He finds me at last. I am stretched out on the bed beneath its covers and blankets in the dark, punctuated only by the flashes of light sweeping by the window. He immediately begins to undress in the tiny space left between the bed and the door, which he has locked, manipulating the many moving parts of the metal handle and latch. My eyes adjust to the dark. In the shadows I can see him contort, wrestle with his clothes as if he is shedding skin too soon, as if he is making love to somebody else. He drapes his clothes over the recessed hooks, balls them in the corner. His penis springs up as he shimmies out of his shorts. It is at my eye-level and, in the dull blue light, I watch it expand and arch upward, another ingenious design. Above me, his head catches in the collar of his shirt he is too rushed to unbutton. His taut cock inches from my face transmits the rhythm of the train's movement, quivers and twitches as the steel wheels stutter over the joints of the rail beneath us. I fight my way out from under the covers as he strips off his socks and toys with the clasp of his watch. I work my way up onto my hands and knees. We say excuse me to each other as we bump and lurch into each other and with the train. At last, I am facing the window, my knees on the edge of the bed, my feet flat against the door on either side of his knees. He stands with his back against the door. He fumbles looking for the spot. I reach back through, making a few jerking attempts to grab his flexing cock as it recoils against my thigh, my cheeks, and then I guide him in.
I wanted to do this, this pushing against the picture window, pushing back against him. The train is running along a wide flat river, the water level route, an advertisement of a smooth ride, no heavy hauling over hills, over mountains. The compartment leaves so little room that behind me he can only grind against me, pushing against me and then pulling my hips, pulling me hard against where he is pinned. Outside, out in the country illuminated by the natural light of the moon, the layers of distance emerge — the streaking pattern of things close by and the slow creep of outlined details in the distance. I follow the lazy meander of farmyard light as it falls away, a blazing billboard on a distant hill as it burns out. There are sudden bursts of red at the crossings, the Doppler of sound, streaking across the window like rain. “Susan,“ he says. I feel him come. I can't always feel it inside — the sloughing of the spasms, each less intense than the last — through the skin, but this time I do.
And later, after a series of intricate maneuvers, we have bent and twisted our bodies into this position of rest. He's turned on the reading light over his head by flipping a toggle by my big toe. Instantly, we appear, reflected in the window, tumbled together, entwined with each other, the bed, the roomette. He consults the national timetable, noting that we will gain an hour as we head west. He reads to me the names of the towns we will go through, through the night, passes time relating the nicknames of rail lines: The C&NW, the Cheap and Nothing Wasted; the Rock Island Line; and the New York, Susquehanna & Western, the Susie Q. He turns off the light and toggles my right nipple with his left hand. In the dark, I feel around for my vibrator I've stored above the folding sink, an old Sunbeam with the heft and graceful lines of a Lionel gauge toy train car. I connect it up to the AC socket by the reading light.
At the head of the train are three massive diesel engines powering generators creating current for the electric motors turning the driving wheels pulling us along at eighty miles an hour. I plug into a tiny fraction of that power, some spilled amperage. The vibrator hums like a toy train's transformer. The thrum of those real engines gets communicated through the metal of the cars, carried across the couplings where the gaskets kiss. I feel his hand wrap around mine on the machine. The steel wheels squeal on a radical curve that brings us back to that river. We can feel the inertia of all the weight as the train coasts down a grade. The timetable says we have hours and hours, and the trains are never on time. The hum of the vibrator harmonizes with the pitch of the engines throttling up, four cars forward. We can see the engines, their strobing lights as they wrap around another curve ahead. The current streams back through the train as the sound of the horn peals off like skin. I nudge the vibrator's nob along the water level route, tracing the contours of the terrain. We are in no hurry. We are taking the train. He whispers, a decibel or two above the purring running though our fingers, through our arms, into our shoulders, through our bones. I listen to the names of the stations we'll be passing through, our possible destinations: Sioux Center; Sioux Falls; Sault Ste. Marie; Soo Junction; Sooner, OK; Susie, Iowa; Susanville; Susanna, someplace; Susan, Susan in Montana.
4
“It's a quarter to three…“
Four Dead in Ohio
KENT, OHIO
It doesn't help that the girl is not a student, had run away and found herself on May 4th kneeling next to one of the bodies. The.30–06 round from the Ohio National Guard troop's M1 Garand rifle found him there. It doesn't help either that he too found himself at this shared space and time, the bullet entering his mouth, on his way to, let's say, a literature class that would consider a contemporary poem self-consciously meditating on the efficacy of poetry to accomplish anything of real importance in the real world. The bullet strikes him through his mouth, enters his brain, killing him instantly. Meanwhile, the physics of the recent fusillade, the thermodynamics of the energy released in the reaction shaped within the brass precinct of the crimped cartridge, the military science of massed and sustained and suppressing fire is expressed irrefutably in the outcome and recorded in the phototropic mechanics of the chemical emulsion of contrast, heightened by the technique of burn and dodge, captured in the famous photograph. At the same time 342 miles southeast, a soldier, a member of the Third Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) attached to the Sentinel unit, stands post at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery. The soldiers of the Old Guard are the only troops in the United States Army that can parade with bayonets fixed, a privilege that commemorates an action taken at the Battle of Cerro Gordo in the War with Mexico. And the Sentinel on this day has his bayonet fixed. He glides along at ninety strides per minute marching the twenty-one steps on the mat in front of the tomb, pausing twenty-one seconds before turning and repositioning his M1 Garand rifle with bayonet fixed to the shoulder opposite the tomb, pausing another twenty-one seconds, and then walking another twenty-one steps back past the sarcophagus where the original Unknown Soldier is entombed and the slabs of marble on the plaza floor entombing the Unknowns from the Second World War and the Korean Conflict. What isn't known now is if there will be a fourth Unknown from the war being fought in Vietnam. No one knows how it will resolve. The war in Southeast Asia has only now expanded into other theaters of operation, into Cambodia and Laos. The knowledge of this has sparked protests around the country. At Kent State University, in Ohio, four are being killed at this moment by the massed, sustained, and suppressing fire of the Ohio National Guard. The Sentinel standing post wears no rank insignia to assure that he will not outrank the unknown rank of the Unknowns he guards. What is not known at this moment is that the current war in Southeast Asia will present a problem of knowing and not knowing. The kind of fighting being conducted there, the advances in forensic sciences, especially in the fields of mitochondrial DNA, will make it impossible to not know from now on. There will be, in the future, those who are still missing. The Lost will be lost during the conflict in Southeast Asia, but there will no longer be the question of identity. Any remains found — a crumb of bone or sliver of sinew, tuft of hair, piece of tooth, sample of skin — provide a sufficient key. The crypt of the Unknown for the Vietnam War will remain empty, will be, at some future date, rededicated, no longer the resting place of that kind of uncertainty, and will be transformed to another uncertainty, to the empty bed of those who simply disappeared, who have left no trace. The girl kneeling next to the body of the student in Ohio — I feel as if I should know her. I feel I should know the body. I should know everything. They are missing. They are missed. There is something missing. Everything is missing.