The Best of Gene Wolfe

On the Train

When I look out the window, the earth seems to have become liquid, rushing to flow over a falls that is always just behind the last car. Wherever that may be. The telephone poles reel like drunks, losing their footing. The mountains, white islands in the fluid landscape, track us for miles, the hills breaking to snow on their beaches.

The entire universe can be contained in three questions, of which the first two are: How long is the train? And from what station does it originate?

I do not remember boarding, although my mother, who was here in the compartment with us until a moment ago, told me she recalled it very well. I was helped on by a certain doctor, she said. I would go up and down the cars looking for him (and her), but one cannot thus look for a doctor without arousing the anxiety of the other passengers or exciting their suspicions. Certainly, however, I did not get on at the station of origin; my mother told me that she herself had already been riding for over thirty years.

The porter’s name is Flip; he was once my dog, a smooth fox terrier. Now he makes our berths and brings coffee and knows more about the train than any of us. He can answer all the unimportant questions, although his answers are so polite it is hard to tell sometimes just what he means. My wife and I (all the children we helped aboard have gone to other cars) would like to make him sit with us. But he threatens to call his uncle, the Dawn Guard.

I have formed several conjectures concerning the length of the train. It is surely either very long or very short, since when it goes around a curve (which it seldom does) I cannot see the engine. Possibly it is infinite—but it may be of a closed as well as an open infinity. If the track were extended ever westward, forming a Great Circle, and all that track were filled with cars, would not the spinning earth rush past them endlessly? That is precisely what I see from the window. On the other hand, if straight trackage were laid (and most of it does seem to be straight) it would extend forever among the stars. I see that too. Perhaps I do not see the engine because the engine is behind us.

At every moment it seems that we are stopping, but we continue and even pick up speed. The mountains crowd closer, as if to ram us by night. I lie in my berth listening to the conductor (so called because he was struck by lightning once) come down the car checking our tickets in the dark.

Back before the deluge, Rosemary and I rode Amtrak to Seattle and back—northern route out, southern route back. Between meals, I busied myself by sitting high up in the observation car and writing a bunch of short-short stories. When I got home, I asked my agent to send them all to The New Yorker. To my pleased surprise, this one was accepted.

Flip was the ruffian clown who woke Little Nemo from his wonderful dreams, in one of the finest Sunday comics ever. My father gave Flip’s name to the fox terrier we owned when I was very small: Flip’s barking always woke my father up.

There was no reason for you to care, to be sure, but for both you readers who have stuck with this until now—The earliest memory I have of my mother is that of a lovely young woman bending over me as I lie abed on the seat of a railway car. Her eyes are blue. She wears a gray cloche; from under it peeps a stray lock of auburn hair. Would the year be 1934? I can’t say for certain, but about that. Now I must stop, lest the afterword grow longer than the story.