A few minutes later the tracks illuminate and the train arrives from the south, shamelessly. We board. I pace the empty car up and down, looking for people lying down or slumped in the seats or crouched with a weapon where I wouldn’t see them at first glance, an abandoned child, but there’s no one. The speakers crackle in anticipation of an announcement, then fall silent. We finally slide into the plastic-lined seats. Regardless, the doors close, and the train begins to move. Regardless, we go north, approximately, exactly to where is neither profitable nor known.
*
Gradually, the city collapses and slides from view, and through the window the reddish glow fades, replaced in shades by real, heavy night. I’m unreasonably shocked when, what feels like half an hour later, the train pulls into a station and stops. The doors open, and I inhale sharply, pushing myself down in the seat—the feeling in my gut is that everything is over, they are about to storm the train, we’ll be exposed and forced out, interlopers that we are, that this is where it all ends. You put your hand on my arm, feeling my body tense. No one boards, no infantry arrive. I breathe hard until the doors close again. The train begins its slow acceleration. Forest appears on both sides, occasional stretches of gray water. The towns we pass—visible through the trees, armatured by streetlights—don’t look specifically unpopulated, but I don’t notice any movement within them either. After the first stop I stand and make a show of consulting the map printed on the wall, a mess of primary-colored squiggles spilling in every direction. I trace my finger up the red one and into reaches unknown. “Do you know which line we’re on?”
“I don’t know, the main one.”
Between each station, the panic builds, but as the stops continue, farther and farther apart, deeper and deeper into this endless night, and the train remains empty but for us, my physical reactions lessen. At intervals, we talk quietly about nothing, careful of disturbing the fragile complex of our existence here, of revealing our presence, as if we’re a technical flaw in the system, slipping by and getting out unnoticed.
I lean my head against the window. At some unspecified point in the journey, a force pulses through the landscape outside, jostling everything to one side, a sudden ripple that I’ll only think I saw in retrospect.
The train rolls into another station, without fanfare. The engine shudders to a stop, and the doors open automatically with an empty, metallic sound. There’s no light from the platform outside. I wait for the doors to close again. The lights inside the train blink once, and then go off, too. A new layer of silence pervades the car, an absence of anything mechanical, while the sound of insects slowly wafts through the open car doors. We wait, past the point at which it seems obvious that the train isn’t going to leave the station, that wherever the tracks go, this is the last stop. You clear your throat, uselessly—it’s so obviously a space-filler that I almost comment on it—and we wait a few minutes more. Eventually, we peel ourselves from the seats and stand, shakily, as if we’ve been asleep for a long time.
We step out onto the unlit concrete platform and hear night sounds, air moving through trees. As we walk away from it, the train seems to become a husk—not something we ever rode in on or that ever traveled, but a static piece of the background, a painted-in part of the scenery. We feel our way to a staircase in the dark, your one hand at the back of my neck, the other in the air. I see a railing in the moonlight, and we follow it down.
The train doors do not close behind us. The train does not move again.
There was never any going home.
III.
NORTH
THAT FIRST NIGHT IN NOVEMBER A YEAR AND A half ago, in Richmond, the kid, dead Casey, still sputtering in the field behind us, we walked back to campus together, toward the dorms. That was it—we’d stood next to each other in the gathering outside after the show, we decided we’d had enough at the same time, and we’d walked to the show from the same place—all it took was space and convenience.
As we moved across the parking lot away from the crowd, you skipped into pace beside me, as if this was not your usual rhythm, you were used to moving faster—it was an obvious metaphor right out of the gate. “So…what did you think of the show?” you said.
“It was good! It’s refreshing to hear punk rock with a Southern accent.”
“Yeah, they’re pretty great. I can’t believe we got them to drive up all the way from South Carolina for this dinky little show.” I’d gathered that you had something to do with the planning of the show, which wound up being one of the last either of us went to in Richmond proper—their performance had been in the works for a long time, but the turnout was bad, as it usually was those days, the few and the proud; it was clear by this point that the center of whatever flimsy scene once existed in Richmond had slumped away, everything had changed. Six months ago there had been shows every week, regular series, there were “up-and-comers” and “mainstays,” no longer.
I was walking with my hands shoved into my pockets, empty except for my school ID and room key. I’d raked at the interior fabric until it was on the verge of disintegration. I was still in my ascetic phase, the aftermath of the gun—the weird impermanence, the sense that anyone or anything could disappear or materialize at any time—and it was comforting, the reassurance that I wasn’t carrying anything but my clothes, a head I shaved every day, and the devices necessary to gain access, generally, to the facilities where I was housed and fed. It was part of what kept me at the local punk shows despite the way the community was fizzling out, despite what I had done to expedite this—there were bands, or figures in bands, or had been bands in the past, who subscribed to the same kind of lifestyle, which felt like deprivation or abnegation but carried a moral weight. Proudest moments, I told myself I was aspiring to some higher code, that my vision would be clearer and starker than anyone else’s.
This was during your blue mohawk period, which I learned during our walk had been initiated a couple of weeks prior; it would stay this approximate color until summer break, when identifiers tended to change. Much later, on the bus to the city, maybe in the spirit of scrapping the past, you told me that during this year—and possibly the year or two preceding it, many eras ago—that you were trying to be “basically Tank Girl.” The delivery of the remark was casual, but was followed by a silence that gave it a peculiar gravity, the air of a deep and long-held secret, a confession of precedent, that you aspired to this kind of fantasy, maybe some part of you saw yourself plowing through apocalyptic deserts in war machines you fabricated yourself, a copied haircut and patches with British slogans. (If you’d asked me at the time, I would have called my student ID a “tag”—as with anything, it went both ways.)
“You seem nervous,” you said, as we walked.
I shrugged—the movement was probably imperceptible because we were in motion—and, to be sure, waited a few more steps before responding. “I like to make sure that everything is consistent,” I said, slowly and very deliberately, stupidly implying something vague that I hoped you’d question (yet which was impossible to question in its vagueness), as if I was some dark reservoir