You open a valise — and a life comes back into view. A life that was already done with, locked up and put away. And as you spread it all about you in the room, on the bed, on the seats of chairs, wherever there is room, somehow you feel a little frightened at what you are doing, feel you have no right to do this. It’s like trying to turn back the laws of nature and of God. Force a minor, two-by-four resurrection on something that was already at rest. You’d better watch out, you keep telling yourself; you’d better be careful.
A photograph of a man, torn in half, the diagonal edge ragged, exposing the grain of the paper beneath the silver coating. His face showing in close-up, but only from one cheek down. Who was he? What was he to her? Where was he now?
Smiling at her. Smiling at the lens that had taken him, but it must have been she behind that lens that day, for it was a special sort of smile that you don’t give just to the lens of a camera. Warmer than that, closer than that; saying, You’re over there and I’m over here. But you were over here with me a moment ago, and you’ll be back again a moment from now. We won’t be apart any longer than that; we weren’t meant to be; we won’t let ourselves be.
“To my darling Starr, Vick.”
Who are you, Vick?
Don’t you even miss her? Don’t you even know she’s gone? The moment’s over, don’t you even wonder why she doesn’t come across there, back to where you are?
Keep on smiling, Vick. Keep on smiling forever that way. You’re smiling at empty space now, and you don’t know it. You have no eyes any longer and cannot see. She’s gone from behind the lens of the camera. You remain, but she is gone. Gone and she’ll never come back. Would you keep on smiling if you knew that?
In some quiet place — it looked as if it had been taken in some quiet place — she could almost hear the girl’s clear silvery voice ring out again.
“Stand still now, Vick. Move back a little. No, just a little; that’s enough. Now smile for me. That’s it.”
Smile forever, Vick. As long as the glossy paper lasts.
You can stop smiling now, Vick, she’s not there anymore. You’re smiling at vacant space, Vick. There’s a hole in the world, behind the camera where she was.
She propped the partial photo up and sat looking at it.
The sun was going down outside and the room was getting dark.
A patch of light lingered to the end, right there where she had the photo. Playing it up, making it stand out; making the image on it seem luminous.
Tell me, Vick, she pleaded. Tell me while you still can.
The light contracted, swirled to a closing pinpoint, went out; like an iris-out on a motion-picture screen.
The photo was dark now, blended into the surrounding darkness of the room.
The train rushed from night into oncoming day, as though it were speeding from the heart of an hours-long tunnel on toward its steadily brightening mouth, coming nearer, ever nearer, far down along the track. Then suddenly it was all light outside, the scoured-aluminum color of first daybreak.
Suddenly there was a landscape, where there hadn’t been before. A tall brick stack went by, with a full-grown shadow already. Suddenly there was today, where there hadn’t been before. Suddenly there was now, and the darkness had become then. The whimpering of a little baby in its mother’s arms, somewhere here within this same railroad coach, was the new day starting. As young as that, as malleable, as un-storied yet.
She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t wanted to, she hadn’t tired. Sleep was for the purposeless, an interruption between nothings, to make them more separately bearable.
Head back against the sloping chair all night. Eyes half-lidded against intrusion but never once altogether closed; just as they still were now. Journeying, journeying, question marks for telegraph poles along the right-of-way. Journeying not into tomorrow, journeying into yesterday. A yesterday twice removed, at that. Somebody else’s yesterday. A yesterday you skipped, that never was, once — to you — today. Ghost yesterday.
The man came to the door and said the name of a town.
She rose and took her bag down, and the train died under her as her tread moved down its aisle. It was dead already, when she reached the platform. Steam veiled the opening to yesterday, the car door, as she stepped down through it. Then it thinned and went away again, and left her — yesterday.
So this was it.
She glanced down at the cindery gravel needling her feet, and up at where the sun rode high in the sky, sending down rays like a chemical bath or solution, bleaching the world. And over at a weighing machine, with a round mirror that showed only sky though it was sighted directly at her face. Probably because the glass was fitted into its frame unevenly.
And at a semidetached shingle hanging lengthwise over a passage entrance, that read “Baggage.” And at a bench, of contour-curving green slats, set against the station wall, with no one on it. With only a folded newspaper on it, left behind by someone. And the shattered wrapping of a candy bar under it, like a little silver derelict ship, rocking lightly in the wind but never sailing forth across the cement platform sea.
So this was it.
Here once you stood, Starr. Waiting for the train that was taking you away. Maybe right where my foot is now, as I move it out a little; to where that crack is in the cement. Maybe you moved your foot out too, to that crack, and covered it for a moment, looking at it but thinking elsewhere. Who stood with you? Did you stand alone? Did Vick stand here by you, perhaps his hand upon your arm in defeated remonstrance; most certainly his eyes upon your face in unavailing plea?
What was he saying? You didn’t hear? Perhaps if you had listened, you would be alive now, instead of dead, at the thousand-mile-away end of these tracks. Wouldn’t it have been better to listen to stale, dull, homespun words of advice, and be alive today, than to throw them over your shoulder, and be dead today? You don’t answer that, Starr. And I don’t either. For I’m not sure what the answer is.
Did you look around you for the last time (perhaps over his shoulder, as his arms held you)? Turn your head, a little here, a little there, a little elsewhere, as I do now? See a mirror that doesn’t reflect your face, a shingle reading “Baggage,” a bench with no one on it? Were you glad? Were you heartsick? Were you frightened? Were you bold?
The bricks and pavings, serried cornices and building fronts, perspective-diminishing streets, of home.
You have come back, Starr.
There was a lunch counter inside the station. There always is, in every station. She went inside and across to it and sat down on a stool.
She hadn’t eaten on the train. She hadn’t wanted to then, she still didn’t want to now. She didn’t want food, she didn’t want sleep. She had no time for distractions like that, she had a dream. She too had a dream now; bitterer, stronger, than any dream Starr’d ever had. But you had to pause, to swallow, to sleep, or you faltered.
There was a girl behind the counter. A single, thin stripe of turquoise-green bordered the cuffs, the collar, the pocket orifices, the upturned cap brim of her otherwise all-white garb.
“I want coffee.”
“Anything else?”
“Coffee and nothing else,” Madeline answered impatiently, as though she were bored even having to waste time with that.
The girl came back with it.
“Could I ask you a question?”