All pulls out, takes a turn, heads horizonways. Ahead of the train, its urge, far at the horizon — a tong of Orientals laying track out there, sloped amid the icy shimmer…they’re hammering in huff, laying track to the one track all the other tracks wind into, to pass through the tunnels of wind. Clad in silken skyshaded azure pajamas, sporting ponytails under dishpan strawhats don’t ask how they stay on they keep always, miraculously, a length enough ahead, a chug beyond then around the cliffed bend. They labor furiously, shvitzing to freeze a skin above their uniforms as thin as daybreak’s rashers, wielding hammers that might be their own arms distended, outgrown to smack the rails, the stakes and ties due west. All the wheels in a row, linedup on one of the infinitely interlocking, weaving tracks into one track, then past the horizon out again and in, disaster and its aversion, incidents of merging and splitting then merging again, until alone, finally, atop a lone slick track laid a length ahead of progress, laidout solitary through the forests then through the thinned forests and then the trees, who knows what trees, the grass and rubble, ruderal hope; the sadness inspired by trash that will outlive you, that must; to no purpose waste that can’t console…then, more grass in every shade of gray — and then trees again, all of them mere roots of His familytree, its fruit ripened to spoil, and then into the forest, its forests again and again: a landscape of repetition, an enumeration of repetitions enumerated, tradition’s ritual and its counting balm upon the heads of the fingers then kissed…folklore as an aid to sleep, the mythic soporific—
The faster they go, Ben’s windows become ice and soon, halfsleeping, He has to pry His face away from the frozen. He has the compartment to Himself — the entire car’s His, it seems He’s alone in the train. To rouse, He goes out to the aisle — to explore, to forage for a diningcar, for food & drink, vendors, concessions He’ll compromise, if there is any diningcar, with waiters and a cook and a bartender, too, if there’s even a conductor, nu, if that’s not too much to ask, any official stoking the way and not just ghosts with the train itself a hobo between homeless worlds, condemned to the superstitious itinerant: a train that haunts the tracks desperate, enraged…all on its own, for Him and Him only. And so, to hope for an outside voice, whether it be live from the wilderness booming theology, or only temporally shrill and coming over a ceilinged speaker to tell Him what, where to stop, to get off for and just go. He makes way up the aisle, thrown from seat to empty seat, then enters the next car, one class upgraded from that of His board: it’s labeled on a sign as Levi and empty itself; the class of the car ahead He enters, it’s called Cohen, and is quiet, abandoned: this class the only class outfitted in plush, and there’s a tiny draft of heat, a lick up from the lowermost grill. And then the locomotive — but who knows how far the hierarchy extends in the other direction, eastward past the classless Israelien and further down the track again plunged into the unnamed, the unlabeled if not unmentionable rearcars, stretching to the intent or is it the purpose of forever — they’re packed, sardined to the gills: hymn, they’re the emes sardines there, herrings, also whitefish and sable, mamash salmon smoked and pastramitized, beluga sturgeon and its caviar, too, upward of ten kinds of roe, fish bound for the coast, preserved fresh in their unheated hold; they have to be in Holywood for tomorrow brunch; latterday lox flown in from parts east — the bris plate secreted deep in the dimly skinned hold.
