half-registers the tsunamic vista of dawn’s armada in a far enflamed east. Then she slides back into the sleeping bag on the mattress at the base of the throbbing antenna above her.
In her head she keeps seeing Sara listening to that wall down below. One of the last conscious thoughts she has is that her lifè has veered wildly out of control lately and she likes to be in control, even if it means assuming the well-defined role of slightly subservient daughter, its definitions threatened only by her role of lover. But Sara is gone now or perhaps, she thinks at the end, I’m the one who’s gone. Not long before the crash of morning light she sleeps the sleep of the dead, as Sara always put it, and dreams of her own birth, her mind ticking down all her memories like the last hours of summer.
Two women on a train. Their destination is the end of a lie, although they don’t yet know it’s a lie. The older woman has truly convinced herself that in her last days she wants to get as far from the lake as she can, that she’ll die free of it at last; and thus the 2029–2031 younger woman arranged for them to leave the Chateau X in the dead of night by boat, although not sailed by the young man who loved her so unrequitedly and to whom she couldn’t bear to explain she was leaving. Rather the two other women Brontë met months earlier from the Freek Recherche lunatique drove her and the Mistress along the serrated shoreline in a beat-up thirty-year-old
exposing my pregnant belly to the city and the outside world in order to try
Jag that barely had room for them to the port at Los Feliz, with its abandoned observatory looming in the hills above.
From there, over the course of twenty-two slow hours a ferry sailed the two women further inland to San Gabriel. Lulu is sick. On the ferry deck bundled in a large coat and scarf and swathed in the gray of the wind, black late-autumn countryside and the solar casbahs of outer zedberia passing by and white waves on the lake like the veils of a hundred drowned brides, she seemed to Brontë only intermittently conscious of the journey. On the train now Brontë reproaches herself for bringing Lulu. But it’s too late, they can’t go back; they’re traveling on Armand’s money and, at that moment, Armand is shackled blindfolded and naked in the Chateau dungeon with the little red ball in his mouth, delirious far beyond any thrilling contemplation of the cracking of the walls around him and the lake beyond, delirious even beyond wondering when his Mistress Bronte is going to return. His henchmen wait in a limo on shore. In thirty-six hours it will begin to cross the narrow landfill of their minds that perhaps something’s amiss, at which point they’ll begin calling a cell phone that lies on the stone dungeon floor two wicked inches beyond the farthest expanse of Armand’s chains. Sometimes Armand can hear the footsteps of his Mistress in the Lair upstairs, or so he supposes. What he actually hears are the steps of another man searching the Chateau for one woman he knows of, and another he won’t admit to himself he knows of.
By early morning Brontë and Lulu reached San Gabriel port. They missed by twenty minutes a train that comes through only once a night, when it’s on time at all, and winds up in Chicago. Unsure how stupid she could count on Armand’s boys to be, or how far they might come to find her once they retrieved their boss, Brontë didn’t much care for the idea of sitting around the station
and prepare him for its chaos, and in that minute there in the toilet when I was
another twenty-four hours. In the small waiting room of the terminal, she found a kid who just put his girlfriend on the train, eating a sandwich out of a vending machine; she offered him one of Armand’s hundred-dollar bills if he would drive them to the next station and beat the train there doing it. Is she all right? the kid said looking at Lulu, chewing his sandwich in deep thought. She’s sick, Brontë answered. I need to get her on that train. Forty-five minutes later the three were careening through the San Berdoo badlands into the rising morning sun. Slipping in and out of an ecstasy of sunlight through the windows, trying to remember the color blue, in her mind Lulu added greens to grays to see if they made blue together.
All she knows she remembers is red. Two hours after having left San Gabriel, they beat the train to the Barstow station by ten minutes. After moving Lulu slowly up the stairs of the train and down the aisle to a seat, Brontë was bringing up the luggage as the train pulled out; the conductor came by and sold her two tickets. In the concessions lounge several cars down, Brontë buys water, a sandwich, fruit salad from a can. She’s alarmed when Lulu won’t eat. Lulu surfaces consciousness long enough to look out the window and say, Where are we? Seven or eight other passengers are scattered throughout the car; a couple of other women several seats up whisper between them. You have to eat something, Brontë insists, tearing off some more bread. “Where’s the lake?” says Lulu.
“At least drink some water.”
Lulu takes a sip of the water Brontë gives her. “Where’s the lake.”
“Behind us. We’re going to Chicago.” Chicago? Lulu asks; for
losing him all I could do was hate myself for not having taken him back to the
however much it means to either of them, Brontë might as well have said China. All Lulu knows she remembers is red. In her mind she’s been on this journey a long time, with its rails of green and yellow and its tracks of orange and purple (Tyrone the Train! I want to ride away with you …) as they rumble through the Mojave marshlands. After nearly forty-eight hours without sleep, Brontë sleeps until the train jolts her awake and pitches her upward; she’s momentarily disoriented, and for an instant she thinks Lulu is dead. Jeez, she cries softly touching the woman’s cheek, to which Lulu opens her eyes and turns to look at her. By this time they’ve been on the train all day. It seems to be moving slower and slower, crossing landscape more and more barren although, looking out the other side of the train, Brontë notes snow on far northern mountains. Every ten or fifteen minutes a tiny house glitters in the distance. Twilight falls in blueless magenta; a spreading red sky from the west is scratched with livid vapor trails, like God trying to claw his way in. Plutonium sagebrush blows south.
Lulu mutters in her sleep. Brontë gives her more water, trying again without success to get her to eat; then the younger woman dozes again and the next time she wakes, the train has stopped completely. In the night outside their window, symmetrically staggered in concentric circles around them and stretching out for miles like battlefield bunkers, single abandoned railway cars are lit by the lightning of a desert storm. The lightning is so fierce that the flash of it across Lulu’s face, as well as the tremendous thunder that follows almost immediately, wakes her as well. Brontë sits up looking around them. No one else is on the train except, at the far end, the conductor in his own seat; when he sees his last passengers have awakened, he saunters up the aisle.
silence of a dreamless delta, while at the same time I also believed it was
Pueblo d’Elektrik, he announces idly.
“Is this Chicago?” asks Brontë.
“Pueblo d’Elektrik. Last stop.”
“I thought this train goes to Chicago.”
“You have to transfer here. Nothing between here and Occupied Albuquerque and that’s another two hundred miles.”
“When does the Chicago train come through?”
“You’ll have to check with the station.” He leans down to look out the windows on the other side of the train. “Couple of days, I think. Station may be closed for the night.”
“A couple of days?”
“Might be open in the morning,” he says, “you can find out then. In the meantime you can probably get a room here at the pueblo. Yes,” he laughs at something he finds extremely funny, “you probably can. Yes,” he goes on laughing, “I would think so.” Brontë helps the older woman to her feet and moves her down the aisle. Down the stairs and off the train, she scurries Lulu to the shelter of an outside corridor that links the station to the railroad hotel next door, then moves the bags as the conductor watches. With Lulu and the baggage huddled against a wall, the younger woman darts from one dark window of the pueblo to the next, trying to see in. She finds a door and raps loudly; the rain and lightning and thunder grow. The conductor still watches from the top of the car as the train pulls out, heading down the track. Brontë has almost decided to break one of the windows when a light