Chapter One DIALOGUE Who are you?" "A traveller." "From where?" "The place before this." "Going where?" "The place following." "Ah, a conversationalist of a certain cryptic style, I see. Seeking what, if you please?" "Whatever you care to name." "It makes no matter, is that what you mean?" "Whatever." "But such an attitude, for having journeyed, doubtless, such great distances?" "All distances are great." "Surely not if I just cross the road." "You quibble, and I'm not a philosopher. Though, lost in thought, I might traverse a whole world, pacing from one wall of my room to the other." "Ah, then you're a kind of poet." "And not, you think, a maniac?" "Curious assurance, to be asking of a stranger!" "And why not a stranger?" "But we've scarcely met, I hardly know you!" "A feeling I often share regarding myself...." "Now you descend, I'm afraid, into the true shallows of philosophical cliché" "Yes, that's a hazard of travel: it promotes half-baked metaphysics. And an appetite for their expression." "Surely not for all travellers!" "Indeed. But now you see the kind of traveller you have before you." FOG Fog delays my plane en route. The aircraft sits on the dark mountain runway with its wing lights blinking, but its propeller is still and the fuselage door shut at the top of the mobile staircase. A woman passenger drinks the weak brandy at the dingy bar counter in the terminal hut. I pace up and down languidly, peering out through the mist-grimed windowpane. "This lousy weather," grumbles the woman at the bar. Her lavish hair is yoked with a dashing headband. "Oh, I don't mind it," I reply. "I'm a poet, you see. I'm writing a verse epic all about delays." The woman blinks at me and scowls, puzzled and disapproving. I grin. "Just a joke," I tell her. "I can't stand this either." I drift over to a warm armchair and settle down, with that mix of tedium and anxiety particular to the circumstances. A while later the woman comes swaying over in my direction. She sinks into a neighboring chair in a glamorous heap, like a meteor expiring in a blaze of chic garments. Our pilot materializes behind her. He sits on her chair's armrest. He is seedily good-looking and rakish in his worn-out uniform. He strokes the woman's heedless shoulder. "Just as well she is like this," he observes. "In a fog of her own.... Such a beautiful lady is an angel of death," he declares. "She is bad luck to a journey by air." He grins at the look on my face. He winks. "Just a joke," he says. The fog lifts a while later, and the plane takes off. When the woman awakens, I call for coffee and we hit it off. More bad weather forces us down again, but now on a lush coast. We decide to break off our journey altogether for now, and madly we lose a month to pleasure ... in sun-bleached cheap hotels in the far corners of villages, in hammocks at twilight by the sands of a humid, isolated bay. Thanks to fog we lie entwined, letting the warm sea shove us about like flotsam. But the woman is too fond of drink, and early one groggy morning, I sneak away to the local airport, alone. My life resumes its interrupted course. Six months pass. One day I receive a letter. It's from her. "Hey, remember that handsome pilot, who flew us in the fog?" she writes. "Well, talk of the poetry of delays, we've gotten married. Yes we have, and I'm expecting our first in a few months' time!" The letter trembles in my hand until I read the au revoir. "Just a joke," it says. SUITCASE I'm on an old-fashioned train. I doze off to the gentle sway of the wheels. I wake up. I blink. Then I sit bolt upright. My suitcase is missing. I look around wildly. The train has stopped, in the open countryside. I leap up and throw open the sliding door and rush out into the passage, shouting for the conductor. The carriage is deserted. So is the next one. I come back and see the outside door of my compartment open. I clamber down. A crowd of passengers is gathered by the tracks a ways off. They watch the conductor kneeling over an open suitcase, whose contents he is strewing over the ground. It's my suitcase. I give a shout and go running along the side of the train. "That's mine!" I cry, as I come up breathlessly. "That's my suitcase! Someone stole it. What are you doing -- where did you find it?" The conductor looks up at me mildly as I squat beside him. "This is yours, you say?" he says. "Yes, yes," I assure him irritably, scrounging around for my personal things and restoring them to semiprivacy under the eyes of the crowd. "Someone made off with it while I was asleep. Where did you find it?" "In your compartment," he says. "On the rack above you." I turn my head and stare at him. "What are you saying?" I demand. He shrugs. "You were asleep," he says. "We didn't know whose it was." He gets to his feet. "Well whose the hell did you think it was?" I protest, clapping the lid down and rising with the case clamped unlocked and dangling clothing under my arm. "You were asleep," he repeats, looking faintly amused. "We couldn't be sure." "Look, is this some kind of joke?" I snarl, flushing with anger. "So what if I was asleep?" "Now, now," says the conductor, holding up a hand, amiably. He glances over a shoulder and draws me away a few feet down the train from the other passengers. "Tell me, have you ever been here before in this part of the country?" he asks confidentially. "What's that got to do with anything?" I retort. Over his shoulder I see the crowd inching forward to catch our words. I give them a glance. They look back at us, unabashed. "My point is," the conductor continues, angling his head with that amused, superior look that crinkles the sides of his eyes, "one more time, it makes people in these parts start wondering all sorts of things, when they see a young fellow like you, dozing away by himself like that." I stare at him. I lift my head and stare at the faces beyond him. I come back to him, squaring my shoulders. My cheeks are aflame." `Things?' "I demand shrilly. "What `all sorts of things?' My god, what allows you to make off with my personal property and go through it out here like a sideshow, because I dozed off? Something people have been doing in trains since they were invented!" The conductor shrugs. He grins at me. He doesn't speak. "I'm going to have you fired for this," I declare venomously. I shake a fist in his face. "I'm going to write a letter, and have you thrown out of the railroad! I've never been so insulted in my life!" I push him out of the way and stalk off balefully with my suitcase through the crowd, shouldering several aside as I go. I stop once to glare back at him. The train moves off. I sit fuming in my compartment. I glower out at the countryside, which looks benign and hospitable as ever: tan and purple rolling hills, wide wandering streams, trim cottages set among stands of plump trees. I let out an oath and bang my fist on the seat beside me. "The insinuating bastard!" I hiss. "He's going to ruin my holiday!" I shake myself. I get up and open the lid of the suitcase and start repacking it neatly. My blood boils, thinking of my private items strewn out like a yard sale by the side of the train, thinking of the expression on the conductor's face. "What the hell's the issue about my dozing off?" I protest out loud. No answer comes. The train hoots, and rushes along now into the hills. Copyright © 1999 Barry Yourgrau. All rights reserved.
