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TRAIN
CH.2
Espinoza
considered turning the music down to stop his hand shaking the syringe. 200mg of .5% Bupivacaine budded and shivered in time to the African drums and Ethiopian free saxophone that were making Espinoza’s speaker cones jump around.
He let the anitbarb needle glide in from a third of the way up his forearm, on the side toward his body with his palm turned up and limp on the desk like a dead spider. It entered Espinoza’s ulnar tunnel, just shy of his ulnar artery, and, depressing the plunger, Espinoza felt his skin catch fire, burn black, crisp up, and peel away, like usual.
The syringe landed in the trash.
Espinoza band-aided his arm and buttoned his too-big, camp-branded green shirtsleeve over his bony wrist, while the saxophone yelled at him and his index and ring fingers on that hand went gradually numb. His middle finger would’ve lost sensation too, except Espinoza had no middle finger, only a pug’s-tail stump wearing a tidy sawtooth scar. His pinky and thumb were unaffected, but that was a risk he’d have to take.
He leaned back so his view out the window swung around like a lighthouse beam, and he saw the Book Man’s Mazda bouncing toward him, toward this office. It rode soupy on banged up shocks, stood up tall as it summitted a rise and crouched at the bottom so the tires knocked slush off the wheelwells. It was almost here.
Espinoza turned up the volume knob and let the drums beat his face in. Even in their precisely tensioned and grounded suspensors, his speakers thrashed around like netted fish. The noise punched the walls and jiggled the door.
The typist outside, Mila, would be wearing the soundproof earmuffs she kept in her top desk drawer with her other essential supplies, like Benzoyl Peroxide and progestin.
Everybody else would be glaring this way, at Espinoza’s door, at their boss’s door, and wishing harm on him, hating him while his music stomped around their cubicles shouting at them.
But the speakers were already helping Camp Supervisor in Chief Espinoza: were allowing him to stop thinking about everybody outside, radiating their hate through the door at him, or the finger-stealing Book Man skidding to a crunchy stop in the parking lot.... Instead, Espinoza let the African drums beat him into the far wall, allowed the noise to whisk his eyeballs into cream and mess up his hair, and as he fell into this state of relaxification, he was able to make a small black dot appear in front of each of his eyeballs and blow them up like photo negatives until they filled up his retinas and all he saw was hot, stinging darkness, like the spot in the middle of a candle flame.
When Espinoza was inside the circle of black flame, he didn’t have to think about how he was supposed to run this mining camp. Or how in fact he cut more of a figurehead. He held meetings sometimes and got reports from the seven foremen and the operations people. Things like balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow reports and price futures blew around his desk with the seasons, like leaves. He watched them swirl but couldn’t make out any pattern. When the numbers were good, then, good. He knew how to dust off the regional accent he sometimes dressed in, say congratulatory things to the foremen and the operations people, shake a lot of hands, and see about bonuses, including his own much bigger bonus. The bigger the bonus, the less guilt he felt in taking it. When the numbers were bad, he’d scatter even more words to the wind. He’d say things like, “No mistakes, people.” But he never saw any change in a person’s behavior after they’d heard it, much less a measurable reduction in mistakes made. The numbers danced around him and played keep-away with his self-efficacy. “I couldn’t make a dent in the fucking numbers if I locked everyone in the cafeteria and burned it down,” he’d slurred at Mila, his typist, through the door the day before. Part of him believed this. Subconsciously he suspected that if everybody in the camp vanished tomorrow, the machines would come to life anyway, unmanned, and attempt to meet their targets. He would take his end-of-day reports off the fax and find the numbers unscathed....
Not in the fiery black circle, though. Here no past could be remembered, nor future dreaded. There was a painting on the wall above his desk of a ship’s rudder stranded above the waterline, but he couldn’t see it from within the fiery black circle, either.
Nothing could penetrate, so tightly did the speakers grip each molecule of air in the room. Not even the fact that this season in particular the numbers were all bad, and Espinoza had no idea why - not even that could make it through. He had not been able to make himself look at his reports in months, but he knew bad things kept on happening. Orders went out late. Trucks broke down. Breakage came in high. QC-pass came in low. Well, what was he supposed to do about it? He’d held all the meetings you ought to hold and let all the team foremen and department captains yell at each other. They seemed to know exactly what was being fucked up and in what position. Each of them had their own proposed solution in which each placed absolute confidence. Well, they ought to know, Espinoza often thought; they’re in the thick of it! These people wake up every morning and put bootprints in the snow, so to speak, don’t they, and so what am I going to tell them? If only they all agreed about any one thing.
He wasn’t sure what more he was supposed to do, only that he was definitely supposed to do more, probably a lot more.
Instead, each morning, Espinoza showed up to work twenty minutes late, strode past everyone into his office directly, shut the door, removed one of his cheap loafers, and used it for a doorjamb. On went the stereo system! Saxophones wailed and drums warred! Outside, Mila rolled her eyes and went for her earmuffs.
Each day, under cover of all this noise, Espinoza unlocked the desk drawer where he kept his secrets and removed two: a bottle of Old Soldier and an issue of a serialized Shonen manga called “Over/Under.” Deep into these two substances Espinoza sank....
The manga told the story of Tanako, a 14-year-old psychopath, whose attachment to the human race had been washed away by the same sudden flood that snatched his parents off a crowded street and threw them down a rocky swale to a sticky end in the jaws of an iron storm management grate, against which a small crowd was pressed into a mangled mess flung across four pages in thick red brush strokes. Only bits of the parents were visible, and only if you looked hard.
Tanako, the son, left the hot, crowded island where he’d been brought up soon thereafter. He braved the fog that surrounded his home country on all sides, piloting his one-man sailboat where no islander in his memory had dared: out! into the wider world, of which much was rumored, but little was known.
The orphan boy drifted for months over an endless blue void, till his supplies were exhausted, his body spent, his spirit quenched, and all memory of his family, his homeland, and his own identity had vanished over the horizon. Aimless and nameless, he fashioned a noose and flung it over the crosstree, intending to hang himself at sundown once the waves had stilled.
When the time came, Tanako climbed the mast. He hung his compass around his neck, then the noose, and prayed his last prayer, committing his spirit to Ryūjin. As he got up the courage to jump, the clouds overhead brightened and turned an angry red. Tanako gazed up in horror at what looked to be a terrible portent (another glorious double-page spread, drenched in red brushstrokes). A panel later, the red clouds spat out a tiny glowing red object, a meteor, which struck the water a few meters to starboard with a flaming sizzle and capsized Tanako’s tiny craft.
Tanako nearly drowned trying to get the noose off his neck, but the sight of the glowing red meteor sinking deeper into the ocean had stirred a last, long-hidden strength within him. Images bubbled for the surface. He remembered blue-dark mornings spent pearl-diving in volcanic pools with his mother (though he could recall neither her face nor her name nor the sound of her voice), and he kicked off the bottom of his boat, equalizing as he dove after the meteor....
Later, Tanako built a laser cannon powered by a tiny chip off that meteor, lashed it to the prow of his sailboat, and embarked on a merciless career in piracy under the assumed name “Red Tiger.” He painted a snarling tiger’s head in blood across his mainsail and sliced ships in half just above the waterline with a single shot.
Espinoza had a red tiger’s head tattooed on his left thigh an inch above his knee. He couldn’t remember having it done. He couldn’t remember how he’d come by the manga, either, or when he’d first read it. He felt Tanako had always been with him, sailing fearless through the fog that shrouded his life; that one day Tanako would lead Espinoza to where the cloudbank ended and the mist parted, to the Great Outer Unknown past the deadline and over the white peaks into faraway lands of which Espinoza clung to rumors....
....
The Book Man’s hand and arctic-feather-coated arm did what none of this riotous crowd of thoughts could do: it pierced the fiery black circle. Espinoza watched the disembodied arm haunt its way over to the stereo and turn the big knob all the way down.
With his other arm, at the same time, the Book Man shut the door behind himself, which required that he contort his elbows and shoulders into a zigzag Espinoza would have thought impossible, like he had two or three more joints xylophoned up inside his coat, ready to be deployed out his shirtsleeves - the Book Man shut the door behind himself, shut it in the faces of the earmuffered Mila and her four or five rubbernecking colleagues, whose necks, from Espinoza’s point of view, stretched up off their shoulders like taffy, keeping their nosey heads in view till the aperture closed.
“Are you going to eat those?” wheezed the Book Man, pointing at the box of yesterday’s donuts in the corner.
“Ngh,” said Espinoza. The speakers were hissing and the fluorescents were buzzing. To Espinoza they sounded like the ocean, like waves rolling over him and pressing him down....
The Book Man tiptoed to the box and opened it. It contained no single donut in whole, but lots of soggy, torn-away pieces of donut with fingerprints in the icing. The Book Man glanced at Espinoza, who stood there like his eardrums had been shot out with lasers, stood and swayed behind his own desk. His mouth hung open.
“Did you eat these?” asked the Book Man, gazing again into the box.
Espinoza had eaten two, yesterday, but didn’t say so. He wanted to answer, but was gripped by an absolute and penetrating terror, which had seized hold of his tongue and tied it.
“Did nobody think to save one for me?” whispered the Book Man, and turned again to look upon Espinoza like a tank turret swinging around. Some kind of terrible pressure was building inside the Book Man, hunching his shoulders into a high hill and testing the aramids in his creaking jacket. His eyebrows seemed to be doing the work of clamping down some white-hot hatred, keeping it from bursting out his eyes and roasting the air to plasma, so that instead two plumes of steam shot out of the Book Man’s ears.
The look knocked Espinoza backwards into his chair.
The Book Man turned away, sat, and ate the leftover pieces of donut in the buzzing silence. When the donuts were gone he got to work with his fingernails: scraped up the extra glaze, then, using lips, wriggling tongue and teeth, licked, sucked and scraped his thirteen fingernails clean one at a time. Extra attention was paid to the Book Man’s three extra fingers. Espinoza couldn’t give the provenance of two of those three (a woman’s left middle finger and a very small, hopefully-not-a-child’s pinky), but the third he knew, and missed, from his own left hand. He, Espinoza, had taken better care of that finger. The Book Man liked to bite his nails. He’d even nibbled Espinoza’s cuticle to the quick.
“All right,” the Book Man wheezed without turning. His head had descended so low toward the donut box that his back looked like a big white egg. The droplights in the ceiling bounced a grid off the taut plastic. “Let’s have the books, then.”
Espinoza fell out of his chair. The chair rolled all the way across the room, spinning, and bumped gently into the far wall. The Book Man watched this.
Espinoza crawled across the plastic tile to where the file cabinets loomed. He unlocked the big red one, full of red folders, full of red ink, a red tide splashed across page after page, red kroner signs, red minus signs, red arrows tilting down and to the right....
His escape into the fiery black circle had been cut off. The Book Man crouched between Espinoza and the big volume knob that could save him, wheezed under the serrated fluorescents that would expose him without mercy. His bell was tolling. His time had come. His sins would soon find him out.
What would Tanako, the “Red Tiger,” do? Well, he might seize Mila’s big red typing machine and knock a concavity into the Book Man’s piglet-pink inflated-mylar dome, then dive through the window glass and, in one balletic swoop, burrow out of sight into the snowbank. From there he could dig a snow tunnel out of the camp, under the deadline, around Station 12, over Engineer Pass to Katjuk Station, where with luck he might pop up right under the track and, slipping between the sleepers, barnacle himself to the undercarriage of a westbound passenger car and vanish into the unknown, a fugitive, wanted for financial and managerial inadequacies, various....
Except Espinoza felt certain that no mere typing machine, ninety-pound hulk or not, could put a dent in that thirteen-fingered monster. Maybe the Book Man’s forehead would open and swallow it with a final carriage-return DING! Or maybe the Book Man couldn’t be touched by any material weapon; maybe the typing machine would pass through his body altogether, as though the Book Man had ascended to some other realm wherein momentum did not equal mass times velocity unless the Book Man allowed it. Or maybe the Book Man’s body would accept the typing machine into itself and warp around it, like an inflatable, before returning to sender with ten times the force. Whatever the case, next thing he knew, Espinoza would find himself seized in a seven-fingered fist, dangled over an unhinged maw, swallowed whole, and digested in the dark next to those soggy scraps of donut.
He lifted a stack of red folders from the red file cabinet and pivoted, on his knees, arms laden, to face his accuser, his executioner, in whose pocket lay quietly the guillotine, the razor-sharp cigar cutter and automatic suture device of the Book Man’s design, the Finger Snatcher 9000! - knelt holding the measure of his measureless failings and shortcomings.
The Book Man’s taut pink face stretched into a smile with a sound like a balloon being twisted. He held out both hands.
Espinoza crawled over, set the stack of folders on the ground, and pushed them toward the Book Man till they touched the tip of his plastic loafers.
The Book Man’s face stretched into an even bigger smile, till the ends of his mouth reached higher than his eyes.
He leaned forward with a thousand creakings and groanings and took the first folder off the top of the pile.
The Book Man glanced at the first page and shut the folder again almost immediately; placed it gently in his lap and held it there by wedging it between his stomach and thighs. Less than two seconds elapsed while the folder’s cover page was exposed to the air. Two seconds were enough. “Mmmmmmmmmmmm,” the Book Man wheezed, expelling all the air in his lungs. He scrunched his brows. “Shall I transmit these figures to management directly? Or... Mr. Espinosa, have you considered the question of *when*, and *how*, and in what *style* they ought to be transmitted?” Saying this, his smile stretched so wide it warped his face into one of Bacon’s “Faces and Figures” and parted to display his 49 phosphorescent blue-white teeth. Rumor had it the Book Man’s mandibles had been surgically stretched to accommodate them all.
The light emitted by those 49 teeth did to Espinoza what UV radiation does to a bacterium. Something critical to his functioning broke deep inside him. Tears welled up and spilled. His spirit was withered, his strings were cut, and he collapsed into a boneless mass there on the floor, tipping forward till his ear rested against the Book Man’s knee, where he leaked mucus and tears into the Book Man’s slacks. Espinoza could hear the Book Man’s body at work through that ear, every organ pressing and shoving its way free of the others, a squelching grinding sucking bubbling factory that produced no human good, least of all mercy. But Espinoza couldn’t process the data. All systems had been placed on standby except basic sensory function and life support. A man is kneeling on the floor, thought Espinoza. He ought to stop crying, the worm.
A six-fingered hand patted Espinoza’s head and stroked his hair gently. The hand emitted a surprising warmth.
“When did you come to be employed here, at the camp, Mr. Espinoza?” buzzed the Book Man’s voice far away among the fluorescents.
Espinoza made an effort to stop crying and clear his ductwork so he could answer, but the tears wouldn’t stop, and his nose and throat had their own ideas.
“Mr. Espinoza,” wheezed the Book Man.
An orchestra of snuffling followed till Espinoza could manage, “Don’t know.”
“You don’t remember,” wheezed the Book Man.
Espinoza shook his downcast head.
“By which you mean that you’ve been here a long time.”
Nod.
“A long, long, long time.”
A sniff and a nod.
“You’re out over your skis, aren’t you, Mr. Espinoza.”
Nod.
“You’ve gone over your horizon, haven’t you.”
Nod.
“Perhaps you’ve got in over your head, too.”
Espinoza went still. He could feel the Book Man’s thumb on the back of his neck.
“You remind me, Mr. Espinoza, of a certain poor inanimate object,” said the Book Man. “I expect you don’t know anything about the functioning of an internal combustion engine, but these mining camps - of which yours is one among thirty-nine, did you know that, Mr. Espinoza? - they work to a similar purpose and require similar components. I will explain while you attempt to collect yourself.”
Espinoza could’ve as easily flown. His brain was buzzing like his stereo system, disconnected from its source signal. Each word the Book Man spoke caused Espinoza to pop and whine internally, as if someone were tapping the exposed end of an unplugged speaker cable....
“Like an internal combustion engine, this mining camp takes inputs and gives outputs, and many components are employed in transforming one into the other. Like an engine, you can lay out the workings of a mining camp on paper and attempt to forecast how they will behave, but like an engine, a mining camp doesn’t often behave how the paper says it should. There are imperfections in the inputs and imperfections in the components, which, in every engine ever put into service, introduce *vibration*. Vibration arises everywhere, and it encourages problems all up and down the system. Vibration can foul the components and fumble the outputs sure as deliberate sabotage, and less preventably so. And that, Mr. Espinoza, is where you come in. Built into every internal combustion engine of which I am aware is a thing called a *torsional vibration damper*, a little piece of elastomer, like rubber, which is crammed into the cracks between pieces of steel and titanium and *squeezed*, Mr. Espinoza, squeezed whether it likes it or not. I imagine it does not. But that is its purpose, its reason for being, is to be squeezed. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
Espinoza had been attempting to move as little as possible, but this effort caused him to vibrate from head to toe, as though he were acting out the Book Man’s metaphor.
“What do you remember about the world outside this camp?” asked the Book Man, removing his thumb from Espinoza’s neck.
Espinoza shook his head.
“Anything?”
Shook his head some more.
“Nothing?”
“Water,” said Espinoza.
“What’s that?”
“Water,” said Espinoza.
“There are cisterns of water here at the camp, Mr. Espinoza,” said the Book Man. “And a lot of frozen water underfoot.”
“Ocean,” whispered Espinoza.
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm,” rumbled the Book Man. His six-fingered left hand again descended to stroke Espinoza’s hair gently. The hand was big enough to palm Epinoza’s head from ear to ear. “The ocean.”
Espinoza snuffled and nodded.
“Do you remember green grass, Mr. Espinoza?”
Espinoza nodded.
“What do you remember?"
After a while Espinoza said, “Green.”
The Book Man emitted another “Mmmmmmmmmm,” a sound which rolled around and resonated throughout his body and was transmitted into Espinoza’s ear directly, as though the Book Man’s kneecap had come magnetically alive like one of Espinoza’s speaker cones. “You know, Mr. Espinoza, it is my experience that when a man is over his horizon, no matter the man, no matter his loyalty, no matter his steadfastness, he begins to feel a fondness for the three ‘R’s: roads, rivers, and rails. This is not an exhaustive list, only an alliterative indication of what I mean. The ocean, too, might draw such a man to itself. Sails filled with purpose.”
Espinoza felt the Book Man’s other hand descend and cup his face, tilting upward the ear not pressed to the Book Man’s knee. There came a shift somewhere in the room’s fundamental balance, like the moon had entered a new phase - a change in gravity that compelled sympathetic churnings in Espinoza’s guts. There was heat and a sour smell. Espinoza felt he was being squeezed, as though the atmospheric pressure had risen. When next the Book Man spoke, Espinoza realized the monster’s lips were half an inch from his own upturned ear. But all this only registered as raw data. Tripped sensors, zeroes flipped to ones.
“I myself am come to you from across the ocean, did you know that, Mr. Espinoza? By fusion-impelled container craft I have hewed the waves and broken the ice. I took no pleasure in it. My metabolism does not agree with these weathers. I have lost thirty-five pounds since two weeks ago this Tuesday, and in my mind’s eye, ever undimmed, I walk the rolling green hills and gaze over the glistening lagoons I left behind - for there is good country to be had in this world, Mr. Espinoza.” The Book Man paused here to inhale, a wet wheeze that hauled in so much air it made Espinoza’s ear pop. “May I show you some?”
The buzzing open-aux sound in Espinoza’s head thumped and snapped as if someone had dropped a needle. New signal was being introduced. The last sentence, “May I show you some?” was a puzzle he was being asked to solve. The words were entirely mysterious and immediately compelling, so heavy with meaning they put drag on the minute hand. But the Book Man answered the riddle for him.
Espinoza felt the Book Man’s lips tug the cilia of his earlobe by static attraction, so near did they descend as he whispered: “I have come to love the scent and taste of this left second middle finger of mine. You have an indefinable, textural quality about you that I enjoy right down to the mitochondria, which statement of fact I hope you will accept as the highest compliment. Would you come with me to Jacksonville as my personal assistant, Mr. Espinoza? I would be extremely grateful if so, and disposed to waive any debt owed as a consequence of the transaction we were discussing before. Jacksonville, Florida, Mr. Espinoza, is a land of sunshine and flowing water and trees grown tall and strong by standing rooted in fertile earth. The sun and its celebrants enjoy each other year-round. In fact the atmosphere is so hospitable that you will find women and children mingled with the men in equal measure. And here is a happy thought. When all data are unscrambled, and the long history of your life is fixed, I hope this frozen misadventure will rate a footnote and no more. I hope you are finished being squeezed.”
The signal modulated. Snow glommed into structure. Lazy breakers rolled across Espinoza’s internal screensaver and smashed into the shoreline. He woke a little.
An old scrap of memory came to him from over his horizon: an impression of young adulthood, of adrenaline; images of himself redlining a scrub speeder over a hill, at risk of smashing into sunny waves that glittered like knives. He was bleeding in several places and didn’t mind. Somewhere a saxophone was laughing at him. Of course Espinoza knew this episode from *Over/Under* Issue 32, in which some chickens of Tanako the Red Tiger’s come home to roost and he is forced to pilot a speeder in a manner frowned upon by law enforcement. But Espinoza could not remember the first time he’d read this story. It had become so entangled with his own identity that it felt like a memory, and might as well have been.
His body spasmed. He found himself suddenly free of the thirteen grasping fingers. He’d landed in the position described by the phrase “flat on one’s ass,” looking the Book Man full in the face. The two were close enough to share a spaghetti noodle.
....
The other hand, the one bearing Espinoza’s own long-lost digit, vanished away into the Book Man’s pocket and emerged again, glittering, flashing with polished surgical steel, a bright spot in Espinoza’s teary left peripheral - emblazoned, by laser engraver, with the label:
FINGER-SNATCHER 9,000, PATENT PENDING, OW00ID17787
Espinoza’s left wrist was seized in a grip that could have bent a barbell, and his pinky - his pinky! a digit missed by the Bupivacaine! - was irresistibly guided into the deadly aperture. Espinoza yelped, began to shake and to whimper, plastic loafers clicking and scuffing for grip to plastic floor, squeaky little breaths coming fast, but his wrist might as well have been cemented to the Book Man’s thigh.
“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” said the Book Man. He spritzed pinky and blade with a pink bottle of pocket sanitizer.
Espinoza shut his eyes, imagined putting a noose around his neck, and silently committed his soul to Poseidon.
Shortly thereafter, four successive pressure waves passed through the office building, shattered both windows, dislodged two ceiling tiles, tumped over Espinoza’s chair, and exploded one of the lenses in the Book Man’s glasses, whose shards embedded themselves in the flesh under the shirt pocket where he’d stowed them.
The room’s two interior walls imploded, admitting a riot of jostling office furniture, Mila the typist, Mila’s five coworkers, their personal effects, and the rest of the building - several hundred tons of concrete, plastic, and steel - riding atop an avalanche: several hundred *thousand* tons of freshly-dislodged ice and snow from halfway up Station 12.
Espinoza and the Book Man were permitted time for one reaction each before they too were swept away. Espinoza used his to say, “Oh!” The Book Man used his to snip off Espinoza’s finger.