It assuaged the featureless dread that slept in every moment, and the homesickness for that lost family, and the guilt, the mute guilt that would not describe to him what he was doing wrong. He had a list, but could get no answer, the guilt staring hotly at the drowsing dread, either fearful of its awakening, or impotently desirous of it.
But in that swoon he became quietly determined, as one can only become in sleep or near sleep, to banish the old soul and find a new one. What could be finer than to become a new person overnight? To stay fixed in a role too long was a kind of mental illness, was it not? It was likely now that he would enlist. The country was going to hell. He certainly wasn’t going to lead men to certain death on its behalf, certainly would not die for it — no, not for it, not die for anything, but simply confront the Great Illusion in what had always been known as the Theater of War.
The dreaminess was interrupted — he thought the cause was some untoward motion of the rocking hurtling train that he could not immediately pinpoint — by swellings of unease, dread’s eyes heavy-lidded but open, in which he was forced to wonder a little anxiously who he was, if no longer himself. Deep drifts of black-needled trees clustered blurrily, enveloped his view like a storm cloud, then burned off like fog, like a dream shredding itself into streamers of the real and the unreal, revealing what at first, in dark but overexposed flashes, seemed a flat and empty ocean of tallgrass. Towns were advanced upon like islands, mounds of earth humped up out of marshes and built upon strangely, with an air of tidal forces having been abrogated only for a short time. and stranger still, within that vast sea, lakes, the inverse of the mounded villages, benthic settlements as if the land of the towns had been quarried and the pits filled with water. On the map, unfolded carefully so as not to disturb the slowly spreading concentric circles waving out from his brain, and glimpsed in the flare and slow blackening of a long wooden match, were plotted these thousands of lakes, in shapes that could be repeated nowhere in nature and with names that could not have been suggested by their shapes, only by private and unreadable histories. In the no-man’s-land of the train at night, he recollected murmurs of science, lectures he’d audited at Berkeley, discussions between fiercely committed but quiet, articulate, idealistic men. What had they said? That these northern lakes, lying shallowly like mirrors on the face of the plain, had been formed when great blocks of ice, remnants of glaciers buried in outwashed alluvial dirt, had at long last melted? So that these lakes actually rose up from below, welled up rather than gathered?
And was this the old soul or the new soul whispering to him? He couldn’t say, of course, and didn’t really care as he drifted in and out of sleep. Great minds, great men: Father had endeavored mightily for him. Ah, it was somehow comforting to think in this way, of wise men and sound thinking, and a bountiful, loving father. but as he did he found himself wishing only that he might continue north in the dark and splendid smoking train until such a destination might be reached whereat it would be clear he was now safely beyond the world of actors, in an eternal north of the mind and infinite abode of nameless heroes. Yes, that was it, a place where the poor and the weak could smash, in stunning miracles of justice, heavenly light blazing all around them, angels attending horns blasting tribute, the wealthy and the powerful — then vanish into thin air, as evanescent as the power they thought to seize. Oligarchs and their dead-eyed spies. That’s all it was, all it ever had been. Father was a fool, a powerful, kind, smart, loving fool, and so too were Alexander and Andrew bloody blinkered fools. So was Teddy “The Great Charlatan” Roosevelt, for that matter. At least Father and his brothers, and yes, sure, Roosevelt too had been, were still, kind and loving. Oligarchs and would-be oligarchs, kind and loving or not. Spies and traitors and those who had not yet had a good chance to betray or murder, kindly and lovingly or not. Oh, I am forgetting my lines! Can’t wake up, can’t fall asleep, everyone expects me to know exactly what to do and when to do it, but I am lazy or cowardly or. or something has happened that prevents me from learning my lines, and now, now they will know, there will be terrible consequences because the lines are of Absolute Importance no matter what you might think about the world or illusion of world you’re living in. I’ll stand there and the light will fall on me and I won’t know what to say, I won’t be able to fake it, and that’s all I’ve ever done. I’ll have to admit that I do not know what to do. My God, the wrath. they will hate me so terrifyingly. All these long, long lines of people whom I know I must know but do not, everything is on fire, metal is shrieking and bricks are bellowing and we have no past, no future — and yet here they are, demanding that I speak the speech, that I confess. They have drawn together again in the darkness, waited and waited and waited until they could find a seat and now all the seats are filled: I could have saved them. SAVED YOU FROM WHAT? I shout like an actor, a politician. But they remain silent and unmoving in the plush red seats. Their wrath makes them mute, just as their fear had in the old days. the little boy, Joe in the beginning but I never even knew the name of the second one, the Son of the Plumber Who Runs the Gas, opens the box of the limelight. we hear the sound approaching before it hits us, like a wave, sends us rolling and slowly, slowly tumbling, dancing silently upside down, and carries us out to sea.
The station was shuttered and damp looking. He stared at it through the greasy window, monochrome in the first light of day. The window smelled of hair tonic. Fellow travelers arose about him, webbed of orifice, petrified of tendon, organs sagging and leaking, tissues matted and discolored, cheeks ballooning with weariness, eyes red from fitful sleep — and prepared themselves for the day. Vera remained deeply asleep next to him.
He felt somehow that the train’s motion through space had sucked him clean. He did indeed feel devoid of personality, of feature, and as he watched the gray lines of the platform seeming to assemble itself as if from out of a fog, he imagined himself a tiny hallucinating demon-naif. The wood of the platform, the flesh of his body — he could see right through it, chemicals pooling, drifting, breaking down. Vera had murmured in her sleep, as if they had been sharing a dream, the dream, and wanted to know who she was, who she was becoming, and what she was to do. But it wasn’t clear if she meant herself or some other woman entirely, and there was no peace in knowing that anyway, in knowing one’s self, no peace in living according to principles. it was all just holding something at bay, and now he wondered if he hadn’t given way, sometime in the infinite night, hadn’t slipped free like a suffering anchorite, a Hindu, a Chinese sage.
He continued to stare at the platform and for a moment was convinced that he had slipped away, that he was dead.
Father was not dead. He was dead.
Then, like the flick of an electrical switch or a chemical reaction that had just passed into the realm of his perceptions, he saw his thoughts and his freedom as a prison and a nightmare, a slow, droning, uneasy, insanely peaceful purgatory, a limbo from which he was now being roughly shaken loose.
A young but weathered-looking man walked heavily past. He saw only his hands, knotty blocks of sun-darkened muscle, and took him to be a farmer. Charles turned away from him as the young farmer made his way to the front of the car, back to the smeared smoky window, and saw a young woman walk past on the platform. She carried a sack of what he guessed were potatoes over her near shoulder, obscuring her face.