The train flew west. Lake stood in the aisle of his dark empty car watching the passing small towns while the cold air came through an open window. There was a field in a flood of stars; he had known it once. There was a house beyond the field; he had known that once too. The train flew past all of it. For a while he heard the sound of a dog on the ground below; it ran along barking until the train passed a wooden fence by a road and then the dog was left behind. Soon they were at a river; he knew this river. As the train flew past, as he turned to look toward his destination, he parted his lips as if to say something or cry out or simply breathe a little. The train wound its way into the open red mouth of the moon.
He fell asleep in his compartment by the window to the sight of the black river beneath him. When he woke several hours later it was morning, and the river was still there. He decided they had stopped a while on the track during the night; he looked back in the direction they had come and strained to see the banks of the river behind him. He wasn’t sure whether he saw them or not. The train hurtled on, a moving tunnel unto itself, the space of the west clearing before it and collapsing behind it. Lake fell asleep again; occasionally he would wake with a start, only to determine the train was still moving and had not yet reached the other side. When he woke again at dusk, he sat up abruptly to stare out the window; the river was still beneath him. He was certain the train had not stopped for any significant period of time. The horizon looked utterly different from the way it had looked that morning, and now Lake was sure the riverbanks behind him were far out of sight. The train seemed to him to be moving fast, though it was difficult to tell since there was nothing but river and sky against which to measure.
He languished in and out of a stupor, overwhelmed not simply by the weeks and months of his journey but by the fifteen years he had lived on the moors disproving everything of his life except for a sound he had heard once long before from the other side of the river he was now crossing. As he dozed he dreamed only of the river and how he would wake to the white banks of the other side. People went west all the time, he reminded himself in his sleep; this is not unusual. It’s in the nature of the times to go west. But when he woke the next morning the train was still moving and the white banks of the other side were still not in sight. Lake explained to himself that it was one of the world’s major rivers.
Sometimes an islet would appear or something that resembled the early stages of a marsh. By the end of the second day there were more islets; the water was magenta and the clouds were low and rumbling, barely a hundred feet above him and rushing ahead like rapids to the edge of the earth. On one of the islets he spotted a red windmill spinning against the sky, and then on another islet another windmill; within the hour there were waves of them as far as he could see, red windmills slowly spinning against the sky on a thousand islets spotting the water. The clouds rumbled on. We are approaching the other side of the river, Lake told himself with some relief. But within another hour, before darkness fell completely, the islets began diminishing, the windmills began disappearing, until there were only a few left on their outskirts, and then just the river again, as before.
He sat up through the night, dread weaving a cocoon inside him, and collapsed at dawn into exhaustion. When he woke that afternoon the larva of dread had burst forth into full blown terror. The river was still beneath him and the sky sagging onto him closer than ever. The sun was white in the west; and as he sat watching it, he saw a geyser erupt from its middle, first a small spittle of black, then a trickle in slow runnels up over its face. My God, he said, and raised himself feebly into the window of the train and held himself there, as he had held himself in the window of his college room many years before, thinking of her and contemplating before him the very track on which he was now stranded. He did not consider going to another car of the train to find someone else; he did not want to find that there was no one else. He didn’t want to walk on looking for someone until he got all the way to the front of the train, to find no one was even running it. He didn’t need to discover this. It was no wonder, he told himself, his mother had disappeared without a
