1.

We ride only on the tracks that are orange with the rust of time. How else avoid those other trains crisscrossing a land notable for the variety of its features—observing schedules, answerable to purposes clearly understood by the presidents of railroad companies and their most casual passengers alike? We follow no schedules; and if there is a purpose to our endless divagation, I never knew it. (That the performances might be a figment of my or someone else’s imagination is a thought that increasingly occurs to me.) I begin to suspect that we are traveling to no purpose; that the train appeared one day on these rusted rails as if by an act of spontaneous generation such as van Leeuwenhoek claimed to have observed in his retort after the introduction of an electrical current in water.

I do not remember when I first came to be here. Perhaps I, too, unfolded suddenly like a Japanese paper flower in water—like the animalcules in van Leeuwenhoek’s laboratory. But something tells me this is not the case: memories, for one thing. I can recall a time when I was not on the train. A boyhood in a town red with brick factories and gray with smoke and dust. And later, life aboard a merchant ship, if the few impressions I have of it can be said to be a life. I seem to have been skillful with a marlin spike; to this day, I can feel in my hand its weight and the rope stiffened by salt water. Of course, they may be someone else’s memories. Who is to say that we cannot receive another’s recollections like a legacy—an unsuspected inheritance from an uncle who, until the moment when the lawyer informs us that we have come into some money or a property in Ravenna, we never knew existed?

I was the train’s brakeman. This much is certain. I remember it in my absent thumb, the pain of its dismemberment. We had stopped for the night in an ancient forest. I would not have been surprised to find Yggdrasil presiding over it—so Germanic the gloom, so primeval the silence. Bewitched into a moment’s carelessness, I offered up my finger to the coupling. I feel it still—the pain when finger and bone came away in the train’s iron fist. I doubt I would feel it so keenly were it someone else’s loss.

In the mirror, I appear to be a man of sixty. But mirrors lie; and on such a train as this, what treachery might not they practice? But let us say sixty, or a little less. I was a young man still when I suffered my mutilation. It has been, then, many years since I have been other than a brakeman. I was not relieved of my occupation because of my accident. I continued for a time after it—of this, too, I am sure. It was for some other reason that I ceased to be a brakeman. My own or some other’s.

I am now an assistant to the impresario. I say “an assistant,” for I cannot be certain that I am the only one in this capacity, any more than I am sure another brakeman is in the rear of the train, performing my former role. I can only assume that one is: A train must have a brakeman. He may well be asleep at this moment in one of the rear cars set aside for the brakeman—the car I once shared with the flagman, whom I never see anymore. The end of the train is not visible because of the great number of cars, or the frequent turning of the tracks, or the darkness that seems always to be at our rear. As if the train were on the edge of night. The engine and the caboose following immediately behind it are the only cars that have not been tainted yet by that unnatural dark. A premonitory darkness ranged malevolently against us. I feel it just as a gravestone might the pressure of a hand intent on robbing it of its inscription. The engineer maintains that it is only our locomotive’s coal smoke blackening the sky.

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—jugglers, 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.

“The performances had been minutely described—by you—in the form of a story—in a book of stories attributed to you—before I ever saw them at the end of this train. You understand me, sir? The enactments follow your account of them.”

I think this strange and unlikely but say nothing.

“You did not, by chance, photograph the performances that you saw?” I ask instead.

“Why, yes.”

He takes from inside his coat a small album bound in morocco leather. He removes his wire-rim glasses, whose lenses are unusually thick, polishes them on a handkerchief, puts them on again, looping the wire parentheses about his ears. He opens the album. I lean over his shoulder the better to see the photographs.

“They’re blurry!” I complain. “I can’t make anything out!”

He is incensed. “I assure you they are not! Or if they are slightly out of focus, it is the fault of the subjects. Everything moved. It was beyond the shutter’s capacity to stop it.”

“This waxwork dummy?” I shout, incredulous. “This poor chained beast? Or this hanged man on a gallows? Surely, he did not move?”

He bangs the album shut; I listen to the volley of his displeasure inside the rocky defile engulfing us. “The whole earth moves,” he says drily, an ear cocked as if to hear it move.

I howl with laughter as the photographer gathers up his belongings and leaves. He goes behind the cairn—to sulk, I imagine. I glare at the typewriter, hating it, feeling in my fingertips a history of pain. The pain of words.

The train begins to move, the deafening roar of its engine drowning all other sounds.

Whether sheep or boulders, it matters not at all. In a geologic age, what might not anything become? The train advances as if nothing at all were there to arrest it. Or what might be, belonged to another time.

5.

We are hurrying through the night. The iron locomotive is cold to the touch, though the boiler blushes with the fury of combustion. The engineer is awake and companionable. He smokes a pipe, which is, in miniature, a firebox ardent with fragrant embers and dreams. Its smoke mimics the immense river of fume endlessly unwinding from out the locomotive’s stack—lost now, where all is blackness, in night’s vast ocean. The stack, too, resembles the gramophone’s tundish; and the rails by day and at night with the locomotive’s beam upon them are like a scar upon the body of the earth. It amuses me to consider the correspondences between the similar and the dissimilar by which the world is constituted and made whole.

“It’s all an illusion, you know,” the engineer says into his pipe, causing a shower of incandescence to erupt from its bowl, the bowl that I have seen him polish on the flanks of his broad nose when he is caught in a dream of who knows what—his other life in the trees, perhaps.

I cast upon him a cunning look of bewilderment; for I do not trust him, though sometimes—let me admit it now!—I love him. What else is there, here, for me to love?

Removing the pipe stem from between his teeth, he goes on: “What you were thinking just now, it isn’t true.”

Suddenly, I know what he says to be the case and feel as the condemned man must, hearing the lever yanked, which releases the trapdoor separating his boots from eternity.

The engineer knocks the dottle from his pipe as he gazes through the window at the night’s reeling sky. Pointing first to the one, then to the other with the stem, he says, “The Southern Cross and, there, the Great Bear—how is it possible,———?” (He said my name.) His voice is shaken by a profound emotion, which may be fear, or wonder, or something else.

I am moved nearly to tears to hear him say my name, so rarely do I hear it said at all. Except, from time to time, in a dream when a young woman in white speaks it from across the room, in a house between a river and an olive grove. It is always, in the dream, night, with not so much as a cricket to interrupt the stillness, or a firefly to lighten it.

He shovels coal into the firebox; the iron door rings once against the shovel’s blade as he roughly closes it. That ghastly sound seems to echo among night’s bastions, whose shadows swallow us all.

“A cold night,” he says, wiping his hand on his striped mechanic’s overalls.

“Do you have a theory of time?” I ask him shyly.

He taps with the toe of his heavy boot the bin in which his calendars accumulate, one year’s followed by the next. “Time is as iron and inexorable as this locomotive,” he says, “and as cold as tonight. Only in the bodies of women do I find consolation for having been born into it.”

“Is that what you find in the trees?” I ask.

In the moonlight streaming though the window, I see the old man blush. Old, though only yesterday, or the day before, he was no older than I am now.

“We will come soon to an immense desert,” he says, gazing sadly at night’s falling dominoes. “It will be a long time until we see trees again.”

“How do you know when there is no map and we’ve never before traveled this way?”

I pretend to be calm so that he may let slip some secret of our journey, which is, for me, aimless and obscure. But he says only that an engineer knows such things, that his instincts reveal what is hidden from sight. He uses the word foretold, which recalls for me the flagman’s theory of time, which I do not understand, though I have thought of it many times over the years.

“You can count them—the calendars . . .” This, my answer to the question of how many years he has been our train’s engineer, which once I asked him. The terrain was different from this—a plain, green and limitless, marred by clouds’ lumbering shadows. They made me think of buffalo herds slaughtered from a train, which I don’t think was this one, but some other. Some other track. Some other time. “You, who like so much to count provisions, could count the calendars in the bin and know then how long you’ve been here.”

He smiles at my innocence, says, “In the beginning, I had no need of calendars. I was happy to give myself completely to time. So counting them now would be inconclusive.”

“You never went into the trees then?”

“I tell you there was no need! Life aboard was sufficient. There was no need that was not provided for by the company.”

“The company might have had the foresight to include among the rolling stock a car of women—for the coupling of brakemen!” I laugh idiotically. “A rolling brothel.” I continue in a voice tinged with weariness and disgust. “We have everything else.”

“There is such a car; at least from time to time one appears that answers to its description.”

“And you never visited it?”

In spite of myself, I feel my pulse quicken with the voyeur’s wild agitation, as if seeing in the mind’s eye were enough. And perhaps, for one afflicted with imagination, it is enough.

“Once or twice, no more,” he says. “I did not wish to find my pleasure on a manifest among sardine tins, pachyderm, and instruments of torture. It was, as I recall, a performance in which desire was acted out. I left feeling anxious. And appalled.”

“What will you do when the desert comes?” I ask uneasily.

“What I have always done,” he says.

I study his face: It seems to be that of the moon itself—white, luminous, and cruel.

“Kill myself.”

6.

Only once have I seen another train. We arrived together in a narrow valley—our train and some other. The two parallel lines of tracks were forced close together by cliffs on either side of the river, which separated them and the rails. Ours, orange with rust; the other, silver—bright as mirrors in the sun, so that the eyes stared as if stuck open and only by shaking one’s head would they close. I looked at our train’s reflection in the river, hoping to see its end; but the cars pulled behind the locomotive and caboose were without number.

That train was crowded with passengers. For the space of time we traveled together, side by side, with only the narrow river between us, I could see men and women sitting in their seats, reading newspapers and magazines or sleeping, or else walking up and down the aisles—even passing between swaying cars on their way to their berths, or to dinner, or to the observation car at the end of the train. Although I waved and shouted, they seemed not to notice us. I was close enough to see their faces, their hands in their laps, or in their knitting, or clasped by other hands. These I took to be the hands of lovers, perhaps couples on their honeymoons. At no time in my life have I known anguish to equal this, when I saw those men and women holding hands. So that is love, I said to myself. And again, I tried unsuccessfully to attract their attention.

“They do not see us—not even from the observation car,” lay the engineer said. “We may be traveling side by side, with only a few meters separating us, but we occupy different times. Or if the same time, we are more aware than they of its qualities and aspects, dimensions and liabilities. It is that awareness and not those lovers that cause you anguish. Consciousness is the full awareness of time.”

“I would rather be on that other train,” I said bitterly.

The engineer said nothing; and in a little while, the mountains fell away behind us, the land broadened, the two tracks veered apart, and I saw neither the train nor its fortunate passengers again.

7.

Just as the engineer foretold, we have come to a desert. There are no trees now where he can take his ease, or practice his subversion, or immerse himself in time’s fullness—or escape from it. In the shimmering distance, I see tents, which appear to soar against the unending sands. The tents are colorful and moored by camels and horses, or so it seems from my remote and moving vantage.

Peering through binoculars, I can see Arab girls dancing at the center of intricate Arabic letters written with silken scarves on the still air. The scarves are rose-colored, pink, orange, blue, and green. At dusk, before night sweeps like a scimitar vanquishing day, the sand will borrow the colors of those numinous scarves; and tiny lights, as if at faraway depots, will mark the place of those mysterious encampments, lost in a vague and noiseless world. A world where time is marked only by the alternation of day and night.

The engineer keeps silent, shut away with his memories perhaps, while the train hurls itself against the desert at an impossible rate of speed, so that the duration of day and night is registered by no more than a flickering light against the never-ending rails ahead of us. Or behind us. Or above us, for sometimes we seem to be riding with the sun or moon under our feet, though it may be only the glimmer of the tracks. It must not be forgotten that we are traveling in the land of mirage.

In spite of our velocity, we spend years crossing the desert.

One day it is finished.

Limitless sand gives way to illimitable snow; gold becomes white by a perversion of alchemy. Flatland becomes tundra; and dune, tumulus as the train enters an ice age. The engineer cannot be wakened. It does not matter that he sleeps, except that I feel very much alone. I keep to the caboose, taking no interest in what can be seen through its windows. In London once, I heard Peary address the British Cartographic Society concerning his arctic expedition. He claimed a terrible beauty for the place, but I see only death in it.

I think I am slowly freezing to death.

I hear a clatter on the roof of the car next to mine—not a clatter, a measured, mincing tread amplified by the metal roof but dulled by cold, dead air. A girl climbs down the caboose’s ladder. I help her inside. She is wearing only slippers and a kind of corset such as I once saw at the Palais du Trocadero. I think she must be on the verge of extinction to be so scantily attired in this frigid place! I wonder she does not shiver, that her lips are not blue and her fingers black with frostbite.

“I’ve left my balancing pole on the roof,” she says. “Will it be all right, do you think?”

“Who are you?” I cry as one will, finally, who has seen quite enough marvels in his lifetime.

“The tightrope walker,” she replies, looking at me with alarm; for I was at that moment tearing at my eyes as if to have them out once and for all.

“Tightrope walker,” I say, adding mine to the echoes of what has come and gone or is still to be.

“From the circus. Why are you acting so strangely? Please stop before you hurt yourself!”

“This is, then, a circus train?” I ask, hoping to have found, at last, the ungainsayable truth.

“Yes. What else?”

“And has it always been so?”

“As far as I know.”

“How far is that?” I ask, searching her face for signs of treachery.

“For as long as I’ve lived,” she says, much annoyed. “My mother and father performed on the high wire. They fell to their deaths from it.”

“But aren’t you cold in that costume!” I shout, confused.

“A little, from the wind on the roof. The train’s going so fast!”

“You walked all the way from the rear of the train?”

I could love this woman, were there time enough. I could take her in my arms and stop time, though her eyes are not yet shadowed by sorrow.

“Yes, it was very exciting!” she said, clapping her hands like a child.

“Over so very many cars?” I say, amazed.

“Oh, there aren’t so many as all that!”

“And what season of the year is it?”

“Summer. July. What is the matter with you?”

“Summer. July. Did the impresario send you?”

“Impresario . . .if you mean the signore, owner of our little circus—yes. He’s very angry. Why hasn’t the train stopped?”

It has been many years since the train last stopped. Not since the desert—even before that, on a plain in a battle’s aftermath. Men lay in a muddy ditch, or hung on wire in attitudes of submission to history and its follies. The sun was eclipsed by cannon smoke. Unless it was the train’s own smoke spreading like a canopy overhead as it lost its inertia.

“We ought to have stopped two hours ago! The people were lined up on either side of the track, waiting to welcome us. The engineer did not even sound the whistle! The signore was very angry. He sent me over the roofs to see what was wrong.”

“Why didn’t he telegraph me?” I ask, turning to the telegraph key. But it is not there. The typewriter is also gone.

She looks at me as if I were something other than I am, or thought myself to be. A thing apart. She climbs into the locomotive to wake the engineer, who is dead. Or revolving through his fingers a tespyh while he sits before the Cilician Gates, in the Taurus Mountains, where the Euphrates begins its descent.

“You must stop the train!” she shouts, shaking me like one who is asleep.

“Me? I don’t know how!”

The train is hurtling toward destruction, an iconoclasm that will deliver me from all forms and performances, to a forgotten siding where I may rest and dream unmolested a theory of time. I stare, entranced—not afraid in the least that there are neither rails nor ties beneath me.

“But you are the brakeman!” she screams. But already she is fading, like a photograph improperly fixed to resist the seduction of obscurity. It is a great burden to be in time and to know that one is, just as it must be for those giddy ones, who feel always the earth’s turning beneath their feet.

Where my thumb was, I feel an itching prelude to growth. My hand is remembering. Soon I will remember myself as brakeman and, perhaps, even as once I was, before I unfolded like a paper flower into time—a young man not on a train and, perhaps, happy.