The inside walls of the bar car are streaked pewter. The cigarette smoke shows the air motionless. But the walls and floor rattle and jounce.
         All the blinds are down. Thirty people are drinking against weather. Some hunch against the bar and hold their drinks in both hands, elbows in at their sides. The rest lean against the train walls, gripping themselves as if fighting rain and wind.
         A shotglass of Scotch tips, and the liquid spreads out across, filling every groove and grain of the wood, making it glass. A fat young man in a stained white shirt turns against the wall, continues turning all the way around, then slides himself into the little metal bathroom and slams the door. Where he stood, piss stands, saturating the black absorbent floor grime. Cigarette butts are yellow like petals.

         Two blocks of facing seats hold five young women. The mousy one with a knowing smirk motions her to stop; she stops. They have a seat for her.
         They shriek and bounce forward, hands on their knees. Beige wool slacks, angora sweater, silk blouse, leather skirt. Hair in soft swirls and flips. Rings with simple stones and necklaces of pearl, simple gold bracelets.
         The auburn girl has cheekbones so high her eyes are stranded behind her face. The high thin eyebrows seem part of her forehead, not of her eyes.
         The blonde has a perfect high-tilted nose and sits back relaxed, looking at it from the left, then from the right.
         All ten of their shoes have sharp little points.
         She's sweating. She sweeps the hair back from her face. She shrieks. The other girls freeze. Her shriek turns into a shrieking laugh. The other girls shriek too.
         She can move her hands around as she talks loud, making it louder. It's the way they do it. She can tip her head back and smile like a joke about smiling, her teeth just slightly apart, soundlessly.
         Smiling knowingly, she gets up, kisses on the cheek the mousehaired one with the indulgent jaw-fat. Wry, she waves, wry she gets through the door of the car.
         The silver metal room between the cars roars. She's bent double. Then with her head down waist-high, she rushes into the next car.
         A mirror of the double set of facing seats. The wife in balloon tight slacks, pink, her face blotted red, the tip of her nose a little flat lozenge. The husband in loose gaunt-crotched beige slacks, gums fallen, jowls fallen, staring through thick distorting lenses. Their four children with them, placid, motionless.
         She bursts into their aisle bent, hands twitching, and falls between their seats onto their shoes. While she shrieks a sort of terrified laughter, her whole body twitching, her eyes are closed, eyebrows raised slightly, her face looks peaceful.

         She stands in the aisle with her belly pressed against the side of one of the seats. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open, her hand up with all fingers extended like the air has a wall.
         As she opens her eyes her neck seems to stretch a little, her head seeking, points at the faces of the five boys in the facing seats. One smiles like a politician, one smiles watery lipped and sickly falsely, one smiles wet-lipped and big fuck eyes, one doesn't smile but appraises her, one looks at the other four and not at all at her. Pants legs at angles, crooked, parallel, all move at once when she opens her eyes, folding open or shut like insect legs.
         They have a seat for her. She turns to place her body into it. They look at the body. She stops--turns back. Then dives into the seat head-first.

         A young man with his hair dyed red has a cigarette in his mouth. He waves the long paintbrush slowly, letting it seek. Then daubs another green splat on her torso. Her back is turned, standing, naked, holding a book open in the air reading. She's about one-third green. She shifts her weight to the other hip, book to the other hand. The green lines and splotches all shift gently. She rustles to the next page.
         He turns her around by the wood tip of the brush against her hipbone. Her face has a fat green X over it. Rippling lines across her front don't pause for her breasts. It tricks the eye into not seeing breasts there. Her crotch is all green, wet, soaked dripping green down her thighs. He now soaks the brush and slaps some more paint there. The cover of her book says How It Is.

         The kitchenette rattles, pans jump off the little stove. She weights the tin skillet down with three unbroken eggs.
         In the husband's spot, a fat bleary-faced man with his shirttail hanging out leans against the refrigerator and tries to look at her. She's talking all the time, never stops talking while she works, never looks directly at him.
         She pours from a quart bottle of Scotch over the eggs, then turns on the blue flame. She looks at it. Plucks each wet egg out one at a time, breaking the contents back into the Scotch. Then all shells go out the window.
         "That's disrespect," says the man drunkenly. "That's disrespect to the chicken." He slides down to sit on the floor.
         His eyes close slowly. The eyelids sit over his eyes like red boiled paste.

         The car has been dark for hours. She's under a seat, her head aching, wet all over. The constant stream of passengers walking up and down the aisle just step over her bare legs, which stick out across the floor at a broken angle.
         A piece of chewing gum clings to a green bolt that holds the seat to the floor. The gum is a beautiful little gray boulder, the color of putty if something were inside putty stretching it open, trying to burst out.
         The backdrop for the boulder looks like a high cliff of foxfur, dark, flickering in the drafty foot-air. The cliff emits a wrenching sound, and she sees it's the hair of the frowning young man. His nose and forehead are pressed into the floor as if they skidded to a stop there.
         She laughs.
         His entire head falls over and the eyes open. His left eye, closest to the floor, looks straight into her right eye, also closest to the floor. Their higher-up eyes are too skewed to meet.
         "Can I get you a Bloody Mary?" he says. After a pause he connects his sentence with a gracious raising of his eyebrows, and a sincere attempt to raise his head.
         "I'd love one," she says, squinting, smiling. They fall asleep again.

         The train curves. She looks out. They are on a red trestle, sailing over a little valley. In the rising faces of hills out both windows, tiny houses. They seem made of paper. Blue paper, white paper, folded paper roof.
         A Japanese girl across the aisle is in the full light of the sun. Her white blouse glows almost too brightly for her face to show. She moves her hands through the glow, opens a little wooden box and takes out a pocketwatch. Her black hair bends over the dazzling amber metal and glass. Then she leans her head against the window, hiding her face in the sunlight.
         The train toots gently. Both sets of windows fly through a white tube of steam.

         Rattle and rocking corridor. Sun and drifting dust. On the left are the doors of private staterooms.
         A dark tall man with a briefcase chained to his wrist and a big Rumanian mustache slides sideways, trying to peer into each room. When the tan American in the white suit strides up the corridor, Rumanian freezes, glares out the window, hiding his wrist with his free hand.
         As soon as the American's gone, he slips into the stateroom behind him. At the same moment a blonde naked man darts from a room three doors down, and tries to get into the next room. He's wearing a purple garter on his thigh. The door he wants is locked, and he pounds on it once while looking around frantically. It opens for him and he's gone.
         A gunshot.
         The green blinds are drawn behind each door down the corridor, except the last door. Through the large window the whole room is visible.
         It's a recording booth, with a piano, big oatmeal-colored moveable screens scattered around, and microphones hanging down like branches. She sits at a table right against the window, gazing through the glass. She's wearing big square headphones, which she holds onto with a hand over the left earpiece.
         The mike she's talking into has a little round screen on it, like a black sieve for the words. She stares at it as she talks on. Her body does small leaps and twitches in the chair, matching her exuberant words, but her face is scared and frozen.
         He crouches behind her, by the piano, in his long coat. He's balanced on the ball of one foot, looking up at her back grimly.
         Without looking around, still talking to the mike, she takes her hand off the headphone, puts it behind her chair, and moves it like a duck's mouth for him. It yaks as she talks.

         As she follows him up the aisle, her eyes stare at the back of his coat. The pattern in the cloth floats diagonal slivers of walnut in rows on a pool of chocolate.
         Her eyes keep looking at the joggling coat. In front of her mouth floats a point; her shoulders rise tense toward it, and her forehead lowers into it.
         Her chin is jammed against her chest, eyes bugged open staring at the cloth, marching. She reaches an arm into the chocolate. He turns around and she turns into slapping hands, he turns into grabbing hands. When she scratches his face he turns and walks. The chocolate pours down the funnel.
         When the highway ripples, she notices she's been watching it. It rises and she blinks, it turns and darkens and flies suddenly over the train. She jumps. Now it's out the other window.
         Her window shows a local street now, the doctor's office first, then the pharmacy, then the empty high school.
         A block from the train she can see the little downtown circle, and a village green. All the people are there. Red laughing groups have gathered at each end of the green.
         The two mobs start to run at each other.
         She cranes to see. Then it's blackened by a hospital. Police station, church, liquor store.

         When her hands are flat in the air an inch from the glass, the train is a ghost. Then she's facing upwards, the train slides sideways through trees without knocking them down.
         When she moves her hands flat an inch above her lap, the train is on end, writhing high in the air, knotting itself trying to self-strangle.
         When she makes fists, the train twists off the cliff into the sea. It falls through dark water with the increasing speed of falling through air.

         She's hiccupping, slicing air with a pocket knife, gurgling at the ceiling. He grabs her arm to get the knife and she bites his stomach. He has to hold both her arms and force her head into his chest with his elbows. Her hands return to their usual shaking. He pulls the knife away.
         She's still. Her hands shake.
         He has the knife. He takes a piece of her hair and slices it off close to her skull.
         The loose hair feathers down across her face. She looks through it at his shirt. Fine blonde lines blacken across the glaring orange paisley rag.
         He cuts another chunk, using her head as leverage for the knife. She sits back in the seat. The hair falls on her lap.
         Her eyes are wide, sidewise, away from his body. As her mouth opens, the eyes close. Her body lies back in the seat. Her teeth are clenched.

         A black man in a glowing white shirt walks up the passage.
         White curtains on both sides cover lower and upper berths. At the far end of the car, a fat man in a white-rope-tied pink robe shuffles out of bright light and puts his thigh against the wood of his lower berth to keep track of it. Then he puts on a black eye-mask, and takes cotton from the pocket at his nipple and tears it in two wads, screws them into his ears.
         His blind hands run slowly down the curtain, setting it in space. He side-steps till he's in front of the curtain opening, facing away; with one motion he sits down and back into the berth, he's swallowed up and gone.
         She walks down the corridor in felt white pajamas and a white night-cap.
         She walks slowly. A hand reaches out of an upper berth and grabs for her cap, but misses. She stops. It grabs again, pulls the cap up from her head. Her head stubble bristles in the rattling train.
         Inside, the berth is a dark box with one white shadowing screen. The champagne glass he hands her is shadow glass, spider bubbles in dim liquid.
         He cries, choking back harsh sounds, the top of his head against her upper arm.
         She hugs his neck, her hands reach back to touch her own shoulders, her knees hug his chest. She stuffs her mouth with a corner of the sheet.
         She's lying flat and still. He flips the sheet up and it relaxes against the air, floats down over her body like an overall touch, she's covered and white and gone.
         She is floating over one spot on the earth, warm, settling down slowly, resting on the ground.