The Apartment A Novel(20)

Eventually I decided to get off the train and go for a walk. There was no point worrying about having missed my destination, since it was not an important destination. A girl at the tourist office – I had gone to the tourist office to get brochures in English on walking tours – had suggested I go there, a small and pretty village in the mountains, where the children in the city went to learn to ski. Now, as far as I could tell, I was on the other side of the mountains, in the flat and vacant sprawl of the bottom of a huge valley. The station was just two low-lying platforms, with narrow shelters and a hut at the end. There was a guy in an orange high-viz jumpsuit pulling a gas-powered generator on wheels behind him. He saw me get off, and he stopped what he was doing to watch me, amused but also infuriated. I didn’t know what I had done wrong, but I gave him an apologetic smile. I walked the length of the platform, through a gate, and into the small town. There were cars parked on the streets, and the shops were open, but there was nobody walking around. Because of the extreme clarity in the sky and the bright sun near its noontime winter apex, the streets were – as I walked around them – alternately very warm in the light and freezing in shadows. Shadows stretched across empty lots; chimney smoke made shadows too. The shadows of delicate weathervane animals stretched monstrously over the streets. And when you walked from a patch of light into the shadow of a building or a house, your breath appeared. I had never seen anything quite like it, so sudden, so delineated. This was before I had my boots, so my feet quickly became cold and sore, and I wanted to sit. I found a hotel with a view, from its restaurant, of the motionless plains that lay to the south-east. The hotel was old and quaint and a little depressing, and the woman serving me spoke no English. A small fire burned, and I sat close to it.

After about an hour an American man came into the dining room. He had a laptop, a wireless modem, a mobile phone and a sat phone. He found a table as far away as possible, but the restaurant wasn’t large, and when he spoke on the phone he spoke as though he were shouting across the Atlantic. He talked about energy, and drilling, and also about sustainability and diversification. He was ex-military. Even if he hadn’t looked ex-military, being in the military creates a way of speaking. I placed him from the South – North Carolina, maybe Tennessee, though it gets harder and harder to tell. After a few long conversations he closed his computer and put everything in his bag and leaned into his chair, really sank into it, and pulled his baseball cap down, the way a cowboy pulls his hat down to go to sleep, and crossed his arms, and he looked out the window, just as I had been doing. He was probably my age, maybe a little older. He had closely cropped grey hair. I considered it too strange that two American men had come all this way to stare out the same window, so I got up and started to leave. Nice view, he said. Sure is, I said, and kept walking.

I went back to the train station and checked the time for the next train back to the city. I couldn’t make sense of the timetable. The man in the high-viz jacket was gone and there was nobody else around. I sat on the kerb and smoked a cigarette. I figured another train would come along soon. I finished my cigarette and walked over to the hut to look for somebody, but it was padlocked. I went back outside the gate and started to light another cigarette when the American man drove up in a black Range Rover and rolled down the window. I could hear country music playing in the car. It was a weird thing to hear. You trying to get back? he said. Affirmative, I said – I wanted him to know that I knew he was military; I wanted him to know that he did not blend in. Army? he asked. Navy, I said. What the hell are you doing out here? he asked. I missed my stop on the train, I said, and I figured I’d have a look around. I’m just here visiting. He wore silver-framed, square sunglasses, and he mostly spoke to me while staring straight ahead, or into his rear-view mirror. The next train isn’t until the evening, he said. People come and go once a day. What’s out here? I asked. A power plant, he said. A big motherfucking power plant. You live out here? I asked. Hell no, he said. I’m leaving tomorrow, back to the States. So, Army? I asked. Yeah, he said. Retired. Oh yeah, I said, me too. Forty-second infantry, he said. No shit, I said. I told him what I did, and that my FDE worked with the Forty-second. Hey, he said, now that is some crazy-ass shit. Then he said, Listen, you got hours to kill, and I don’t have shit to do. I’ve been wanting to drive out to some ruins since I got here. You want to join me? I looked up and down the deserted street. I thought of my cold feet. So I walked around the other side, opened the door, and climbed inside. The seats were of soft leather, and I had endless leg space. My God, I said, this is a sweet fucking vehicle. I was worried he might go on about Iraq, or talk about his work, or ask me a hundred questions, or pointlessly chat about weather, but instead he cranked up the country music and said, All right, and jammed the gas down and we were screaming through the desolate and icy countryside. He took out some Kodiak and filled his gums with it. Want some? he asked. But he pronounced it, ’awnt sum. Sure, I said. He handed me an old white polystyrene coffee cup, the kind you drink out of on construction sites while wearing hard hats, and we were spitting and sucking and I was starting to feel a bit fucked up and queasy. I couldn’t believe he was driving fast when there were patches of ice and compacted snow everywhere, but I placed great trust in him immediately, and assumed he knew what he was doing. The tremendous white and yellow light was everywhere, and warm.