I
THE SIGHT OF THIS old train car saddens me, though I cannot quite articulate why. There is something unnamable about the rattling of the empty wooden seats, so like the pews of a deserted church, that puts me in a lonely humor. It is an unusual feeling, since I have never in my life been alone.
Jagged mountains rise and fall outside the window, dotted with white trees and the occasional lodge long since abandoned to the wild. It has been one hour and forty-two minutes since the last snow-shrouded sign of civilization crawled across the landscape, and it will be fifty-four minutes before the next appears. This is not accounting for delays, accidents, breakdowns, avalanches, or seismically induced derailments.
The only other occupant of the car is a young boy, bundled so heavily he resembles a sphere more than a child. He sits alone because he failed to follow his mother off the train at the penultimate stop, but he does not appear distressed. The conductor had promised to deposit him at the correct station on the return south, and he shrugged in reply, biting shyly at the forefinger of a well-chewed glove.
The train stops twice so workers can clear snow from the tracks, adding, according to my timepiece, forty-one minutes to the journey. It is not so deep into winter that such a delay will prove fatal, but I will arrive on the dangerous side of dusk. Perhaps that is for the better. The man I plan to meet at the station is not likely to be punctual, especially since he does not expect me. He may not even yet know of the death that brings me north.
The snow-laden firs bow their heads and shed motes of light as the sun slips between two western peaks. The boy squints out the window, drawing intricate outlines of mountains in his condensed breath and wiping them away with equal enthusiasm. I study him at play, noting his movement and development, his flushed cheeks, the herpetic sores at the corner of his mouth. He is a charming creature.
He meets my gaze and reddens, balling his hand in the palm of his four-fingered right glove. I suspect come nighttime the ride will only get colder, so I remove my own gloves and offer him a trade. Wordlessly, he compares them to his current pair. He slips his hand inside and, finding them to be close enough to his own size, accepts. As the train once again bellows and lurches, his complacent smile reveals dark gaps of missing teeth. He spends the rest of the trip removing the gloves, twisting the fingers in knots, untwisting, reversing them, and wearing them again. By the time my destination comes into view, he is chewing away at one leather forefinger.
The train whines to a stop. As I bid farewell to the child, I suddenly long to trade places with him, as easily as we have traded gloves. I would like to ride back south in his place, to assume his unworried demeanor, to occupy the capricious brain developing in his skull. Perhaps, one day, I will.
But for now, I must address my own mind. I must follow the eddies of darkness where the flow of my thoughts has been interrupted, where a gap has opened and swallowed a portion of my memory. Only a corpse is left, a body I should have seen die, but whose agonal moments slipped past with nothing but a tense, vague unsettlement.
I collect my things and disembark. Workmen drag several dozen boxes of supplies through the snow, and I follow their tracks to the three-walled shack that passes for a railway station. The shelter offers little respite from the cold, and I shiver between crates and containers, massaging a numb forefinger and curling my frozen toes in their inadequate shoes. The train reverses course, black smoke billowing in its wake, and disappears back into the maze of mountains. Silence falls with the dusk, and the encroaching shadows color the snow an endless, featureless blue.
Baker arrives with predictable lateness, and in his usual manner: bathed in the exhaust of his snow-treading vehicle, balancing sidesaddle on a torn foam seat, with a small branch of pine—a poor substitute for the cigarilles he has vowed to eschew—poking aslant from his frosty beard. At his back creaks a sled of his own making, a rickety contraption of wood and metal on which he hauls supplies between the station and the town.
Suppressing an unexpected pinch of anxiety, I watch him rattle up to the shack, smoke wheezing from the machine’s trembling tailpipe. I raise a hand in greeting.
Baker slides from the seat. He looks to his left, then his right, as if hoping to find someone who can explain my presence. He, of course, does not recognize me.
“You’re of the Institute, I s’pose,” he says.
I nod.
“Hell of a fast arrival. Been but two days back the château sent the letter.” He speaks hard Franco, and though this young tongue of mine is unused to its phonemes, I am familiar with the language. “Just nay thought—lor, never mind. I’m Baker.”
I pretend I do not already know. He extends his hand and I take it.
“You lost a finger there,” he says. “Can ’quire summore gloves in town. Nay far. Any luggage?”
“No.”
Copyright © 2022 by Hiron Ennes
