by Paul Park
She nodded toward the syringe-case on the table. “That was my plan. But I can’t, because the colonel would know. He could tell—he’d know. Damn it, he’d know. He saw the bandages.”
She smiled a defeated smile. “Those cuts kept you alive. You can thank that broken glass, not me.”
3. THE SECOND HINGE
You’d have to brush your teeth, Paulina thought. And wash—you smell like smoke. And change the way you speak. It’s not so easy to become someone else, with someone else’s memories. What did the stranger know about the house on Marshall Street?
She closed her eyes and turned away from Lizzie’s smiling face, her wine-soaked breath. Eyes closed, Paulina pictured the little scene she’d created in her mind, the exploding fire, and the two girls running away through the snow, out of the firelight and the questing lantern. Matthew stayed where he was in the little dell on Christmas Hill—why didn’t he move? Why didn’t he try to save himself?
His eyes, also, were closed, the lids pressed together. He wore the wire-framed National Health spectacles that he had gotten when his father was at Cambridge in 1962. They’d called him “four-eyes,” and tied him to a fence. He had light curls and darkish skin. In the future, the boys still wore their hair long, she was glad to see.
A tear ran sideways down her cheek and dripped onto the white enamel. She imagined the “clones” erupting from their vats, their faces blank. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Bethy—holding hands like paper dolls they formed a line, the last one reaching toward her with a stubby, unformed finger. As if in response to this fantasy, she heard the scream of the air brake, and the car shuddered and convulsed. She couldn’t tell whether the Martians had released some kind of shell or bomb, or else whether the flare from the signal gun had managed to ignite the hydrogen in the balloon. She felt the concussion, and a rattling, metallic hail in the branches of the trees. The car swerved, then slowed along the straightaway, shuddering as if it might break apart. Paulina held on to the sides of the bed, and Lizzie fell back against the window, grasping the curtain to stay upright. The wineglass tumbled from the little table, rolled along the floor.
Beside those at either end of the car, opposing doors led from the middle of the compartment, down to the tracks on either side. As the train squealed to a stop, Lizzie staggered backward to the left-hand steps and unlocked the door. She turned back to emit some kind of barking command, lost in the steam whistle. Then she was gone.
Paulina tumbled to her feet. Just like her namesake, running away into the snowy woods to escape the men from Mars, she didn’t ask herself where she was going. Legs aching, she hurried backward through the stalled train, through a series of identical, empty compartments, each with its massy curtains and leather seats along the sides, framing the long Oriental carpet, a line of red medallions.
Each with its hospital bed set into brackets on the floor—she turned her face away. Fourth in the sequence was the library car, and at the end of it, hunched over the fried egg on his supper tray, lit from overhead as if in a circle of gold, sat Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA, in a gray dress uniform only a little worse for wear, and decorated at the breast with the Cross of Southern Honor, which in calmer times he had received from the anointing hands of the Virginia UDC, for his heroism during the siege. He drained what looked like whiskey from his square-bottomed tumbler, blotted his lips with a white handkerchief, and stood up from the side table. His boots shone, his gloves were in his belt. “Is she awake?” he asked—he didn’t recognize her yet, maybe because she was wearing Lizzie’s clothes, she thought. His fine brows knotted with worry and surprise, a momentary tremor of expression. Then his face was smooth again. “Ah,” he said, and smiled.
It took him just that long to tell the difference. He knew who she was. He’d known her her whole life. Paulina examined, around the circumference of his plate, a circle of four linked sausages, the last one smudged with yolk. For a moment she was reminded of Elly’s niello bracelet.
She gripped one of the overhead oak rails while she considered what her cousin’s part had been in this, why he had risked his life to deliver her to his old enemies, whose dark banners he had faced at the Crater, and on a dozen other hard campaigns. Now they were deep in Yankee territory. Why was he dressed like this?
Between the two doors that led down to the tracks, she paused. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asked. “Did Lizzie dress you up like that?”
He placed his napkin on the tray. “I was coming to see you now,” he said. “I do not want you to exert yourself. You have lost some blood.”
“I am fine,” she said. “Really.”
He held out his hands. “Oh, my little lump-cat. You were always such a stubborn one.”
His eyes, as always when he looked at her, were kind. “You catch me at my last meal. Is there something I can provide for you? This must come as a great shock.”
Beyond him, in the cushions where he had been sitting, she could see the gutta-percha doll. It had been damaged, one of the seams ripped out, some of the stuffing spread over the leather seat.
Someone must have brought it from her bedroom. Someone must have brought it, and her diary too. Almost she felt like running to him, to grasp hold of his hands, as she had when she was young. Instead she glanced down the steps to the right and to the left.
“You must ask yourself what you are doing here, where we are going,” said the colonel after a pause. “It is very simple. I am taking you to see your mother. She will be waiting for us at the next station in twenty minutes’ time. That is … I am not sure why we have stopped. I was just going to…”
He trailed off. The tumbler fit into a raised corner of the tray, which in turn fit into a raised corner of the table. They slid together like a child’s game. “Why?” she said.
“Child, they were going to kill you. Because the Yankees broke the terms.”
That wasn’t what she meant. How could he betray his country, the Commonwealth of Virginia? How could he dishonor his uniform, and once dishonored, why would he still choose to wear it? That was the puzzle, and she could not solve it by giving in to her emotions. Perhaps her grandmother was right about one thing at least, that he was crazy or unstable. In fact, the more she stared at him, the more nervous he seemed, his complexion pasty under the flickering electric lights, his eyes darting from side to side—was he afraid she might bolt down the side steps? Where would she go? There was nothing but darkness outside the windows, and Paulina had assumed they were still in the railway tunnel—no, that wasn’t it. What had he said, that her mother was waiting for them at the station?
Perhaps as she’d slept the train had debouched into the dark fields of the Yankee empire. As if liberated by that possibility, she pressed her imagination outward through the opaque double-paned windows, framed with velvet curtains and gilt ropes like a series of miniature proscenia. Soon the stagehands would hoist the artificial sun into the vault, and the dim red light would chase across the woodlands and the hills, and press against the stone walls and pale, clapboard façades. Men in black clothes would spur their black horses. Women in black veils would scuttle through the streets. Or else it would be still dark when they reached the station, and she would step out onto the platform under the dripping kerosene lanterns high up on their poles, a forest of discolored light, and under those flickering trees the Yankee empress waited with her court, surrounded by her silent army of black dogs. Her gray hair would be arranged in a towering headdress, but she would be a stranger. What had her cousin meant, “You catch me at my last meal?”
“Whatever happens,” he said now, “I would like you to know how much my visits to Mrs. McKenney have meant to me all these years, when the world seemed dark to me, the comfort I found in you when you were just a child. You would wait by the window to see me turning in the gate, and you would raise your little arms so I could pick you up. That meant so much to me in difficult times. Even now I wonder if we could all meet together sometime, in this life or the next, a
t the table in the Marshall Street house.”
How could that be? How could he even think that was possible? What did he even mean? “Why is it so dark?” she asked him.
As if in response to her question, the whistle blew. The left-hand door slid open, and there was Lizzie mounting the steps, dragging behind her a man—no, a boy, dressed in a woolen coat and gloves.
Paulina recognized his clothes. He had lost his scarf somewhere. Perhaps in the heat of the bonfire he had stripped it off.
“Obstruction on the track,” Lizzie announced.
The train started to move, a gentle shriek. “What do you make of this?” she continued. “Almost ran him down. But he was alone.”
She wasn’t wearing her goose-down coat. But she still had her flare gun, which now she tossed onto one of the banquettes. “What do you make of him?”
Paulina would have preferred not to say. A bomb, maybe, had stopped the train, an incendiary device dropped from a balloon. Wouldn’t she have seen the flames? She darted down the opposite steps, but the door was locked.
“Here,” said Colonel Claiborne, suddenly above her, hat in his hand. With no gentleness at all, he reached into the well where she was cowering against the door. He pulled her up the three deep steps. “What do you know about this?”
She preferred not to tell him. She recognized the clothes, the flannel shirt under his coat, but not the boy himself under his spectacles. Or maybe it was just that he was different from the way she had imagined, smaller, younger. She’d assumed he’d be good-looking. Panicked, she twisted out of the colonel’s hand, sure now there was a problem. She felt giddy and light-headed, because the world and the invented world were twisting inside out. Someone else was in control; someone else was making the decisions. Her mind was full of questions that could not be answered. Who had been in those beds in the three cars she had run through to reach this one?
Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA, sitting at the end of the fourth car with the golden light around him—had the train itself taken the shape of Elly’s bracelet? What were the limits to what she could create, what she could perceive?
There was something unformed about the boy’s face, a blank quality that frightened her. By contrast, elsewhere she could see every detail: the colonel had dented between the long and subtle fingers of his left hand the crown of his felt hat, decorated with white feathers—in the old days “the knights of the white cockade” had been his regiment’s sobriquet. How to get away from him now? She retreated up the car the way she came, and he followed her, right hand outstretched. Lizzie dragged the boy by the collar of his coat. He looked stunned.
It was only later that she understood why. Now, whether lightning had struck the train, or else the conductor had thrown the switch, but all of the electric tubes and chimneys failed simultaneously.
Colonel Claiborne lifted up his hand, and as the shadows engulfed him Paulina saw the flash of a gold bracelet on his narrow wrist. And maybe the boy was somehow prepared for the sudden blackness, because he took his chance. “Shit,” Lizzie remarked, a word more suited to a future century. She had lost him in the dark.
Paulina reached backward and pulled open the door behind her. Standing in the rattling gap between the two cars, she could see the hinge had come uncoupled. The electric cable had pulled apart. It sparked against one of the chains that held the cars together now.
Light came from the door of the preceding car. Full of a strength that was not her own, with her naked hands she tore out the pins that held the chains in place, and it slid away at about five miles per hour while her car drifted to a stop. Chased by a panic that seemed almost artificial, she jumped down and to the left, away from the track, and stumbled down the berm. It was made of cinders. She fell to her knees and barked the heels of her hands. But nothing hurt her. Puzzled, she got to her feet and staggered off into the approaching dawn, across the unformed plain and toward the lightening horizon. In the distance she saw an anomalous spire of rock, in whose shelter she found the boy waiting, out of breath.
How could he have gotten there first? Then she understood. In this landscape there was nothing he couldn’t do. Their enemies weren’t chasing them, and couldn’t chase them till he gave them his permission. The train couldn’t move until he raised his hand. He’d found a place to hide, a bed of rust-colored pine needles amid the sheltering boulders.
She looked at him more closely. In the new light, his face had lost some of its terrifying blankness. She could see he had blue eyes, a square jaw—she saw that now. He was young, it had turned out. Fourteen was young. How could she have forgotten? She had not thought he’d be so young.
Yet he was dissatisfied with the shelter they had found, the rocks that had loomed up suddenly and miraculously in the empty sand. “They’ll see where we have gone,” he said, sounding older than he was. But how could she have forgotten what fourteen-year-olds were like? “There are no pine trees around here.”
“So then where did they come from?” she said, digging her bare feet into the needles. But she knew. He gave her a pained look.
“I should have thought about the pine trees first. And you—you were on that hospital bed. There was no time for you to put on any shoes. I’m not even sure what kind of shoes you should be wearing. Aren’t you cold?”
“No, I’m not cold.”
“Neither am I,” he said, taking off his coat.
The sun, as it rose, illuminated a landscape different from any she could have imagined. Because he was doing the imagining: they sat in the pine needles, watching the sun rise, an opaque glow at the bottom of a deep defile, slowly revealing the peaks of snowcapped mountains. He said, “My little sister has a bracelet that my mother gave her, something from her family in Virginia. It looked like something made for a woman, but a man had worn it, a Confederate officer. I’d never thought his wrist would be so thin.”
She said, “I have a bracelet too, though I haven’t seen it since I was a little girl. My cousin brought it from the island of Ceylon. I remember it was made from elephant hair and braided gold.”
He looked startled. Now that she was used to him, she imagined his face was one she’d known for years. “It is possible to make a mistake,” he said. “Not remember right. How likely is it that he went to Asia after the Civil War?”
“Several times,” she answered stubbornly.
“How likely is it that he gave you a gold bracelet with his name on it? He probably just showed you the one he had on.”
Now she could see the land more clearly as the shadows of the mountains retreated toward them. Looking back, she could see the steam engine in the distance, the stalled train, its windows winking in the sun. How could she have come so far? And in the darkness, propelled as if by fate, she had found the only level ground for miles. The railway tracks skirted a wide plain, but on the near side the ground fell off suddenly. They sat at the edge of a cliff face with the valley below them. What originally she had mistaken for pine needles, now she could see it was just sand, rust-colored sand, and she dug her toes into it.
“Maybe you can answer all my questions,” she murmured. “I don’t usually get the chance to ask—I didn’t trust him,” she said, meaning her cousin. “Why was he dressed like that, in his old uniform? Why was he wearing a medal from the UDC? If you had rescued the daughter of your former enemy, is that what you’d wear? If you were bringing her to meet her mother at the station?”
Matthew smiled. “Work it out,” he said. “It’s not so hard.”
“Perhaps he’s not a traitor after all.”
“Let’s say.”
Her hands didn’t hurt anymore, and the ache from the cuts along her legs had disappeared. She had a bandage below her collarbone. Turning her back, she worried it out from underneath her camisole, between the buttons of her blouse. There was no trace of a scab or even a scar. Was it possible she’d been asleep for longer than she’d supposed, and instead of north she’d traveled west, perhaps as far as the Oklaho
ma territory?
No, that wasn’t it. The answer was more simple: her cuts and bruises had no further part in the story. She didn’t need them anymore.
The shadows were receding from the landscape in front of her. On the plateau where they sat, the rocks were dry. Far beneath their feet, the dusty valley was bisected by a river. A mile away, level with her eyes, an eagle hunted for the updraft. “Gram,” she said, “is she a part of this? If he was pretending, maybe she was too.”
“What would she have to gain?” he said, less a question than a prompt.
“Maybe they were working together all along. How could the doll and the diary be in the train, unless she had a part in it?”
“Good question.”
Paulina turned toward him, suddenly furious. “You know, don’t you? You could just tell me!”
“I don’t know everything,” he said.
“What was on the beds I passed in the compartments? I couldn’t turn my head to look!”
His mittens were gone. He examined his fingernails. “I hadn’t decided.”
“Tell me this,” she said. “If they were part of the same scheme, why did they go through all that at the library? I could have just climbed down the wisteria and ridden away.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “It’s in the past.”
“Maybe the Yankee empress would have been suspicious otherwise. Or maybe Gram had some enemies among the UDC.”
“Maybe,” he said, picking at his nails.
“You don’t even care! Maybe they needed all that bloodshed, for him to be a hero one last time. And then the empress would have to take him in. He would have no place to go. He’d have sacrificed everything, and she’d have to bring him in and thank him personally. No wonder he’s dressed up.”
