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 a man stood lecturing to people who no longer had walls. He explained that what we were seeing was not a crisis, it was a sorting. A chandelier fell. A sofa passed his head. He spoke of the Shadow, of the unpriced portion of every organization, of a snake eating its own tail for margin, and when someone fell through the floor he said exactly. In Second Class a consultant sat on a luggage rack while two porters took the carriage apart a plank at a time, writing each one down before it went forward. Plank 1,114, wainscot, oak. He said that the starved cell digests its own machinery and for a while is lighter and more efficient. They were promoted that morning, the porters, and still looking for the right expression. At the end the carriage was a floor, and then it was one plank, and the porters looked at the plank and at each other, and the elder one wrote 1,402 and stepped off, and the younger followed, and the consultant stayed in the air a moment longer, lecturing, which is, I suppose, the only time he was ever right about visibility.
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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