Ezekial's Train, Chapter Eleven

Daniel Christiansen can feel the vibrations of the train beneath him, the hum electromagnets and the soft whirring of motors far away. So like the trains he rode all over Europe and so different. Something like the trains he's seen pictures of from Japan, long bullet-nosed things a mile long and looking faster than sound. So like them too, but so different.

As the train vibrates around him he can feel the vibrations through his being, enveloping him like a pocket of warm air, surrounding him completely as if in a cocoon. It surrounds him and he surrounds it. Space and time function differently here and he knows that the train is not moving in any rational sense, just as the train is not truly a train, but a vessel of some sort. A vessel and the tunnel through which it travels, both at the same time.

So like a train though, the way it moves, the shape it occupies. He can see it from outside as clearly as if he was out there watching it, observing it from all angles within and without, staring down the grim face of the giant cat creature whose image it wears on its forward edge and seeing every berth and machine inside just as clearly.

He can see the rows and rows of people sitting calmly, some chatting, some dozing, some doing things he can't quite decipher.

But they aren't people.

* * *

Daniel shakes his head and realizes he's been daydreaming again. It seems to be happening so often lately as he sits at his desk, staring out the window over the streets below, idly sketching on his drafting pad. Only a year retired and he already feels his wits slipping into atrophy. He'll have to find something to keep him occupied soon or else Ester'll start worrying about him even more than she already does.

Looking down at the drafting pad he sees the train from his day dream, the same one that he's been sketching absentmindedly his whole life, though not for years.

That same train or whatever it is, long and sinuous, snaking off into the distance, looking like a snake crowned by the head and forelimbs of a puma or something like it if anything. If he were seeing it for the first time he'd say it looks like the sphinx transformed into a bullet train, but this isn't the first time he's seen it. He starts drawing a locomotive like he remembers from the war beside it, to scale in the technical way that he's accustomed to, his fingers moving swiftly in the way that they usually do. Drawing mostly of their own volition, they move on their own and creating something he could barely have imagined before he'd seen it. Just as they always have.

It was those quick and brilliant flourishes of design that had him partner in an architecture firm barely ten years out of college on the G.I. Bill and retired twelve later, wealthy and successful but with too much time on his hands for drawing trains and angels. Now the old steam train comes together beside the strangely anachronistic train from the dreams, looking both from the future and the past especially next to the hard edged, gear driven monster next to it. Like night and day, they juxtapose each other on the paper there, each drawn out with grid lines around them as if in a blueprint.

Before he realizes what he's done he's drawn a stocky bear standing by the train that's carrying a box with it. Quickly Daniel sketches a tiny hammer and sickle armband on the bear and the shape of an artillery shell on the box, erasing the switches he'd put there at first. It's only the bear from the war.

Not that other one.

“Daniel honey, are you home?”

Daniel hears the door clacking shut in the front room and Ester's voice calling to him. “Yah. What are you doing home so early?”

He turns, dropping his pencil on the vellum paper and looking to find Ester's smiling face and outstretched arm. “I can't come home early, huh? Not to my own house? Silly man, I thought I'd come home and check on you, maybe we could go out for lunch since I know y'all hadn't ate anything yet.”

She come up to him and wraps an arm over his shoulder, leaning down to kiss him on the lips. “Ha, you know me too well, you do. I would forget to eat did you not remind me. What have you in . . .”

He trails off as he sees her looking over him at the drawings on the desk, the sketches and the diagrams, the trains and the bear staring out from the paper with more intelligence than a bear should be expected to have. “Honey, you aren't havin' visions again, are you?”

“No!” he says abruptly, pushing a stack of letters down onto the vellum pad awkwardly, “Of course not! After all these years, that I should have . . . those visions again. Preposterous!”

“Honey, look at me.”

She looks into his eyes and stares at her with a wrinkled brow, trying his best to show his sincerity. “I promise you, daydreams, nothing more. I. . . think of them often as I sit around with nothing to do. They still puzzle me.”

“Just don't think about 'em too much, okay honey?” She leans in again and kisses him a little longer than before, reaching out to push more papers over the drafting pad and the touching his cheek as she pulls away. “They may be what brought us together, but it don't mean I want to see 'em coming back.” She smiles suddenly and lightly slaps him on the top of his gray hair, “Sides, you found me last time, don't want you havin' visions again that find you a new woman!”

“Oh honey, I would try you know, but the women, they say I am too old.”

He looks up at her and stands, a twinkle in his eye as she wags her finger at him. “You ol' letch, you. Y'all be the death of me yet, like mama always said.”

Daniel chuckles softly at the old joke, wrapping his arm around his wife and moving with her toward the front room, grabbing his coat on the way. “Now where did you want to take this old retired letch for lunch then, eh?”

* * *

“Honey, I know you spend too much time puzzling out those visions since you retired the firm. I see the sketches all balled up in the trash and I see 'em doodled in the corners of every piece of paper in the house. Why you thinkin' about 'em so much these days?”

The last rays of light are filtering through the blinds in fiery slices of orange and deep yellow, leaving strange shadows to fall on the room, lighting up the bookcases and the architectural models in their cases, the accumulations of a successful life gathering dust around their townhouse as they grow old together. “Ester, my evening star, you know that I cannot forget these things that happen. You know they still are in my dreams all these years.”

“I know honey, but I never did stop worrying about you. It's been hell, twenty five years since you had a vision, least if you're telling me truth it has, but I still worry.”

Daniel reaches out and puts his hand on hers, gripping it softly. “Yes, yes it has, but I still just can't make sense of it all. I never could.” He looks away, toward the window to avoid her gaze. “Neither could your father, though he did forgive me for not being the savior he sought I know that he never stopped thinking of them either.”

Squeezing his hand before letting go to run her fingers through her own gently graying hair, she speaks softly. “My father, may he rest in peace, never was gonna find what he was lookin' for as long as he looks in that book of his for it.”

“The Bible you mean? But so much of it made sense then, to what was written there. My own mother would've had agreed with him on that, if nothing else. . .”

“Daniel, their gone, both of them, but we're still here. If you need to think on those visions, do it, but I swear with each passing year I feel a little more like that was all some sort of dream. Like it happened a long time ago to some other people.”

“But that is easy for you to say, yah? Not so much for me.”

The last rays of dying sunlight are gone and Ester stands to turn on another lamp, watching Daniel from the corner of her eye as he speaks. “Yes, not so easy for me to forget, even though the memories do fade around the edges. Even being there, I do not think you ever truly understood.”

“I understood enough I think, to help you come out the other side, though at the moment I don't know why I bothered.”

Daniel stands and walks to Ester, touching her softly and pulling her face towards his again. “Darling, do not take such thoughts.” He pulls away before going on, avoiding her gaze again, for a moment.

“It is just that they have, these past months, been more on my mind. There is something that I can feel in the air, something creeping on the edges of my mind. Not like a vision, not like a vision at all but something. There is something happening, or something will.”

“Daniel, let's talk about something else.”

“No. I must talk about it. The bear, Mordechai, he said seventy-five years, or so I thought, but it is now been twenty-five and why should I be thinking about it now? Why?” There is a long pause and the sound of Ester's nervous breathing fills the room. “Unless. . .”

“Yes?”

“. . .Ester?”

Daniel looks to her suddenly and she sees he's shaking as he does, his eyes afire with fear and confusion. “Yes honey, it's me.” She does her best to smile, suddenly afraid her self. “You alright?”

“What, what's happening? Where am I?”

Now she's very afraid and she feels like she's watching a story that she's seen before, a story whose ending she can see and is afraid of. She tries to laugh, to put him at ease but she knows that it's finally come. “Where you think you at, old man? You ain't up and losing your mind on me again, are you?”

Daniel looks at his hands, turning them over and bringing them to his face as she edges towards him, “We. . . we were on a boat.”

Now she can force a smile no longer and she runs to him by the window, covering the space in only two steps as she clutches him in her arms before putting her hands to his face, looking into his eyes fearfully and finding no comprehension. Finding a person staring back that is not her Daniel. Finding a person who plainly doesn't know who she is. “Look at me, okay? This is important. Tell me, who are you?”

He looks at her and she can see the gears turning behind his eyes, trying to figure it out. Between the fear and the confusion Ester wonders to herself which she'd rather see, Daniel losing his mind to Alzheimer’s or the visions again.

“What? I. . . I am Daniel Christiansen.”

“Not your name, honey. Your name ain't who you are. Daniel, Ezekial, whoever you are, don't make no difference.” Suddenly she realizes tears are running down her cheeks and her own hands are shaking worse than Daniel's, clutching his face so hard that she can see the skin around her fingertips turning red. Before she even has time to know why she would say such strange words, she has said them.

“Your life belongs to you. Your choice belongs to you, you hear me?”

“I don't understand. . .”

“Sweetie, you ain't never gone understand, and neither will I, but as long as you know who you are, deep down, your life is still yours and can't nobody take that away from you.” She leans in to kiss him and whispers, the tears flowing from her face to his, “I love you.”

And he's gone.

Barely catching him before he hits the table behind him, Daniel is a dead weight in Ester's arms as she lays him on the couch, cradling his head and feeling for a pulse. His eyes are closed and he feels calm, not like the fevers he had all those years before, but she is afraid. Daniel is an old man now and not as healthy as he was then. “Daniel . . . Please honey, are you there?”

As if from underwater, his eyes flutter open with a vague understanding of his surroundings. They glide over Ester's damp face unseeing but then the focus on a spot somewhere behind her, somewhere in the unimaginable distance as he says aloud in a soft but firm voice, “Mordechai.”