Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  When he woke, the suburbs of the city were rolling past him. Carl was twisted against the window asleep, his mouth pressed to the glass. The newspaper was crumpled in his lap, turned to the obituary page. Michel blinked slowly at the newspaper, then sat up and stared at it awhile longer before reaching over and taking it.

  He looked at the listing that caught his eye. “M. Adolphe Sarre, pioneer of the French cinema” was the way he translated it.

  The obit identified Sarre as the director of a film called The Death of Marat, begun shortly after the first world war and finally assembled in a completed version only this year. The article quoted several critics and historians who spoke of Sarre in admiring but strangely ambivalent terms. He had died in his sleep; since a “disturbance” at the film’s opening some weeks before, which resulted in one death and several serious injuries, his physical and mental health had declined precipitously. His exact age was unknown, as were the details of his early years.

  Very carefully Michel folded the newspaper again and replaced it on Carl’s lap. Then he sat back in his seat and watched the passing suburbs again, which were gradually disappearing altogether. The sun bore down on him through the glass, and when he returned to sleep, the dreams began all over again, one after another.

  In the first of the dreams, flitting across his eyes before he even shut them, he saw Lauren on a boat.

  They sighted the bottle on the coast three days after leaving Paris. It was dusk and they sailed into a forest. Only the tops of the dead trees were exposed, bare and twisted; small fine branches brushed across their faces. The fog was thick and the light of the fallen sun glowed beneath the sea, so the tops of the trees appeared red. The branches waved back and forth before the boat like bloody arms above the water, and in the wind from the west they seemed to moan like lost sailors. Billy didn’t understand where the forest had come from. He’d never seen it before, and now, gazing at the coast, that didn’t look quite the same either. He was afraid Lauren would think perhaps he was becoming confused like any other very old man. The ocean turned dark, the old man and the woman continuing to maneuver the boat through the thicket of treetops with their long poles; and then they saw, in the light of the moon, the glint of the cognac bottle bobbing in the water just beyond the edge of the forest. More frantically they worked their way through the trees; each time they hacked at the branches with their poles, the trees seemed to shudder, the blow to the bark seemed to blacken, the moan from the forest sounded lonelier. By the time they freed themselves the bottle was farther away, barely visible to the south in the moonlight. Darkness fell utterly, and Lauren took to standing at the boat’s edge holding the lantern before her, casting what light she could on the waves. Finally out of exhaustion from navigating through the sea forest they dropped anchor and slept. In the morning, of course, no bottle was anywhere to be seen.

  All the way down the coast they witnessed the rituals of winter’s end. In the woods that lined the beaches, Lauren could see the people dancing at night, the women in long burgundy dresses and men in long coats, weaving through the orchards in each other’s arms, each man carrying a flaming torch so that the entire shore was a nocturnal pattern of crisscrossing light and smoke. At the water the men would hand the torches to their partners and the women would cast the torches to the sea, the waves exploding one after the other. Lauren could still hear the singing after the boat had left the dancing far behind. Five days out of Paris Lauren and Billy came to a seaport circled by high fortress walls on the one side and another forest on the other, where the trees were blue and hung like teardrops against the landscape. A row of docks and bars stretched past the fortress walls, far behind the water’s edge. All the boats were immobile in the sand. Billy stood watching the shore, and took his pole and drove it down into the water alongside the hull. He seemed startled when the pole stopped. “Where are we?” said Lauren.

  “We are in too shallow water,” said the old man. “Take a pole and help me push the boat farther out.”

  When they had moved the boat, the old man decided they would drop anchor. The water was still not very deep, and strangely tepid; the two waded to the docks. On the beach they passed dead fish and seaweed that lay dried in the sun. Half a kilometer down from the city walls, the land curved upward; the terrain became hilly and difficult. An old house overlooked the rocks, its windows naked of glass and doors banging open and shut in the wind; a path led from its front beams down to the sand, and not far from the path, standing alone in the middle of the beach, was a huge stone, perfectly black and almost perfectly round, and nearly Lauren’s height. To have gotten to this place on the beach the stone had to have been moved by many men or some very violent sort of upheaval. In the sun against the white sand the black stone could be seen from a good distance away; Lauren and Billy had in fact sighted it from the boat.

  The two walked down along the docks and through the old city gates. In town they bought enough bread and cheese and fruit for several days. The old man calculated that by then they would be off the northern coast of Spain. On the way back Billy stopped outside a bar and stood awhile staring. “What is it?” said Lauren. Billy looked struck. He went in and Lauren followed him. Inside he stood staring at the curvature of the café’s interior, as though he expected something else. “Have you been here before?” she said.

  He turned to her as she peered around the room. “Yes,” he said. “Have you?”

  “No,” she answered, with some surprise.

  He nodded. A few sailors sitting at tables looked at them. All the bottles were gone, and the room did not glow like a lantern. They bought three bottles of wine, opening one. There at the bar Billy got into a conversation with a fisherman sitting at the closest table. Lauren sat drinking her wine and after a while the conversation stopped and Billy said to Lauren, “The shoreline began receding about ten days ago, he says. People came out one morning and found dead fish and animals all over the beach, as though the sea moved so quickly even the fish hadn’t time to move with it. The boats were all aground. The men in the village plan to push the boats out tomorrow.”

  Lauren nodded.

  “Everyone’s in shock,” Billy went on, “because usually nothing happens here. Wars, plagues and disasters have always passed this village by, he says. I told him about the forest we sailed through up north. He said he’d heard of a couple of villages flooded south of here, and other villages suddenly finding kilometers of new beach.”

  Lauren nodded again. “Has he seen the bottle?”

  Billy spoke to the sailor. The sailor listened, his features registering nothing. He shook his head once. Billy answered, “Nothing astonishes them anymore.”

  When they returned to the black stone on the beach, Billy looked to the boat out in the water. They’d have to leave the next day if the sea continued to retreat; he didn’t want to chance the boat sinking into the sand. While Billy gathered wood for a fire, Lauren walked up the path that led to the old house. The wind had died and in her approach she caught the house standing very still, none of the doors moving, none of the dead blue shrubbery stirring. No sign of a human life was to be seen, and in the open doorway, when Lauren called out, no one answered.

  Twilight swirled before her as she moved first through the lower level and then upstairs, where she found the bedrooms and a tiny sitting room. There was one large bed in one bedroom and two tiny beds in another bedroom, and a third small bed in the sitting room. She recognized the view from one of the windows. From another window she could see the large black stone where Billy had a fire burning on the beach. She recognized the hallways from certain vantage points. For a while, perhaps half an hour, she sat in the small room on the third tiny bed and thought how appropriate it would be to find the bottle here, to walk out the door and see it there at her feet, or catch the glint of it on the beach. She thought how appropriate it would be to open a cupboard in the kitchen and find the bottle looking at her, or to see it on the windowsill of this very room. That
she should rediscover Jules where Michel had been a child seemed ludicrously perfect, and she sat studying the room carefully, to make sure she was missing nothing.

  The old man was standing at the base of the path when she exited the house; he’d been watching the front door expectantly. She was unsure how long he’d stood there, or how long he’d refrained from calling her. They slept on the beach. They woke in the morning to scores of sailors pushing the boats toward the water. The tide was now farther out than the previous evening, and Billy’s own boat appeared to be tottering precariously, scraping the ocean bottom. Better go, he said to her, and the two of them gathered up their food and started for the boat, the voices of the sailors and fishermen rising around them as they exhorted each other to pull faster and push harder. When she was submerged to her knees, Lauren glanced back over her shoulder at the old house in the distance and it occurred to her, maddeningly, that she had neglected to check the date that was carved in the wall over the bed. She wasn’t convinced it meant anything but Michel had thought so, and now she thought to herself, When I see him again and tell him I have found the very house, he’ll want to know the date. I won’t be able to tell him because I was so busy thinking of the bottle.

  As Billy had predicted, they were off the northern coast of Spain within three days. He was stunned to find the beach of San Sebastian stretching far from the city’s edge; the sand was covered with townspeople walking up and down in a daze. Lauren and the old man got food in San Sebastian and sailed on. The sea was calm all the way down the coast of Portugal, and the beaches grew larger and larger until, suddenly, one afternoon past Lisbon, the two found themselves face to face with a new range of cliffs that Billy had never seen. He sat at the front of the boat on an old empty wine crate, the palms of his hands flat on his knees, gazing at everything around him in wonder. After a long, long lifetime of navigating these coasts, everything had become strange. It didn’t seem quite fair that after struggling against the regressions of old age, everything should now conspire to cheat him of the things he knew well, and upon which he’d come to count. Along the cliffs of Portugal were a row of bells, suspended in erected wooden squares that could be seen framing the sky in a series of blue windows. Within the windows, surrounding the bells, were round iron cages where wild cats were kept and fed by the peasants nearby; when the cats tore at the cages attempting to escape, as they did constantly, the bells rang and could be heard from a far distance. In this way boats would not sail into the new cliffs at night, or in the fog. Though deaf to the bells by this time, the cats were no less sensitive to the thundering rhythms. When Lauren and Billy sailed by, the cats turned to her as they had always done; the sight of her on deck was enough to strike them motionless; it wasn’t even necessary that they hear her calling them, it wasn’t necessary that she attempt to call them. She sailed past standing silently on deck. The cats held themselves to their cages watching the woman on the passing boat; and for kilometers around, the people noticed the bells had stopped ringing.

  One morning she woke to a shadow across her eyes. Then she saw it, glowing and hot-blue, a towering rock that shone like a huge looking glass in the sea. Sitting on the deck of the boat, she caught the reflection of her yellow hair off one of the jagged peaks; and she could see him sitting, as he always did, on the empty crate staring straight before him, the palms of his hands on his knees. What is it? she said, and turned when the massive mirror flooded her eyes with a flash of sunlight. He didn’t move at all, or answer, not stirring from the box or moving his fingers or his legs; and when she asked again, it seemed like several moments before he said, Gibraltar. She lifted her head to the rock again; she could see the heat wriggling skyward from the surface. Billy turned and pointed the other direction. Africa, he said, to the far coast. Farther south is Casablanca. This direction is Algiers.

  And Italy? she said, and when he pointed across the Mediterranean, she slid into something like despair, because she knew her quest had nearly run its course.

  They drifted eastward along the northern Moroccan coast; Gibraltar dropped far behind them, a huge cave into which the sea and sky disappeared. The wild groves of Africa streamed by, and at dusk the dunes trembled and young brown men emerged from beneath, shaking the sand from their shoulders and running along shore, waving to her. At night pinpoint lights glimmered deep within the trees.

  They drifted this way several days, never exceeding the current, altering the natural course only when the water became dangerously shallow. As with the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal, the beaches of Africa had grown enormously, to the best of Billy’s recollection; he hadn’t sailed these waters in a lot of years. They docked in Algiers for food, then set sail for Sicily. Heat intensified; food spoiled quickly. The old man’s watches from the crate grew longer and more still.

  They had been at sea nearly three weeks, and were half a day out of Tunis, when they saw the boats on the far edge of the water, a series of dots moving south: Scandinavian yachts and large Dutch houseboats, ancient Arab dhows and Indian baghlas, Chinese junks and Somalian sambuks. As Lauren and Billy approached, the activity on board the vessels became more apparent; varying in size and crew, all vessels were intent on a like destination, and it wasn’t long before the new boat seemed to fall into place. Each boat was carrying a different cargo: fruits and vegetables, carpets and chests, tusks and skins, guns and daggers, opium and cannabis, figurines and miniatures and statues and art objects. Some carried livestock—chickens and pigs—and one transported a white horse, still and magnificent in the sun, its gaze fixed on some point along the horizon. There was a boat carrying three black female nudes, statuesque and gleaming; they were bound at their wrists, bright gold rings shone from their ankles, and they stood facing Lauren and staring at her hands. She put her arms behind her back. For as far as she could see, both before her and behind her, the line of boats glittered various colors in the afternoon, gliding soundlessly to Tunis.

  By early evening the city could be seen on the coast; she could make out the strange round spires and a thundering black human flow between the buildings. On the beaches stood erect huge sails of blue and gold, hovering over the white sand as though to navigate the entire city south; there was the rustling and hubbub of carts on the docks, to which the sea rushed on collision course. Domes of silver and shaded glass shimmered in the twilight, and houses perched precariously on poles, as though impaled above the other rooftops. The people in the streets rushed to the sight of the boats, but no one waved or cried to the marketeers; they watched in silence, without expression. The boats surfaced like a caravan from the ocean bottom, with their agents and brigands, merchants and dark priests in robes and tunics, cloaks and headdresses and jewelry. The entire city went quiet. As dark fell the lights of the city shifted in color, first in orchestration and then individually, chaotically, popping and bubbling in different hues: the whole of Tunis seemed to be exploding in concise, hushed detonations. The black flow of the avenues stopped, all the faces turned seaward.

  That the boats, as Lauren and Billy had been doing since passing the last Portuguese latitude, were moving with a natural current seemed to alter Lauren’s own rhythms and intoxicate her; the sea itself seemed to be funneling into Tunis—not the center of town but just beyond, around the corner of Africa, on the edge of the Carthage rubble. Her sense of failure left her—all the failure that the years compounded as the boats wound and rushed along, like the nights and days that had brought her this far. She found herself languishing on the deck of the boat and given to its unshakable passage, watching the three women on the other boat who studied her in return, never moving, never struggling. The channel of water became so narrow as to barely accommodate the hulls; the ruins of the ancient ghetto loomed, a huge sunken harbor in the distance and walls and pillars buried and blackened by the Punic Wars. Doorways were filled with earth and the halls were rivers lined by the hardened stone galleries in which Phoenician marshals once sat. As the boats descended further
, the ceiling of the city rose above her until it was far from view; at times she could catch in the light of the torches the last remnants of the gold-leaf frescoes that overlooked the stairways; sometimes, in the light of the torches, she could see the rotted statuary in the palace corners. Brown faces darted among the black windows and archways. Echoing from some unseen hall Lauren heard a fugue of flutes, ominous and looping, so ceaseless she couldn’t be sure if the continuing somersaults of sound were a melody or in her own mind. Occasionally in the dark she caught the glimpses of a lurid red and heard sharp cries from beyond each turn in the waterway, which itself rumbled forward with greater speed.

  The music looped through her mind, the glint of the gold rings around the ankles of the nudes on the boat before her flickered across her eyes, the glow of the torches and the lapping of the water and the rippling heat of the moment captured her, and she stared ahead through a series of arches, one within the other, arch within arch, perfectly in line, continually multiplying as the boats sailed on. She thought of her child and began to cry. She dreamed of Michel: he was in motion too, and surrounded by the whisper of small spiraling voices.

  He was somewhere in France. He heard them call his name. Michel, said one. Adrien, said the other.

  He froze, listening to the patterned thud of his heart. He blinked in the dark and waited: the train was frightening in its rush. Just when he decided he was hearing only the echoes of a dream, he heard them again.