We liked the train, I should say that first, so no one thinks we are complaining. It had a dining car, a children’s car, a band car with a trumpet in it, and a timetable that ended in the words Easter Island, 4:15. The hour was smudged in my copy. In the clock of the carriage it was something else. The conductor, who had seen both, said the two were in perfect agreement, and one doesn’t argue with a man who is that calm.
The first thing to go was the trumpet. I mention it because it made a small sound going in, a toot, almost polite, and because afterwards I thought that if someone had been listening carefully at that moment he could have gotten off.
“We’re short of fuel,” the engineer said. He said it the way one mentions rain.
Then a seat went through the door. A woman said that was her seat, and the engineer said not any more, and she looked at the empty place for a while, since there was nothing else to look at, and I think she was already beginning to understand that a seat is something you have only while you are sitting on it. Then a table went. A hat rack. A hat, which a man caught in the air and cried out over, that’s mine, and the fireman took it from his hands with great gentleness and put it where the others had gone.
“Your hat is working,” he said.
The train went faster. This is what I can’t explain to people on the ground: that it went faster, and that this seemed, to all of us, more or less like an answer.
I’ll tell about the tarantella, because it was the last beautiful thing, and because I was there.
The music director had written it on the back of a menu. A dented trombone, a bucket of nails, a hubcap, a saw played with a bow, and a pump organ that breathed instead of playing. He insisted it be heard before the band was burned, and so it was: the baritone, who sang only nouns (coal, hat, mother, ledger, hat), and we danced the way people dance who have been bitten, which is to say wildly, and without any pleasure, and with great precision.
“What is it for?” I asked him.
“It’s a cure.”
“For what?”
“For whatever bit you.”
Afterwards they took the piano. Six men pushed it down the corridor while the conductor explained that it had been reclassified as morale infrastructure, and the pianist followed, still sitting on his stool, and was given the stool as severance. The strings went one by one with a small bright sound, and the saw bent the last note out into the dark. The director went on conducting after the band was gone. He conducted the nails. He conducted the hubcap. The speed gauge said nine miles an hour, and someone asked him to play it again.
“Which part?”
“The part where it burns.”
It was then that I noticed the compartment.
I mean mine. I had been given one, I had the paper, and when I went back to it there was someone sleeping in the bed, someone who opened one eye with the courtesy of a man who has been expecting you. You were never assigned a compartment, he said. You were assigned Car 7. I went to Car 7, and there wasn’t one; I found Car 9, and in Car 9 was the same man, in the same bed, with the same eye. I left. When I looked again, the numbers had gone around, 7 into 9, 9 into 3, 3 into 7, and the conductor, who counted eleven cars, said there were twelve, and when I counted again there were thirteen, and he nodded as if I had finally said something.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Car 7. And you?”
“Car 9.”
I want to be accurate here. I don’t think I said it. I think someone said it for me and I heard it from a little way off, as you hear your own voice on a recording, and I only remember that it was agreed.
The mail went after that. The mail car had come loose, I suppose, or been let loose, and the engineer opened one sack in the corridor, so we could see: pencil, ballpoint, the careful handwriting of people who rarely write. To whoever is on the train. To the folks going to Easter Island. To the man in the third car, you’ll know him by his hat. A pressed flower. A dollar folded very small.
He read one aloud, because he could. Dear traveler, we saved you a seat at the church supper. We kept it warm. We’ll keep it warm until you come.
“That’s nice,” said the fireman.
“It’s forty-one years old.”
The sack went into the fire. The flower made a sound like a held breath. The dollar took a long time. And I thought of a hundred towns behind us, each with its porch light on, each one a small stubborn fact the train was making false, mile by mile, simply by not being there.
There was a nurse. I put her here because she came to the doorway at about this point, gray at the temples, wearing a cape from France that she had never given back, and carrying a leather bag whose contents nobody remembered. She asked where her compartment was. The engineer consulted a clipboard and said Wellness, Legacy, and then, cost center, and pointed with his chin toward the firebox, and there was the fireman, nineteen years old and soot to the eyebrows, with a face she had seen on a thousand stretchers.
She asked if she had a choice. He said not in this model.
She put the bag down. She took off the cape and folded it, as you fold something for the next person. Then she walked into the fire the way she had walked into the wards, without hurrying and without stopping, and on the way she said thank you to the boy. I would like it noted that she said it to him.
Meanwhile the carriages were closing behind us. I don’t know how else to put it. It was like living in a house where one room after another is taken, quietly, without anyone having seen the taking, and where one gets used to it so exactly that after a time the corridor seems to have been built the length it is. We moved forward. We said it’s better this way, there was always too much room. The accounting department went, and it turned out to be a thin young clerk at a high desk by the window, copying a ledger by hand, so thin he seemed ruled in with a pen. They took the desk. They took the floor. He stood on the draft and went on copying. Nobody knew what the ledger said. It was forty years deep and every page began Dear Sir.
“Leave him,” said the accountant, after a while. “He was here before the Company.”
So they left him, and the car went to pieces around him, and the fire waited, politely, as fires do, for him to finish.
In First Class, the lecturer stood before his audience. The carriage was missing half its walls. A sofa went past his head. He did not turn.
He had once been a semi-famous Jungian, known for a book about archetypes in corporate decision-making and for introducing the phrase “collective individuation” at a conference in Zurich. For twenty years he explained the unconscious to people who preferred not to have one.
He had also taken up temporary residences on trains: a winter on the Orient Express, a spring on the Trans-Siberian, six weeks between Paris and Istanbul. He liked trains because they seemed to provide a moving unconscious: compartments, corridors, locked doors, strangers, dreams, and the reassuring knowledge that someone else knew the destination.
He had called this “the archetypal journey,” and had been quoted saying that Dostoevsky understood the railway as a metaphor for the divided self.
By the end, he could no longer tell whether he was describing the world or merely repeating the language in which the world had described itself to him.
“No, no, no, no. What we are co-witnessing is not a crisis. It is a sorting.”
A chandelier fell.
“The sorting is not a thing that happens to the cohort. It is a thing the cohort does, upstream, to its own downstream. We were very clear on this at the Winter Offsite. The unpriced portion of the organization has been long-tailed into visibility. We now proceed to shadow-forward it. To retire it into its own optionality. With dignity. With a rolling dignity.”
He clicked his remote. Nothing appeared on the wall, because there was no wall. He clicked again.
“The Collective, as we know, is an invisible hand with a vesting schedule. The Individual is a hand that has been de-collectived. Between them stands the Firm, which is the Individual at scale, minus the Individual. I do not say plus. Plus was a Q3 word.”
An elderly man in the second row removed his cap. A woman beside him folded her hands. She had heard the word vesting once before, in church.
“A boom is a malinvestment that has not yet been told.”
He clicked. On the part of the wall that remained, a snake appeared, eating its own tail.
“Told by whom? By the snake. The Jungian will call this the ouroboros. The Austrian will call it time preference. I would ask you to look at it a moment before anyone calls it anything.”
He looked at it. So did they. The snake had taken its tail in to the second joint and was working steadily toward the third. It did not hurry. It did not seem to find the arrangement unusual.
“The snake is not eating its tail for eternity,” said the lecturer. “The snake is eating its tail for margin, and each bite is accretive to a thing we are not yet permitted to call the head. Observe the jaw. Observe the commitment of the jaw. I would ask you to hold the word head loosely. Hold it the way one holds a receipt.”
A second chandelier fell. He stepped over it without looking, the way a man steps over a tenant.
“Streamline is a verb the firm performs upon itself in the presence of its stakeholders, who are, I think we can say, present.”
A passenger in the third row fell through the floor. His notes stayed in the air a moment and then followed him.
“Exactly,” said the lecturer.
The audience applauded. It was unhurried applause, from people who had understood nothing and had been told, in the finest voice they had ever heard, that it was in hand.
In Second Class, the consultant sat on a luggage rack. Beneath him two porters and a brakeman were taking the carriage apart one plank at a time. They worked with a claw hammer and a ledger, and each board was logged before it went forward to the firebox. Plank 1,114: wainscot, oak, serviceable. Plank 1,115: wainscot, oak.
He had been a consultant for thirty-seven years, though nobody could remember exactly what he had first been hired to consult about. He had advised railways, hospitals, governments, airlines, and once a monastery that wished to optimize its silence. He had published a book called The Smaller Footprint, which had been translated into twelve languages, though in three of them the title meant something closer to “the disappearing shoe.”
The porters had been promoted to Associates that morning. They stood very straight. The title had come with a vocabulary, and between planks they were still looking for the expression that went with it.
“Faster isn’t the metric,” said the consultant, to the middle distance, where the metric was. “We are not here to de-board the carriage. We are here to audit its becoming-visible. Each plank is a decision with a face. You will find that the face of a plank is a lagging indicator of the face of the plank before it.”
“Plank 1,116,” said the elder porter. “Wainscot.”
“Precisely that. Thank you.”
The elder porter did not know what he was being thanked for. He felt it from the collar down. He wrote the number again, more carefully, in a hand that had not been that good in years.
The luggage rack went into the firebox. The consultant came down to the floor without any change of tone. The floor began to go, a board at a time, and he moved with it, lower and lower, as the track came up through the gaps, until he was sitting on another passenger.
“Please move,” said the passenger. “This is Second Class.”
“Very efficient,” said the consultant, and shifted his weight, and went on.
His disciples sat on what remained of the benches, taking notes on the backs of their hands.
“Consider the starved cell. The starved cell digests its own machinery in order to un-starve the machinery. It becomes smaller, and this smallness is forward. It is lighter, and this lightness is owed. For a while it works. We say of such a cell that it is carrying its own cost of arrival. Capital, in its present phase, has stopped growing and begun interfacing its digestion. It eats the interface. It interfaces the eating.”
A window left the carriage behind him. The younger porter logged it. Window, one. Glass, various. His lips moved over the word various. He had never been entrusted with a word like that.
“But who is the interface?” asked a disciple.
“Everyone, as a standing amount.”
“And the customer?”
The train went through a house. The house was no longer there. The consultant considered the new opening in the wall, where the weather came in, and the brakeman, who had been working at that wall, stepped through it into the dark and returned a moment later holding the wall.
“An excellent question,” said the consultant. “It has been pre-answered forward. We find the customer at the point where the customer is least a customer. At the margin of the absent. In a sense, we leave him a vacancy.”
“Yes,” said the disciple, and wrote it on his wrist. “Yes.”
The younger porter had stopped logging. He stood with the pencil in the air. It was not confusion on his face. It was the opposite: the relief of being, at last, within range of someone who knew.
“He’s very good,” he said.
“He’s the best I’ve heard,” said the elder, and meant it, and wrote Plank 1,311, and underlined it.
By then the carriage was a floor and a roof, and then a roof, and then one plank, with the track running under it and the night coming up through the seams. The porters stood on it with the hammer and the ledger. They looked at each other.
“Does this go in the fire?”
“It’s what we’re standing on.”
They considered it for a long moment, the way men do when the arithmetic is simple and the ledger has no column for it. Above them the consultant had reached the part about the gift of the smaller footprint.
The elder porter wrote Plank 1,402. He looked up at the consultant, and then he stepped off. The younger one followed, with his cap in his hand.
The consultant had no place left to sit. He stayed up in the air a moment longer, lecturing.
I am aware this sounds like satire. I would only say that I was standing there, and nobody laughed.
The passengers had been on the train for years. This is what I came to understand and it is the part I like least. They had jobs. They received mail, until the mail. They knew which toilets were broken, which conductors were reasonable. They had boarded to get away from a war whose name had been used up, like the towns, and then there was a timetable, and the timetable grew a kitchen, and the war became a thing they were from rather than a thing they were fleeing. Children were born in Car 4 who had never seen the ground hold still.
An old woman knitting by the window, with a photograph of a house pinned to her coat, told me kindly that we would arrive by spring. She had said it, I think, for nine springs.
I asked a man who had been aboard for thirty years whether he had ever wanted to leave. He said, leave for where? I said, Easter Island. He laughed, a good laugh, with a cough at the bottom of it, and said that Easter Island isn’t a place, it’s a department.
“Which one?”
“That depends on whether you’re arriving or departing.”
And then, because I was young and he was being kind: “It isn’t necessary to have a ticket to Easter Island in order to be late.”
After that I went forward. There was a dining car, a sleeping car, a car of offices, a car of people whose work was to decide whether the offices were authorized, a car with no one in it. I should say that I was not hurrying. I opened a door and there was another carriage, and at the end of it another door, and on it, in a clear hand, EASTER ISLAND. I went through. I turned around, and the door I had come by was not there, and I felt no alarm at all, only a great and ordinary tiredness, like the end of a long afternoon.
They burned the children’s car that evening. The schoolmistress stood in the doorway with a stack of arithmetic books and said a long-term investment, and the accountant said no quarterly return, and the cook threw a roast into the fire so at least someone would have lunch. Then the baggage car: trunks, photographs, a daguerreotype of somebody’s mother. That’s my mother! Fuel, by weight. Then the velvet, which burned hot and smelled expensive. Then the curtains, the carpets, the lamps. By then everyone was standing, and the engineer looked around and said, we’re not using the seats.
Somewhere in there the train left the rails. Nobody noticed. The engineer asked where the track was, and was told it was gone, and said then we’re making good time.
We crossed a field. Then another. Then there were fish.
I’d like to be exact about the whale, because afterwards people said I made it up. It lay beside the train on the ground, large and dry and unsurprised, and the fireman looked at it for a long time and said we’re in the ocean. There was no water. The seabed went out flat to the horizon with a cruise ship tipped in the mud, and a man on its deck calling across the emptiness, do you have Wi-Fi?
Ahead was a town, in the way. The train went through the barber’s, the post office, the bank, the courthouse, and a judge landed on the locomotive and cried stop, and we said we’d burned the brakes, and he asked why, and we said efficiency, and he thought about it and said proceed. Below the town there was a mine, and below the mine there had been something worth digging, and the town slid into the pit neatly, like a drawer. The CEO ran out of headquarters shouting that we were destroying the company. The engineer said we were monetizing it. The customers? Burned. The town? Behind us. The CEO smiled, excellent, and jumped aboard, and his headquarters went into the firebox floor by floor with the ticker still running.
Then, ahead, the statue: very large, very calm, facing inland with its back to a forest that was no longer there. There were stumps. Then fewer stumps. Then none. What happened to the trees? the engineer asked, and the consultant said they’d been useful. For the statues. For the canoes. For the fires. And then? Then there were no trees.
“Anyone can reach Easter Island,” said the engineer. “All you have to do is burn everything on the way.”
I’m told that this is where I should have woken up. In the stories it’s always here. But there was the firebox almost empty, and the engineer’s seat went in, and the controls, and the floor, and the engineer said what’s left? and the fireman said us, and they began, with perfect courtesy, to feed each other to the fire, and I watched them, and I understood that I was not on the train the way the others had been on it. I was on it the way a reader is on a page.
At last there was only the locomotive, then only the firebox, then only the fire, going on across the bed of the Pacific. And behind it, I swear, all of it was following: the statues, the mine, the town, the forest, everything that had been used, in a procession, at a respectful distance.
“Isn’t that impossible?” asked the accountant.
“Don’t use that word,” said the lecturer. “That’s called growth.”
The engineer looked at the timetable. Easter Island, 4:15. His watch said 4:16.
“Late,” he said.
There were no brakes. The statue was directly ahead. The train struck it, and the statue broke, and the train broke, and then, for what I can only describe as a long time, there was nothing at all.
Five of them climbed out of it: the engineer, the fireman, the accountant, the lecturer, the consultant. The train was gone, and the town, and the mine, the forest, the Pacific, the passengers. The accountant had the quarterly report in his hand and his face was lit. Record earnings. Record efficiency. Autophagy. He looked at the bottom line and said there was one problem, passenger revenue was zero, and the lecturer said that was fine, they’d eliminated the cost of acquiring customers.
I came out of the smoke then. I should say that I had been wearing the cap for some time, and that it fit, as these things do. I had a ticket punch in one hand and a stack of forms in the other and I said, in a voice I recognized as the conductor’s, which is to say as mine:
“Tickets, please.”
They looked at me.
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be validated.”
I punched the engineer’s hand, and the accountant’s. I bent and punched the fire.
The fireman received a promotion. There was nobody left to give it, so he gave it to himself. Then he promoted the fire, and the fire burned the promotion, and he wrote a letter on the back of the ashes: Dear Company, enclosed find my resignation. Yours very truly. The accountant said he would have to enclose the resignation first, and the fireman said you do and I’ll fire you, and I stood there with the punch and the forms, and the light began to come, in the east or what had been the east, at a quarter past four.
The promotion became fuel.
The train, which no longer existed, accelerated.
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