They found themselves under a train one day, one morning. I found them there. I found most of them sleeping, huddled against their backpacks, or curled unto themselves beneath the caboose, and when they awoke, no one among them could tell the other where they were. All they knew for certain were the details of every place they had been, with only a vague recollection of the places from which they'd come.
There were five of them, each one in the same ordinary clothes as the next, each one bearing the same irreconcilable difference between what they had brought with them and the things they remembered.
“Who are you?”
“Is it morning?”
“Where am I?”
“Who is this?”
“Who are you?”
No one's eyes blended well with the moisture in the air that immersed everyone in the smell of corn fields and gasoline. They all sat or lay beneath the caboose of a stationed train, with corn fields to both sides and endless tracks in two directions. The morning had dawned, the sky broke, and sunlight peered over the mountains like the eyes of a curious girl.
“Who are you?”
“Why do you have to know?”
“Were all of you here last night?”
“I came here to get out of the rain.”
“I came here with her.”
Between them there was nothing to share, but in light of the awakening day around them, so much had already been said. The wind streaking through the open fields had awakened the soil with a last vestige of power. The wind spun in whistling circles high above the train. Crumbling rocks echoed across the height of the mountains, and pebbles lying across the train tracks shuffled, rolled and stumbled into other pebbles, resounding through the fields like taps on a door.
“So?”
“So.”
“So someone say something.”
“Don't look at me, I don't have to.”
“And I'm not saying a thing until all of you show me what's in your bags.”
“Why don't you start, then?”
“I don't have to.”
“Then neither does anyone else.”
“Then I'll start.”
Karina Lavi was the first to say anything relevant, and so she told them all that she'd been running away, and that she hadn't seen her mother in more than three weeks. The last she saw of her, the old woman had lit a match over a stove and burned her eyes. Karina saw it all from outside the kitchen window, and though she screamed and shouted for someone to help her break into her mother's house and put out the fire, by the time Karina had broken the glass and climbed inside, her mother's body was a charred fig, an unrecognizable remain that bore no resemblance to the old woman with wide eyes that Karina had come to refer to with the affectionate moniker, my unholy barnacle, that not only defined how much the old woman held on to her children, but also attested to how much she had let go of the rest of the world.
“And I've been walking ever since,” said Karina, “in circles, in lines, and all kinds of ways, just away, as far as I could get.”
No one said a thing. They were all quiet. The others around Karina had listened and turned their eyes to the open fields. They sat beneath the caboose, with ample space to walk out from beneath the train into the fields around them. But no one moved, as the caboose wheels encaged them in a wall of silence.
In a distant field, a herd of cows roamed behind a circle of fences, aimless. From the train, the five saw the cows' grazing tails and bobbing heads, inhaling the animal patience that exuded from across the remote divide like the permeating fume of a candle.
“It smells like manure.”
“I don't smell a thing.”
“I'm sorry about your mother.”
“Thanks,” said Karina.
“I smell it, too, but it's not manure.”
The railroad tracks ran in opposing directions for miles. A string of power lines ran alongside the tracks, and it was anyone's guess where they met, at either a lit sign or a power station, at a street light or a lamp. It could have been anywhere. The gravel strewn across the tracks accompanied the metal rails in both directions.
“It's hot,” said Karina.
“It's cool.”
“It's windy.”
“We're under a train and I don't feel a thing.”
“We're under the caboose and we shouldn't feel a thing.”
Karina turned to the last of them, the one beside her, as they all sat in a circle that began at the sight of Karina's hands and ended at the sight of a backpack beside a man with bags under his eyes. Karina pointed to the man's backpack.
“Is that a bottle of wine?” she said.
“A broken one,” he said.
“Why did you bring it with you?”
“Why not?” he said. “I've needed it, I've been needing it,” and after he pushed the bottle neck inside his bag, he told her why. Insalah Moore told them all that he'd been attempting to sleep for five nights, but in every effort to close his eyes, he couldn't keep them shut. Every night had passed as the previous night had, with his lying on his back, his eyes straining, his sight hazing, and a pain above his eyebrows that sunk into the depth of his mind. He hadn't been able to stop thinking for five nights. The first night he lied awake in his bed, the second on the steps of his porch, the third restless night in the backseat of his car in a parking lot of truckers, the fourth in the bathroom of a public school, and, on the fifth night, he attempted to sleep at the very freight train beneath which they all found themselves, a train that had seemingly been abandoned between stops, but which, on that morning, had alarmed Insalah and everyone else with the whistling wind beneath it.
“And I'm certain,” he said, “I know it, it couldn't have been any other way, I had to have been the last one here last night.”
“I don't think you were.”
“It certainly wasn't me.”
“It could have been any of us,” said Karina.
“It couldn't have been us.”
It was quiet. The world turned with the sprinkling effects of solitude, the shivering fields and dawning sun awakening the birds. Everything they could have said as to who was first and last, they already had. The five sat in a circle, Insalah and Karina beside each other like a pair of unwilling bulls in a herd. Karina closed her eyes and scratched her lips. Insalah turned his head, faced the corn fields beside the train, and scratched his throat.
“Five days?”
“And you haven't slept in all that time?”
“No,” said Insalah, still looking away.
“Did you quit trying after a while?”
“How does it feel?”
“I tried hard to sleep,” he said, turning to everyone and leaning into them. “I tried everything, and it doesn't feel good.”
Insalah turned to the corn fields. The cows had vanished from anyone’s view. The winding trail in the mountains had disappeared beneath the piercing shine of the sun, and there was no wind.
“I'm sorry about your sleep.”
“That's fine,” said Insalah.
“Your eyes must be in pain.”
“They hurt.”
“You've seen a lot of the night, haven't you?”
“In every way,” he said, “under every conceivable shade and, in this past week, in all kinds of weather.”
Insalah stared at the woman ahead of him. Her nose, her eyes, and the roots of her hair all emitted a thick shade of cream, engrossing her in pallor so indistinguishable from white that, had it not rained the previous night, it would have made it difficult not to call her a ghost. “There are five reasons we’re all here,” he said, “but only one is yours.”
The woman nodded and lowered her eyes. Her name was Respita May, and she told Insalah what she had only shared otherwise with a written diary. Respita May had always been mindful of the night sky since she was twelve years old, making sure to fall asleep before the sun set. There was something in the monthly cycle and its degradation of the moon that she believed would bring the end of the world, every twenty-eight days, often every twenty-nine, and, at the end of each cycle, she anticipated a cosmic eruption to awaken her and mark the last of history's unfortunate occurrences, and though it had never occurred, she spent every night looking for a new place to hide without so much as catching one last glimpse of the moon before she fell asleep.
“And I've never slept under a train before,” she said.
“Neither have I,” said Insalah.
“A first then?”
“A first for us both,”
She turned away, and he did, too, smiling.
There were corn stalks to each side of the caboose, lined for miles in every direction, growing, standing, swaying to the dawning day, and at the edge of the field, the gravel path of pebbles and rocks marred the end of an insurmountable kind of vegetation.
“It's someone's farm,” said Insalah.
“It can’t be, it has no fence,” said Respita.
“The field is wild,” said Karina, “growing everywhere, and it can’t belong to anyone.”
“And it probably doesn't.”
Karina turned to the circle. She peered at everyone and stopped her gaze at the only two who hadn't said a word more but to concur at the sight of the corn fields or disagree at the smell of manure in the air. “And you?” she said. “What can we make of you two?”
Doctors Kai Pomono and Lila Gole turned to each other and then looked down at their bags. Lila took her bag in her arms and opened it. She showed it to everyone else and took out a plastic bag of raisins, offered some to everyone but they all declined. Even Kai waved his arms in a gesture of refusal, as he'd already begun to tell everyone the story of how long he and Lila had been on the road. The doctors had left a clinic in the mountains that aimed to treat and restrain only the most extreme cases of leprosy, and they'd been traveling through the mountains for seventeen days when, to their surprise, it had started to rain. Fortunately, they had arrived onto plain land. They had first, however, arrived at a station, but, as all its doors were locked and windows shut, they hurried along the tracks towards the shadow of a stationed train they discerned despite the growing rain. They arrived at the train, collapsed beneath the caboose, and fell asleep, all in a single motion from the bout of a tired mind and a breathless scamper across the gravel path. They carried a pouch of syringes, a case of penicillin vials, and a backpack of spare gloves, socks and towels. Lila carried enough water for them both, and Kai, in a plastic bag tied to the end of his backpack, carried a token of his abandoned profession, his bloodied and discarded frocks.
“And there’s only so much we could bear,” said Kai.
“And now we're going home,” said Lila, “going back home, back to Landing.”
2.
It had rained the night before and pools of water lay amassed beneath the caboose and around everyone's feet. Scattered puddles lay around the train. Bits of mud sat on either side of the railroad tracks, and most everyone's clothes were covered in trickles of it.
Karina sat unscathed by the weather, her shoulders clean and her legs dry. Her bags had not dampened with the previous night’s rainstorm, but her hands hung moist from a night’s bout of sweat. She had tossed several times in her sleep. All night her hands had lain cupped beneath her face, collecting perspiration from her brow. Sweat had also soaked into her socks, where her shoes bore the additional misfortune of mud. Her shoelaces hung covered in trickles of it, and the bottom of her shoes were engrained with pebbles and bits of trash from the blowing wind.
Beside her lay the bags she’d brought, every one of them half covered in rocks. The other four people sat around her. Their eyes roamed and no one spoke. The air hung quiet until Karina pointed out what everyone had already known.
“So we’re all here,” she said.
“Everyone,” said Lila.
“Awake and in between long walks home,” said Kai.
“I’m not going home,” said Insalah.
The air hung quiet. Insalah looked around at everyone’s bags, while Respita glanced at everyone’s hands. The doctors, however, had eyes for only each other. Kai reached for Lila’s bare shoulders, and Lila, in turn, grazed the top of his hands before turning away. She looked to Karina and opened her eyes wide
.
“So are you going home?” she said.
“No,” said Karina. “Landing has been the farthest thing from my mind since I walked across the county line.”
“And how long ago was that?” said Kai.
“A few days,” said Karina.
“And you walked the whole way?” said Kai.
“I camped along it and hiked straight through some nights,” said Karina.
She reached for her backpack and opened it. She removed a stick of cream from it and painted her lips in a soothing ointment that glossed the ends of her lips in a light shade of beige. She placed the cream back into her bag.
“We’re off as soon as we can go,” said Kai.
“It’s the same for everyone,” said Karina.
“I’m sure.”
“I’m in no hurry,” said Karina.
Kai unhooked his watch and slipped off his ring. He stuffed both into his shirt pocket and rolled up his sleeves. When he leaned back on the gravel, his elbows bore into the rocks. They shuffled beneath him as he breathed. His exhalations echoed off the axles beneath the train. The cold steel of the wheels and bottom of the train hung covered in a layer of morning dew. Occasional drops of water spilled onto the ground, making puddles across the rocks. Drops of water fell onto everyone’s hair, too, and some of them shook their faces or ran their ringers through their hair to stay dry.
As everyone did something to keep themselves clean, Respita's silence went unnoticed. She had moved away from the circle and dragged her bags to the side of a wheel. She sat there moving only her eyes, as she gazed across the bottom of the train and said nothing. The collar of her shirt fluttered in the frequent breeze, as did her sleeves and the ends of her pants. Her eyes turned to each person when they spoke as they spoke. But no one returned her stares. They just went on talking. Words rolled off each person’s tongue and spun in the air like birds.
“My legs are soaked,” said Lila.
“The rain that came might come again, and I don’t want to be here for it,” said Kai.
“We won’t be,” said Lila.
Had it not been for the commotion Respita made in rising, no one would have noticed her leave. Everyone, though, turned to her as she began to shuffle across the gravel. She crawled to the side of the train and pushed more than a dozen stones aside. The tapping rocks echoed in the moist air and filled it with the kind of frailty typical of monumental occurrences that come and go with everyone watching. She inched to the side of the train. The sunlight that met her there when she arrived drowned her fingers in heat.
“Let’s not get stuck here,” said Karina.
“No one intends to,” said Kai.
“No one,” said Lila.
Respita rose to her feet. She stood beside the caboose with sunlight covering her face. The darkness beneath the caboose had given her hair the impression of a dark orange hue, but in the morning sun, her lavish hair hung from her like a red table cloth. She rested her hands on her hips and peered across the corn field, standing with the pose of a dignitary. The train behind her gleamed in the morning sun. Her eyes shone.
An encampment of aimless cows stood hundreds of yards into the corn field. Green fences marked its borders and yellow hay covered its grounds. The morning sun drowned the grounds of the grazing fields in yellow, and the bright air surrounded it in a fogged halo. The fences stood as tall as the corn stalks, and gray wires connected them like the framed barrier of a playground.
“Do you have anything to drink?” said Karina.
“No, I have no bottles of water left and very little wine,” said Insalah.
“What’s in the bag then?”
“Just rolls of maps.”
A bout of silence fell over the train. The corn stalks rustled in the breeze and the cycling winds whistled as they circled the train. The sounds of the cow bells rose and fell in waves, but after a while, they grew faint and altogether mute.
Respita stood at the edge of the corn field and swept her pants clean, shaking each leg in turn. She brushed speckles of mud off the hemming. Flies hovered above her and streaks of mud covered parts of her face, beneath her eyes and beside her lips. Her complexion shone in the sun, but shadows from the swaying corn stalks covered her arms after she crouched and sat on the gravel.
The certainty of a sunrise was that the moon hung perched in the west while the sun rose over the other side of the world. And so Respita faced the east end of the horizon. The sun crept over the mountains with the laggard pace of snail. It covered the sky in a growing sea of light and would soon immerse the world in day. Until that time, Respita watched the eastern skies, if for no other reason than her own unmentionable fear of the moon.
In the growing sun, her face emanated the facade of a scratched window. An array of scars and small scabs covered everything, including her cheeks and lips, and each cut bore into her skin with the length of a staple. The scratches buried impressions of blood everywhere, at the bridge of her nose, beside her lips, beneath the sunken spaces of her eyes and beside her ears. Every last scar and scab resembled the uneven pattern of embedded gum on a paved road, every last one a product of an adolescent habit she never interrupted.
Respita carried the burden of her disrupted appearance with sunken eyes, and with a resignation evident in the silence that bore over the sky whenever she collected a puddle of rain in her hands or looked into a glass pane. On any given night, once Respita started scratching, a strong probability hung over the air that she wouldn’t stop. It loomed in her eyes as an unfortunate burden, and she had carried it every single day since she was twelve years old. Many along the way had attempted to make her stop, everyone, in fact, either by stating in no uncertain terms that her fear of the moon was unreasonable or by restraining her so that she couldn't move her hands. None of it helped. Once, when Respita was twenty-three and she had stayed awake past the sunset, one of her lovers had gone to insufferable lengths to dissuade her from scratching her face by holding up a papier-mâché replica of the sun over the bed. It worked for a while, but, by night’s end, Respita had not closed her eyes and had insisted on insulting her lover’s good intention with a verbal display of rejection.
“I see the moon through the window behind you,” she told him, “so if you want to do it right, be a man and close the shades.” When he did, he still had to restrain her as he lay next to her in bed to keep her from scratching away at her face. They lay that night for over an hour, trying to sleep as they whispered into each other's faces. He held her arms down with a strong embrace. Meanwhile, she lay awake with her eyes open, looking at him, wondering why he didn't open his.
“Just shut up and go to bed,” he said.
“Open your eyes, I'm not tired,” said Respita.
“Why?”
“I don't want to be the only one awake.”
“I'm awake.”
“Then open your eyes.” He did. He looked at her and wondered openly how ridiculous he thought her hands were.
“Why can't you break the habit?” he said. “You're going to ruin your face.”
“It's my face, so stay out of it.”
“Go to bed, then.”
“No, wait.”
“Go to bed.”
They lay awake looking at each other without a spoken word. Except for the blinds that fluttered with the breeze, the bedroom was quiet. The lamps did not budge on their tables and the floorboards did not creak. The passing cars on the road left no trace of wind, and the house windows did not thump. Several minutes passed before Respita even shifted in bed, and all she did was turn in his arms to face the wall beside the bed.
“If you want to know,” she said, “stay awake and listen.”
Respita told him everything. She told the man beside her, the man she would see twice more, of her growing fits of impatience as a girl, of how she scratched with little intention. Respita told him about a humid night in July when she was twelve, when she'd suffered a bout of nerves from which she never recovered. She’d been in Landing then, in her mother's house, in a bedroom on the second floor that was nearest to the stairwell, and so she was accustomed to hearing all kinds of sounds from the steps despite the fact that no one walked across them at night.
On the night the habit began, there’d been an uncomfortable wind blowing heat into her bedroom. Respita had been up for most of the night drawing on her bedroom walls, and, as she sketched the spurred boots of a cowgirl at the bottom of the wall, she felt the trickling warmth of water on her eyes. She wiped it. More dripped onto her eyelids and she wiped that. The frequency of the dripping water grew and left the anticipation of an anxious itch across her face, and so she scratched her eyes and nose until she looked to the ceiling and saw a patch of gray on one of the tiles, from which a pool of water spilled in dripping bits onto her face. Respita sneezed. The power of it sent shivers to the back of her head, filling her scalp, ears and throat with an itch that spread to her quelling eyes.
She rose and walked across to the window. In her confusion, she stumbled across a pair of shoes and a pile of shirts on the rug, recovering her balance at the wall where a glass of water stood on the windowsill. She poured some of the water in her hands and doused her face in it. She looked through the window and saw her pale reflection in the glass against the sight of the moon behind the window. Respita mistook some of the holes on the moon for stains of gray water on her face, and so she scratched her complexion in her attempts to rid them. She mistook craters on the moon for dried blotches of misty gray, the edge of the moon for lines of dripping dust on her face, and Respita scratched her cheeks with the unrestrained rage of the disoriented child that she was, her nails unceasing until she lay tucked away in bed that night with a blanket over her eyes.
_______
Juan Carlos Reyes is a Contributing Writer to Tertulia Magazine. He has been nominated for a Push Cart Award and was a PEN USA Fellow in 2007
Copyright © 2007 by Tertulia Magazine. All rights reserved. The articles, documents, and information on this web site are copyrighted materials of Tertulia Magazine and its writers and artists.
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