The Ninth Berth – Tractate 10: Lights
10/10
This is the tenth and last part of my serialized novella The Ninth Berth. Previously: Tractate 9.
I might publish another post with explanations about the story and its symbolism. Or not.
Tractate 10: Lights
07:24 – …
א
Seconds after the impact something outside slammed the ground and our car shifted downhill. A high and abrasive alarm went out. Kagami lay unconscious on the floor. He had a content face. Shesh and Seraphina hovered by the mattress.
He’s breathing, I said. He got knocked down. Should wake soon.
Thank you, Seraphina said. She was catching her breath. Her stare held gratefulness and also fear.
I turned to the window.
Jesus, I let out.
The carriages formed three sides of an incomplete square. The emerald flank of another car faced us in the distance, parallel to ours. The car between the two had collapsed on its side. All I saw was its dark underframe. Windowpanes slid out from above and people emerged and periscoped like meerkats. They found a desolate terrain of grass and mud where broken poles and catenary lines lay like the abandoned toys of an irate deity.
Let’s get out, Seraphina said. She grabbed the violin case.
Shesh watched Kagami as if trying to solve a riddle.
This is not the final destination, he said, mostly to himself.
The alarm stopped and white noise replaced it. Then Czerny’s voice, uncannily calm.
Valued passengers, we have arrived where we shouldn’t. Please remain calm and vacate the premises immediately.
What happened?
It was Kagami. He looked calm, unbothered. Shesh and Seraphina explained what happened and helped him stand up and showed him the wreckage outside. He didn’t react.
I’ve been dreaming, he said after a moment. Of this.
What did you see? Shesh asked.
The rail track stopped. The train didn’t slow down in time.
A prophecy, Shesh said.
Are you all right? Kagami asked us.
We’re fine, I said.
I opened the compartment door. Water flowed downhill and the fish from the aquarium with it. Crabs explored corners of the corridor. Through the window on my right was the overhang of a cliff. The front of our car stood close to the edge and its white stratus. The car perpendicular to us was closer still. Far away across the ravine, the jagged silhouette of a rocky massif like flatten Dolomites standing witness.
I stepped back into the compartment and told them what I saw. I climbed a mattress and the tray table and found a box attached to the bulkhead by the window. I opened the transparent plastic clip and lifted the emergency hammer out. I aimed its tungsten tip at the left corner. The windowglass spiderwebed. We pushed it together until it detached from its frame and fell away. I cleared the remaining glass from the bottom edge and helped Shesh step out. He dropped down on the mud where he almost fell, his one hand braced against the frame and his handless arm carrying a black fabric bag. Kagami and Seraphina followed through and I went last.
ב
We stood by our car next to a patch of soiled snow.
Low clouds and morning mist mixed with smoke from some unidentified place. Sunrays pierced through grudgingly. The emerald cars and the dark green of the pine needles colored the grey scene. Birds called from the trees but we didn’t see them.
Passengers coalesced in the middle of the square, assisted by staff in blue uniforms. No sign of Czerny. The elderly couple from our car strolled along the collapsed car, smiling, stopping to take pictures with a film camera the man held around his neck. I turned and saw their compartment window untouched.
Kagami was still groggy. We moved on closer to the forest edge on the other side of the railtrack, at a distance from the precipice. Kagami sat on a dead tree trunk. Shesh sat next to him and conjured a water bottle he offered him.
More passengers spilled from the carriages.
Could have been much worse, I said. What you’d call a miracle, rabbi?
We shouldn’t count on miracles for our survival, my friends. The kudz spoke to us, warned us. I’m happy we’re alive. And if we died, we wouldn’t be here discussing it.
Never heard a rabbi bring up an anthropic argument, Seraphina added. As far as I’m concerned it’s all happenstance. Where are we anyway?
She was looking at Kagami who was checking his phone.
If the GPS is right, we are just twenty-six kilometers from the terminus, he said without looking up.
Shesh’s smile widened. He looked at the sky as if contemplating stars in a cloudless night.
Almost there, he said.
He bent to fetch the fabric bag and handed it to Kagami.
I won’t need this anymore. Please have it.
Kagami accepted the gift and picked the kudz from inside. He didn’t know what to say. He said thank you with a polite nod.
I’m going to walk, Shesh said. I’ll arrive before you. Maybe I’ll meet new friends along the way.
Don’t, I said. You’d walk the whole day in the cold.
Walking will warm me up. I’ll see you all soon. Take care of yourselves my friends.
And he left towards the head of the train. We watched him grow smaller against the wreckage and the mist. He didn’t look back.
Kagami sat in silence. I asked if he was all right. He said he just needed rest and his head didn’t hurt anymore. He pulled the photo from his pocket and smiled at it. Seraphina brought him a blue blanket and wrapped him in it. I didn’t know where she got it.
Kagami held the kudz in both hands and stared at it.
Everything all right? I asked.
He looked up as if waking.
Yes. I was thinking. About the train. About this object.
The rabbi’s box, I said.
I will keep it with me. Bring it to Japan. Shesh is a good man.
ג
Miles, look.
Her hand rose toward the trees. A blackbird lifted from a low branch and vanished into the canopy. Below where it had been, an aperture opened between two giant pines.
She left her violin case with Kagami and walked toward a narrow path into the forest.
Her anthracite shell jacket and black pants disappeared in the shade. I followed her.
The path was of brown pine needles and zigzagged between trunks that rose branchless like wooden columns. Ten meters in, the path widened and straightened. Under the sparser needles layer, square cobblestones emerged.
When she heard me catching up she slowed.
You didn’t want to follow him? she asked.
The rabbi?
Yeah.
I’m not that adventuresome. And it’s objectively not the right thing to do. But you knew he wouldn’t listen.
I don’t think he was much concerned with what’s right. She glanced at me.
What do you mean? I asked, glancing back.
Defining right and wrong takes so much trouble. All the risk-reward calculations. Discomfort and unpredictability scare us but that’s how you learn. The journey matters. Even more so when it’s on your own terms. She paused. I know how that sounds.
The way rabbis tend to comment on religious matters, I said. Seeking the right line of argument, conclusions as a by-product.
More clichés. But maybe. I don’t know, I’m not a rabbi. She kept walking.
The forest was now sparser and with different trees. Not only pines but also birches and bare oaks. Beyond their crowns the sky lightened. Shy sunlight broke through and lit remnants of snow that sparkled like abandoned crystals.
We strolled slowly and stopped when we heard sounds. She said she’d seen an owl fly from a branch but I’d missed it.
She stopped and knelt.
Look, she said.
She stood up and handed me what she’d picked. A white feather.
That’s fitting, I said.
Yeah, angels watching.
Or your owl.
It wasn’t white. I saw it.
Must be an angel then.
Do you believe in angels, Miles?
Come on.
What?
You sound like a lawyer. Asking a question only if you know the answer.
Right? I was interested in what you’d say.
And?
You said exactly what I expected. She smiled.
I got got, I said, and I pocketed the feather.
ד
We’d been in the forest for almost half an hour. Now the path was just bare earth going downhill to a small rift where no tree had grown. It was an expanse of torn ground as if moved by machines decades ago, a mix of forest soil and limestone covered by a thin skiff of snow.
Beyond the treeless zone the ground fell away into darkness. Tree crowns rose from below and between them something green and curved that wasn’t a tree.
Let’s see what’s over there, then we’ll go back, she said.
Fine by me, the train won’t leave without us, I said.
The path got steeper and slippery. We held branches to keep our balance. I slipped on a flat rock and almost fell.
When we reached the flatter area the path vanished and we stepped in the snow. There was no other human footsteps but there were animals’ steps. It was quiet and windless. We paused.
Beautiful, isn’t it? she asked.
It is. Let’s see what’s over there? she ignored that and stood still.
This place reminds me of something, she said.
Of what?
I was ten, a hike with my dad in New Mexico. It was drier, obviously, but the colors were the same.
Rio Grande? I asked.
Maybe, I don’t remember. But I saw a snake and I wasn’t scared. He was proud.
Were you living in New Mexico then?
Yeah, a couple of years. Then we moved out again. My dad’s work.
What’d he do?
He was a scientist. Nuclear physics.
Like Kagami.
Not exactly the same field. But not that far, now that you mention it. It ended up driving him crazy, literally.
Kagami seems quite sane to me, as far as scientists are concerned.
Fair, but his mission is insane. He’s an idealist, unlike my dad. He thinks if there’s one chance in a million it’s still better than none.
You don’t believe that.
It’s not about belief, it’s about statistics. I only believe in the law of unintended consequences.
I thought you hated statistics.
Which is a way to acknowledge it. You don’t hate something unimportant. Nobody’ll tell you they hate the number 98 or trees’ branches. And I don’t even hate it, for that matter. It’s just less worthy of my time than other things.
Guess you could say the same about people. It’s not the people themselves you resent but the time wasted with some of them.
Not sure of that. It’s not mutually exclusive. Wiktor Czerny is an interesting case study. Like a serial killer is. But I’d rather hang out with you or Shesh.
I’ll take that, I said.
I walked to the edge. The green structure was a half-sphere blanketed with moss atop a cubic stone edifice the size of a cabin. At each corner stood pyramidal stone spikes point upward and bare of dust or stains. The wall beneath was ochre and stained by moisture and lichen. Stairs descended on both sides to what I guessed was an entrance.
Seraphina joined me.
What is that? she asked.
A temple?
Let’s find out, she said.
I took the left stair and she the right. The stone steps were eroded and of uneven height. We met at the center before a narrow iron-barred door. She found the handle and pulled and the door opened without a sound.
Inside, a flat ceiling and walls painted white save for the lower third tiled in pale turquoise squares depicting flowers, plants, animals. Pale stone benches flanked each wall.
Across from us, a niche framed by a roman arch was empty.
In the center of the room, candles burned in a shallow pit. Five thin white candles with twisted shafts, their flames steady in the still air. Unlit candles waited in a small wooden bucket beside the pit.
We stood in silence.
Miles, she said.
She knelt and chose a candle from the bucket and lit it from one of the burning flames. She planted it among the others and looked at me.
I knelt and took a candle. The wax was cold on my fingers. I held it to the fire until it caught and placed it with the rest. Seven flames.
I stood first. She raised a hand toward me but then withdrew it and rose on her own. She smiled faintly.
We should come back here someday, she said.