Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

“Today. Now.”

He leaned back and looked at it more intently, as if it trying to detect some evidence of a crime. Unconvinced, he got up and spoke to a female supervisor. They talked. The supervisor looked at Cadence covertly, then walked over to the window.

“When and where do you want to travel?”

“Today. New York City.”

Cadence watched the supervisor study the voucher again, and only then scrawl OK on it. The supervisor’s initials followed on the lower left corner. The whole thing was obviously a tremendous inconvenience, requiring extra steps they didn’t want to take. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had actually paid for her ticket. The voucher was the equivalent of Amtrak welfare, and Cadence could damn well wait. The supervisor walked away, the agent again took his seat on the high stool, shot his cuffs in preparation, and gave a sigh that indicated that a long, laborious process was about to begin.

Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

He was a two-finger typist. As Cadence glanced at the clock, something inside her died.

A clunky printer got to work, spitting out three tickets onto a tray.

The P.A. boomed, “AMTRAK 14, SIERRA SUMMIT, BOARDING NOW THROUGH GATE 10!”

“Is that me?”

“Yes ma’am.”

She thought about squeezing her hand under the grate and grabbing for the tickets, but the clerk was not finished. He pulled over a stamping device that looked like a loaner from a transportation museum. Cadence watched in agony as the process ground on. He worked slowly and with great deliberation, as if following instructions whispered through an earpiece: Put the tickets in the little hand-press one at a time. Apply palm sharply. Stamp. Check the stamp. Repeat.

“SECOND CALL, AMTRAK 14 …”

The only other place this slow, she thought, must have been the Bulgarian Railroad, circa 1930.

Stamp. Check stamp.

Now a rubber ink stamp came out.

No better example can be made of the layering of technologies that burdens progress, she thought; just add on — never displace.

“LAST CALL, GATE 10 …”

“Is this going to take—”

The clerk smiled and shoved the tickets into the trough. “Have a great trip.”

“Thanks!” Cadence turned and sprinted down to the platform. People were hurrying, blocking her way with bizarre collections of luggage. Red hard-side Samsonite Travelers, army duffles, BlackHawk Assault backpacks, string-tied boxes, greasy brown paper grocery bags.

She found the right car.

The conductor was ready to pick up the footstool.

P.A. rumbling. “TRAIN 14 DEPARTING …” She stopped and looked very deliberately at the steps.

“Ma’am?”

She took a step, her eyes following her foot as if it belonged to a stranger. She climbed aboard, then turned to watch the uniformed conductor. He looked at her, then smiled and slowly pulled away the stool. He did this grandly, as if his secret job was to create life’s points of no return.

She wrestled down the aisles and found a window seat. With the nesting instinct of travelers embarking on a long journey, she deposited her backpack on the aisle seat. A mark to ward off strangers. She secured the rollerbag packed with the valise and manuscripts on the floor.

She looked down the car and smiled. Not crowded at all. Maybe eight out of thirty seats occupied. But the headrest smelled musty.

Arrival time at New York’s Penn Station was four days away.

The train lurched and the platform outside began to act strangely, sliding backwards from this oddly immobile perspective. Redcaps glided by with empty luggage carts without walking. She closed her eyes to reset her perspective. There followed a slow, accumulative creaking sound as hundreds of tons of metal protested against scores of train couplings.

The world soon reordered itself to the eyes of the mover. In less than a minute the great upside down U of the station mouth opened to spill into an outside world of endlessly parallel and crisscrossing tracks. She squinted at the maze of rails shining brilliantly atop the black lines of metal, as if some monstrous spider had spit out ferrous webs to ensnare some fantastic prey.

She liked this exercise in abstraction — the high contrast, the confirmation of order and art in all systems derived from life. Flowers, whelks, the faces of mites, whale cochlea, sermons, movie genre rules, journeys …

“Excuse me …”

She jumped.

The man in the aisle looked to be in his late twenties, well groomed but in wrinkled clothes, his hand extended toward the opposite row.

“Are these taken?”

“No, feel free.”

The man began to do his own nesting, but with the air of practiced routine. He plumped his pillow, tidied his books and newspapers, adjusted the seatback, stashed his eyeshades just so, and nestled his radio in the open bag down at his feet. The bigger bag went up above, and she somehow knew he wouldn’t have to open it during the trip. She half expected him to wipe his hands together in satisfaction, but he abruptly turned to her and asked, “Want anything from the cafe car?”

She waved a no thank you and turned back to watch the rail web and the trashy backside of Los Angeles dissipate as the train gathered speed. This was a chance to get some perspective on the rude and strangely fascinating ass-end of the city, and she gorged herself. Vines, trash, dumps, back entrances to seedy shops and bars. Inexplicably, she saw the lost graveyard where a thousand rusted and battered supermarket carts trundle off in the night, squeaky wheels and all, to gather and die.

Finally bored, she rummaged for something interesting in the valise. Clues to Ara seemed to come and go in this pile. Even the documents seemed to shift around. She found a small piece of paper, shaped as if sliced by a knife from a larger page. She pulled it out and held it up to catch the strobe light of a passing bridge. The paper contained a bit of verse:

Down roads long and weary
Past borders high and far
Through gates shut tight
Each to the other vow
Together to spy that dark blue sea!

A rather simple and affected halfling limerick, she thought, barely qualifying as a riddle. Of no magical significance or power whatsoever. All in all, a trifling thing.

Or was it? It was, after all, a vow, something far weightier than a promise. Whoever “each to the other” were, it was theirs. Cadence pondered whom in the world “they” could be. Ara? The one called The Bearer? In this pile of scrap it was doubtful she would ever know.

The train slowed and came to rest in a maze of tracks and warehouses. It lurched and stopped, again and again, as if queuing in an unruly line of racehorses at the starting gate. Liquid metal slams cascaded along its length. It rolled forward and gained speed.

Soon enough, the sun was setting in the ocean, far beyond Topanga and the quiet and shuttered remnants of the Mirkwood Forest. That place receded from her mind as evening shadows swept forward over the shoulder of the train. Her view flew past the dusty tracksides of San Bernardino. The country was thinning out.

The neighbor across the aisle had not returned.