Thursday, September 25, 2008

Genusfrog [ 6:20 pm ] | 0 comments

THE DESERT JOURNAL: TRAINWRECK

It felt like one of Calvino's train stations. Those neon lit stations that remind you of some indecipherable past. The train is unspectacular. I sit alone in a cabin. I get the feeling that I'm a long way from the front.

It doesn't matter.

The spectacular happens anyway. The train careens off the tracks into a desert. It keeps travelling, without a railroad beneath it. This goes on for days.

All day outside my cabin window, all I see is dust. I wait for hours to see some sky. At one point, I imagine the desert as a narrow strip, like a beach. A narrow strip of sand, animal bones, buried treasure and pale yellow shrubbery.

After a few days, I forget where I had been headed to. Perhaps it was a terminal in the city. A crowded station where the teenagers slept on the benches and the turnstiles believed they were the cogs that moved the city.

Perhaps there was nobody at the station.

As it turns out, there was no station. The train lumbers to a stop with its first two cabins submerged in a gaping hole where desert sand used to be. People took photographs. They took turns to take photographs. They smile and show peace signs to the cameras. One of them put his hand on the wreck and gave a thumbs up to the pointed camera, believing as it clearly did, that the train was some relic.

When a train wrecks, nobody remembers where it was going. People only remember where it fell over. They arrive with their keen senses of journalism. And they report.

This is not my report. This is my port.

Labels: fiction