LAST TRAIN TO KANKAKEE

Robin Scott

Sidney Becket began to run a very real risk of eternal damnation when he was quite young. When, by the time he was fourteen, he had robbed three candy stores, raped a twelve-year-old girl, and shot his father with his old man's war-surplus '03 Springfield, his damnation was pretty well assured. But Sidney never gave it a thought; he was too busy learning.

And what he learned on the south side of Chicago, he applied with admirable diligence the rest of his life:

 . . .click of cue-ball . . .fat moneyman in the shadowy corner . . .groove in the slate into side pocket . . .dollar bills on green felt like spring leaves in Grant Park after a hailstorm . . .

In the army, in 1945, it had paid him well:

 . . ."Hab'n Sie den Pennicilium mitgebracht?" "Jawohl. I got it. 500 million units. 500 bucks." . . .and the dollar bills like green roof-shingles, stacked and interleaved with German efficiency . . .

After the war, with his army stake, it had been hot cars:

 . . .engine block shivering under the air-hammer . . .sweet stink of acetone-base lacquer . . .young men, tough and swaggering, who on a good night could deliver three or four cars apiece to the abandoned bakery on Cicero Avenue . . .and the C-notes layered and bundled like the Chicago Tribune on street corners before Sunday dawns . . .

And then it had been hijacking television sets, and then it had been a string of cribs in Calumet City, and then it had been running uncut heroin up from Matamoros and then it had been Leavenworth, Kansas, and one-to-five. And because Sidney got busted again at Leavenworth, it had been five more. (One of the kids he had dragooned into the back room of the supply shed had objected to the use the older convicts were putting him to, and he had bled a good deal and died from a sacking needle in the eye.)

 . . .O you girls of Calumet City . . .O you hot and dusty reaches of King Ranch . . .O you gray walls and jolly fellows and jute-torn hands  . . .and the bills fluttered and skimmed across lonely truck-stops and hot summer night streets and mesquite and through the bars . . .

And then it had been bunco in L.A. and a pyramid club in Frisco and an acid cult in Berkeley and Mary Louise Allenby. ("I will save you, Sidney. Believe, Sidney, and I will save you.") And he pretended to believe and married Mary Louise Allenby and jacked the dues up to fifty dollars a quarter and upped the price to five dollars a cube and when Mary Louise fell for the cryogenic preservation bit and invested all her money in a deepfreeze plant, Sidney sold lockers and perpetual care for twenty grand a throw and my god how the money rolled in and even Mary Louise was getting tolerable as long as he could get off to Vegas or down to Tijuana every couple of weeks, and the lessons of South Chicago were really paying off and everything was paradise, or as close to paradise as a man like Sidney Becket could reasonably expect to get, when one night about three in the morning, while he was in bed with a Mexican girl, her lithe young pimp, and a middle-aged couple from Ligonier, Pennsylvania, a small piece of vascular tissue, worn and swollen, broke loose in Sidney's vena cava, sailed gracefully along for a distance of twenty-seven millimeters before nosing a horny edge into its channel, and blocked the flow of blood to Sidney's right auricle.

 . . .O deep and mysterious briny . . .O windless sail . . .O diastolic dance . . .O cavéd auricle . . .

Sidney's last words, as he lay flopping and wheezing at the foot of the bed, were: "Bury me inna ground! Don't let Mary Louise stick me in one of them goddam lockers!"

With Latin shrugs he was shipped, comatose, back to Bakersfield; and as soon as the doctor had reeled in his stethoscope and shaken his head, Mary Louise had a couple of the boys wheel Sidney into the cold room and slide him into a locker. And because Mary Louise had been unable to save Sidney while he was alive, she determined in the full flush of her love and fanaticism to save him for some life to come when she could take another crack at him. Deep inside, she distrusted the efficacy of the freezer plant, although she felt her own psychic harmony with the appropriate celestial vibrations made the plant the best bet for her customers. Accordingly, she removed two lockers, Sidney's and an empty, to a deep vault far beneath the San Pedros Mountains.

 . . .O love of savior for sinner . . .O lust of painter for canvas . . .oh love, oh love, oh careless love . . .and the dollar bills danced like phased electrons into the coffers of the Pacific Light and Power Company . . .

And in '76, five years before Mary Louise's own death, when the cesium-fluoride cell came out of the laboratory, she was one of the first buyers of that remarkably long-lived power source. But when she died in '81, her own survivors were not as careful about her corporeal preservation as she had been about Sidney's, and although the cesium-fluoride cell and the deep vault saw Sidney through the holocaust of the Sino-Soviet war, two major upheavals along the San Andreas fault, and something over four centuries of mortal Sturm und Drang, when he regained consciousness, the latent images of Marie, Juan, and the middle-aged couple from Ligonier, Pennsylvania, still in his retinas, he awoke alone. Mary Louise was no longer there to save him.

"Jethuth Crith!" said Sidney as a measure of awareness seeped into him. The machine whose surrounding complexity had produced instant awareness that he was no longer in Tijuana but in some place far beyond the imagination had reconstituted his tissues almost cell by cell. But marvelous as the reconstruction had been, there were small anomalies in the brain: Sidney was fifty percent deaf in one ear; his left hand trembled beyond control; he had a lisp.

 . . .O marvel and wonder! . . .O future perfect! . . .O best of all possible worlds! . . .O any day now . . .

Sidney's voice brought a human being, a very tall woman with close-cropped white hair, red and blue lines painted on her face, and some sort of instrument in her left hand which she pointed at Sidney. Her only clothing was a slender belt from which a number of glittering appliances dangled.

Sidney shrank back into the nest of wires and tubes which surrounded him. "Doon't be frightened," said the woman in a terrifyingly strange accent. "You have be long asleep." She did something to the instrument in her hand. Sidney heard a whine and felt a plucking sensation all over his body as wires and tubes left him and retracted themselves into the monster at the foot of the bed. One tube remained, and when Sidney struggled upward to a seated position and made to lower his legs from the bed, the tall lady did something else with her instrument, the remaining tube throbbed once, and a tingling sensation in Sidney's left arm suddenly spread upward and out across his body and he sank back. "Jethuth Cri . . ."

He awoke again in a dimly lighted room. There were no people and there was no marvelous monster. A tray of food appeared and he ate. A screen appeared before him and two people dressed like the nurse spoke to him in odd accents. They told him of his revival, of his importance to them as the only survivor from his time, of his value to historians and physiologists. They told him of the events of the intervening centuries. He was fed again and slept again and watched the screen again and they told him of the civilization he would soon join and the role he was expected to play in it. He ate and slept and watched the screen and learned what he needed to know, and then one day the screen remained dark and a door opened into the room and the tall, white-haired lady appeared and gave him a slim belt, a map of the city, and an oddly shaped key to the living quarters he had been assigned.

 . . .arching dome and happy people . . .happy, happy people . . .rebirth of Sidney, rebirth of Buckminster Fuller, rebirth of Townsend California . . .and the artificial leaves in the artificial park fluttered in the artificial wind like counterfeit dollar bills cast mechanically on the white belly of an inexpert whore . . .

Sidney's first year in the San Fernando Dome went quickly. He was a dull man, but all his wants, no matter how esoteric, were provided for, either in the flesh or in perfect illusion, and because of his novelty value, he did not lack for human company.

During the second year, however, the novelty wore off. Sidney was unable to establish any sort of permanent relationship, and he found to his infinite surprise that he missed Mary Louise.

No one was interested in saving Sidney. No one was interested in saving anybody. There was no work for him, no need or opportunity to steal or con. Even pleasure, infinitely exquisite, infinitely realizable, becomes infinitely tedious.

In his third year, desperate with boredom, Sidney attempted assault, but the seven-footers could not be attacked with the naked fist, and they were proof against any weapons available to Sidney.

There remained only one being vulnerable to assault, only one recourse to a boredom so pervasive and desperate as to make life insupportable. In March of his fourth year in the dome, Sidney leaped from his flitter and fell two thousand feet onto the fused sand of what had once been the Mojave desert. It took them nearly a month to patch him up. In June, as soon as he felt well enough to be up and about, he took a high dive into the dome sewage disposal plant, was broken down into his component molecules, and widely distributed throughout the Northern Pacific by the Japanese current.

 . . .O effulgent effluent, phosphorus gleaming . . .O infinite distribution and final fleeing . . .and the molecules Brownian danced like ping-pong balls in a county fair bingo game . . .

Awareness once again returned to Sidney and he found himself—or that amorphous gathering of impressions, sensibilities, lusts, hatreds, and ratiocinations which constitutes self when the distraction of flesh is temporarily removed—standing (in some strange fashion) in a place, near a thing, which he chose to interpret as the 63rd Street station of the Illinois Central. He was not alone, and when a thing he chose to see as a train pulled in, he was caught up in a rush of other amorphous gatherings, clouds of scintillating neural energies, seeking to board it. The cars of the train had individual compartments, each with its own door to the outside. Every amorphous gathering had a key (held in some strange fashion), and every key fit a door. Sidney too had a key, but his did not fit any door. After a bit, all the compartments were filled, the train gave a businesslike wail and moved off down the track in the direction of Kankakee, and Sidney found himself alone again, his useless key still held (in some strange fashion) in what he chose to see as his hand.

Another crowd arrived and another train and Sidney tried again. And then another train and another and another. Sidney gave up. He looked at his key (in some strange fashion). There was a number on it: 22/5/1970.

"Let's see," thought Sidney (in some strange fashion), "I went down to Tijuana on May 20th and it was that night I ran into Marie and Juan and then it was the second night with Marie and Juan when that old bird from Pennsylvania and his wife joined in . . ."

 . . .O lust of baker for the unformed dough . . .O love of savior for sinner . . .O love, O love, O careless love . . .and the now-purposeless scintillas, released from the flesh out of their time, wandered and circled the Collector and Reinserter apparatus like weary waterfowl at a long-dry lake . . .

"Jethuth Crith," said (in some strange fashion) Sidney out loud as his temporary gathering of impressions, sensibilites, lusts, hatreds, and ratiocinations, uniquely uncollectable, and hence uniquely incapable of reinsertion in new flesh, began to disperse, began to rejoin the dispersed molecules of his old flesh, "Mary Louithe didn't thave me. She made me mith the train!"

And Sidney was indeed doomed to eternal damnation. The dispersal went on in the slow and stately manner of such things. All summer and fall, the ocean currents spread molecules of Sidney across the broad seas; hygroscopic particles of Sidney were sucked up in thunderheads and further distributed across the broad land; and all that had been Sidney came to permeate the very fabric of the world.

And that was not all. Solar winds caught at infinitely tenuous scraps of Sidney and carried them elsewhere and still elsewhere. Time, which has no importance to someone in Sidney's position, flowed in its steady meaningless stream, and Sidney's dispersion continued—to the stars, to the very limits of the universe. And as he approached those limits, Sidney grew slowly aware that something—someone—was receding. And as the volume of space he informed expanded, so did Sidney's power and despair, so did the joy and peace of whatever—of whomever—it was that he was—Sidney realized—replacing.

 . . .O Great Chained Being . . .O fresh pollutant in the stream of time . . .O infinite distribution and recession . . .O pantheism and eternal panmeism . . .and the Gold Watch of Time is burnished as a retirement gift for the Old Chairman of the Board . . .

And Sidney's damnation was complete when, his expansion finished, his size and power infinite, his dominance total over a cosmos in which there was now indeed nothing worth his stealing, he realized (in some strange fashion) that he was now God and that even his reincorporation in flesh, a matter now easily within his powers, would not change things much. It had after all been tried by his most immediate predecessor without notable success.

Afterword

As a teacher of writing (them as can't, they say, teach), I suppose the most frequent question I hear from students is "where does a writer get his ideas?" I suppose there are as many answers as there are writers, but one that seems to me to cover a good deal of ground is that the writer gets his ideas when he tries to figure out something he doesn't understand.

Let's face it: very little in life makes much sense to a rational man. We are all soldiering in those ignorant armies that clash by night. Some people accept this and don't worry about it. They seem to adopt a utilitarian and canine attitude and evaluate the human condition with "if you can't eat it or drink it or screw it, piss on it." Some people try to paint or dance or sing or love or drink or smoke some sense into life. Writers try to impose form on it.

And when you extend the purview of life into the great unknowns of eschatology and the future, the preoccupations of science fiction and fantasy, what a challenge it becomes! Then it is that reader and writer alike feel like

 . . .some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.