I’m going back. I ‘m sorry it’s taken me this long. I don’t pretend to be strong enough for it. I don’t pretend to have the passion my dreams once had. I don’t pretend I’ll hear the music I once heard or that I’ll even reach the place where I heard it. Entering the last half of my life I could feel myself tire; entering the last quarter I feel myself succumb. I’ve tried every way to disprove what, in my heart, I knew to be true; I suppose it’s in the nature of most men to spend lifetimes trying to do this. I cannot watch, sitting on the shores of the Old World, the ripples of my country going down for the third and last time. I would rather know, when I die, that faith betrayed me than that I betrayed it.
In the mornings, as Lake was shaving, he would look up from the white round sink to the blue round hole in the wall which was the sea; the boat slipped slowly to America. Sometimes at night he woke with the urge to fill the walls and ceiling and floor of his cabin with equations; he resisted this. There were no equations left, and he didn’t want trouble with the ship’s crew; he imagined being put in a small boat with a compass as the captain pointed vaguely back in the direction of England. So he simply sat on deck facing the west waiting for the sight of land and always listening carefully, should he hear something.
He spent no time in New York except what was necessary to cross town and get a train out of Penn Station heading west. Within the hour the train was past Newark. During the night the train came to Pittsburgh. The train continued across country; the morning of the third day Lake arrived in Chicago. In Chicago he found the buildings painted with pictures of human parts. On the side of a store would be an open hand and on the back of a gas station would be an open eye. There were human parts set against backgrounds of rainbows and ocean waves, desert plains and outer space. Walking to his old room between the railway tracks and the university, Lake went down a street of mouths painted in wilted colors, and from every mouth came bright splotches of sound like electric word balloons. None of what he heard was the music he was listening for; none of what he saw that he remembered was anything but a trapdoor for him. An old store sign, a familiar archway, the perennial sound of a bus stopping at a certain corner, the smell of beer in the wind, sometimes even a long-forgotten face now many years older: these were all trapdoors, opening beneath him and sliding him down a chute to 1934, 1935. I should have been more careful about time and dates. Crossing an old bridge, he would feel the falling black rush and find himself standing where he had stood thirty years before, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and a dead blonde lying at his feet.
He went back to the station. He asked for a train west. They gave him a schedule for Rockford. They gave him a schedule for Peoria. Pressed, they found a schedule for St. Louis. I said west, he told them. Finally they gave him a schedule for the West. One train that left at no particular time; one had to wait for it at the station. One train with no signs of destination on the side; one had to know the particular train. On the fifth night he saw it, a white eye roaring out of the dark from somewhere above Lake Michigan. At first it seemed very far away, rising and falling; then suddenly the rhythmic huff of it became an overwhelming howl, barely stopping at all. Just before he jumped on he had this funny light-headed feeling, right at the end.
The train flew west. Lake stood in the aisle of his dark empty car watching the passing small towns while the cold air came through an open window. There was a field in a flood of stars; he had known it once. There was a house beyond the field; he had known that once too. The train flew past all of it. For a while he heard the sound of a dog on the ground below; it ran along barking until the train passed a wooden fence by a road and then the dog was left behind. Soon they were at a river; he knew this river. As the train flew past, as he turned to look toward his destination, he parted his lips as if to say something or cry out or simply breathe a little. The train wound its way into the open red mouth of the moon.
He fell asleep in his compartment by the window to the sight of the black river beneath him. When he woke several hours later it was morning, and the river was still there. He decided they had stopped a while on the track during the night; he looked back in the direction they had come and strained to see the banks of the river behind him. He wasn’t sure whether he saw them or not. The train hurtled on, a moving tunnel unto itself, the space of the west clearing before it and collapsing behind it. Lake fell asleep again; occasionally he would wake with a start, only to determine the train was still moving and had not yet reached the other side. When he woke again at dusk, he sat up abruptly to stare out the window; the river was still beneath him. He was certain the train had not stopped for any significant period of time. The horizon looked utterly different from the way it had looked that morning, and now Lake was sure the riverbanks behind him were far out of sight. The train seemed to him to be moving fast, though it was difficult to tell since there was nothing but river and sky against which to measure.
He languished in and out of a stupor, overwhelmed not simply by the weeks and months of his journey but by the fifteen years he had lived on the moors disproving everything of his life except for a sound he had heard once long before from the other side of the river he was now crossing. As he dozed he dreamed only of the river and how he would wake to the white banks of the other side. People went west all the time, he reminded himself in his sleep; this is not unusual. It’s in the nature of the times to go west. But when he woke the next morning the train was still moving and the white banks of the other side were still not in sight. Lake explained to himself that it was one of the world’s major rivers.
Sometimes an islet would appear or something that resembled the early stages of a marsh. By the end of the second day there were more islets; the water was magenta and the clouds were low and rumbling, barely a hundred feet above him and rushing ahead like rapids to the edge of the earth. On one of the islets he spotted a red windmill spinning against the sky, and then on another islet another windmill; within the hour there were waves of them as far as he could see, red windmills slowly spinning against the sky on a thousand islets spotting the water. The clouds rumbled on. We are approaching the other side of the river, Lake told himself with some relief. But within another hour, before darkness fell completely, the islets began diminishing, the windmills began disappearing, until there were only a few left on their outskirts, and then just the river again, as before.
He sat up through the night, dread weaving a cocoon inside him, and collapsed at dawn into exhaustion. When he woke that afternoon the larva of dread had burst forth into full blown terror. The river was still beneath him and the sky sagging onto him closer than ever. The sun was white in the west; and as he sat watching it, he saw a geyser erupt from its middle, first a small spittle of black, then a trickle in slow runnels up over its face. My God, he said, and raised himself feebly into the window of the train and held himself there, as he had held himself in the window of his college room many years before, thinking of her and contemplating before him the very track on which he was now stranded. He did not consider going to another car of the train to find someone else; he did not want to find that there was no one else. He didn’t want to walk on looking for someone until he got all the way to the front of the train, to find no one was even running it. He didn’t need to discover this. It was no wonder, he told himself, his mother had disappeared without a trace, standing on these tracks, riding this same train into the dream of America. It was a wonder, he told himself, his father and uncle had ever returned at all, had ever returned to look aghast into the empty fireplace. He was thinking all this and watching the black geyser of the sun when he heard the door of his cabin open behind him.