The Last Intervention

I am hurtling through an empty field on a high-speed train. Thin light stretches beyond miles of grass-like stubble. A full moon. My thighs press against the seat, as my back arches at these discoveries. Both palms run across arm rests in mirrored exploration: Knotty fabric, like my grandmother's dark, dining room brocade.

Partially filled magazine racks and cupboard cabinets are my view of the forward wall. I appraise the odd, insistent notion that I will be flung to my knees below them into the seam of the floor, as if for this moment I share the conductor's brain, and an emergency stop is inevitable. My seat is surprisingly comfortable, I think as my feet scrape circles of reassurance onto the space between me and my pre-assigned position of imminent doom. Everything seems extraordinarily clean, I notice that I notice. Irrational prescience fades, as I assign brand new to this unexpected, global, almost sterility.

For another moment I stare out the window, my mind unusually blank. This is, for me, a singularly confusing, uncustomary self-observation. Now I can just make out a hazy, unnatural glow hovering in the gloom above a veritable corral of skyscrapers. A large city is rising ahead on the horizon where our tracks merge into what I take to be an urban thoroughfare ahead. Indistinguishable, they fade together into a narrow slit of darkness bisecting pumpkin-tinged slabs. At this distance, the buildings huddle like livestock in the rain. Is that where we are going? I wonder, suddenly confused by the question, itself.

How can I not know where I am?

Have I been asleep?






I can recall checking baggage. Meticulously, I now replay the last part:

Porters haul away suitcases and trunks. Two plywood crates go as well. Everything had been stacked in a triple-headed mound at the bottom of the table where something is attached to my ticket by a young woman who could not possibly yet be twenty-one years old. She affects five ear studs carefully aligned on each side of her head, and a small purple ball sticking up on the side of her left nostril. Unfortunate color, I adjudge without an ameliorating thought: Looks like an unripe boil. Merciless disapproval has distracted me from my now-appended ticket which I return to my pocket, its new flapping unsurveyed. I am far more concerned that The Boil Woman not notice I've been staring at her nose than I am with my jacket's additional bulk.

I must be moving to be traveling with this sort of luggage, I reason, adjusting the miniature pillow I find wedged against the base of my skull. I am at last beginning to wonder why my memories are fragmented, why they require decisive focus for retrieval:

Why am I not alarmed at such a State Of Mind?

Especially when I appear to be well-into the beginning of a major life-passage, and have no idea what is happening?

It occurs to me that I ride a speeding train in the middle of the night. Suddenly, I now register than I am responsible for a lot more stuff than I can possibly carry from the station platform on my own.

Do I have money to hire help when I get wherever it is I'm going?

I reach for my wallet to check. Creeping terror rises in my throat —traveling up the root of my tongue. Saliva fills the space behind my teeth. With a start I hear a swooshing noise as I suck air to forestall drool. I am further embarrassed by a convulsive gulp which, I imagine, must be audible to everyone in this car. I am waving my wallet beside my face. Immediately, I slam the wallet into my lap, mortified, as I swivel toward the back of the car.






I am alone.