Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
–Genesis 11:7 (The Tower of Babel)
Ever since you could remember, you have had a recurring dream in which you wander a subterranean train system. The dream is always different, but the underground cave-like structures are the same: scaly, rounded, speckled stone stalactites in shades of dark red. Carmine. Garnet. Maroon. Burgundy. Where there is not hanging stone, there are gaping pockets of nothingness, great voids of darkness. These are deep space.
This is the deep space of your sleep.
Running through the darkness there are subway trains, which sometimes trek along track line that disappears into tight tunnels of that deep red stone. Wire flails out of both train and above track like wild telephone wire waving in the wind. There is no wind down here. There are also lines of coal-cars that travel open, overflowing with coal, rubbish, lots of sharp, rusted tools. Ever since you can remember, the tools are rusted, beyond use; they have become part of the car.
Where there are not trains, and where there is not darkness, there are large, plastic elevators with life-size green, yellow, red and blue plastic arrows pointing to the direction of travel. Sometimes they are the right the direction.
Often there are the wrong direction.
You avoid taking them.
Down here you will not find The Library of Babel. Down here you will not find the original tablets of the Ten Commandments, nor the Shroud of Turin, nor medals, currency, ruins. Here are not the houses at the end of time, the cyclones that they did not not survive. But there are measurements of infinite space, carried by these trains, and the weight that gauges when the stories of lives might surface. These trains never surface. There is always a long way to go. Never once, when you are down here in this place, do you think to use or find a phone, landline or cellular. You don’t think of time at all, of the killing time of birds and the failing of generators, of the joy and misery of small boats running aground, of unpredictable currents, of the many relatives you must write, the thin blue sheets of paper that lie blank and fading on your desk in that other world, where here is the other other world.
There is only the boarding of the rushing train. There is never much time to board. Doors open and close like an involuntary shudder that comes in deep sleep. You know you are in deep sleep where there is only the boarding of the rushing train. This is a consistent concern. This is the one of only two concerns.
The other: there is never any ground beneath you.
You board the trains in the direst of circumstances: there is never a platform to wait on, only a random placement of thin, steel bars on which you perch, climb, balance yourself before jumping into cars as their doors open. Sometimes you successfully make it in, and enter a train that is crowded and brightly lit. You talk to the people. You pass by the people and talk to them one by one. Always you ask them where they are going. They answer in languages you know you once spoke. You can’t understand them. No one in the entire car is speaking the same language. The car falls silent. Always you are offered a seat where there is no seat, because you are small. You prepare to squeeze yourself, but instead fall into the space with ease. You huddle into the bodies next to you. The train rushes madly through the narrow tunnels, past those pockets of darkness in which some work lights hang on blood red cords from stalactites. You hold on tight, and they hold onto you. There comes a point where your grip tires, when the lights begin to fail in the car, where people want to get out, even knowing they will have to start all over again.
Where you are going does not matter.
Where the train is going does not matter.
When you are on the train, you fear it will stop and you will have to transfer. Have to start all over again. You pray for the crowd to swallow you up, to seal you in their togetherness, but instead you are always rushing, rushing, climbing, swerving, squeezing past, squeezing in.
Sometimes, though, often, though, you never board. You miss sliding through the doors, feel the snatch of air passing as they lock shut and the train exerts a force forward, throwing you off. It is then you are falling, a feeling you now will know. Imagine: your chest collapsing into your limbs. It is a falling not in your nature—you are taken in. You are always nearly gone, going, going, going.
You fall extracted, subtracted, stolen.
*
You want to speak of the dream you had last night. Last night, you woke up in deep space hanging onto the side of track lines. These tracks were new to you. These tracks will remain new to you: single boards of rotting, warped wood and bent nails, splinters, rusted metal holding them down on either side. You crawling along the outside of the track, along the rusted metal, the boards at head level. There is nothing beneath you. There is nothing to grab onto, but track.
In the distance: a narrow platform where many have gathered waiting for the train. You know you must get there. You carefully make your way, right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand, bringing up your legs, knees to chest as you do so. You must get there.
Under a twisted lamplight, hanging upside down from a stalactite, you see someone doing the same thing, only heading toward you. This person is going the wrong way. This person is headed toward you.
You call out: the platform, the platform. It’s the other way. Go the other way.
You call, and in the distance you can see a female form, and she’s speeding up, still making her way toward you. You can see, under the twisted lamplight, that she is angry. She is making her way toward you, her legs swinging out wildly. Those on the platform call out to you, to both of you.
There is only her body coming towards you which stands between you and the platform. There is not enough time to reach the platform before she reaches you. You begin to retreat the other way, as if retracing your steps. Retracing your steps to nowhere. You know you are in deep sleep where there is only her body comes towards yours, to knock you off. This is a consistent concern. This is the only one of two concerns.
The other: there is no ground beneath you.
She reaches you quickly enough. She is laughing happily, like a child. She tries to pry your hands from the bars, and says: jump up, jump up, swing yourself up. She bats at your hands and laughs.
You manage to swing yourself up into the train tracks, and you begin to run, run away further from the platform. She runs behind you, laughing. She reaches you, throws her arms around you, brings you onto the track. You feel a nail go into your left leg and then your right. You feel the nails pierce the skin, flesh, muscle. You fall onto the track, your back pressed into her stomach, and as you see the headlights of a train approach in the distance, coming toward, you realize you understand her.
You understand what she is saying. You understand her language.
You must get up, she says.
And go where? you ask.
In the distance, the train is approaching. The stalactites around you glimmer silver specks in deepening red hues. Here there is nothing, and it has an echo.
Don’t, she whispers.
Don’t what? you ask.
Don’t look away from it, she says.
There is nothing but the lights of the train approaching, the darkness from which it emerges, the framing repteilian curves of stone. There is nothing but the train which you will not board tonight, or rather, at this moment. There is nothing but these things, and the speech you share is the echo of it. It would not have an echo with either of you, as you sit, somewhat pinned to tracks that the echo of the nothing is the future selves, the much harder to follow laws of you, and you must follow into it.
And even after you pull yourself up from the nails and taste the blood seeping from your legs, even after hand-in-hand you run toward the light, the wood crumbling beneath you, the wires above you around you waving and whipping dangerously close—even after you awaken, you no longer know who remains approaching, the train—or your hearts which will not give.