He walked for a long time. He began to get cold again, and sleepy. The temptation was to stop walking and lie down. But, doggedly, he continued on. If a train were to come, he realized, there was little chance he would get off the tracks in time. He tried not to worry about this. He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.
And then, up ahead, the glimmers of light became more complex. He stared as he approached, eventually understood that there were more rails for the light to reflect off of, that he had reached a junction.
He stopped at the split. He could keep going down the main track or take the branch line. The branch line might lead to a station or a small town or at the very least a siding where maybe he’d find some modicum of shelter. The main line would too, eventually, but perhaps not for miles. The branch line, just like the main line, had been plowed. Didn’t that indicate it was important? Or did they plow everything just in case?
He took the branch line.
He wasn’t sure how long he walked, maybe fifty meters, maybe several hundred—he was too busy concentrating on keeping moving to pay attention. Eventually he smelled smoke. Not long after that he saw a line of light, very thin and very sharp, as if someone had sliced cleanly through the scrim of the dark to reveal a blazing world behind. He was so grateful to see it, he couldn’t stop moaning.
It took a few dozen steps more before he realized that what he was seeing was a line of light left by an improperly drawn curtain. He could sense the house in front of him but in the darkness couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t tell for certain what was the darkness of the sky and what the darkness of the house. Still, it felt strange to him—off somehow. Only when he was very close indeed did he realize it was not a house at all but a single train car.
He found the steps that led to the compartment door but didn’t have the strength to climb them. They were too steep, and he was too tired. Instead he draped himself over them and tapped on the base of the door with his gloved fist.
It hardly made a sound, just a faint dull noise as distant as an echo. They won’t hear me, he thought. I’ve made it to the very threshold of shelter, but I can’t manage to make them hear me.
And then he realized he didn’t hear anything either, that the passenger car, despite being lit inside, seemed utterly silent. Perhaps, he thought, there is no one to open up for me. Perhaps there is no one there.
As soon as he thought this, the door was suddenly flung open. A great cascade of noise poured out, engulfing him. Strong hands took hold of him and dragged him up the stairs and into the compartment.
The air inside was so warm he almost fainted. A huge fire roared at the far end of the compartment, obscuring the whole of the back wall, seemingly uncontained. The hands let go of him and he fell in a heap on the floor, and then they were on him again, grabbing him, lifting him up and patting him on the back, steadying him, only slowly letting go once they were sure he could stand.
A drink was placed in his hand, a clear viscid liquor of some sort. He took a deep drink: it burned going down and made his vision blur. When his vision returned, a face was in front of him, wrinkled, hairless, even the eyelashes absent.
“Feeling all right now?” the face said, then grimaced. The voice was strange, a kind of tenor whisper that seemed to come at him from every direction at once.
He nodded.
“One shouldn’t be out on a night like this,” the face said. “Only fools are.”
“Where am I?” Grauer managed.
“Just a place,” said the face, and then it stepped back a little farther. The body below the face was clothed in a garment made of long, tattered strips of fabric that pooled on the floor. It was difficult to make out the body’s contours within except in the most general fashion, but even with just that it felt to Grauer as if head and body did not belong to one another.
“A train car,” Grauer said. “It’s a train car.”
Body shrugged. “If you like,” the face whispered.
Grauer became afraid. “Either it is or it isn’t,” he said.
Face and body bowed deeply, without a word, and then upon straightening led Grauer to a seat covered in red velvet. He was helped to sit down, facing the crackling fire that seemed to threaten to consume the far end of the car.
“Can I stay here until morning?” asked Grauer. Some time had passed. He felt warmer and very sleepy. He was happy to be alive.
The body again bowed deeply. “If you like,” the face said again, and then waited, attentive.
Why is the body still standing there, the face bobbing above it? Grauer looked down and realized that trapped beneath his boot were a few of the frayed and tattered ends of the long garment. The body was still standing there because it was unable to leave.
He tried to lift his foot, but the foot didn’t move. What was wrong with him? “I seem to be standing on your clothing,” he told the other.
“It’s not my clothing,” the face said.
“No?” said Grauer. “What is it?”
“My skin,” the face said.
He had somehow slipped out of the seat and was lying on the floor of the train car, looking up at the pale, empty face above him.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What?”
The face didn’t answer.
“Can you help me up?” he asked.
Still no answer.
“Hello?” said Grauer.
And then, a little later, “Hello?”
The train car had darkened, he realized. The noise, too, which had seemed so raucous when he first entered, as if it had been the product of a dozen drunks, had subsided to nothing. Now it seemed not even loud enough for this single face and body, who seemed the only other person or persons in the train car, if in fact a person or persons at all.
Whatever the case, the body had gotten down on hands and knees, and now the face was very close to his own, peering into it.
“The train will be leaving soon,” the face whispered.
“There is no train,” Grauer whispered back. “There is only this single passenger car.”
“The train is leaving soon,” the face repeated.
“Fine,” said Grauer from the floor, closing his eyes.
“Do you have a ticket?” the voice asked.
Grauer ignored it, tried to sleep.
“No ticket?” the voice asked.
When he did not respond, hands grasped him and in a single fluid motion lifted him from the floor and to his feet. It left him gasping for breath. It felt like many hands instead of just two—perhaps more hands were hidden beneath the voluminous tattered garment. Or, rather, skin.
“Ticket?” the voice asked again.
He shook his head. A moment later he was dragged down the aisle to the door and pitched unceremoniously into the snow.
When he awoke, it was light outside. One of the brothers was slapping him, saying his name. He turned his head and saw the other brother. Which one was the oldest? With all the frost on their beards and faces, he couldn’t tell them apart.
He managed to blink, let out a hiss of air.
“He’s alive,” said one brother to the other.
The second brother didn’t bother to answer. Instead he leaned in close to Grauer’s face. “Grauer,” he said, “we’re going to get you out of here. We’ll carry you to safety. Just stay with us.”
All right, he said, only no sound came out. He blinked.
“We’re not far from the railroad tracks,” he said. “We’ll take you there. With a little luck a plow train has already gone through and we’ll be able to follow them.”
No, thought Grauer. Please, no. He blinked.
“With a little luck there will be a branch line we can take in a kilometer or two that will lead us somewhere we can get you medical attention.”
No siding, he tried to say. No passenger car. Go straight. Don’t stop. Please.
He blinked.
The brother offered him a smile. He patted his shoulder, then st
ood.
Strong hands grasped him, pulled him roughly to his feet.
“Up we go then,” a voice said. He couldn’t tell which of the brothers it was, or even if it was a brother at all. He couldn’t feel his legs, but he heard the sound of his feet dragging through the crust of snow. “Stay with us, Grauer,” a voice said. “Here we go.”
Justle
My father, when he had had a few drinks too many and my mother was not around, would sometimes draw me close and whisper too loudly, conspiratorially, his boozy warm breath flooding my face, “Son, did I ever tell you about Justle?”
“But I’m Justle, Father,” I would say, for this was the unusual name that, despite my mother’s objections, my father had bestowed upon me.
“So you are,” he would say. “So you are. But it’s a place too. Not just you.”
“What kind of place?” I would ask.
He would squint into his empty glass. “Not much of one,” he said. “Hardly a place anyone can live. More a way station, really. A place between places. Does that still amount to a place?”
Whether I said yes or no, chances were this would be the end of it, that he would fall silent and say nothing of note until, ten minutes later, maybe twenty, he passed out.
But twice, he went on to tell me more, to tell me the story of Justle, of what had happened to him there.
The first time he told me, I was too young to make sense of it, but I still had the feeling, perhaps because of his manner as he spoke, that he was telling me something he should have kept from me. Not only from me, from everyone. The second time I was older, nearly an adult, and could make more sense of the story, though it took my becoming fully adult before certain portions of it grew clear. There is still much about the story that I have difficulty believing was not fabricated or false. And yet, when my father told it to me, he did so with a sincerity that was, in him, not only uncommon but completely unheard of. This left me feeling that he believed all he said. Or at least that whoever he became when he was drunk did.
The story he told was this: When he was young, before he met my mother, he lived in a settlement in what was called in those days a recovery sector. This sector, like the others, was devoid of vegetation, and the air was dim with heavy smog or smoke. His eyes burned constantly, as did his throat, even though he used an oxygen regulator. In places, the ground seemed to have been stripped bare and hit repeatedly with mallets to make it very hard indeed—as if the dirt were not dirt at all but something artificial.
Work in a recovery sector merited hazard pay, and for the promise of this my father intended to spend several months participating in a cadre that would work to speed the sector’s recovery. Most young people did such a stint in those days, he claimed, as a way of gathering money to purchase a place within one of the domed cities.
He was assigned to one of two twinned settlements, each established within one of two ruined, adjacent cities. Castu his was called, Polx the other. The settlements had been, he explained, named after the ruined cities, and the cities in turn had been named after two brothers. So, you see, he told me, some people are named after places, like you, but some places are likewise named after people. A name can travel in either direction.
Food had to be shipped in. If it remained more than a few days uneaten, it became contaminated and could not be consumed. Individuals, too, were cautioned not to remain in a recovery sector for more than sixty days at a time. Each settlement was a single, sprawling prefab erected within the confines of its larger ruined city. The prefab was sealed off for safety: to enter you would pass through an airlock and into a decontamination chamber. Protective clothing was discarded there to be sanitized for use the following day. Along with this protective clothing, my father and all his cadre were issued regulators that filtered and recycled the air. Within the building, one could breathe normally. Outside, one could not.
“What I did exactly, what I managed to accomplish, how effectual it was, is still not clear to me,” he told me. “In those days, we did as we were asked, and it did not seem important to know exactly why. A job was a job. Some days, I would be told to strap a device to my back and suck fumid air through a tube. Other days I was given a sticklike device that made a clicking sound, the frequency of which changed depending on where I pointed it. Still others found me on my knees using a red and abrasive soap to scrub a designated stretch of ground clean.”
One day, as, eyes watering, he was again drawing contaminated air into a tube with no indication he was having any effect, his cadre leader approached him with the command to go to Polx. “Now?” he asked. “Yes,” he was told. “Immediately.”
He unbuckled the device and shrugged it off. “Who is to accompany me?” he asked. For whenever anyone went to the other settlement on some errand, they took a companion, in case anything went wrong.
“Just you,” said the cadre leader.
“Just me?”
“Polx has need of an extra man.”
“How long?”
The leader looked at him, confused. “What do you mean, how long? For good.”
And so my father packed his scant possessions, said good-bye to the other members of his cadre, and left for Polx.
Halfway there, his regulator began having trouble. Soon, it was quite difficult for my father to breathe. Or not breathe exactly—he was breathing fine, but the air was deficient: he was not getting enough oxygen. He felt as if he were slowly suffocating.
He considered turning around and going back, but he calculated it was slightly farther to go back than to go forward, so he continued on, despite knowing there was no chance he would arrive. Stay calm, he told himself. The more you panic, the more oxygen you’ll use. The more oxygen you use, the sooner you’ll die.
And so he moved forward but very slowly, as if traveling underwater. His goal was not to make it to Polx—there was no chance of arriving there without a working regulator—but only to make it far enough along the path before he passed out that he would increase the likelihood of his body being found while he was unconscious and comatose rather than lifeless.
But did Polx even expect him? And wouldn’t Castu just assume he had arrived? Would anyone miss him?
He blew into the regulator then banged it against his hip to clear it, but it was no use.
He began to experience hypoxemia, though he did not know to call it that. Instead, he told me how his head began to ache. He kept walking. Despite the slowness of his stride, his heart was beating rapidly, and he experienced a strange euphoria he associated with the knowledge he was going to die—though why death might make him feel euphoric he was at a loss to say. His vision began to darken as if the world were growing dim, but it was only him growing dim, so to speak, not the world. Through it all he told himself, Stay calm, stay calm. He kept walking, slowly.
“If I had had a comm, I would have alerted my cadre leader,” he said. But he had none. They had taken his comm away when he left for his new cadre—the comm belonged to the cadre, not to him. “I kept trying to figure out what to do, but all I could think to do was keep walking. Either I would survive or I would not.”
He walked for perhaps twenty minutes until something further began to go wrong with his already irritated eyes: portions of his vision became occluded by dark blotches. He felt dizzy and nauseous and wanted to sit and catch his breath, but he knew that if he sat down he would not get up again. And so he kept moving, seemingly slower and slower, the air bitter in his lungs. Soon, despite being in motion, he felt he was hardly making any forward progress.
And then the path took a slight curve. As the ruined buildings fell away, he glimpsed something. At first he thought it was nothing, a hallucination, but as he drew closer he became convinced it was real. Something whitish and rectangular, a sign or placard at the top of a metal pole slightly taller than he. Probably a relic from before, he thought, something that by freak accident survived the devastation that leveled the city, an advertisement for a long-gone shop. Or perha
ps it was more recent and upon reaching it he would read something like Polx 4 km, with an arrow pointing along the path.
But the sign did not offer any of that. Instead, there was just the word Justle and there, beside the word, an arrow pointing him off the path.
Justle, he thought. He peered off the path. Maybe three hundred meters away, almost obscured by the smoky air, was a structure that seemed intact. Of recent construction? No, he didn’t think so. But hardly as weathered or dilapidated as the few intact structures he had passed.
“I thought that either I could keep walking in the direction of Polx and probably die, or I could stop here, leave the path, and see what this Justle held in store for me. And so I left the path.”
Carefully he stripped a glove off and left it in the roadway, facing the sign. He folded over the fingers of the glove, leaving only the pointer finger extended, gesturing off the path toward Justle, hoping that if they did come looking for him, they would guess where he had gone. And then he stepped off the path and began to walk toward Justle.
It was not far, just a few hundred meters away. In normal circumstances he would have reached it almost immediately, but hobbled as he was, his regulator defective, slowly suffocating, unable to move quickly, it seemed to take forever. I thought I could convince myself to finish the journey by focusing on walking halfway there. Then, once arrived at the halfway point, I would walk half of what remained, then half of that … My father sighed. Only after having done this three or four times did I realize something was wrong with my thinking, that if I kept walking in this fashion I would never arrive.
He came close enough to the structure that he could see, stamped into its metal wall, the word Justle, which he took to be the name of the place. I have asked myself since: Was he right to see it as such? Am I truly named after a place? Or am I in fact misnamed after something else entirely, something misunderstood?
There seemed to be a light inside, a dim but steady illumination. Someone was there. Or perhaps he was simply hallucinating.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Page 12
