They take the train, wanting its store of shared breath. They watch for a sign, recognising almost nothing. They left this country two or more transformations ago. It has changed in their absence. They remember fragments: sleeping on long journeys, lights and towns flashing by. They see familiar images. Grey towers crumbling beside the railway line in indistinct light. Rain-green fields turning to concrete flats. Corn spread out in golden paths to dry, a dream of abundance that remains elusive. Nothing touches them.
After the body, what can they know of their life but its details? Memory, experience, all the fragments of attention that hope to accumulate meaning. Their specific instance, so brief. Always this transitory. There are billions like them, arriving and departing. They might choose to stay with any one of them. It would be a kind of death for the other, they suppose, and a kind of life for them – a kind of selfhood.
What would it take to stay? Days, weeks, a lifetime of delicate transferences. It could destroy the host.
To take one life is a crime. A crime for which there can be no restitution.
What if it is only borrowed?
They do not know what justice looks like. But perhaps those terms don’t matter anymore.
He watches the apartments set against the rail line, mesh boxes overlaid with ghostly laundry, repeated like stacked versions of the train. There is an ache in his left hand where a break has set but not healed. He is strong, despite the frailty of age. His eyes won’t look away from the window, and they stop trying, giving themselves over now to the lines that nest outside, now to the smudge of a fingerprint on glass, a little remainder. He listens to the guard in the corridor attending to the openings and closings of doors, a ceremony that is conducted ten thousand times, across ten thousand carriages, as blessed by repetition as a prayer. They loiter in him, hesitant to harm.
The train is pulling into a station. With his eyes they watch the passengers leave and arrive, preoccupied, passive with tiredness and travel. The sound of the platform dulled by the glass. He breathes out and the steam of his breath fogs the window. They might write their name, if they could remember it. His hand doesn’t move.
They look for Adam in the crowd. Habitual now, and hopeless.
The train slides out, and they watch the small city recede: the tall glass shrinking into damp cement flats, then farmhouses, village roofs and fields, moving back in time. Houses where the light of the city has not yet arrived. Only the train’s light searches their rooms, checking in on each of them as they sleep. The machine goes on looking steadily, as if it knows what for. The man inhales. The lungs are weak. He doesn’t suit them.With effort, they lift a hand to the mouth, sniff the nicotine between the fingers, sending signals that reverberate like voices in a cave. The train is shucked to the side by a freight passing, grainers full of coal. Blood in the ears. He’s coughing, struggling against the pressure, sitting up. They get in his lungs and settle them, but it’s hard to stay. In the dark there is no-one else close enough. Tracksuit hoisted to hip-height, tingles in the calves and feet as the blood pours down, a dam collapses. The meat collides with a closed door, then the rail that holds down shade. At the end the urn gleams dimly in the light from the guard’s room. They want to go to her, but he shuffles on before they have a chance.
The toilet reeks of unwell kidneys. Shadows slip past underneath like fish. If there is life in the water below this bridge it is invisible. This pissing makes him sigh, the train lurches, they feel how glad he is to have missed the slippers. He pushes the flush button, but the water refuses. Empty. He breathes, and the lungs grasp at oxygen.
They’ll drown with him.
He hovers a moment by the guard’s door, then returns trundling down the corridor. They glance into each room, looking out for someone wakeful. At the other end of the long car, he pushes the exit button and it opens. He stands between carriages, enclosed by the room but also in the air, which smells like burnt things: oil, the thick coal-fired atmosphere. No light but the cigarette. They feel the drug swim out through his extremities, tracing the circulatory system, as if it’s ink. The breath. They wonder how long he has left.
They want more.