FIELD REPORT: everyone has decided to survive this catastrophe

June 30, 2010

Last night I took the night train through Bavaria into Munich.  I had the high bed, right at the top of the car. It was late, and we closed the curtains so that we could go to sleep.

In the berths below were a Dutch mother and daughter – the restless mother parted the curtains and watched out the window late into the evening as the darkened landscape crept past.  A sharp line of silver cuts through the car: her hair glows white and uneasy in the moonlight. The daughter, a redhead, disheveled and snoring lightly as a kitten, half-twisted and zaftig in dark blankets.

There was a small lamp at the top of the car, with a tiny black plastic switch and a milky white plastic lampshade. Greasy. It does not work. With the curtains closed, the car is dark.  We could be anywhere: not on a train in Germany.  The old woman is uneasy, and parts the curtains to watch Bavaria slip past.  She knots her fingers. I have the high bed, above the jitter of light from the curtains.  My glasses kept slipping the wrong distance between nose and world – a constant series of minor adjustments to keep everything in focus. I thought of bedbugs, railroad journeys, Bavaria, of being rocked and carried, of the moon, of others at night on trains along the same tracks, of the haphazard slip of years that puts one here and another there…

Eventually, the gentle movement of the car heading north across the mountains into Germany, the sway and creak of the upper berth, the rushing of the wind through the open window snapping the curtain, the bright white light issuing from the Dutch mother’s hair, the grease on my nose slipping the glasses down, the blur of the black and red letters against white signs, the sound of the night, the altitude, the memory of fresh cherries earlier and the shape of the pit in my mouth, the taste of my tongue lying exhausted in the night, the sound of the wheels on the rails and their echos over time begin to send me to sleep.

I held my eyeglasses in my hand. I didn’t want to put them away – I want to sleep with them. What if something happens in the night, on the train, what if in Germany, what if a language I can’t understand, what if I fall into the past and cannot see, what if instructions, what if emergencies, what if I need to, what if something happens that I need to understand.

Shortly before dawn the alarm sounds. In the top berth, it is inches from my ears. An unreal screaming that shakes us awake. I wake in contractions and evocations – displacements. The Dutch mother is gasping and pulling at the window and throughout the train everyone waking and syncopated and calling out. Everyone has decided to survive this catastrophe. Attempts to organize, locate, identify. What are they saying? It is impossible to understand. None of us speak the same language. I am halfway down the ladder, barefoot. I remember my passport, my sandals, my sweater – I climb up again. The porter has my passport. My shoes are gone. We are all within this alarm inside a train car in Germany.  People are pressed against the windows. We see the earth outside begins to slow and halt. The berths empty of people.  The train is slowing. We are in Germany, and people are trying to escape the car.

Later, when the siren stops, and it was a false emergency and evacuation is halted and there are hours more for sleeping, I dream again and again that my glasses have fallen and broken. Over and over, that I try to reach for them, and they have been crushed on the floor of the train car during the alarm, and I am unable to leave the car. Everything is over. I couldn’t see.  I wake for it, and my glasses are in my hand. Again, I fall asleep and dream, only to awaken holding my glasses.

Below me, the old Dutch woman cannot return to sleep. She huddles by the window, pulling aside the curtain with her fingers, watching over our progress across the land. What we thought was happening did not take place. And now unsure of both our waking and our dreams.