A depot, an empty station. Ben waits for the fleck at the end of the sky: expectation, what might be a train might be only a blown speck of dust. He straddles a beaten bench unpainted and missing two legs. It’s been how long, a snow’s ever. Needled to the top of the only cactus here is a clock — a saguaro hosting the demoted if not forgotten station’s timepiece of only one hand, which is the hourhand, to the minute, or else it’s the second, up to whom, don’t think it ticks anymore: lightning struck’s stilled the mechanism; it holds an approximation of halftime. On the other hand, what’s the rush — frozen: that winded aleph from the east He hopes is a train comes no closer, but He’s done complaining for now, has hardened, holds puff and kvetch; think about it — at least there’s a bench, even if all it offers is splinter.
Here has no walls, no platform either, just this bundle of wood where a bunch of tracks, previously sunken, intermittently risen, converge then go on, track track, just metal and straight, far as west. Scattered haphazardly, protruding from the sand as if an alien species of arid growth, prickled in iron, unfinished, are levers and switches He has to rein Himself in from futzing around with, they tempt. His robe’s in tatters, draped around His head then cinched with its belt as kafiyah, to keep Him from sky. There’s no roof either to this, except weather, a snowball of sun beating cold.
What’s most disastrous, though, isn’t this lack of robing warmth, or of room & board, or companion, it’s the lack of a schedule — the affirmation of existence at the discretion of time. Know that in schedule is warmth, and that it is room and board and that it’s companionship, too, their hope. Ben searches for His in the sand, amid this dunedom chilblain and blown, howled and tossed and flungamong, a surface of shifting time and times, a confusion of stops and starts and both at once, at the mercy of unhoured weather. As if each sandgrain contained a number, a time number, a train number, a platform number and track number and the number of a stop, rownumbers and seatnumbers and letters, too, these letters and numbers engraved then effaced by the numb finger of a fiery gust. There are times of arrival and times of departure He sees, and sees prices, in what currencies and where to change to what, then transfers departing when for where, arriving who knows if at all, in a whirl, miragemotion, fluxed, mixed up with each other in the mingle of snows, packedoff, dispossessed, only to flake intercalated by the fix of the quarter, in precipitate wisps, drifted to nothing, the destruction of order, any system’s front passing through. Then, mindsick with dizziness to turn to the depot: thinking, where if you even wanted to would you pay, and who; He’ll be lucky if the thing arrives, the train, if once it arrives it ever leaves, if its cars are all hitched, if He’ll make His connection, where and to what. The sky doesn’t announce the stops anymore. No one is woken. Ben, His face, His nose, the only nail holding together the wood of the bench. A trainwreck, forgive.
The sound’s a hiss, undertongued shrill and then the smoky and fatty metal and meat smells seethed in a single stack, its vibrations opening the throat of the track into a quaking, mouthing fullvoiced, this wantonly gaping geshray. All aboard the morning, the desert. A locomotive comes into view, its single shining eye its headlight hulk and ever nearing as if the rising of the sun itself, illuminating the train of the engine: rusted loops and pulls and hauls soon slowing, now slowed, towing in the wake of its woke what brakes like an entire straightened equator, an endless end of the line, of coaches, passenger, cargo. A big old puffer, its 4-4-0 lead truck replete with snowplowing cowcatcher and towering inverse pyramidal smokestack to pulverize the sparks; Xmas Special classy, though izled aged, worked hard: its once neat forecab a memory of red trimmed in happy brass lately faded. It stops at Him as if for Him, sizzles. Ben tries to climb on and it snakes again, sisses, lurches a length, flings Him off. He gets up, tries again to clamber, another lurch, and again, He’s flung again — each time the stack’s smoke billows in regularly rolling puffs as if in mechanical laughter, tinged black. Making His footing, He finally swings on: rollingstock tumbling, without a ticket, to absquatulate paperless, without any documentation, official or not, neither destination. As for a passport, stamp this.
All pulls out, takes a turn, heads horizonways. Ahead of the train, its urge, far at the horizon — a tong of Orientals laying track out there, sloped amid the icy shimmer…they’re hammering in huff, laying track to the one track all the other tracks wind into, to pass through the tunnels of wind. Clad in silken skyshaded azure pajamas, sporting ponytails under dishpan strawhats don’t ask how they stay on they keep always, miraculously, a length enough ahead, a chug beyond then around the cliffed bend. They labor furiously, shvitzing to freeze a skin above their uniforms as thin as daybreak’s rashers, wielding hammers that might be their own arms distended, outgrown to smack the rails, the stakes and ties due west. All the wheels in a row, linedup on one of the infinitely interlocking, weaving tracks into one track, then past the horizon out again and in, disaster and its aversion, incidents of merging and splitting then merging again, until alone, finally, atop a lone slick track laid a length ahead of progress, laidout solitary through the forests then through the thinned forests and then the trees, who knows what trees, the grass and rubble, ruderal hope; the sadness inspired by trash that will outlive you, that must; to no purpose waste that can’t console…then, more grass in every shade of gray — and then trees again, all of them mere roots of His familytree, its fruit ripened to spoil, and then into the forest, its forests again and again: a landscape of repetition, an enumeration of repetitions enumerated, tradition’s ritual and its counting balm upon the heads of the fingers then kissed…folklore as an aid to sleep, the mythic soporific—the train kills the goyim, the goyim kill the goyim, the goyim kill the goy, the goy then kills the goat with his train, but they both die because the goy he also eats the goat, gevalt, which was ill, had terrible worms…and then, the odd stretch of fence, link or post, a trackfront house, a defunct yard whether for feed or lumber, the lot where better business practice comes to die; animal, that goat, cow, or chick, kinder and then again, emptiness; the iron, the steel, and the wood, the scorified energy, relentless and yet still it’s a miracle that everything works — all of it more dangerous and terrifying in its sheer haphazardness, its stubborn slowness, a technical exhaustion, a mystery mechanized of steam and of smoke.