Slumping on the subway, we gazed up at the blank windows, avoiding one another’s haunted eyes, hiding our own guilty, anxious or lonesome stares.
We were strangers but soon would become rather too familiar.
Ahead of us the tunnel ended abruptly, with two twisted, broken rails stretching out into a sunny and seagulled sky.
Brakes screeched. The train rattled, hove, groaned — but we shot over the edge and plunged into the gorge.
The driver sighed, opened his window and promptly lost his cap as he took in the valley bottom rushing toward him.
Withdrawing his head, he torched his last cigarette.
But we never crashed. Instead the valley spiraled up past us at a strange oblique angle, and the ground turned into a cliff we fell along.
As the train fell, the cliff split and circled us in a double helix, two fluid streams of conifers, aqueducts, and estuaries that revolved around us within a bottomless blue heaven, a hole forever twisting open.
When his cig was done, the driver shrugged and went to join us.
Upside down, we stretched our hands toward the glass and reached at sideways scenes of humanity rushing by, at escarpments, promenades, palaces and plays, at crowds chanting or celebrating without ever seeing us.
We screamed till we couldn’t, then rested until we could scream again.
The train plummeted through deepening red twilight.
Many universes rode the rims of the spirals we were falling down; we were showered with scents from paradoxical paradises and the armpits of stars.
There were green glaciers with entire biomes frozen into their milky slabs, and coral pagodas breathing atop undulant ridges of rocky flesh. There were velvet suns that made our skin translucent, eggshell planets smiling eyelessly, magma moons heaving and bubbling with liquid black bones.
Colossal sieve-feeding birds swam by and groaned long strange melancholy songs into the cosmic loneliness of our endless sky. Feathered fish smacked against the windows, and we were visited by beasts whose names we invented:
Owlshrimp. Lampeyes. Strianas. Satyrfoxes. Cowled rats.
Fire- and iceworks blasted around us, and an antimatter bomb opened its massive white eye, then its dread black pupil.
But we had grown tired of our fear.
We even became blasé.
Learning to shrug, we strung up chandeliers, danced upside-down and sang karaoke through one-minute dawns. Lit by foreign light, colored Fauvist or Frazettan, we lifted our cocktail bottles against purple-black double sunsets. We had long since swapped names; now we began a more ponderous and meaningful exchange, one that would last the rest of our lives.
Soon we stopped thinking much about the crash.
Able to pluck any resource from the sky, we devoted ourselves to enjoyment, creativity, sport, world-watching and every kind of love. We lived both furiously and lazily, with the fanaticism of the newly free and soon dead.
The train seats we filled with pillows. On the train’s sides we mounted windmills. Between cars we planted terraces with sapphire grass, fur lilies, red scattershy and succulent smudgefruit. From the train’s nose we hung a weighted candelabral library where some folks liked to dangle and dream despite the pages flapping in their faces, and atop the last car we erected a fluttering peacock pavilion and an amphitheater for our orchestras of alien instruments.
We pushed the cars further apart and established intricate rope ladders connecting our dream constructions, our castles, workshops, homes, clubs and galleries, so that the falling train became a vast and sinuously rippling ornament spreading its many-eyed body within our tortured non-Euclidean space, which expanded and contracted around us as we fell through its contours.
The train city sprouted flowers and bowers, showers of space ivy leafing in its windows, caressing our hands as we communed, lost in the conversations and the heady projects that had grown to define us.
The few malcontents who didn’t like our anarchic system waited for a sideways landscape that looked welcoming, then leapt off and disappeared into those tilted worlds. We never knew whether those escapees lived or died.
But most of us felt we belonged to the train and one another.
Free of work, free of routine, free of everything but the obligation to age, we kissed and laughed and fought and sobbed and yelled, just a panoply of confused humans gripping our heads, embracing, going mad or suddenly becoming sane, up nights sleepless and manic or dozing through jeweled days, whispering things we wouldn’t mean in a week, or yelling things we’d mean forever into the snaking black depths of those endless cosmic nights, as we fell through yet another blackness with yet another sun lurking at its bottom, yet another strange day waiting to drench us in unaccustomed light.
Our mystics spun myths about our origins, our poets verses about how someday we’d smash on the ground. Meanwhile we coupled and throupled, brought new strangers into our strange world, and raised sky children who had never known anything but our train’s nosedive through eternity.
Nearly six decades passed before we sighted our end.
Slowly the other landscapes were falling away from us.
Finally the only sounds we heard were our own, echoing but without visible walls. Far below us a fuzziness contracted; over months it swelled and developed details, a scene seeming to be created as we approached.
The fuzz grew into a hilly landscape beside a familiar human city. Inch by inch a steel bridge boned up from the ground, springing over the thigh of a cliff, filling with rail tracks and wheeled traffic nearly frozen in place.
We squeezed one another, murmuring in unease, as the bridge broke up and fell in slow-motion, every whip of its cables lasting for days. Its collapse left two snarled and broken rails protruding from a tunnel.
As we fell past, the tunnel lit up with the headlights of a train. In the train’s front window hung the driver’s sad and terrified face.
Our driver had died of old age. By now only the eldest among us had spouses they’d left behind, lives that had vanished but which seemed to exist now again not so very far away, in the slow-motion world outside of our fall.
Why had we returned after all this time?
And why was the train slowing further?
One man, shouting at us to follow him, leapt onto a nearby outcrop. As his shoe hit earth, he crumbled into sandy stars that blew into our eyes.
Months turned into years as we approached the valley bottom.
We began our cycles all over, but more fervently. Stewarding our last resources, living almost entirely on bread rabbits and tea bugs, we debated, argued, made love, told jokes, refused to accept our fate, looked inward or hit the bottle. Dogged couples carried out their weddings and planted babies; our artists slaved over their masterpieces. We all saw the valley floor coming, yet we couldn’t do anything but live as hard as possible and somehow hope.
Or pray. Many of us, even as our train city decayed and eroded, turned to train-worshipping esotericism, while the scientifically minded came up with theories of our predicament, trying to understand, or at least to find a way of slowing our descent still further.
These astronomers of the ground were the first to spot our shadow appearing on a patch of utterly banal limestone.
The shadow grew into a huge black ragged zero.
The zero, as it grew, began to pull at our reality.
Moving ever slower through space, we accelerated through time. The seconds tumbled past; soon hours elapsed every minute, weeks were compressed into days, and years shot past like bullets, and the centuries thundered over us like the hoofbeats of elephantine centipedes.
Our generations rose and fell, rose and fell, degenerating with each cycle.
The highway cracked up and sank into its landscape. The valley parched into a desert, and the distant cities collapsed into sand. Volcanoes popped like earth pimples. The earth crevassed. The sun stuttered. Our seed sputtered out into raving vitamin-starved eyeless freaks holding fast to one another.
As the nose of our destroyed train city neared the zero, the universe cooled and ran down, the stars went out like sparklers, and the last energy in all the universe gathered itself into a flame that enveloped our train.
This flame attracted two giant pursed lips, poised to blow, about to wish for something very different than that for which we would have wished.
We hit the zero as the flame puffed out.
The flame puffed in.
There was a backwards splash.
Fluid sucked into the train and exploded.
We opened our eyes to what we could never see; our hands were pulled away from one another as we washed out into the indescribable.
beautiful. favorite part, besides the end, for its vividness:
Colossal sieve-feeding birds swam by and groaned long strange melancholy songs into the cosmic loneliness of our endless sky. Feathered fish smacked against the windows, and we were visited by beasts whose names we invented:
Owlshrimp. Lampeyes. Strianas. Satyrfoxes. Cowled rats.