Palaces

by Simon Jacobs

  The world contracts. A face slides into another without my noticing. I choose their names; I see what I want to see. I put on the uniform.

  The tracks. Everything is an echo of something else. You have always been on the tracks.

  IV.

  FOYER

  BOUND IN BLACK, I CLIMB BACK TO THE SURFACE. As the person before me entered, I climb out through the windows of the library, into the rolling greens beyond. I tear across the lawn in my new skin. On the southwest corner of the property, cradled by the forest, I locate an unlocked gate. I break the treeline again, the sun rising directly in my tracks. I hold your shoe to my chest. The trees move from my path; the forest shrinks or collapses, or I finally notice its true dimensions, the way that from far enough away or with quick enough movements, anything reveals itself in broader strokes: I see the border of the forest pushing out to the northeast, thinning in the south, and the whole of it seems so navigable and straightforward—I realize that there are streetnames in there, there were cars that traveled through it by instinct; it was home to somebody. I feel like I’ve reached a critical point, a summit where I can look out and survey the bounds of the world I’m living in, granted the geographic certainty that comes with knowing exactly where I stand.

  The boots seem to offer an unfair advantage to my running, a kind of militaristic edge in their support and acceleration, a ruthless efficiency, and before long I intersect with the same elevated track where, further north, I’d found your shoe. The tracks are much closer to the coast than I thought, embarrassingly close, and for a second the scope of my entire journey from track to track seems laughable, child-sized. I had never strayed far afield. A few hundred yards down, I find a metal staircase attached to the overpass. I clamber to the top and emerge, all at once, on the rails.

  I turn to my left, to the south: the track ahead disappears into a low layer of fog, oozing through the trees. I walk forward in the boots borrowed from the new body, evening my breath, the terrain generating one foot at a time beyond my vision, fulfilling and discrete: I imagine complex loops and circuits of track shrouded in the fog ahead, amorphous in possibility, reassembling before me piece by piece as the future is written. I run again, I test the speed of their generation, as if by moving fast enough I could beat it. The mansions lie at my back like some fantastical, absurd luxury I’d conjured while I died back in the city.

  It’s comforting to have a distinct path to follow, and before I know it, I’m moving automatically, without consideration of my destination, without thinking about direction or spatial orientation, liberated of all thought. Eventually, the burning in my legs is subsumed into the mechanics of running, and I stop feeling that, too, leaving only the mild propulsive thrust of the boots, the physical pattern beneath it. I’m sweating freely, and that also feels productive, like further evidence indicating progress. There’s no telling how much track lies before or behind me. My elevation subtly changes, and at intervals the overpass under my feet switches out with gravel; the forest gently rises and falls beside me as I cut through it. In time, the fog lifts, and the sky goes pale with day full-on. The horizon line draws farther out. The first station I pass—a platform on one side and a railing on the other, an aluminum sign marking another desolate region of the north, a parking lot at ground level, empty as everything else—I acknowledge without slowing down. For the two minutes or so that I’m within its vicinity, my breath returns to me, dimly rebounded off the concrete. The track curves gently, and later, another track swoops in to join it. I see landscape now on both sides, far-off winding roads, motionless little towns, a river. Some distance later, I pass another crappy, abandoned station. I slow occasionally, and then I speed up again.

  The progress is thrilling: I feel like I’ll never have to stop, that this will take me straight on into eternity. At times, I detect the company of something else keeping pace with me, a twinned presence mimicking my movements, loping along beside me at knee-level, but there’s nothing there.

  Then in one step, gravel underfoot, it appears ahead: a train on the tracks, staring me down. My pace falters, my human body catches up—I realize how winded I am, how totally exhausted. I remember abruptly the kids on the tracks in Richmond years ago; I try to summon the moment they’d realized the train was coming toward them—frantically reassembling the seconds preceding this one, the steps they’d walked unknowing, the distance from the center of the tracks to the trench at either side, the input from their other senses (sound, heat, smell of smoke)—wondering how I could possibly have missed it until now, how I could be deliberating at all, as if there was a real choice to make. My life suddenly appears to me as a distinct weight, something I can either grab in my fist or throw away. I make my decision (and what if they had made the same decision?): I don’t divert, I run straight for the train, and as we advance toward each other I feel a lightness wash over me, the abandoning of this weight, a physical relief that I have made a decision, and also abandoned all decisions. I remember leaving my dorm room in Richmond at some unspecified point in the past, closing the door and slipping something into my jacket pocket, and walking down the hallway with this same feeling, and into the night. My legs move like there’s someone else controlling them; peripherally, I notice the station platform stretching alongside the train, but I don’t draw the connection. The presence beside me feels closer than ever, racing with me, opening its snarling jaws. My boots beat along the ties, rhythmic and far away, like the soundtrack to an old movie, assembled long after the footage was shot, where in the finished scene the ambient noise is strangely absent, the footsteps recorded on an otherwise empty soundstage, echoing weirdly. And of course the train isn’t moving, of course it never has, of course I am running for what I always have been, for a house where no one lives, for the unpeopled end. As I near the platform, my arms leave my sides, I open them as if for embrace.

  A gunshot roars out ahead of me from the direction of the train, exploding in the gravel by my left leg. I yelp—or something yelps—and my foot sweeps out from beneath me, but I barely have time to lose my balance or react at all when a colossal force punches me in the chest out of nowhere. I hear the second gunshot as my neck ratchets back, the wind kicked out of me, and your shoe goes flying. I hit the tracks flat on my back in a swept-up plume of gravel. There’s a second of stunned immobility before the pain arrives in a long wave, cycloning around a single point in my chest, pushing up beneath the vest, molding instantly around the bullet just above my heart, blood vessels bursting beneath the skin. A moment of darkness passes, a silence, and then I gasp like a man saved from drowning, sucking air into my lungs, body seizing and gulping. The pain is constricting, paralyzing me from the waist up, my arms wide as the muscles clench in anticipation of a blow that has already come.

  The sky is a blank white. My left leg twitches spastically, flinching away from the wound it didn’t take. My mind is racing, urging me to run, to shield myself from whoever shot me, to keep running toward them, but my body feels pinned down by the piece of smoldering lead in my chest. I keep urging movements to my hand, which seems yards away, just out of range of my influence. I will the sensation along the useless limb, reaching as if for a distant point. Minutely at first, pins and needles begin in the joints of my fingers and gradually spill down my arm, then into the rest of my body, like stutters of electricity lighting up a large, empty space. I carefully rotate my left foot, testing its agency.

  Without demonstrably moving, I assert my hands on the gravel to either side of me, readying my arms for a push. I breathe out once, slowly, then in slowly, and then out again. At the same time that I let the breath go, I push off the ground, angling the top of my body to one side to make a smaller target. I simultaneously bend my knees, and slide one leg backward in the gravel to use as an anchor. I’m standing for a second, and then I stumble again, just as a third shot bursts past me, loud enough to buckle me again. I go briefly to the ground and sort of bounce back, deliriously grabbing the shoe from bes
ide the tracks, regaining my center of gravity, trying to orient my eyesight on anything, and finally I take in the figure standing on the edge of the concrete platform some forty feet away, an oversized pistol pointed toward me with both hands: it’s you.

  I scream “STOP!” into the air and throw up my hands without ever really reaching true balance. I trip again, lurch forward, my vision pitching down and then bobbing up. It could almost be comedy. “Josephine, it’s me! Don’t! Don’t shoot!”

  I hear something clatter to the ground, a body after it. My thought—as I go down too, again, balance lost—my fleeting thought, which I lose as soon as I have it, is that your hair looks different from the way I remember it, unaccountably different.

  *

  I make it the rest of the way to the station proper by turns on my hands and knees, the train looming like a decommissioned missile. Above, as on a pedestal, you’re seated on the concrete with your knees pulled to your chest (one foot shoeless and battered, the sock threadbare) and your head buried in your lap,

  dressed in the same clothes you’d left the third mansion wearing. The pistol lies a foot away. I haven’t seen enough to know if they all look this similar.

  I climb up onto the platform and lay the mangled sneaker beside you like an offering. It’s a different color than when I found it, the material has absorbed so much of my stress. I roll onto my back to sit up. There’s an almost perfect hole in the vest where the bullet entered, and my chest aches beneath. I pick out the crumpled little cylinder, still hot, and it skips out of my fingers. I think: This is fatal.

  You raise your face from between your legs. It’s still colored with fear, smudged with dirt. The wound from the kitchen counter has scabbed your cheek. “I didn’t realize it was you.” You reshape the shoe and gingerly slide your foot back into it, as if it’s sustained some injury. I sense a widening gulf of knowledge and information between us, of the time since we separated; with each passing second, the chance that we will ever exchange these experiences decreases. “I didn’t realize.”

  I move closer and wrap my arms around you, knees included, my own legs folded out to the side. It’s wrong—given everything that’s happened between us, it’s completely the wrong gesture, assumes space that hasn’t been earned back—but I can’t think of what else to do, how else to justify being here. I realize that I have a beard again.

  You don’t react to them at all, the arms. I don’t recognize them either. The empty straps and holsters on my leg, the double-laced black combat boots, all part of the same performance. I open my mouth and almost ask something about pleather, but the thought suddenly seems inconceivably stupid. My gloved hands clasp and unclasp in front of your legs, touching no skin, and then they let go.

  I look to the train: the doors are open in every car, static, like it’s always been sitting here abandoned, passed in and out of and between like trees in a forest. The sight registers as familiar, the same way the treeline did when I realized I was lost, a déjà vu feeling that I’ve been here before. This is the platform where we left, where we broke north. This is the train we walked out of.

  My body alights with sudden opportunity. I reach into my back pocket for the roll of money I’ve kept there, that I’ve transferred from suit to suit. I hold it out without much ceremony—it’s a thick roll, slowly uncurling—saying, “Look what I found.”

  You take it as we stand. Light sifts through the windows of the train and out the open doors like a ruin. “What’s this?”

  “It’s money,” I say.

  You fan the stack out in your hands. “Are you kidding me?”

  I look again. I realize that the bills have inconsistent, erratic borders, each a slightly different rectangle than the rest, and they’re a cheap pastel shade of green, the numbers in cartoonish font, like something traded by children. You tear one of the hundreds in half and let the two pieces flutter away.

  “It’s fake,” I say.

  “Goddamn.”

  You throw the stack into the air. It catches the sunlight in predictable ways, dumbly translucent, a prop in someone’s roleplay. You turn and enter the train like you’re walking into another room. The money settles around my feet or else blows away onto the tracks.

  I stare out in the direction I came from. I imagine the terror you must have felt when you shot me down, the sight of another body barreling toward you down the tracks. I take this moment from the platform, from your perspective, looking out. You must have seen me coming from miles away, long before I noticed the train. I see myself advancing while you stood paralyzed on the platform, unsure of whether or not you should run—where was there to go, really, but back the way we’d come, back to the mansions—the fear mounting exponentially, watching until my figure became unfailingly, threateningly clear on the horizon, disguised in uniform. And then, at the critical moment, you’d reached out your hands, and the gun had appeared. You pulled the trigger once, because that’s where your fingers were, that’s what was in your hands. Nerves dragged the shot amiss. You leveled your arms and fired again. A moment of gut relief, at the sureness of the second shot, and of my fall. And then I rose again, like nothing is supposed to. I nudge the pistol with the toe of my boot. Up close, it’s obvious: the make, the model, the grip, all of it is exactly the same, recycled from another region, another time, fired at last, the would-be victim now standing above it, immortal. The gun grates against the concrete. I kick it as hard as I can off the platform. I don’t hear it hit the ground.

  I follow you onto the train. You’re not in the first car, so I walk down the aisle and cross the divider into the second. Here, too, the seats are all empty, the fabric ratty and picked over. I cross through to the third.

  When I enter the fourth car and you’re not there, I start to panic. I think that you’ve disappeared again, or, worse, that you were never here in the first place, that I’ve created the whole scene in some kind of perverse hallucination, the phantom shooter, like Candace or August or Vivian, erased out of my world.

  I find you in the sixth car, in an aisle seat halfway down, staring ahead. I see the top of your head first, facing away, contrary to the way we arrived. I look to the right, out the door across from you—it’s the same car where we exited. Beyond, the staircase leads down to the parking lot, to the northern road, to the mansions.

  You press your knees to the side so I can take the inside seat by the window. The empty gun holster, the narrow sheath in the pants that’s meant to hold a knife brush against you as I pass. I sit heavily in the seat. I peel the gloves off and stuff them beside me. I want to ask about Vivian, if you found any trace of her, of your brother, just anything; but if you had, there’s no way you would be here, there’s no way you would have come back. You look ahead and swallow once, trembling slightly. I notice the other cuts on your face, above your eyebrow and, under your chin, three short slashes in parallel. Your hair is coming in uneven, the collar separating from the rest of your shirt. Your arms cross in your lap at the wrists. Minute, old white scars etch upward. A lump forces its way up through my chest, into my throat. I turn to the smudged window. I wonder if the fingerprints are mine, how long you’ve been on this platform, if you were waiting for me, if we could proceed by saying nothing and find a livable pattern in the silence.

  “How did you lose your shoe?” This is all I’m able to get out, without looking at you.

  “It—”

  The interior lights stutter on. I whirl around in my seat as if to find the cause, your answer lost. You look up at the ceiling, eyes shimmering. The car doors slide closed, then open briefly like there’s something blocking the gap, and then close again. The collision resounds through the empty car—I can’t fully comprehend what’s happening around me, what all of this signifies. For a moment after the doors close, there’s no motion, the air full of anticipation like a held-in breath. Then, a continuous, monotonous whirring beneath everything is present where it wasn’t before. There’s a clank, a minute shift backward (my
stomach goes forward), and then the train is moving ahead, the breath released. The train is pulling out of the station, back the way it came. The train is moving.

  My throat constricts, and my jaw starts to ache with something fighting to get out. My knees shake up and down, uncontrollably. I turn from the window back to you and my mouth sort of falls open in a weak, startled gasp. I crane my head to look behind us, to see if other passengers have appeared. The vest pinches my chest. The car remains empty but for us. The train slowly gathers speed, moving in its constant diagonal line. I think: If I hadn’t boarded the train, it would never have moved. The world would have stayed as it was. To the south, the city waits, at this moment both emptied and populated. Somewhere distant, Vivian runs through the woods from one mansion to the next, or she awakens in her bedroom three states away. Candace stands before a mirror and applies concealer to an old scar. Your mother’s night shift ends. A set of parents mourn before an empty coffin. The world dwindles and swells around us—one by one, it grows and reduces in size, while I fight it back toward zero. It had never been catered to us; it had been served to me. I recall our conversation after Casey’s death, my silent refusal of any attempt to escape, to put anything to rest, the naked room around us, and I realize what I’ve been taking from you since before we even met, which seems finally to have reached its absolute: everyone else. I imagine myself stepping forward out of the wallpaper, revealing in my silhouette the background patterns, the shifting, conspiring textures that have always hemmed you in. Immediately around us, the air of the train car becomes thick with possibility, like the way I awoke in the second-floor bedroom in the deep of the night, overflowing with intention. I look over and your face warps, as if through smoke.