Kern is in a tunnel about ten minutes from Lares’ room and there’s a little light filtering down from high above and it seems to brighten and darken with his heartbeat, though he feels perfectly calm, and oddly detached from his body.
“Watch your breathing,” says the ghost. “Easy. Long exhalation. There you go. You can handle it. Your heart is a soldier’s, and you’ve seen worse than this.”
“Where now?” His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, like it might be someone else’s.
“The subway, to the airport. It’s way past time.”
“Won’t it make me visible?”
“It won’t matter, if you can make it to the station. Transportation infrastructure is highly secured. It’s suicide to try a hit in an airport.”
* * *
The train’s doors sigh shut, sealing them in. A raw edge of panic as its engines heave to life, but now there’s nowhere to go. Waft of chewing gum, motor oil, damp humanity, and then, as the train accelerates, the shrill harmonics of metal under strain. He remembers Lares saying that a train is like time, or history, irresistible in its momentum, its future unseen but coming on fast, and unavoidably.
He pretends to ignore the other passengers, who look rich, or at least no poorer than the favela’s better-heeled bohemians. Across from him is a couple, older, like someone’s parents but good-looking, speaking Spanish over the train’s roar and squeal. In a dry tone the man says, “So, really, you can see how very useful it all was,” and the woman—dark haired with small, freckled features—laughs, showing her gums, and Kern, helplessly, remembers a dark-haired woman sitting him down on a stool, working over his scalp with probing fingers, hunting down lice as the light faded in the window, the smell of something cooking. He remembers the house of white stone, the heat on white sand and the sharpness of her fear when she heard the wasp whine that he realizes, now, could only have been aerial drones, invisibly high overhead. He’s read that where the breath goes, the body follows, so he inhales, willing away the tension in his back, the heat around his eyes. There must have been some moment of final parting, but it’s gone, and all he remembers of the aftermath is walking north through the desert in the company of weary strangers, how the hard-faced, sunburned coyotes had cursed him, told him to go where he was wanted and tried to run him off, but it was better to be cursed than to have no place at all, and sometimes, after dark, the women gave him water. At night he’d gone off by himself, always half-awake, listening, lest the others go away. Near the border, the night sky was full of drones, their shadows gliding over the bright constellations as they fought their duels in the upper air, proxies in a war he’d never heard of. Minutes of stillness punctuated by the rapid flares of missiles firing like flurries of shooting stars, then detonations’ flashes illuminating the ragged contrails, and a few seconds later shock waves rumbling over the desert.
The train banks, centripetal force pushing him back into his seat, and now the woman across the aisle looks like no one, a stranger. He looks out the window—black, dust-furred infrastructure, leftover space, occasional flashes of graffiti passing too quickly to be attributed. A hint of salt on the air, and he thinks of the enormous pumps that keep the tunnels from flooding. The wheels clatter on the track, and all the other passengers seem to be asleep, or staring blankly into space, serenely confident the train will take them where they need to go. The woman laughs again; Kern closes his eyes, thinks that he must be in the present, that the present is gone once the thought has formed, that the present is a train that’s just leaving the station.