The faster they go, Ben’s windows become ice and soon, halfsleeping, He has to pry His face away from the frozen. He has the compartment to Himself — the entire car’s His, it seems He’s alone in the train. To rouse, He goes out to the aisle — to explore, to forage for a diningcar, for food & drink, vendors, concessions He’ll compromise, if there is any diningcar, with waiters and a cook and a bartender, too, if there’s even a conductor, nu, if that’s not too much to ask, any official stoking the way and not just ghosts with the train itself a hobo between homeless worlds, condemned to the superstitious itinerant: a train that haunts the tracks desperate, enraged…all on its own, for Him and Him only. And so, to hope for an outside voice, whether it be live from the wilderness booming theology, or only temporally shrill and coming over a ceilinged speaker to tell Him what, where to stop, to get off for and just go. He makes way up the aisle, thrown from seat to empty seat, then enters the next car, one class upgraded from that of His board: it’s labeled on a sign as Levi and empty itself; the class of the car ahead He enters, it’s called Cohen, and is quiet, abandoned: this class the only class outfitted in plush, and there’s a tiny draft of heat, a lick up from the lowermost grill. And then the locomotive — but who knows how far the hierarchy extends in the other direction, eastward past the classless Israelien and further down the track again plunged into the unnamed, the unlabeled if not unmentionable rearcars, stretching to the intent or is it the purpose of forever — they’re packed, sardined to the gills: hymn, they’re the emes sardines there, herrings, also whitefish and sable, mamash salmon smoked and pastramitized, beluga sturgeon and its caviar, too, upward of ten kinds of roe, fish bound for the coast, preserved fresh in their unheated hold; they have to be in Holywood for tomorrow brunch; latterday lox flown in from parts east — the bris plate secreted deep in the dimly skinned hold.
Ben stays way up front in the Cohen car, that of the priestly class, despite His not being deemed worthy by whom: those who could, who would afford the price of such comfort, who are or at least were in a position to upgrade, produce the downpayment, submit to eternal scrutiny, entropic review…and even if He were so inclined, whose wheels would He grease, whose eyes would He have to oil to look other ways — nothing worse than being in a situation with no authority to bribe, you’re only alone if there’s no one to buy off…just those Orientals implacable, working their hammers of arm up down up down, through and past this scenery of movingpictures, Sunday matinee landscape panned over and around, again and yet animated again; enough to make Him nauseous…all this reek and dreck dripping from the train’s netherworkings, from between the cars, their toiletstalls, spraying to puddle with lubricants, those oils and greases underneath, fallen, goddamned the sign says it’s Occupied, as if He’s invading the opposite mirror — it’s Him inside squatting, shivering, hiding from no one save the shadows of His own inner fear, reflecting the outside world, its paranoid guilt how it both disrupts His gut then feels bad about it, apologizes with appetite, hunger, need; the toilet chugs, glugs, rumbles fouled bright blue like the water of the ocean further if ever, then overflows into the aisles, freezes slick to the floor. Around Him, passing overhead, through the poled wires both telegraph and phone, allpointsbulletins for Ben long put out, receiving little real response, only a titter of pranks, a smattering of honest tithepayers scared into visions. Hell, get them whoever they ever are nowadays, the Garden and the government and sum the world’s private capital, the international bountyset, the fortune and glory goys — get them desperate enough, they might even flag down a stretch of these trains, leash a few dogs down the aisles, shepherds sniffling under the seats, between the cars and then up on their roofs…but by that juncture, trackshift, lever pulled, flag up, routed on the wrong oneway past the last un-listed stop, He’ll be gone, hidden by a kindly bearded pointsmensch maybe, told to wait for the next train, for the one after that, in one of those tiny corrugated shacks that’s both the office and quarters, the desk astride the bed — then cradled tight amid the engine’s undercarriage, a shrunken shyly suckedup testis of the locomotive itself; to ride on, a splay of shadowed, perhaps only potential, stops later, further down the ghosted line, and then — another hiss, yet another lurch, a stop frail and still for here and now final, He leaps to the meager platform, makes on, oblivious of the absurdly narrow gauge of His escape, following only the map of that unsettled tum; and oblivious, too, to the workers — miracle migrants to the west’s newest expansion, the unlived but holyheld past — swinging back onto the train, which switches its orientation around to chug in the return direction, its locomotive downed, out of service, the train’s head and heart within towed now in reverse.
Bone voyage, the scowl of the wind. Blind Wiedersehn. It’s terminus, officially at least, and everybody off…for Him, though, there’s never a last stop, no final destination. Ben takes a breath around: the environs of this humpy dump of a depot littered with stakes — a grimed glimmer of gold, and silver, these railroaded claims delineating the hope had for clearing: these stakes pounded then left forlorn to mark nothing but their own abandonment, plots forsaken, the demarcation of a dream abused. Its true appellation, this junction jubilating a former wateringstop the locals that remain have taken to calling Bad Chan: there’s a mensch, the only mensch around, maybe the only mensch left, this letzing marshalik up on the forbidden rung of a stepladder painting in a bluff of choleric red a new name atop an old name and its beaten bandage of sign: Chelm, Hotzeplotz, anyone, Kasrilevke, Shnippishok…though isn’t that Maine, Neue England — tongue out, he hasn’t made up his mind. Open for suggestions. Closed Shabbos. Ben walks up and asks him what there is to do around here and the mensch scuts his way down without deciding on a designation, then disentangles from a tincan tub of signs on the porch of the sloughed slouchy depot one in the shape of an arrow he spikes into the stairside ice at a lean.
It says, Spa.
Why not, He thinks, revivifying, just the thing! To take the waters — where…the purest, repristinating air!
Ben transfers to His feet, following the directions intuited, maybe, mapped on His palms in dirt, in mud and the spew of the axles, shvitzing almost away in giddy excitement. He sets off for the colonnades, the rivering waters, rived, earthily heated and healing, medicinal, hundred percent hydroxygen for whatever might ail. To prescribe Himself a rest, His entire flee given purpose by the sudden prospect of pilgrimage, though the waters would probably be frozen, and the hotels might all be long booked. He walks the arrow, perhaps pointing wrongly or just down and out of light but finds no more signs, no higher, faster track, whether by way of faring or handoff, by night or because they’ve never existed — an indication of how elite this spa actually is — only overgrowth, dense wood without traiclass="underline" hidden, recessed, a jewel set in a greengolden, lunesilvered valley always beyond; down gulches up gullies, 1 Mile’s what He remembers the sign having said, hymn, that or ten at the most, one for each toe, deep into the forest of petrified palm among which are scattered, protective in passage, a huddling minyan of redwood, displaced sequoias sufficiently withered — to pass through them, their arched hollowed trunks, dragging with Him a piece of baggage claimed at random, Lost & Founded through thickets through thorns, tearing straps and imitation hide, Injun luggage seamed, scraped, zipped with tears to obscure its multihued beaded monogram, CHAI (standing for Chief Had An Idea, though unfortunately for his people the Chief ’s was to pack up the prairie then move out to Palestein, abandoning his wife and nine kinder). Ben comes upon a river soon, a hot burbling brook slicing its way through nature giving way to the kemptness of grounds, winding a valley around, then cleaving a clearing — revealed, beneath the palms’ icicled fronds and shaded by their hang from nothing but the freeze unremitting, we’re talking nestled: the insanitorium, a fallenrates paradise, starting at threehundred shekels a night.