New
Arrivals
Author-Allmoran
Titles
Mystery Train
by Allmoran
Summary: Jim, Blair, and Simon are all having the same dream, or rather a dream with the same theme.
Warnings: A little language. Absurdity warning.
Author's Note: A section for each character--another fragmentary exercise. I guess I'm still working up to a real plot.
Disclaimer: Mine they're not.
"Well I broke down in East St. Louis
on the Kansas City line
and I drunk up all my money
that I borrowed every time
and I fell down at the derby
and now the night's black as a crow
It was a train that took me away from here
but a train can't bring me home" --Tom Waits, "Train Song"
~~~~
I.
The train was pulling out of the station, and all I knew was that I had to be on it. I was in the clear. I had consumed no drugs of any kind recently; in fact I had consumed nothing at all except a can of Coke and half an order of fries in the past twelve hours. If I ran for the train, I might not make it in time--but it was a fair bet that my senses wouldn't go on the fritz and leaving me hanging the hell under it. And I had to get on that train. Sandburg was on it, and if he managed to head for the Canadian border without me, I knew there'd be trouble. Sandburg had in fact worn a camouflage green T-shirt emblazoned "Trouble" that day. That's how I knew this was a dream. Even Sandburg, with his tendency towards joyful-but-corny expressions of personality, wouldn't wear something so patently obvious. Nope, this was a little bit of revenge foisted on me by my unconscious, a little bit of payback, perhaps, for my tendency to subject Sandburg to vehicular torments--shuddering helicopters, the hydroplaning pickup, crap cop four-doors that shimmied to the point of breakup during high speed pursuits.
But dream or no, I still had to get on the damn train. I ran. I ran with maddening slowness, the watery walking-through-Jell-O slowness of dreamland. I shouted as I ran, I think, the most patently obvious thing I could come up with:
"Sandburg!"
As if he could stop the train with some dutifully translated bit of tribal magic. I wouldn't put it past him.
It was a beautiful train. I couldn't believe I was thinking that, but I was, and it was. It was an old-fashioned locomotive, redone in high-shine silver instead of the traditional black. The cars were striped, though not with the predictable Amtrak red and blue. The cars were rainbowed, shimmery; they made me think of trout leaping into the sunlight out of a glacial stream in the heart of the Cascade Range. I wished I were there. But no, I was still running; the train was pulling out, and Sandburg was still on it without me. I just had to focus on that little dilemma, and it was all gonna work out fine. But all of sudden I slowed. I stared at the shimmering train cars. I stared. Could I zone in a dream? Apparently I could. I felt myself slipping into a dream within a dream, I guess it was. These days I'm willing to accept most of the oddball mental states I find myself experiencing. Jesus. Not three years ago I was the sort who'd tell a rookie cop not to leave his mind too open, lest his brains fall unceremoniously out onto the floor of the bullpen.
Now I was zoning on the troutlike beauty of a dream train. Go figure.
Sandburg's face appeared in the open doorway of one of the cars. Or I think it did. I remember his hands clutching fuzzily the edges of the door.
"Jim!" he was shouting at a great distance, "Get on here! Move your ass, man!"
He was fading; his voice all bent with Doppler effect. Was the train still moving? All I saw were the rainbow stripes. I did hear the train whistle, a lonesome sound I guess; it belonged way out in some mountain pass, bouncing off the high peaks, not at this rail station, deserted though it seemed to be except for Sandburg and myself. Where were all the people? A lake of water began to rise up out of the tracks. This was a dream. The lake was for the trout that were the cars. I want to wake up, I thought. Wake me up! I could not wake up. I could not move. Blair? I thought. The rising lake was fascinating. I mused, childishly: I can't wake up because I *like* this dream.
I stepped closer to the tracks.
Sandburg jumped then. I know he did because in my dream I was moving forward towards the tracks, drawn by their slick, visceral shine under the rising water... and suddenly instead of being behind the train trying to catch up with it, I was somehow standing right in front of it, this great headlamp in my face, the light sharding like glass off the cars. There was absolutely no spatial logic in this dream. (Unless its logic reflected, somehow, the warped landscape of my unconscious--but hell, that's the Professor's department.) Sandburg suddenly planted his hands flat on my chest and he pushed me backward, putting all of his weight and forward momentum into the shove, and talking all the while rapid-fire-- not, (characteristically, I realized) because he was truly panicked, but because words were his armor, even in dreamland.
As we were toppling backward with dream-slowness I got a close-up view of the big letter T on Sandburg's T-shirt. And I actually felt the weird, springy texture of his hair smashed flat against my face.
"Nice shirt, Chief, " I heard myself say.
"Ah, Jim," he was saying to me, "Are you with me now?" We were still falling backward. (No temporal logic,either.) "Are you with me? 'Cause I just fell off a train. I think we're even now."
The whistle blew. There was this burst of silvery light, all prismatic with colors. I woke up choked with what I think was laughter.
***************
"And I've seen it all, I've seen it all
through the yellow windows of the evening train" --Tom Waits, "9th
& Hennepin"
~~~~
II.
I love it when I dream about trains. (Oh, get your mind out of the gutter--they don't all muscle merrily through tunnels with sophomorically phallic determination. The good Dr. Freud had some useful insights, but he's at his most boorish when it comes to objects twice as long as they are wide.) Then again sometimes dreams are just that corny, aren't they? I dreamed of a train repeatedly the first year I was at Rainier--every single time I'd concluded a study date with the lovely auburn-haired Sharone Tallant. The train in that recurring dream was a clone of the one I caught sight of the first time Naomi carted us up into the Rockies--a sad, lone freight wending its way up into a high mountain pass. Yeah, that dream engine had a stark kind of beauty, and it was cloaked in a weighty ambiance of Freudian wish-fulfillment...but I suppose the "lone freight" image should simply have spoken volumes about my chances with Sharone at the time. (How many heartbroken blues songs involve trains? I rest my case.) Of course I did not recognize that sorry truth until later.
But I digress.
So the other night I had a particularly weird train dream. Jim and I were on the high platform of a railway station, in Cascade, I think, though the station was not one I recognized. (Love it when dreams do that--they strand you somewhere that looks unfamiliar but still give you the unmistakable feeling that you are somewhere you know intimately.) The train waiting for liftoff on the tracks was a gorgeous old-fashioned engine, redone and shiny, as full of mythical possibility as any I had ever seen. I wanted to sing the blues. I wanted to write a whole new blues song. I wanted to ride the rails like a Depression-era hobo.
This is so cool, I thought. Then I heard a voice bellowing over the PA:
"Ellison! Sandburg!"
Oh, crap. The voice was distorted, but there was really no mistaking the captain, was there?
This is so *un*cool, I thought. I glanced over guiltily at Jim. What had we done? Or, perhaps more accurately, what had I done?
Jim didn't seem disturbed at all. Maybe he hadn't heard. (right!) Maybe I was hallucinating, I thought hopefully. Could you hallucinate and dream at the same time? I was pretty sure you could. After all many cultures (including my own, some of the time) blur the line between the two anyway.
"Just hand me that bag, willya Sandburg?" Jim said, "I think I stuck the tickets in there."
I went to hand him the bag I had slung crosswise over my shoulders. I lifted it up over my head and heaved it fancifully in his direction. I put a little spin on it as I tossed. (This was a dream. I felt invincible.) And the heavy duffel slipped from my hands and landed, with a resounding smack, on the tracks right in front of the shiny, hissing engine. I think I watched it, with a kind of wide-eyed dream horror, as it tumbled down from the raised platform. Then all of a sudden the bag's graceless downward trajectory struck me as sort of funny.
"Oops," I said. I started to laugh.
"Dammit Einstein," Jim yelled, "I thought you were the brains of this operation."
I was choking on my laughter now. The bag had landed topside down, reminding me incongruously of a sad slice of pizza I had chanced upon the night before, cheese side down on the exit steps of a crosstown Cascade bus. That had struck me as funny as well, I remembered. So much for someone's dinner, I thought. The pizza had landed upside down! On the bus steps, where someone might step on it, squishing cheese and tomato and who knew what toppings! Now that was amusing. God, I needed sleep.
Now I *was* sleeping, and I was still losing it over accidental inversions.
"Ellison! Sandburg!" hollered Simon on the PA, "I'm gonna nail your asses to a board if you don't get in here."
Nail our asses to a board? Wasn't that a line from a bad cop movie? I laughed harder.
"What the hell is the matter with you, Sandburg?" Jim said. He strode over to the edge of the platform and surveyed the damage. He still didn't seem to hear Simon's polite entreaties.
Then Jim looked away from the fallen bag and back at me. "You know what?" he said, "This is a damn fine-looking train."
"Yeah, it is," I said through my laughter. "You know Jim," I added, "Trains are..."
"Yeah, yeah, it's a phallic symbol, Dr. Freud," Jim interrupted. He set his hands set on his hips and faced me squarely, smirking.
"Actually, " I said, sobering up, "I was going to say that trains have got to be one of the most elegiac images in the canon of American music. You know, someone's always leaving on a train, or hearing the whistle, or waiting on a train...it's sad, really. It's the heart of the blues."
Jim looked at me and nodded slowly.
"Well," he said, "You and me, we know from the blues, don't we Chief? Maybe we just shouldn't get on this fancy little engine here."
His eyes crinkled up and he smiled. He looked from the bag to me and back again. "I'm not climbing down there," he said.
"I will," I told him, " After all I'm the one who dropped the ball here...or rather the bag."
"No, no," Jim said. "You stay right here. I think we can let this one go. You know--just be in this world."
What? This dream was starting to slip from the groove with which I was familiar.
"Uh, did you just say what I think you did, Jim?"
"Sure, sure," he said. "Sometimes you just gotta let it go."
"Zen detective, huh Ellison?" I said. I flashed him a grin. I really couldn't help myself.
He was still grinning back at me when Simon's voice came over PA again:
"Sandburg, if you don't wake up, I'm gonna have to stick you on desk detail for a month!"
Huh? I sat up. I was back in the loft, of course. My room was dim, but I could see that the article about transculturation I had been reading had slipped down onto my lap--and that my twin pens had left a spreading green-red rainbow of stains on my white Rainier University T-shirt. Oh, man. I rubbed my eyes, still seeing that gleaming engine, still feeling my helpless laughter. The Zenned-out Jim was a fantasy to be sure. I'd have to write this one down.
As I was simultaneously scrubbing at my shirt and searching for another pen, a dark figure appeared in the doorway.
"Chief, you up?" said Jim, "'Cause I just had the weirdest dream."
******************
"Mystery train rolling round the bend
Mystery train rolling round the bend
Well it took my baby
Away from me again" --Parker/Phillips, "Mystery Train"
~~~~
III.
The night of the Mayor's annual dinner I had a particularly vivid dream. (No more Italian brandies for me; no more Italian brandies after champagne, steaks and ginger creme brulees, anyway.) Still, it was an interesting dream. I was on this old-fashioned train, lovingly reconditioned and done up in high style. It looked liked the fabled Orient Express...and it had beautiful high windows, outside of which a flat, eastern Washington-looking landscape coursed calmly by. I was in the dining car with all of my men and women; Major Crime was all around me, laughing, not a care in the world. We were celebrating. A giant banner hung from the ceiling of the dining car: "Party Train," it read. Oh god, I thought, considering the rainbow-hued letters, where the hell's Sandburg? Is this his doing? But why was I being so paranoid? Obviously we were all here because there was something really good to celebrate.
But this was a dream. The train suddenly morphed into a cruise ship, some over-the-top QE2 clone with high railings and a blindingly white deck. We were still all there: Rafe, decked out in a tux that screamed Yves St. Laurent, was leaning over to punch Brown's shoulder; Taggert was giving Connor some kind of a strange look; they were drinking champagne in flutes, the sun refracting through them. The ship was trawling through calm waters, Pacific, I think. There was still a fine atmosphere--celebration, conclusion, like a wrap party after a film with a pretty decent budget. What in the hell were we celebrating? I didn't know. But somehow it seemed not to matter.
I leaned on the ship's railing, smoking a cigar, looking out over the blue surface, at the distant blue-on-blue of sky and horizon. Ellison appeared beside me. He was dressed in black and seemed uncharacteristically serene. He leaned out a little, gazing into the sea. We didn't say anything for awhile, and then I suddenly became aware that the atmosphere was changing. It was a dream; the weather could shift in a microsecond. The sun went in. The air got colder, and as I looked around, unnerved, I saw that everyone on the ship had disappeared--except for Jim and me.
"Jim," I said, a little panicked. He was still there--but I realized, to my horror, that I could see through him. I looked down at my own hands. I could see through them too. "Uh, Jim," I repeated, trying to get the words out, the dream-paralysis settling in my vocal cords. I realized then that Jim was smiling at me, placid, his mood unchanged. I took a short breath, and calm came sheeting over me like a warm shower.
"Hey, Ellison," I managed, "Fucking ghost ship, huh?"
He smiled some more. "Ship of fools is more like it," he told me. I finished my cigar, stabbed it out against the rail, and with a slight, undramatic flourish, tossed it over the side into the ocean. Somewhere in my half-waking consciousness I heard a familiar, sunny voice remark, "That's why you're the Captain!"
Before I could bellow the most obvious thing I could think of: "Sandburg!", I woke up.
The End