Beautiful Machine Read online

  You press your lips together so tight that your whole face trembles.

  Burton drags you. “Come on,” he says.

  You are whimpering. He pulls you out through the door. Pulls you over the gap between the train cars and shuts the door. He shoves you into the little washroom. He is breathing heavily, snorting through his nose. His fingers twitch and his eyes flicker. His whole body is tense and trembling. He locks the door behind him and he stares at you with his nostrils flared.

  You shake your head. Your legs are clenched together. You are trembling. Your fear mirrors his eagerness. You shake your head.

  He curses you and he hits you across the face. You cry out and he shoves his sweaty fingers between your lips. You gag. He wraps his fingers into your mouth and pushes you against the wall. His hands are tugging and plucking like a child fumbling with a stringed instrument. A cello or a harp, a great bone ivory harp, music twinkling on the strings like falling rain. Your mother used to play the harp, long ago before you were born. She played it in her own vanished youth.

  He pushes you down on the toilet. He is panting and hungry. His fingers scrabble at himself. He looks at you. “You dirty fucking –. You deserve this, you –.” He says the word. You are nothing but the word. Not like him, not a person. Just the word.

  Your throat is closed, as though there is a hand wrapped around it still, choking you silent. You cannot scream, cannot hardly breathe.

  Private Burton is leaning towards you when something catches his eye out the tiny window. He raises himself on the tips of his boots and he looks out. “The mountain,” he says. And he looks at you. “We're going under the mountain.”

  The train enters the tunnel, and everything goes away.

  * * *

  The train is screaming when it comes out of the darkness. Light blazes in through the windows.

  There is blood on your hands, slick and hot and wet. Your own blood? Clothing in shreds, limbs twisted, a pain in your belly. You want to be sick.

  Asima is crying. When the train comes back into the light and the illumination of the sun covers her she looks like a wailing ghost. Her hands are clenched and furious.

  Private Burton's head is caved in, his skull broken against the wall. The hard iron curve. Bits of hair and blood stuck to the corroded metal like a living thing, like a growth. Blood runs black down the surface, dripping onto the back of Burton's pale hand.

  Rudolph Harris is breathing hard, his face pale and the expression frozen to his features. Private Burton's blood is on his hands, on the cool blue cuffs of his uniform. He seems surprised. There are red spatters on his face. Grandmother hits him, beating hopelessly with her arms against his body. Her husband Tamir tries to pull her away. She cries out. She spits on the body of Private Burton.

  Private Harris pushes them back. He is shoving them all back across to their car. He is shouting at them, brandishing his firearm. There is cigarette ash on his collar.

  You sit there, limbs locked, staring at the body across the little washroom. You wonder what has happened.

  Maybe Asima waking up in the darkness of the tunnel, peering in that void and seeing that both you and Private Burton had gone. Running back down the length of the train to find Harris. Him standing just outside the train, the red glow, the the tip of the cigarette illuminating his features in the rushing blackout beneath the mountain. The horrible sound of the train winding its way beneath those generations of impossible stone.

  Or maybe Harris walking back down the length of the train, lazily with his gun slung over the shoulder. Walking there just after the train entered the tunnel. Growing suspicious, coming out across into the next car, feeling his way in the dark as he crosses the narrow gap with Asima and then Tamir driven by their unease to follow.

  Maybe Harris and Asima sitting across from each other, looking at each other as prisoner and captive under the dim glow of the electric lights. Hearing, over the roar of the engine and the groaning of the tunnel, your voice.

  Maybe they simply sensed it.

  They are all here now. Burton is dead or dying but it makes little difference to you now. What has happened has already happened. Irrevocable, a word your father liked to use. You understand at last.

  The light pouring into the washroom seems grotesque and exaggerated. The dark of the tunnel went on for so very long, you thought that you would never escape. Now that the mountains are behind you it seems too easy, too simple. Surely this has not truly happened. You are still in that darkness. His breath still hot on your neck. His weight still heavy on your body. His hands still pressing against your skin. You will never get out of the tunnel. Any moment now you will close your eyes and find yourself once again submerged beneath the mountain.

  Private Harris is forcing the others back into the passenger car. They are shouting and clamoring. You are sure that this will not end without more blood spilled. It comes to you then: everyone is going to die.

  You move as if in a daze, rising to your feet and gathering the tatters of your clothing about you and walking out the door. Everybody ignores you. It is like they cannot see you. You take the first step towards the car beyond. Stepping, then walking, then running, running running, panting and clumsy. Your legs buckling, knees threatening to give out. How long was that tunnel? Already you are beginning to forget. Some things cannot be recalled, if only for fear. There is no past.

  You open the door and you see the engine. The hot mouth of the furnace gaping in its hunger for a shoveled morsel. You feel pity for the train. That great and beautiful machine reduced to this. The faces of the engineers damp with sweat and red with exertion. Some of them look up and they see you. They have deep and hopeless eyes that peer out from soot-smeared faces, turned horribly pallid by the darkness which surrounds them, grotesque like undercooked eggs slopping from the shell.

  They make no motion towards you. They do not seem to care. Your clothing hangs in rags on your body. Their hands are huge and callused. Their arms bulge hideously.

  They make no effort to stop you as you start up the ladder on the side of the car and pull yourself onto the top of the train. The sun is low in the sky. The wind roars. It tears at your hair and your clothing. There is an iron rung atop the train car. You wrap your arms around it and you hold on.

  The speed of the train is cleansing, the rush and the fury of it as pure as fire. Your life is in your own hands. You could let go and die anytime you wanted. You take comfort in that. They do not own you. You do not belong to them, nor Burton nor anybody. No one can touch you up here.

  The smoke of the train pours over you. You breathe its heat.

  The top of the train is like another world. How strange to think of the people beneath you. Searching for you? The mountains recede behind the train until you can hardly trace the metallic line of the rail back to the black mouth from which you have emerged. You hold on tight and you shut your eyes.

  An hour passes and nobody comes for you. Another hour after that. Have they forgotten you? Given you up for dead? Your hands sting and ache, locked to the rung like the bones have fused in place. You uncurl one finger at a time, just to prove you still can.

  The sun cools and slips away.

  You lay your head down on the trembling roof. You can feel the motion of the train through your jaw. You stare out. The rocks black and shining, the trees cruel and bare. The moon gapes like a bright hole in the sky through which you might crawl free, if only you could get to it, if only you could climb high enough.

  The train is slowing down. You feel as though you have become one with the train. The train is slowing down.

  You pull yourself up on your knees and turn. A city is spread across the world, a thousand cloaked lights gleaming in distant streets. The great roar of life inaudible over the rumbling of the machine beneath you.

  The city lies across the river, a great black river riding starlight. The span of the bridge is cold silver, a web of needles over water. All that water rushing to nowhere. Acros
s the river is an immense rail-yard. The train station.

  The train goes very slowly over the bridge. So slow that you feel safe rising to your feet. You stand atop the train and you look out at the great city. It seems poised to swallow, a great predator coiled in wait. You take slow steps against the train's momentum, creeping back along the top of the snaking thing. And now you see how long the train is. The rearmost car is so distant. How many there are! What is in all of those cars? More coffins? More prisoners?

  You come to the end of the car and you step across. No more difficult than stepping over a puddle on the sidewalk. You walk further and you wonder if they can hear you below, if their faces are turned up, maybe gazing into those strange dark vents and wondering what it is that lives there.

  You look at the river below. It is so far down, so deep. You know that you should jump. That water is freedom. It would wrap its cold arms around you and it would bear you safely on, away from the train, away from the city, away even from the war.

  But you cannot jump. It is so far down. You feel dizzy just looking. You kneel and put your face against the skin of the train, eyes shut. Your thoughts swim in that water. You want to vomit but there is nothing in your stomach. You vomit anyway, bitter drool spilling from your lips. You cling to the train and you shiver. The stench of your fear is overwhelming.

  The train crosses over the river, crosses into the city, crosses into the rail-yard. There are so many trains there, like bloodhounds with their noses pressed to the silver thread of interlaced rails.

  You crawl onto the next train car. The cargo car. You peer over the edge. The train is going very slowly now, coming to a stop. The door opens easily. You dangle down and drop into the car. The coffins are all around you. They were poorly secured, several of them have fallen and broken. The bodies are sprawled out with their arms twisted, stinking warm.

  You stand there and you look upon the faces of the dead.

  They are not soldiers in the coffins, none of them are soldiers. They look like you. They look like your family, your aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and your brother. They are not soldiers.

  You run out of the train car, forgetting that the train is moving, even slowly as it is. You fall hard against the tracks and you roll, you tumble. When you stand you find that your face and hands and knees have been scraped and cut. You touch the little wounds with trembling fingers. You are off the train. You feel as though something has been cut, an invisible cord now severed.

  The train rolls away down the tracks.

  The rail-yard is dark. A low fog is moving in, woven with the smog of the city, of smoke from so many trains pulled this way and that on the serpentine web.

  You make your way towards the immense station.

  * * *

  He saw the little girl come up from the tracks, her face so dark with filth that she almost looked like one of them. Her clothing was torn and she had a far off look in her eyes. It reminded him of soldier's eyes, which have seen bodies riddled with bullets or torn by mines or mangled in wire, somehow still alive and unable to believe it. He saw that same look in her face.

  He saw it in his own face, in his reflection. The war had put it there. No going back. He couldn't go home now. The bombs fell, and it was as though none of it had ever been. His wife, his child, his home. Torn from the world in a single flash of light. As though they had never been. He could not remember ever having lived there. No specific memories; they had all gone up in the fire. He was not that person anymore. He was some new thing, not fully human. The person he had been was like a childhood friend, half-forgotten. He thought of his former self in that wistful, melancholy way that people thought of old pets long dead. The beloved thing, now buried.

  The girl was tripping over her own feet in an effort to absorb the immensity of the train station. All that dazzling chaos. He remembered what it had been like for him when he'd first seen it. How amazed he had been, and how proud. This is what I'm fighting for, he told himself. That we could make something like this, so vast and beautiful, this is why we deserve to win. Electric light like crystal blazing brighter than the sun. The ornate tile floor, colored rock formed in dizzying patterns as complex as chaos. The gleaming brass, brass everywhere: the handrails at the edge of the platforms to keep back surging crowds, the hammered plates at the ticket booths upon which were inscribed unchangeable cost of fare, the ornate clock-face like some gargantuan monument to time itself.

  All had changed. The rails scuffed and worn by the touch of a hundred thousand filthy refugee hands. The ticket booth plates covered over so that inflated wartime prices could be scrawled on, over and over again rising higher and higher. The clock quiet and broken, its repair a priority to no one. The minute hand still turning resolutely while the hour remains forever unchanged. Six o'clock. The arrow pointing always down as if in protest. He spoke to the clock sometimes. Argued sometimes. Pleaded sometimes, sometimes begged. Most times he just told it to go fuck itself.

  And then there were the trains. So many trains! God, he hadn't known there were so many trains in the whole world. Where did they all come from?

  The girl was wandering in his direction. She tugged at her tattered sleeves, chewed on her lips with such naked hunger that it would not have surprised him if she were to bite right through the flesh.

  And then, as if she could feel his gaze, she turned to look at him.

  She flinched when she saw him, but only for a moment. She was not disgusted, not like the others. She did not shy away or cry out in fear. She simply looked at him.

  He didn't quite know how to respond. He kept looking, waiting for her to cringe, but she did not. She came towards him. She came almost close enough that he could have reached out and touched her if he had wanted, and then she came another step closer and she sat down in front of him. Nobody came that close anymore, not the other veterans, not the doctors, not the charity workers. Nobody had come as close as the little girl.

  “Do you have any food?” she asked.

  He almost laughed. “Do I look like I have food, girl?”

  She shook her head, rubbed her nose on the back of her hand. Was she crying? No, he didn't think she was.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Course you are. Everybody is these days.”

  “Do you know where I can get food?” she asked.

  “You got money?”

  She shook her head.

  “Ration card?”

  Another no.

  “Guess I don't, then. Nothing free here, girl.”

  “Oh.”

  He studied the little girl. She seemed very stern. Her brow was furrowed and her fingers clenched. She worked at them absently, massaging life back to the digits.

  “Where you come from, girl?”

  “Train,” she said.

  Laconic little thing. He was starting to like her. “Musta been a hell of a trip. Look like you been riding in the smokestack.”

  She shrugged, and then said, rather defiantly: “So do you.”

  He laughed. “Guess I do.”

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “This spot here. You in my home right now.”

  She seemed surprised. “Here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you live here?”

  “Why not? Nobody charge me rent, nobody ask me to work. Sometimes I find a crust or a coin or something. Sometimes useful things.”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Train station kinda things.”

  “Don't you have a house?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened? Did it get bombed?”

  He nodded.

  “I'm sorry.”

  “You ever been in a bombing, girl?”

  “No. I knew a girl at school who was. Her parents made her lie down under a table in the basement until it was over. She said it shook the pictures right down off the walls.”

  He snorted.
“Hid under a table? If that's gonna do you any good then you aren't in much real danger, now are you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Damn right you're not.”

  She nodded, seeming to accept this.

  “It's this war, it...” he said, and didn't know how to finish. He couldn't finish, there were no words for it. He didn't think that a girl, even a filthy spunky thing like her, could possibly have any idea of what it had been like out there. Nobody could who hadn't been there for themselves.

  He was still out there in that field, that fucking field. He could not leave it. They told him it was a miracle he was still alive, a miracle they'd found him in time. Bullshit. It would have been a miracle if they'd found him before the fire had burned itself out.

  He'd grown up near that field. How he'd loved it then! How strange when war brought you home, and all the landmarks of your childhood are transformed. The mounds where you once played king of the hill now bled over for the same game. The woods you'd climbed in hacked down to set up an artillery emplacement. A few hours after the army arrived, he no longer recognized the field. Torn earth. Swaths of barbed wire. Fire burning everywhere. Memory washed away in blood.

  The shell took both his legs and one arm at the point of impact, ripped them away before he even knew what was happening. He remembered the heat of it, the way it seemed as though the earth was heaving beneath him, spitting fire like vomit. He remembered being thrown back. The great crater opening like a mouth to drag him down, an angry earth broiling with flame. He remembered the fire crawling up his body as he'd tried to climb out, clawing with one hand and not understanding why his other arm wasn't working properly, why his legs were not functioning. Dazed by the blast, he thought, and the fire burning across the cobalt blue of his uniform. He felt so weak that he could not even turn his head when the fire reached his hair. He had felt it burning, eating the flesh. So hungry. And he had not the strength to scream. It took a lifetime of effort just to turn over and smother the flame in the hot dirt. He'd felt his skin melt off the bone, sifting liquid beneath his uniform. An oily rain came some time later and filled the crater. He'd rejoiced at that in some dim part of his consciousness. He had felt a kind of peace. I will drown now, he remembered thinking as the water started to lap at his mouth. But the rain stopped. He remained in that crater, water thick as mud up to his neck until morning. They found him writhing deathlike in the muck while the sunrise bled across the sky. They were cheering, celebrating. We won, they crowed at him, the bastards are retreating! They dragged him out and they were still cheering, still smiling. There had been men beneath him, clutching blindly in the fire, in the water, clinging to him in the hope that he might pull them out. He had felt them die in the long night.