?”

  “I’m from Dayton.” This meant nothing except a different state, but apparently the answer stood on its own.

  I experienced a moment of panic after I answered, a couple of seconds delayed, a body-wide chill of realization that, though to my knowledge we’d never met before—and how had I never noticed you? how had I failed to map such a crucial person?—our set of friends and acquaintances, our familiars must overlap in some substantial way: what were the chances that you didn’t know August, didn’t know Candace, weren’t aware of some rumor of what I’d done? In the thick of the blooming night I saw all of this unraveling before it even started, the destructive path of revelation twined with the perfect vision I suddenly had of our future together, the kind of fantasy a crush spins hopelessly into infinity. I would spend the rest of my life under this fear of discovery. I tried to bury the feeling by talking over it—to disguise my past steps with forward momentum—and gestured around us, the smallest canvas. “Where do you live?”

  “Brinkman.”

  “I’ll walk you there.”

  “How chivalrous.”

  In a few minutes we came to the most visibly decrepit of the dorms, a three-winged concrete block on the far eastern edge of the tiny campus, no more than five hundred feet from my dorm. Nine months later, we would move into an apartment less than two miles from here, and then we would stop paying. “Did you know,” you said, at the door, “that this dorm was designed by a prison architect?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yep. Stand next to the staircase on any given floor and you can see straight to the end of every hallway in any direction. Every inmate accounted for.”

  You stepped away and swiped your ID in the reader to unlock the door—the lack of analog technology for this was briefly startling, like a moment out of time, a reminder we weren’t living in the ’80s—then turned back. “See you in the pit.” You did a two-finger salute, and you were gone.

  And that’s it; born in fire.

  *

  We follow the railing a short ways to the ground, one after the other. We exit the stairway into a small commuter parking lot, maybe three-quarters full. Like the station, it’s completely silent. The cars sit motionless, as if they’ve never moved, aren’t capable of movement, their owners decided unanimously to remain in the city for the night. I hear you swallow next to me. It’s truly ominous.

  We walk past an unattended tollbooth, around the lowered gate to the heel of a two-lane road, new and black, paved two inches higher than the parking lot. The road is bordered by looming, impenetrable trees, and curves gently in both directions, like we’re standing at the very crest, the access point to an artery that, way down, leads back to the city, and up, to somewhere else. There’s no sound of traffic in either direction, none at all. The wind channels through the tops of the trees, shifting the spired skyline. The feeling of being trapped inside, of moving through the city during those final moments—it’s obliterated as soon as we step into the road. The sky is a rich navy blue, and there are stars, actual stars. We’re standing in the middle of the road, looking up at these stars. I wonder what time it is, if we should be expecting cars, other life, the sun.

  “Do you have a preference?”

  “North. My preference is north.”

  We turn to our right, in the direction we assume leads north, because it’s approximately parallel with the tracks; I don’t know the stars well enough to tell. The road is too wide for our footsteps to echo, but we can hear them on the asphalt, above all else.

  We’re wearing the same clothes we wore to the show in the city, innumerable hours ago, dressed in layers of paint mist and ash from the streets, the accumulation of travel. There’s dried blood on the front of my t-shirt, splattered along with the cosmetics. The skin of my face is hard in places, lightly crusted where the polish has dried and swollen around my cheekbone. I work my tongue under my upper lip when I need a reminder, pushing out the wound, repeatedly breaking it open. There’s still some gunk in my right eye, and every so often I’m suddenly blinking back tears. You look less damaged—you wore your boots to the show; I wish I’d done that. That’s the first thought of consequences I have as we walk, not of hunger or our lack of a destination: my shoes are shit, they’re going to be the first to go.

  I piece the preceding night together in my head—impossibly, we are still in the midst of it. It must be close to dawn.

  The road is tracked by power lines, hoisted above the trees. When the road curves, we follow it, because the alternative is to have no path at all.

  As the thickness of the night slowly rolls back, far to our left, an elevated highway fades into view out of the solid mass of trees, revealing mountains farther back. We stop for a minute. There’s no distant glow of headlights, no sound carried through the wind. It wraps through the landscape like a concrete skeleton. I’m struck again by how everything a certain distance beyond us doesn’t seem real, a painted sheet surrounding the set on which we walk, changeable only by distance and angle, variously lit.

  Eventually, our road splits, offers an exit on the right down a single lane lined in thinning trees. We change courses here—we have options, and the highway is too eerie, too quiet. Around the curve, we find an abandoned gas station sunken into a gravelly offshoot of the road. The fluorescent lights inside burn in
to the declining night, and we hear it humming from a distance, its perimeter glowing like a ghostly shell. I step uncertainly toward it, off the road—there are two pickup trucks visible in the parking lot, and through the windows, I see the shelves are stocked—but you grab my arm and pull me back. “Don’t.”

  “I’m sure there are supplies in there.”

  “I am not that desperate.”

  I don’t press it. There’s something unnerving about the building’s illumination; the buzz of electronics that maintain it seems like a mechanical deception of life, of a structure grown self-sufficient. We walk resolutely past it, the hum following us for a while before it dissipates into the air, becoming ambient. I strain my ears to continue noticing it—the subtle, droning undercurrent—but very soon it assimilates into my surroundings, and I can’t pick it out.

  The road slopes down, and the woods start to separate, unveiling more landscape to either side of us. We keep up our pace for a while without acknowledging it, until the guardrail to our left disappears and a hundred yards later is replaced with a low white fence, bright and idyllic. Grass accompanies the road now, and looks to have been mowed in the last week. The sky goes pink with morning coming on. The tenor changes.

  You don’t speak until we’re out of shouting distance of the gas station and the silence has returned, completely returned. “John, I—”

  “What?”

  “I—I don’t think there’s anyone left.”

  It’s a ridiculous sentiment, and I answer, “That’s impossible,” without leaving any space for consideration, as if talking over you will prevent the thought from occurring to either of us. But there it is.

  “I don’t mean everywhere,” you say, “but here—there’s just, there’s no sign of anyone. It’s like everyone vanished.”

  This time, I don’t answer right away. I take the processing of this thought and relegate it to elsewhere. We continue walking. I make a mental note of it, about my participation in this conversation, that I’m formulating my response and haven’t said anything yet. The sky fills steadily with light, the sun rising from an angle I don’t make the effort to discern, not even to determine what direction we’re moving. It starts to rain, an inconsistent, patchy sprinkle that we can just barely hear, but which at least sounds natural. And I don’t answer, and that conversation ends.