Train Drop

Seth hums a meaningless song to himself watching the traffic of Union Station. As a train moves across the platform, he thinks in reflection, caught between histories, a glimpse of all that happened there. Ghosts of every time they came this way. Reality wave interference on the platform with each passing space between cars.

The train gravitates to a stop. With a gasp, dozens of commuters pour from the urgently opened doors. They file around him in waves of rollerboards and briefcases. Lots of dark clothing. Not very many smiles. Seth can’t think straight in the sea of people, is his meetup supposed to be here? The Plaza? He looks out, sees no clues. This train turns around to originate here, so he is safe to find a secluded seat on a business car towards the front.

And wait. To find her. Or let her come to him. Somehow out of the shadows. He has the ticket right here.

♮ ♮ ♮

Thin Man leans against the wall of a gigantic aquarium carved into the wall of the station. Mostly it houses huge yellow angelfish and big long slate gray carp. He can see little shrimp-like amphipods twisting around by the inner rock fixture near the bottom. And bright purple gravel. Garish. Through the water now he sees the doors out to the Plaza. A group of teenagers waltz by spitting insults at each other. Two women exit through the gift shop to his left. Another angel fish looms on his right.

A buzz and he looks to his handheld, the unmoving icon of a dark man hovers motionless on the screen. His voice appears in Thin Man’s ear implants. Shaken, it sounds like, and starting like he’s been inserted into an existing conversation.

“There is one, we know where they hide. He could find out if any more were on the move, plus we need to terminate… his, uh… data. His implants will melt into chaos and scramble him after. Understood?”

Thin Man is tired of the chasing and spying for this Oligarch of AI or whatever it is the newsfeeds keep naming him. But it’s a paycheck and keeps him out of trouble, mostly. He isn’t ready to go on a murder mission though, if that’s what this is supposed to be. He moved to LA to be done with that life.

But he’s smarter than his boss. “Does he keep a schedule? Lotsa people stream through the tunnels here. How do I know it’s him?”

“This guy commutes, check Fullerton Beach Dome. Just get to the ride. You’ll find him. Use Elithia. Go now.”

♮ ♮ ♮

Seth sits in the cafe car. He has been here before, on many visits to places of work. The attendant is someone he knows, they call him Dolphin. He decorates the car with “ocean scenes”, the kind you see electrified with rotary lights, still pictures circling a fake aquarium.

Dolphin sets out a facsimile of an ancient 1950s tube radio, rendered in black plastic and chrome, spilling out the extremities of Count Basie and vibraphone bebop from a forgotten age. His voice, melodic, up and down as if a slow trombone, punctuated by his whistles and the sound of trains moving: “Aannnnnnd wee hAve a package aaf doNUTS, aaaand twoooooah juicehhhhs!” A bit nasal, but a bit deep, selling the bar car sundries on the intercom like the best hawker around town. On the train, it echoes like a beautiful resonance; he has somehow perfected the art of cafe attendant microphone handling.

Seth pulls back into a booth, sips his tea. Notices the foot traffic through the middle of the car. This train is headed down to the domes, the temperate climate in winter means a lot of them are open to the sea. A lot of the work these days is away from big cities, in blocky office parks with brutishly designed entertainment centers. Huge areas with nanofiber domes can survive the extreme heat of every season but this one, when temperatures drop enough to keep Southern California looking recognizably inhabitable. At this hour late in the day, commuters are headed the opposite direction to their central city gentrification towers and luxury homes to the north of town.

Laughter at the table across, travelers south getting settled with their merlots and bourbons. Young couples dressed for some sort of outing, lacy tops and legs kicking into the aisle, posing in close quarters for selfies boosting to whatever social network is the least horrible at whatever moment in time. A woman hunches over her laptop at the one-seater beside him. Ignoring, but eyeing, everyone. Across, two suit men with beers that keep eyeing the wine and whiskey girls.

Each face he visits carries its own personality, where many become one in representation of a town or city, their fears and dreams are tied to the fate in which they find themselves nakedly reaching out for answers. Groups of people centralize themselves around familiarity. It strikes him that most of the people he meets are not very curious about anything more than splitting distances around them, and judging for convenience.

As they begin to roll away, the not so silent evening and gentle rock of the mag-train slips him into an almost-dream. Every new face presents itself to him as one in a series of paintings depicting Modern American Life in This Town. Shapes of platforms, fences, trees, buildings, all the same. He lets the hypnotic feeling wash over him sitting in the sunset of the cafe car.

Until she appears. She is there again.

Holding the same sign, speaking in the same soft accented voice, shouldering the same docile baby, constantly in bundles, seemingly never aging. Traveling along the aisle showing herself, her baby and her sign, to anyone who might raise their eyes enough to encompass a tractor beam of helplessness.

This is not the first time. The woman is seen around every line and hallway. She has made herself a fixture. And every time he sees her, it makes him uncomfortable. The way she blocks her movement. Watching everyone. He grabs the edge of the table on his booth, pulls his body out behind the woman, and heads to the front of the train to find an empty business car to rest.

♮ ♮ ♮

Thin Man jogs down the platform, flashes a badge of some kind at the conductor attempting to refuse access, puts his free hand on his brimmed hat and jumps into the southbound train as it leaves the station. His long suit coat flaps in the cross-breeze just before the doors close and he’s onboard.

Elithia’s signal grows stronger in his senses. Dims was right, the mark is here.

♮ ♮ ♮

Red pickups. Green minivans.

Little metal capsules – of plastic, foam, and flesh – careen in loose patterns towards unknown places, dragging with them miles of mingled fumes.

Orange utility trucks.

White sporto convertible, beneath the menacing tire towers, flipping through high speeds around building-flatbeds of unsteady cargo velocity.

Red two-seater swinging in.

About the only thing worth viewing from this vantage point is the far away outline of the mountains, barely there or not depending on the weather. Some days never recognizable at all. Colder nights illuminate their majesty in blazes of white fractals, dripping clumsy over scars of geography, biding their time before spring and the wetter months.

Seth’s eyes droop as he watches the train’s approach to the pulled V trickle of the gutter-shaped LA River, lit by rows of brown LED strips, probably originally red and bleached by the constant sun in a waterless river. In the long car alone, he sings softly in meditation, watching the traffic close by:

Seth doesn’t see Thin Man behind him, but for some reason is allowed to finish his song before his entire world is changed forever.

♮ ♮ ♮

A long silence is always the hardest part of a goodbye. Especially when it’s a surprise.

“So, uh, do I get a reason?”

Seth sits on the train, by an open door, watching a video screen. The man in silhouette on the other end always comes to these calls like he is cosplaying a gangster, a man in power that speaks in aphorisms.

“The organization no longer needs your skills with the direction we’re taking.”

“Oh is that turn coming up here soon?”

Not appreciating Seth’s humor at getting thrown out of a moving train, the man in the video screen makes the little “go get ’em” gesture with his black gloved hand and the video abruptly ends. Seth looks at his handler, a roughened guy he could probably take on if he had not been strapped to a wheelchair with loose but very thick climbing rope. Thin Man collapses the handheld and pockets it.

“You’re really going to push me off this train in a wheelchair?”

Thin Man looks down at Seth, switches the wooden match in his mouth from one side to the other in a way that said “do I look like I give a shit.”

The car is vacant but for the two of them, dark and unused. Seth recognizes where they are, a stretch next to the river where the tracks run underneath the Sixth Street Viaduct. Close enough than he could reasonably sprint before becoming a target if he acted fast…

With a heavy jerk the brakes suddenly engage and the train shudders to a stop.

Thin Man stumbles twice, his shoes squeaking loudly on the hard rubberized floor of the passenger train. He is not ready for the sudden change in energy and topples sideways. To steady himself he takes both hands off the wheelchair and throws his arms out in front of him to catch the railing across the next section of seats.

As Thin Man releases the wheelchair and falls sideways, the railing on the front of the bench next to them stops Seth from tumbling the same direction. Unfortunately the railing acts as a guiding rail for the wheelchair and sends it careening through the open door. Seth watches the train walls pass by as the large wheels of the chair somersault him over the edge and he is falling into the dark yard.

♮ ♮ ♮

RUET 2OUEN SLAY

“Or something like that. On a bridge or a wall, no it was the side of a building, directly by the river where the bend looks down on an urban marshland.”

Seth can barely recall what he heard. The words sit there like a phantom, he is unsure where they came from. But now, looking from underneath the train, there they were a block or two away in deep red slanted block lettering on the side of a warehouse. From here the lettering looks small, he can probably drag himself there. His left side feels numb. That landing with the wheelchair did a number to his tailbone.

When the train jolted to a stop and Seth lost his interloper to momentum, the train lost Seth to inertia and the wheelchair lost its constitution to the rocky gravel and large wooden railway ties. Seth tumbled easily out of his improvised bonds but the wheelchair pulled his ass directly onto a rock or a corner of a tie or something equally unmoving.

Quickly Seth does an inventory, everything physically seems alright except for the shooting nerve pain across his left side, but that will have to wait. Getting away from Thin Man is critically important, so with all his might Seth pulls his body between the end of the empty car where it couples to the next.

As if queued, the train maglev starts humming with a loud snap, the cars jerk and slowly ease forward as Seth reaches the corner of the car. Hopping on his right leg he manages to climb up and over the coupling and to the other side. A railroad tie catches his foot and he goes down on his good leg, outstretching his arms to shield his head. The fall isn’t hard, he lies there on his back, watching the front of the train point into the sky as it hits the big bend and moves onto the bridge over the river that Seth should have been visiting from three stories high by now.

Pulling himself between two stacks of old wooden ties, Seth looks around. Thin Man is nowhere to be seen. Exhausted from the battle stress, he slips into unconsciousness.

♮ ♮ ♮

A thin trail of blood forms across the old train turntable, following him, leading him, sight blurry Seth stumbles forward. How long has it been? He can’t tell if this fatigue is sleep loss or blood loss.

Above hardening edges of piping and warehouse rooftops the lavender gradient of another dawn in Los Angeles makes the scene look like it is cut from cardboard and done up with different color spray-paints all around the contour of the buildings. There is even a lone palm tree off to his left to complete the scene. He’s been out all night. They would have found him soon. His eyes follow the tall date palm down to a curving white building that was mostly covered in floor-to-ceiling blocks of red paint. Lettering, slanted, and outlined in some kind of purplish gold: RUET 2OUEN SLAY.

Seth’s train defenestration hangover immediately snaps and he makes sure the heavily stylized words are what he thinks he sees. Not thinking, he had stumbled in the right direction, and now across the road it was right there larger than life. He looks both ways, with the building curves blocking the road there is crappy visibility. Probably nobody could see him much at this hour anyway. The trail of blood seemed to have lost interest, he didn’t feel a wet sensation on his leg as much as a sticky one.

He makes a dash for it. Exposed, limping quickly across the street to the wall with the graffiti. To his right, closer in to the train-yard, he catches a yellow flash of heavy machinery, hits the side of the warehouse with a grunt and slumps down on his left leg, squatting with his right. Seth mutters out loud… “whatever hit his thigh pinched it good.”

When he mouths the word pinched, the numbness that had brought him to his knees spreads up to his lower back, and shortly before soothing his back and neck slowly into the side of the factory, Seth feels the need to lie prone or … between the T and 2 his head falls back and with a slight click, hits the wall and passes out again.

♮ ♮ ♮

Seth peeks up. He is somewhere else. It’s not the side of a building, and it’s definitely not a train. It’s almost desert in the way it feels like the sun is directly overhead, except it isn’t. When he gazes into the bright washed-out sky, a murmuration of starlings appears and forms the word: LAWN

He takes in a deep breath. Remember to breathe, Seth. His thinking isn’t right. Chaining thoughts together as language feels like trying to walk in river mud wearing sandals.

The light seeps into eyes which slowly scan the openings between trees, where there, swooping back and forward, embodied songs flit as birds: between the thick pillar bases of eucalyptus before the sun chances between clouds and around a sheltering leafy bough, up around and sidelong dart these soft-edge tones, making bends of pale hair, exploring rafters of a sky no less a desert morning with the drone of humanity along the sides.

Reaching steady warmth through space to spaces nourished, desolate, and painted: by this baton the orchestration swells to heights where ruffling the leaves, teases and tickles plodding dew into the fading dawn interlude, just beneath the wing of translucence just enough to flare away for star a circle be.

Still while a buzzing gray gives way, to each awoken full in color, the timid tweak and whir of flashing copper hums along a wire little hints of waking life soaked in nectar.

♮ ♮ ♮

Jolted, Seth looks up again, and sits up. It could be the same day, only painted across the current span of time, repeated for the sake of framing the sky in a more perfect hue than yesterday. Differences then tend to be disruptions in the blue plane: scrapings of moisture etched and moving from stream to stream, followed unknowingly by indeterminacy: white-striped smudges of gray-brown starling paths and slow but majestic the silent jet airplane.

Even sounds differentiate, but to a degree of randomness that it’s difficult to pull asunder in the aftershocks of a rainstorm. Brought to this future, his vision blurs and twice shifts beneath the fading atmosphere and star-ward into otherness.

The view is instant, as curves bending the whiteness into defined spaces of sexuality. Flows of copper strands now melt down her back as the softness of sleep pulls shades.

Vanishing points start moving forward, turning the landscape into an approaching cloud of pink noise, stated in its nullification of dimension. When it’s nearly to the plane of standing here watching as if on a screen so close he can punch through, when its gaussian shadow mixes pixelated vision with hints around its edges of a slim moment ago, while it breathes graphite dust into his ears the sound loudens in logarithmic leaps until the jagged edges of continuity branched begin to reach through him, but soon just become him, and in a rushing whirlwind of crystalized static everything zigzags and ceases to be.

♮ ♮ ♮

Darkness. Then dots of light, like stars but more regular, almost window-ish in appearance but still too meticulous in color and too similar in breadth. Linked in verticals: panes of spinning shapes. The source of light seemed to come from within tiny circlets of tensioned liquid, shimmering close together with an interpenetrating harmony, their radiation intensified by the sheer numbers of reflective surfaces.

Smooth. Strips of hot colors pulsating fills his vision and for an instant everything is still, enveloping him in lush lines of touching flesh. In movements, shades of blue are rushing through the sound of his blood in courses strengthened by this curving thigh against tangent figures. Flashes smash the eyes open in ridges, overlooking a subtle excitement with a crown of silver.

The passion is replaced by an unseeing cloud moving, fishing pinpoints from silence and granularly growing outward. Swelling, expanding slowly in solid Prussian Blue, tingling the edges in a soft luminescent powder. Caressing him awake like kitten’s fur, in patches and patterns irregular and scattered, a subtle sheen that brightens to the touch.

Immeasurable.

♮ ♮ ♮

For the fourth or maybe fortieth time, Seth pries his eyes open past the dream. He’s in the warehouse. He recognizes the curvature of the wall he’s propped up against, except it’s concave to each side of him. The whole room is a half-circle, part of some old machine shop, flaking paint on every surface looked like bonito flakes frozen in time. In some places it is difficult to tell what is machine and what is shop.

Two people are with him. A muscular woman crouches next to him on the right, and a figure dressed like a flight pilot on his left, the lower part of his face and jaw obscured by a gleaming bronze beard that did not look like real hair. It was pulsing, flashing … no almost changing shape right there, from braided strands to rainbow arches of bizmouth –

“PAISLEY” the woman whisper-shouts at the man, “he’s awake, you can stop!”

The man called Paisley sits back and the gleam disappears from his beard, it appears to be nothing more than normal red hair that extends down to the man’s belt. The captivating illusion of braids crystalizing is completely gone, and now Seth can’t decide if he noticed the braids and crystals before he actually woke up.

The woman is dark in the late shadows of the warehouse. Her skin is a swishing pattern of indigos and blues. Seth can barely get the words out, but creaks “What, who are you? Where am I?”

The woman extends her gloved hand, Seth takes the queue and reaches his own in a shake. “Call me Lyra, this is Paisley”.

“I’m Seth. So you are?” Lyra is nodding like she knows exactly who Seth is.

“Welcome to Meat Hacker, Seth. Sorry about the dreaming, but they fed you a malicious piece of code before attempting to drop you off the bridge, to make sure your brain was cleared out when the body was found. Lucky for us, Paisley knows how to find that code, but it took some diving, and it’s only temporarily disabled. You were out the whole day.

Lyra pulls back slightly on the curtains next to the door that Seth only noticed when she moved. The sky is blue and marbled with pink as the setting sun touches the last bits of horizon, silhouetting everything. Softly as light fades her blue smudges across his blurry vision and turns everything into shades of gray dusk, Seth feels real sleep tug at him.

“I need to sleep” he mutters before passing out on the concrete bench that runs along the edges of the space.

“Sweet dreams is what they say?” he hears Lyra trail away as the last 24 hours finally melts into a deep river of slumber.