Particle of Wind

In a florescent diner all strident plastic and spattering grease, sticky tables and peeling seats, he punches the most mournful tunes he can find on the nicotined jukebox then sits with his anonymous breakfast gazing through a dirty window, noticing only as his look passes through it the hunched shadow of his own silhouette. He sips his watery coffee, staring through two stunted palms leaning up in the cyanotic dawn, seeking any surviving shard of a receding past; listening to the next melancholy tune, the chronometer of his remaining autonomy.

[The train swayed, lurched across the desert floor between the last walls of mud brick, spun to gold in the late afternoon light slanting across a yellow sky; the wheel-rhythm! aspiring to its proper pace, a child running barefoot alongside down the griddle of sand, barelegged under the ragged remains of some older brother’s or uncle’s gallibeya, waving—or begging—but mainly running until the train gathered its strength and left the child, treadmilling to a reluctant halt and finally stationary, staring, behind.]

He lights a cigarette

[Passing out cigarettes from the first of the three packs we bought in Wadi Halfa, the journey’s point of departure, Don laughed and said “We might as well get started” and we smoked and smoked knowing we wouldn’t have enough to reach Khartoum; so we would have to scavenge cigarettes from laughing strangers until we came to Abu Hamed, the next town where we could buy more—Bringi in red and white boxes, harsh and burning but the desert did that to your throat too so it didn’t matter—and repay our tobacco debts when we could remember where they were due.]

and lets the smoke out in a weary plume, turns his eyes to the street where custom vans, black-and-whites, cadillacs, volkswagens all race through the indifferent morning only to wait, thrumming and restive, at signals

[Later, in the desolation, there was nothing. Just, from time to time, the desiccated remains of a camel that didn’t get there; ribs a hollow tent, hide flapping in the wind of the passing train, jaws yawned in climactic grimace.]

then back to his sullen reflection, and from there to the clock counting the minutes until time to leave this recapitulant breakfast for work: working with eyes or at least mind always on the clock, counting hours then minutes until the clock will finally free him to go home where he will eat and drink and smoke and sleep,

[Somebody whose name I never learned told me the roof was better. Mohammed said no it was dangerous but I looked down the shadowed stifling corridor where there wasn’t even room between piled bodies, trunks, suitcases, gunnysacks to place a cautious foot, at least not for me, even though the tea sellers with their steaming pots and buckets full of glasses made their way through with uncanny grace serving tea and collecting money and emptying the glasses, even washing them in thickening water on the way. The wind that might have helped didn’t quite make it in through the windows half-boarded against the sand. During the day it was too hot for the roof and you didn’t expect to lie down anyway, nor would there have been such extravagance of space; but by night, still standing, the concatenation of the day—the town, the waiting in lines, the shoving rushing hurtling through the half-boarded windows to get a place which wasn’t a seat at all but only a tiny rectangle of floor for all three of us—accumulated hour by hour until horizontality became the essential attribute of nirvana;]

but between the perfunctory breakfast and the obligatory work and the unregenerative night he cannot keep himself from dreading that conduit between warring nations: the freeway—where the compiled exhalations of a million million cars bucking and snorting, crowding, sometimes even clashing in anger or stupefied fatigue, seep in and even over the concerted efforts of a screaming car radio struggle at his eyelids, pulling pulling pulling them toward down,

[so I waited until the next station, just a cluster of ramshackle buildings in the endless desert with the single track stretching north behind through the infinity between now and Cairo and south ahead where there were but couldn’t be but had to be the steaming equatorial rainforests of Uganda—couldn’t be because there was only desert from here in the center to out there: the horizon: the very rim of existence—and the Nile itself just the memory of a blue hairline on its western edge; then slid out through the window and dropped to the sand, bodies coming out of windows up and down the line, and waited until there was an opening in the crowd between cars and used the hand- and footholds of what had once been the couplings for electricity or water or communications but had since become only aids for climbing; hauled myself up onto the curving roof, my bag with the sloshing water jugs and my pilled and threadbare travel blanket swinging against my hip, and found my place.]

and when he finally does rendezvous with sleep it is a necessity, an escape; but he can’t help resenting how much time it consumes, time of which there is so little in each day and so much of that rationed out to driving, working, eating, shitting, that to use more than half of what remains for mere unconsciousness seems such heinous waste.

[Stars were already emerging against the agonizing cobalt sky, and those few cars with vestigial electricity threw bars of light onto the sand; men in gallibeyas—white shadows, black faces—scurried below me, or sauntered, some beyond the light squatting shitting in the pristine desert, so clean that there is no defiling it by the normal machineries of nature; others laying out their prayer rugs and standing upon them facing east and bowing, kneeling, bowing twice, rising again, their fingers doing secret things in the folds of pale cotton as I settled my blanket into a comfortable place beneath the curve of neck and lay back, then rose to sitting while the roof of every carriage filled up with the white-draped men, talking, smoking, lying, or just sitting reveling in this moment of the dusk like me because no matter where or when or how used to it you are, the magic never weakens.

The train heaved itself into motion, wheels shrieking, and the people still on the sand scurried for handholds, threw themselves through windows, clung clustering to the stairs at the ends of cars; I lay back once more, gazing into the depth of sky, stars multiplying into the night, red stars of cigarettes, too; I turned my head and the men and boys beyond me were fading to silhouette, with just that last rose flush of vanished sunset—or the memory of it—upon them, and sat up again because the moment was too miraculous to let slip past, revivifying me from the long exhausting days before. The world was flat, but it was circular. I could see its edge,]

He sips tepid coffee, pokes a white plastic fork into half-eaten congealing eggs while the bifurcation of then and now tears at him like feral dogs ravening his carcass. The song finishes; the next with whirs and stirrings of the machine’s viscera begins: the last song, the final remnant of his own time before he must offer himself over into bondage, fold into his car and weave through traffic to work, but

[a compass-drawn circle beneath the perfect bowl of sky broken only by a tiny tentative bite: the curve of the train’s roof and the dimensionless cutouts, just black now and barely decipherable, of abundant headcloths and wind-billowed robes concealing the men within. I lay back again while the feline wind too hot to be just air stroked me as the train gathered its speed through the Nubian night; turned my head away from the wind: the wind so hot that the only relief was my body’s lee side arced across the curve of train; turned from the wind so that it would not shrivel eyes, nose, mouth into desiccated things like those camels, foundations of future dunes; the wind purring; and slept.]

what song is that? playing: not the words, just the strings and chord progressions hauling him toward some unavoidable crescendo as he gazes through the window through his own shadow to the failing trees; he takes wallet from his pocket and peers inside, riffling through bills that might not be enough but might have to be anyway and counting quickly now because the song is almost finished and before then, before he must rise and shift from this bastion of twentieth-century-america to that other one, his job, he must

[But woke again from time to time; once the train had stopped and it wasn’t the stopping that woke me but the gradual realization of motion ceased because when I woke people were already finishing whatever it was they had been doing out on the desert and ambling back toward the train, squatting within running distance should it labor into movement; I wasn’t irritated at the waking because I already felt myself drifting back into sleep; and because each waking meant another falling because sleep was not an escape, not a necessity, certainly not a waste but a sensual delight valued, sought, and savored, and the waking too; in the middle of infinity, in the middle of night or morning, in darkness, in heat I reached into my bag for a water jug to assuage my razor thirst; the water too not just water but an entire sensory symphony sipped and swallowed, then settled back and slept before the train moved on, holding me in sleep by its lullaby rocking, soothing me, stroking me, whispering me through the desert through the night: a particle of wind.]

decide. The song finishes and he stands and pays for his scrambled eggs and coffee and steps into the swelling morning; though it is still cold I roll down both windows and hold the wheel more embrace than grasp and smile grimly to myself as I spin out onto the street and drive, aiming finally not for work but for the highway rumbling through the breadth of the tentacled city then out of it and into the heart of the vast continent: my shoulders square, my head erect again.

Lawrence Blair Goral
Los Angeles, California — Bayfield, Colorado
1980—2026