by Norman Lock
Nor have I ever seen the impresario. He communicates with me by telegraph, which I can operate and whose language—telegraphy—I understand. Somehow understand, just as I do the many languages in which the telegrams are composed by the impresario, or impresarios; there may be more than one, which would account for the polyglot transmissions: Hungarian, Hebrew, Greek, English, French, German, Italian, Armenian—even ancient and dead languages such as Sanskrit, Phoenician, and Ge’ez. It amazes me how, after a momentary incomprehension, while the receiving key clicks in dots and dashes a communiqué from the last car, suddenly—like a black sky riven by lightning—I understand!
I sit in the chair and take down the impresario’s thoughts. They arrive perfectly articulated and composed in logical paragraphs. When the key falls silent, I roll on the chair’s oiled castors to the small desk with its typewriter and reproduce the impresario’s dictation. In spite of lacking a thumb, my typewriting is infallible. Finished, I proofread the text, enclose it in a manila envelope, then toss it out the window onto the right-of-way. I have no idea whether it is ever found, or read, or set in type and printed. What use the story—the history—of our performances may serve for readers in towns through which we have already passed and to which we will never return—I long ago ceased to speculate. For we never go back, unless it is to hunt for a way forward after having arrived at an impasse. I am ill-suited for my work, yet I manage it well enough and, except for an arthritic condition of my nine remaining fingers, no longer am incommoded by it.
I never leave the caboose or the locomotive’s cab. Not now. There is no point. All that concerns me arrives by telegraph, by dots and dashes.
2.
The engineer does not remember a time when he was not an engineer, although there may have been other locomotives in his past besides this one. I seem always, he says, to have been sitting or standing in a cab begrimed with coal dust and ringing with the tumult of history. He wanted to participate in history—this, he recalls as a man does with fondness a boyhood memory, of speckled fish, say, drowsing beneath the scarcely troubled surface of a brook.
“How better to participate in history than to drive an engine through it?” he tells me while we are eating Spanish sardines. “Yet I have seen nothing clearly through the windows, as the train rushes forward or sometimes backward. It is the same when recollecting the body of a lover—all a blur no matter how determined one was in bed to observe this or that part of her.”
If ours is its engine, as the engineer claims. I myself have yet to understand how our train stands in relation to history, which appears to eddy all about us as we move within it, on axes of rusted steel, which include surprising switchbacks and spurs, none of which has been set down on any map, at least none in our possession. The train stops arbitrarily, when it does stop at all. More than once the engineer has assured me that the train is obedient to his hand and his alone, although I have seen the sweat start out from his forehead as he tried unsuccessfully to hold the throttle open, or, conversely, to apply the brake against the train’s irresistible momentum.
“And did you never walk back to the end of the train?” I ask, daubing at my mustache to rid it of fish oil.
“Never—what for?” he asks, his voice tonic with surprise.
“To see one of the performances!” I cry impatiently.
“When I was young, I may have been interested in performances,” he remarks idly while digging with a matchstick the grease from beneath his fingernails. “But no longer—and the end of the train is remote for a man with bad feet.”
“So you did see them?” I shout. I do not understand why I am so vexed.
“I seem to remember a very tall man and a bearded lady … a trained bear and a juggling act … an exhibition of naked female flesh. But I can’t be sure that it was at the end of this train where I saw them. Doubtless, I was once employed by the Orient Express: I would not picture myself wearing a fez and revolving a string of beads through my fingers otherwise. The women may have belonged to the harem of a sultan.”
I want to interrogate him further, but he falls asleep. It is his prerogative; the night is already well advanced, the moon entangled in the trees on the western ridge of the mountain. (I mean the world’s natural night, a gift to men and women, not that other.) I climb back into the caboose, leaving the engineer with his hand on the throttle. Whether he is awake or not makes no difference to our progress; the rails rest on sleepers—the tracks are laid to serve the excursions of thought itself. This is not to say that the train is metaphysical: It is real—make no mistake!—and the terrain through which it passes can be analyzed according to theorems of solid geometry. But at times, both train and landscape evade our observation; they become subject to invisible strains, rearrangements effected by unseen forces, and something like transfiguration, though this latter state is rare. We know of its occurrence only by rumor, whispered sometimes late at night by the imps in the firebox.
By “we,” I mean the engineer and myself. The impresario confines himself in his telegraphed messages to factual statements concerning the performances, whose history lengthens according to a principle I cannot grasp. How could there have been a demonstration yesterday of lion taming, for example, when, according to the engineer, the train did not stop at all? I grant that a performance is possible within the space of a dream—someone’s: the impresario’s, perhaps, or the lion’s. The engineer is unconcerned, preferring to relate to me the history of the railroad, the invention and technological refinements of the steam locomotive, and to make an inventory of the provisions. Since we never run short of provisions, I tell him there is no need to inventory them. But he enjoys it, he says. Counting the tins, the bottles and mason jars. Whole numbers, he says; whole numbers are comforting.
When the train does stop, the engineer will sometimes climb down from the locomotive and walk into the trees—provided there are trees lining the right-of-way. I follow him with my binoculars until he vanishes among them, absorbed by their entrancing gloom. Invariably, he will return in a radiant frame of mind.
“What do you do in the forest?” I ask him, pulling at his striped trousers’ cuff.
“I do what I must,” he replies; or “I retrieve lost time,” or “I undermine the train—within limits, always within limits!”
“What do you mean?”
But he laughs and will say no more while he opens a tin of sardines or small boiled potatoes.
3.
One day when the train has stopped, the flagman appears from behind the bend ahead of us. Furling his flag and tucking it under his arm, as if it were not a flag but a sergeant major’s baton, he climbs onto the locomotive, which I am guarding in the engineer’s stead. As is customary when the enterprise comes, for whatever reason, to a standstill, the engineer has disappeared into the trees. I do not fear for the safety of the train, nor has anyone assigned me the role of custodian, but I relish the proximity of the great steam engine, which seems, now that the train lies motionless, a kind of domestic familiar, such as a cat rumbling contentedly on a windowsill. There are also the engineer’s calendars stacked in a disused bin—year yielding inevitably to the one before in a recession of time and dishabille. I admit to a sentimental fondness for Robert Giraud’s photographs and the naughty etchings of Xavier Sager.
“How is it that you arrived ahead of the train?” I ask the flagman, who is preparing an espresso with the aid of the steam boiler. “Unless I’m mistaken, we have yet to make that next turning.”
The flagman blows the demitasse’s smoking top. “Have you any cinnamon?”
I give him some.
“Do you have a theory of time?” he asks, resting the little cup and saucer on his knee.
“None that I’m aware of. Do you?”
“Time spins like a cyclone; and as it does so, it wobbles—forward, backward, to the right or to the left. Gathering speed or slowing, inching along or making a surprising leap. And all the while, it is gathering up whatever is in its path—jug
glers, acrobats, trombonists, anarchists, lions, poets, even elephants. You can easily understand how, sometimes, one may arrive ahead of it.”
I lean forward, like a connoisseur suddenly in the presence of the object of his desire. “Are you saying that this train is a circus train?”
“It can be—at times, it is. At other times, it isn’t; it’s something else. You ought to know: You are the train’s author.”
“But one wishes, for once, to have one’s words verified,” I remark calmly in a voice that belies my frustration, my anguish. “To be assured of the truth of what one writes, or its falsity. Besides, I am only an amanuensis, not an author.”
“Then why not see for yourself?” He leers.
“I don’t seem to be able,” I temporize. “I’ve become sedentary. I write; I seldom go outside. In fact, I never do, except to stretch my legs a little. But I don’t go far! Once I went as far as a car full of soldiers. Wounded soldiers. I was attracted by their groaning, their cries. I was frightened and hurried back to the caboose. The next day, I returned with my notebook. To take down their testimony. To record my impressions. To gather background for the writing of a report. But they weren’t there—the car was gone. In its place, a wagon of Gypsies. One of them read my palm: She said that my missing thumb would be restored and I would become a brakeman. Ridiculous!”
The flagman shrugs, sips his espresso, looks out the window onto the empty right-of-way, sits the cup and saucer once more on his knee, says, “Time wobbles back and forth and from side to side, picking up this thing and that. Why not Gypsies?”
He seems to fall asleep. I put a recording of La Sonnambula on the gramophone, crank its handle; Caruso leaps into the silence—his voice, crackling from out of the tundish. The flagman opens his eyes.
“The 1905 Metropolitan revival was brilliant,” he recalls. “A succès d’estime.”
I nod. A silence ensues.
“Don’t people say that a tornado sounds like a train roaring by?” he asks in an offhanded way, like one setting a trap.
Again, I nod.
“It’s the sound time makes as it rushes past. If you put your ear to the rail, you can hear it clearly: the din of history, not to mention the screams.”
“Our train, then, is time?” I ask.
“I never said that!” he shouts—whether at me or beyond me through the cab’s window is unclear. He is silent a moment, then continues: “We, who ride this train, are aware of our place in time in the same way that the truly giddy are of their place on the turning earth.”
“And when, like now, the train is stopped?”
“We’ve entered the stillness at the center of time—the eye of time’s storm. And what better time or place to give a performance?”
“Of what?” I ask, much annoyed by his cheerfulness, which seems misplaced. Irreverent even. Unless it is the gloom, like a yellowish, brownish stain inside the locomotive, which has made me spiteful and afraid. Never in my experience has it dared to invade our precincts, which have been free till now of confusion, but not doubt.
“Of whatever at that moment pleases us most,” he replies, taking no notice of my ill will. “Or whatever is most in need of expression. Ours are not ordinary performances: They are desires made visible, not to mention the manifestation of our anxieties, which are desires’ accompaniment.”
He sets down his demitasse on the iron sill. I observe that the coffee is filled to the brim, though he has been drinking it. Secretly, I preen in my ability to have made so fine an observation in spite of the gloom, which is spreading, and my head, which is swimming.
The flagman polishes his boots with coal soot. Why this, the most ordinary of acts, should cause in me a feeling of terror, I do not know. Whistling a theme from Bellini’s opera, he buffs them with an oily rag.
My heart—what’s the expression? My heart is in my mouth—and I get ready to eat it.
From the caboose, I hear the telegraph key hiss, in a single angry elision, its magisterial disdain.
“What lies up the track?” I ask nervously.
“Up, down, sideways—they have no meaning, for us,” he says, admiring boots that might have been glossed by the night itself.
“What did you see—wherever it was you were—before you came round the bend and saw me?” I shout, my hands at his throat.
Imperturbable, he tears my hands away, coughs, says, “Smoking cities …blood-soaked fields …endless desert … an ice age … the aeroplane.”
“What’s an aeroplane?” I ask, entranced by the word, as if he has pronounced a blessing or a curse on us all.
He smirks, so that I want to fly at him again. Possessed by a sudden listlessness, whose source I cannot identify, however, I remain where I am, inside the iron cab, at the still point. It is as if I and all the world outside the train were drained of potential by a swift plunge of millibars.
“It waits to be discovered or rediscovered, in time, which also has in it forgetting and recollection. This is what is meant by déjà vu. To remember the future.”
The recording slows; Caruso’s voice drawls, elongates like taffy, metamorphoses into that of an animal and then, attaining at last a mineral modality, falls silent.
“And will time itself stop and, like a spent top, come crashing down or, like a cyclone, peter out?” I loathe this flagman, whom I thought was my friend, unless this flagman and the one whose car I shared are not the same. I loathe him but am helpless against the unfolding of his theory, whose shape reminds me of a portmanteau bag. “For God’s sake, finish and be done with it!”
“Time has stopped many times already. Not as this train stops: The train is not time, but rides upon its rails. Of course, this is merely a figure of speech and, like all tropes and metaphors, only partially true. Mostly, I suspect, they lie; but how are we to think about abstractions otherwise?”
I want to know only if the communiqués that I deposit in manila envelopes along the tracks are true. Are we really marionette theater, burlesque house, circus, freak show, music hall, Grand Guignol, anatomical theater, astronomical observatory, maze of mirrors, botanical garden, inquisition, museum of machines, zoo, waxworks—how is it possible that a single train can be all this and more besides?
He leaves before I can sound him. Perhaps he looked into my mind and read the question there and had no answer (or was sworn to secrecy by the impresario). I watch him walk along the reach of track to the vanishing point. For a moment, there is only his flag to signify his having been, and soon not even that.
4.
A man steps from behind a cairn. Over his shoulder, he carries a portrait camera and tripod. He wears a tweed coat and bowler, spats and gloves, and looks altogether suitable to an upland moor. The train has yielded, temporarily, to a flock of sheep. What seem sheep standing in shadow to the unaided eye become boulders when magnified by my binoculars. Not a flock of boulders, surely! A labor, perhaps, or a team, a mustering, a brood, or an unkindness. But how can I be certain that the optical mechanics of magnification do not transform one thing into another? Or in the time it takes to train and focus the instrument, sheep might not become boulders by some principle of metamorphosis unknown to me? The objects on the tracks do appear to be moving… . But boulders, having tumbled down the ravine towering above us, could possess inertia to move them onward—at least for a while. Why not always? Who can say that a thing once set in motion does not continue in some way or another, along unseen paths, by secret and devious passages, in spite of Newton and his apple? If I could magnify time as I do space, mightn’t I see even the mountain creep into the valley?
“Hello!” calls the man, teetering on a rail.
“Come up,” I reply, eager for company now that the engineer has gone to sleep.
He hands up his camera and tripod, then climbs into the caboose.
“Would you care to have your portrait taken?” he asks after he has settled himself and his equipment within the narrow limits of my domain.
I tell him I would but cannot give him an address where I might receive the developed print. He assures me that it will find me no matter when or where; that we will—my photograph and myself—meet in time.
“By the laws of attraction,” he says. “Like to like and likeness to its original. Inevitably.”
He asks me my name, and I tell it to him.
“I have read your stories,” he says with solemnity, gazing at the typewriter as if it were its stories he meant.
“I have written no stories!” I object rudely.
“No?” he asks, surprised. “Not even one about a hippopotamus bathing in the rank green water along the right-of-way? Or musicians who serenade beneath the balconies of the moon? Or the funeral march of a marionette? Or a talking ape who dueled with a cigar for the love of a woman named Mrs. Willoughby? Or a waxworks in the Belgian Congo? Or the revenge of Hyde? Or the invention of a photographic process by which the invisible is made visible? Or a stenographic exhibition where an amanuensis took dictation from the dead?”
“They are factual accounts of actual performances given at the end of this very train!” I shout. “They were dictated to me by the impresario over that!” I point to the telegraph key. (I notice that it is rusty and festooned with a spider’s web.)
“Forgive me, sir, I have misunderstood,” he says. “I did not understand the nature of the enterprise or your activities therein. One is easily misled. Forgive me.”
I am not mollified.
“What has misled you into thinking my reports were anything but the truth of what has occurred? That I am not a chronicler of history? Explain yourself!”
“I have seen several of the performances—”
“You have?” I cry, seizing his wrist with violence enough to make him whelp.
“You’re hurting me!”
Smoldering, I let go his wrist, roll back on my chair to put him once more at his ease. Silence reigns briefly, in which I imagine him counting “One … two …three… four,” as if exposing a photographic plate in the flash of my anger.
