Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  Michel, Adrien, they said, and he sat straight up in the dark, his back to the window. They began whispering to him, and he realized they were in the very next compartment. Sometimes they laughed. Little brother, they whispered, in unison through the wall, are you listening?

  Michel did not answer. He’s not answering, said one. He’s asleep, said the other.

  He’s not asleep, he’s just not—

  Little brother, are you asleep?

  Michel looked over to the doorway, and for one reason or another wasn’t at all surprised to see his uncle standing there.

  Jack Sarasan was bracing himself against the rattling of the tracks beneath his feet. Michel sat waiting for some sort of explanation, only to realize his uncle was waiting too. Instinctively Michel understood. He cleared his throat. He blinked at his uncle once, the verses flashed through his head—and with the first word on his lips he tried to begin. He couldn’t say it. It caught not in his throat but rather on his tongue, entangled, building in pressure until it felt like it would blow up in his face. His uncle continued waiting, leaning in the doorway; and when Michel forced the word in a long clattering stammer, a cacophony of sound, more sound and sputtering, Jack’s face became contorted and purple. He stepped forward, raised his arm, and brought his hand crashing across Michel’s mouth.

  Michel shook himself and woke.

  He looked at the compartment doorway, empty, the door sliding back and forth in its slot with the rhythm of the train. He listened for the sound of voices in the next compartment and heard none. It was early evening outside the window; the train was stopped in an unknown village. Carl’s seat was empty, though his coat and newspaper remained. Two other passengers were in the cabin with him—a man in his mid-fifties, somewhat stout and staid, dressed like a banker; and, presumably, his daughter, appearing no more than twelve or thirteen years old, in a hot pink dress with little gold buttons shaped like tiny menagerie creatures, and a hot pink bow in her blond hair.

  Soon they were traveling through the woods, and the foliage was thick and the dark glistening color of the cold sea.

  Michel watched out the window, his face turned from the other passengers, so they could see only in the reflection of the window and the light over the trees that his face was damp. He wanted to say something to himself to prove he didn’t stutter. He might have said something to his traveling companions, asked the time perhaps, but the prospect of failing was too humiliating to risk. Now he remembered quite clearly his first truly incandescent memory since he’d met Lauren, and that was of talking to himself as a child. He talked to himself in his room, walking in circles, and on the stairs to his aunt’s and uncle’s house, and on the way to and from school, and in the back of the limousine. When he talked to himself he was fully aware that it looked foolish to others, but this was the trade-off: that he never stuttered, that in conversation with himself he was always eloquent and lucid, articulate and impressive in ways he never was in dialogue with anyone else. So now Michel understood that when he forgot who he was that morning in Paris he forgot how to stutter, and now he sat in his seat terrified to make a sound, verbally paralyzed, struck dumb. He struggled to take hold of himself. I cannot have come to this, he thought: I’ve taken so many chances already, I have to take one more. He made himself turn to the banker and his daughter to ask the hour, but they were gone.

  He got up from his seat and stepped into the aisle. No one was to be seen. The father’s and daughter’s luggage was still in the rack. Michel walked up the aisle and back down, looking for somebody to ask the time, but he saw no one. He was confused. Before the last stop, the train had been full of people. Now he returned to his seat and waited. Through the window the woods went on and on, and though the sun was gone completely the sky was still a grainy blue. Michel leaned back into the seat, afraid to sleep again.

  Finally Carl returned with bread, yogurt and pudding. Michel watched him as he sat down. When Carl began to say something Michel leaned forward and raised his hand. What is it? said Carl. Michel opened his mouth and watched Carl as though waiting to hear what he should say. Are you all right? said Carl.

  Michel said, “I don’t know.” He stopped, listening to himself. “Do I sound all right?”

  “You look a little off, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Do I sound all right?”

  “You sound all right to me.”

  Michel eased back very slowly. He was still listening, though the cabin was silent.

  “We have other passengers?” said Carl, looking at the luggage.

  “Father and daughter.”

  “Too bad. We had the cabin to ourselves for a while, when you were asleep. A lot of people had gotten off.”

  “Where are we now?”

  “Not far from the coast. Last stop was Wyndeaux. I’ve been talking to some people on the train. I met several from Toulouse.”

  Michel nodded.

  “You remember,” said Carl. “Jazz capital of the world, right? According to the Christines?”

  “No jazz in Toulouse?”

  “They have never fucking heard of jazz in Toulouse.” He shook his head in disgust. “Have some yogurt.” He produced a spoon.

  Into the night the train crept south across France, through the vineyards of Bourdeaux, then to Biarritz where the train turned sharply east. There a new throng of people got aboard, so the compartment was filled by dark, the banker and the girl having returned to their seats, followed by two young Frenchmen and two very old Frenchwomen. Halfway down the coast the temperature had risen sharply. Carl was talking with the girl, who was sketching in a pad. She had full pink lips approximately the color of her dress and bow, and large round green eyes; as the cabin became warmer the girl’s eyes seemed to turn flushed, and the bow drooped slightly to brush her face. She was fascinated by Carl, who appeared too barbaric to be French but who spoke the language without the trace of a foreign influence. The five men in the cabin were watching the young girl. As the train pressed farther on and the climate became lugubriously hot, the girl’s father glanced nervously around the cabin from one man to the next. The old women noticed nothing: one of them turned off the light overhead, throwing the cabin and the faces of the passengers into fluctuations of shadow and moonlight; the other old woman got up and shut the window. Everyone looked at the closed window in disbelief. The train continued on, the night stretched longer before them; the girl’s pink bow slipped to her shoulder, the shoulder straps of her dress slipped to her arms in the heat: she turned in her sleep so that she was twisted in her seat facing Carl, the tips of her fingers barely touching her lips, her eyelids fluttering in the glimmer cast by the window. Carl looked at the girl and looked at Michel and looked at the other men, all of whom sat staring wide-eyed in the dark while the women slumbered away. Carl finally got up and opened the window. As soon as he sat back down, the old woman immediately woke and got up and shut the window. The girl slumped forward in her seat, pressed against Carl; and the father reached over and pulled the girl away, waking her with a jolt as she gazed around sleepily wondering what was going on. The men readjusted themselves uncomfortably. Michel opened the window. The old woman got up and shut it. The train smoldered.

  Finally Michel and Carl pulled themselves from the cabin and went out into the aisle of the car. Shutting the door, they stood leaning in the opened windows of the train, joining a line of men smoking cigarettes and murmuring in low voices or watching the countryside pass in the dark. Carl rested his arms in the window. The wind was relief from the heat but it was a hot wind, and as they moved farther south the night didn’t cool. After half an hour Carl said, I think I can sleep now, and stumbled back into the cabin. The aisle emptied until only Michel was left. The train came to another stop in another station; there were no great flurry of passengers getting on or off. He rested his head against the glass and thought of her, probably in Venice by now, with her husband. It was an unbearable vision. He closed his eyes to it. Now in the m
iddle of a hot and infinite night, in the middle of an undetermined and eternal territory, he felt more alone than he ever remembered with the exception of the one night he found her on the floor of her apartment and believed she was going to die. In the window of the train, with his eyes closed, he began to talk to himself and said to himself her name, over and over, to hear for himself that it sounded all right each time he said it, and that it never tripped him up, that the sound of it never defied his will to speak it.

  There was the jolt of the train starting, and Michel looked up in time to catch the sign hanging above the station’s platform as it fell away from sight. It was an old sign and its peeling green letters read WYNDEAUX.

  We left Wyndeaux hours ago, thought Michel. That was when he turned and saw them at the end of the aisle.

  They were standing behind the glass door at the end of the car, watching him in a casual, unsurprised way. He lifted his head and stared at them, even shook his head to be sure he was awake this time—at which they laughed. They looked exactly the way they always had, blond and fair and very young, and of course they were exactly identical. They wore proper blue suits, with proper blue ties, like little French children; one of them pulled at his tie to loosen his collar, as though he too was very warm. The other one waved.

  Michel started walking toward them. They laughed and ran the other way, disappearing from the door.

  Michel reached the end of the car, and was moving through the passageway to the next car when he bumped into the conductor. He peered over the conductor’s shoulder into an empty, shadowy aisle like the one he’d just left. The conductor looked at him a bit disapprovingly. Monsieur? he said, and then something else; but Michel was watching the end of the next car, for the slightest movement of something, for a light going on or off, for the last glimpse of a door closing. The conductor repeated himself, and Michel finally broke his concentration to stare at him in confusion, and then realized he was being asked to produce a ticket. The conductor studied the ticket and gave it back with an abrupt nod, noting the passenger was not in his cabin. Michel glanced once more down the aisle, then turned back for his cabin. When he got there, he found it was empty.

  They were all gone: the banker, his daughter, the old women, the young men. Carl was gone too. Perhaps I was mistaken, thought Michel. Perhaps that last stop was Toulouse, not Wyndeaux. He was disappointed that Carl didn’t say goodbye.

  As he stood there rattling to the motion of the train, the compartment doors and closed window shutters rattling with him, there was something Michel couldn’t fail to notice. Streaming into the compartment beneath the shutter of the window was a searing daylight.

  Michel stepped to the window, and raised the shutter.

  Outside the sun was shining on a passing field and the sea beyond; the light was muted and slightly opaque. The grass of the field was high and green, and off to one side Michel could see the village surrounded by what looked to be a series of high fortress walls. A rippling across the water’s surface and the bending of the grass told him there was a light wind, and a houseboat was anchored not far out.

  Then the train broke its speed and began to slow. The tracks gradually turned, revealing a curve in the terrain. As the train steadily rounded the last part of the bend, Michel saw a man and woman in the grass making love. The woman was oddly familiar, and it was only after a moment that he recognized her. She was in her mid to late twenties, still a young woman, and the man on top of her was quite a bit older, around fifty, wearing a blue and white striped sailor’s shirt even as he made love to her. For some reason Michel couldn’t decide if he looked familiar too. For some reason, two resounding, ineluctable ideas occurred to Michel as he was watching this. The first was that he was witnessing the twins’ conception. The second was that he was witnessing his own. There was no way, particularly in this moment of astonishment and shock, that he could reconcile these two ideas: he knew his logic had to choose between them. This was after all not some once-buried but now uncovered memory to question and ponder, since either way this was nothing he could ever have actually witnessed before. He understood it was something else, and he slammed down the shutter of the window.

  Irrationally, all Michel could think was, I must be in the wrong cabin. He stumbled back into the aisle and went to the next compartment. Once again, he found only empty seats, empty racks above. Once again, there was beneath the rattling shutter the light of day. He stood there with the glare sputtering at him from outside the train; and then in one quick motion he stepped across the floor to the window and yanked the shutter up. On the glass was the print of a small hand. Beyond the outline of the hand was the beach. The sea. A house on a cliff overlooking the cove, and his mother now standing at the foot of a path that led to the shore. In the sand was a pit. In the pit lay the bodies of the twins; they were not bloodied in any way, or marked by violence, but their eyes and mouths were wide open and their faces were blue and lifeless. They lay in disheveled configurations along the edge of the hole, and from far down the shore Michel watched a large, almost perfectly round black stone roll forward. It continued moving steadily along the water until it reached the pit, where it fit perfectly into place covering the bodies.

  Michel ran from the window. The train was once again stopped; only when it once again started did Michel realize he hadn’t felt the motion beneath him. Steam rose from the floor, the train pulled from the station, and as the nocturnal flow of the countryside rolled past Michel could now see, looking out the window of the aisle into the night, not a single other face peering from the cars either before him or behind him, the windows forming a checkered stream of gold boxes with no sight of another human being. Far off down the tracks the engine vanished in a silver huff. Michel began running down the dimly lit corridors looking for someone. Every compartment was empty. The same dazzling light from beneath the shutters of every compartment window blurted across the opposite walls. He ran to the next car, and the one after, looking for one cabin window in which was not trapped the daylight. He realized, instead, that he was the one trapped—on a train where the deepest night was on one side and the brightest day was on the other, from which unconscious, unrecalled scenes of his past gasped into each compartment. At the last car he ran into the conductor; he half expected the man to dissolve when he touched him. The conductor stared at him unmoved. Monsieur, said Michel, struggling to catch his breath, not really believing he would get an answer, Where are we? We are in France, monsieur, said the conductor. Yes, I know, said Michel, but that last stop, what was that? That was Wyndeaux, monsieur, said the conductor. Still trying to breathe, Michel managed to say, How many times, monsieur, do we have to leave Wyndeaux? The conductor tried to draw him to the window. You need air, monsieur, said the conductor. But Michel wasn’t listening to him. Michel was listening to something else, coming not from any one compartment, or the end of the aisle, or the next car. It was coming from outside the train, just beyond the closed windows. It was a furious tapping on the glass, and their high frantic little voices calling to him to come and open the shutters. Michel looked all around, and when he turned back the conductor was gone, without a sign he had been there, without a sign of his departure. No other motion stirred the train, no other soul indicated a presence. So Michel ran on, weaving among the narrow walls, from compartment to compartment and car to car.

  One morning she woke to a shadow across her eyes. Then when she saw him, he was sitting as he always sat, hands at rest on his legs, gazing straight ahead. She blinked and saw that everything was on a slant. It was indicative of how deeply she had slept that it took her several moments to look around and realize the sea had abandoned them, and was now two or three hundred meters in the distance. The boat was run aground in the wet sand. In the other direction were the morning hills. They did not look like Tunisia. Lauren put her hands to Bateau Billy’s face, and called to him, and saw his open eyes and open mouth were not going to answer. She pulled away when he began to topple from the win
e crate. Oh, Billy, she just said.

  Because it was so hot, she didn’t have much time. She had nothing with which to dig but her fingers. The sand was wet enough that she could dig a deep hole in the course of an hour. She was parched and famished. When she dragged him from the boat, the sand got in his white hair and all over his old face; she shut his eyes but could not close his mouth, it was too late, and so sand got in his mouth. She tried to clean him a bit, but she had nothing to wrap him in; and there was no time, not for him, maybe not for her. So she rolled him into the hole and then moved back the sand she had displaced; and hoped the Mediterranean would return someday to cover him.

  It was three weeks to the day since they had sailed from Paris. Now she walked to the sea. She took off her dress and held it tight as the waves came and cooled her. In her mind she said goodbye to her child. She walked back from the sea naked and continued awhile before pulling the dress on over her head. Planes roared by; she realized how long it had been since she’d seen a plane. These were headed her direction. They passed the Sicilian shore and turned south, where the horizon was always engulfed in smoke.

  Jason had waited the winter. He hadn’t planned on being in Venice this long; he had expected his wife to join him when she reached the continent, and from there they would travel together south. They would spend Christmas in Naples, and they would move to Rome and then to Florence as the winter waned. They would capitalize on the delay of the race; this would give them time together after the separation and Lauren’s surgery in Los Angeles. At first Jason anticipated all this with only mild enthusiasm. He felt as he had often felt before, which was constrained, immediately less free. This feeling meant even more than in the past, because Jason had finally realized he was over thirty years old and that certain things had to slip away: the girls he had in Italy suddenly seemed very young. He came face to face with the fact that he was never going to win a medal in the Olympics. His peak had come three years earlier, when he raced in the Tour de France and was the only American in history to place as high as second, beating even the favored Soviet rider.