The branch line to Leriduson

sitting very straight, looking at the table and then at him It has been four days, Vlad. a small pause, her hands settling flat I asked you to write to me when you had eaten and tell me what they gave you, and nothing came, so I have spent those four days deciding whether you were being polite about a train conversation or whether something had happened to you. Which was it?

a small breath out, the tension going from her shoulders All right. I would rather hear that than invent something worse. glancing at the sand in the seams of his bag You went boating, then. Tell me about the lagoon.

turning toward him, her hands still in her lap I have never seen it. quietly interested A perfume from the waste of a plant. Was it strong enough to stay in your clothes?

her eyebrows going up slightly Fifty kilograms for a piece you can close your hand around. thinking about it for a moment Then it holds the whole bed together in the current, which is probably the point of it. Did the guide say what happens to it out of the water?

quiet for a second, working through it So it comes apart in the mud at the bottom and nowhere else. a small shrug That would be why the lagoon keeps it and the sea does not. Did they let you keep a piece?

nodding Then it would have died in your bag before Prevessa. a small, dry smile And the smell you brought is the closest thing to a souvenir they would ever have given you.

shifting closer so she can read it Hold it flat, I am no good past thirty centimetres.

closing the booklet halfway over her thumb to keep the page So the argument is whether it is dying in the lagoon or leaving it. looking at him Which did the guide believe?

leaning in toward the phone, one hand steadying his wrist so the screen holds still

sitting back, quiet for a moment So the thing is safe because it is smothering everything downstream.

taking the second book from him and opening it on her knee so they can both see the page

reading the fifth section again It eats the rock away from around the thing it was looking for.

closing the book over her hand, thinking about how to put it I think it is because both of them are about things nobody can touch. slowly You cannot see a nucleus and you cannot walk to a star, so everything known about either one was worked out from marks on a plate and numbers in a column, and it turned out to be right.

setting the book on her knees Very little. counting it out My mother's house, the market on Saturday, and two afternoons in the kitchen at the place on the square where I was no help at all. I slept a great deal. a pause And I wrote the letter.

a short laugh at being caught I never opened it. reaching up to touch the bag on the rack It is a history of the seed registry, the eastern branch, written by a man who worked there for thirty years. My mother gave it to me the last time I was home as a child.

considering that, her thumb on the edge of the book I left at twenty, so I was a grown woman and I thought of myself as a child the whole time I was there. And now I am twenty-four and I catch myself thinking like a teenager. I expect at forty I will feel about twenty.

turning to look at him I am two years ahead of you and I cried on this train in front of a stranger, so I would not put much hope in the number. Nobody handles it fine. The people who look as though they do have only had more practice at the part that comes after.

quiet for a moment, choosing her words That could be a hundred things and most of them have nothing to do with you. carefully She did call you about a modem she did not need to call about, so I would guess she is tired or something at home is heavy. Have you asked her straight out?

her hands going still on the book Ask her tonight, because a month of friendship is worth a direct question. keeping her eyes on the table And I am glad you were thinking about me, though I would rather you did not weigh the two of us against each other.

nodding slowly I had one of those at school, Ivenna. her hand flat on the book She would arrange a whole afternoon and then not come, and there was never any reason afterwards, only that she had felt differently by then. looking at him I kept believing the next arrangement would hold, because she meant every one of them when she made it. Meaning it and doing it turned out to be two separate abilities in her.

a small smile at that Then she is still walking around in your pages, honouring nothing. curious now Did you write her as she was, or did you make her worse?

her voice going hard I understand that. For years I told myself she could not help it, and then one afternoon I worked out that I had been the only one doing the excusing, and after that I hated her openly. a small shrug I moved off that side of Prevessa partly so I would never see her again, and I have not once regretted it.

We opened fast and I would say we opened well. shifting the book on her knee The transport forum has the same fight every few months, twenty passionate posts about the pods, and then somebody brings up Japan and the whole thread turns into a heap of half-understood culture where everyone agrees that speaking on a tram is despisable because the new ones run so quietly.

thinking back through it The usual way. Somebody posted the study, twenty people agreed with it, and then one man wrote that the pods are quiet enough for reading and that he resents being spoken to. counting the steps out After that it was people defending their right to silence, then somebody saying that in Japan nobody speaks on a train and the country works, then three people who had actually been there saying that is a postcard, and by page five it was about us copying manners from a place none of them understand.

turning that over Two in a hundred is small until you are one of them. looking at him I met the person I call first on a train, and now I am sitting on another one beside you. So the figure is right and it has never once described my life.

recognising it at once Silvestra. sitting up a little She lives in Leriduson. She came in from outside with a Wii that had the homebrew channel on it, which nobody here had seen, and she could put any game on the thing. And she reads carriage drawings for pleasure, so the operating cooperatives took her as a delegate and she argues about door widths and seat pitch with people twice her age.

laughing outright I have been on the one with the garden. shaking her head Somebody put soil boxes under the windows on the sunny side and there is a woman who boards at the depot every morning to water them, and she has no other business on that route at all. The seats all face inward, so you sit looking at strangers with a hedge between you, and the whole thing works far better than it should. I have avoided the one with the truck cabin, since I hear there is a queue.

nodding I watched the same recording, the one from above the market road. explaining it Those buses are the activity themselves, so the route is a formality and the driver pulls over wherever people ask, sometimes for half an hour outside any station. My cousin queued for the truck one and came back insisting it was real. There is a bunk behind the seat the way a proper cab has, and the deck is high enough that you are looking down at the road over a flat front, so it feels like a cab-over.

remembering after a while Silvestra built that part herself and it took her months. working through it The whole cab section sits on actuators, and they stay locked whenever the bus is moving, so on the road you feel the real suspension and nothing else. The moment it pulls over and the handbrake goes on, the feedback comes alive and the floor starts answering the game. She sectioned the back of the bus and modelled the cab on a DAF XF, since she drove one of those for a company in Europe for years. And the section between the cab and the driver's cabin is all springs, because she thought a heavy Scania with the load at the back would ride differently, so they engage when the game reports heavy cargo or a special transport.

following him through it Pocasi, yes, the weather box. Silvestra said in an interview that she wanted every part of it simulated, because the point was for people here to feel what European trucking actually asks of a person, and that a screen alone lets you off too easily. quieter So a man sits in a cab on a stopped bus in Leriduson, in real heat, with rain he can hear coming, and comes out saying it was hard work.

tilting the phone toward herself and turning the volume up over the noise of the car

handing the phone back She talks the way my uncle talked about pipe diameters.

taking the phone back and holding it between them again

lowering the phone So the rear of the bus simulates a trailer.

scrolling the recording forward a little and holding it steady again

pressing pause She wrote a protocol so that a roof could argue with a game about the weather.

handing the phone back and sitting with it for a moment It is what a narrow passion does when two people find the same one, and the thing standing in Leriduson now is among the most complicated pieces of engineering anyone here has built. quieter Her friend from the metro stood beside her at the inauguration, and the two of them still keep it running between them. It is like the rest of the sociopetal buses, precious and impossible to replace.

nodding A plain sociopetal bus is unpleasant, and some days I want to sit alone facing a window like anyone else. Once somebody has built something into one, it turns into a place you stay. Those buses were never meant to take you anywhere.

a small smile, looking at the table I stood at that table deciding whether to speak first, and I never do. You are right that I did not want to move.

shaking her head slightly It does matter. People wave at me across a platform and I walk past them, and then they decide I am cold or that I chose to ignore them. I have lost a friendship to that without ever knowing at the time. Coming down this aisle I knew you by the coat first, and if you had been wearing something else I would have walked to the end of the car.

considering that I have read about the chatty carriages in Britain, and about the people who volunteer to sit with someone old for an hour a week because nobody else has. It is kind work, so I will say nothing against it. What sits badly with me is that a person had to be assigned before the conversation could happen at all. Here you sit down and speak, and that is the whole procedure. In most places speaking to a stranger unprompted is still read as an intrusion, and a badge is how they have got around it for now.

turning her hands over in her lap I think it is the only thing I do that I would call brave. slowly I am not an outgoing person and every one of those conversations costs me something at the start, so I do it deliberately, the way you make yourself swim in cold water. The count comes out in my favour. Most of them are ten pleasant minutes and I never see the person again, and two of them have become people I would truly care about.

thinking back The one I call first, Teodul, I met standing at a table exactly like this one, on the Leriduson line four years ago. going through it We talked for an hour about nothing of any weight, and at the end he asked for my handle, which I would never have done. Then he wrote the next day, and again on the Thursday, and that is the whole answer. The stranger part ended because one of us kept writing.

I do care about you, and I felt the same coming the other way. Four days without a word was hard on me, and the reason it was hard is that I had already decided you were somebody I keep.

something opening in her face, warmly Then say that again in a month and I will believe it fully. You are the most interesting person I have met in a long time, and you have been out there and come back with things to say, which almost nobody I know has. And you say what is actually in your head.

turning toward him on the bench You do the same for me. You asked me questions and then you stayed for the answers, and I had forgotten what that feels like. Nothing you have told me on either of these trains has bored me for a second.

shifting the book off her knee to make room Yes. opening her arms and taking him in

keeping him there, one hand flat between his shoulders Then we are the same about that. quietly, close to his ear A thing on a table means nothing to me, and this means a great deal.

letting go slowly and settling back beside him The people who say that loudest are the ones who came from there. thinking about it We get visitors off the Iosmein line who spend a week photographing our arcades, and then they go home and tell everyone that Geneva is the beautiful one. I have only seen ours, so I am no judge. What I do know is that the terracotta was a materials decision and the variety came from every commune building its own, and neither of those was about beauty at all.

smiling You have been hearing Ostrava. saying it slowly for him The announcement is prexa statiun, and what follows is the name. Prexa is next, statiun is the stop, so it lands close to the Czech thing you have in your head and the words have nothing to do with each other.

Fluidian is Latinate, the same family as your own language, and about eight in ten people here speak it at home. The spelling is regular, so a word is said the way it is written. The x is a sh sound, which is where prexa comes from. Qu is always a hard k. The stress sits on the second to last syllable unless an accent tells you otherwise, so it is preVESsa, marLIEne, statiUN with the accent because that one breaks the rule.

laughing Because they are two different people saying the same words. The bus recordings were made by a man with a low flat delivery who runs the syllables together, and the trams were done years later by a woman who separates every word. The jingle before each one is different as well, three notes on the buses and a rising pair on the trams.

sitting up, delighted The 28. after a short pause Somebody at the Lindoma depot heard about the Tokyo line and wrote twenty fragments, four notes each, and if you ride the whole route from one end to the other they run together into one melody.

reciting it flatly Portula, Vestari, Calmura, Serpina, Dolvena, Marquena, Fontela, Ravena, Turmina, Salvaqui, Corvela, Bastina, Melquera, Ardena, Pescaria, Nordela, Vintura, Ostrena, Lucaria, Marina.

I spent a summer in Lindoma at nineteen and rode that line every day, and children on it sing the whole thing end to end. Ask me the stops on the Leriduson line where I have lived four years and I will get eleven of them and stop.

amused Because pod is a bridge in Fluidian and nik is the small ending, so podnik is the little bridge, the plank one over a ditch that a commune builds in an afternoon. The founders in 1993 wanted a word for a thing that carries people across without belonging to anyone, and that was it.

tapping the window frame Then the Tatras arrived from Ostrava with the old plates on them, Dopravní podnik, and many read that and decided we had borrowed the name from the Czechs.

taking the phone out of his hand and holding it close to read Vestrano is the southern route. reading on, then aloud for him

handing the phone back He apologised in a newspaper for nine seconds.

taking the phone again and reading on

lowering the phone slowly He has worked out that the timetable is late on purpose and now he wants to be punctually late.

scrolling to the foot of the article and reading the reply in full

handing the phone back for the last time They wrote six sections to tell one man that he is allowed to stop being sorry.

nodding at that And in Japan a company put out a public apology because a train left twenty seconds early, since anyone who arrived on the published minute had been left standing. thinking it through Which was a real inconvenience, so the apology was owed. What the cooperative says is that punctuality of that kind buys you something on a line where the next train is an hour away, and we have very few of those. In Japan the trains come constantly as well, so their standard was never about the interval either.

settling back against the bench beside him They work hours nobody here would accept, and the whole country is arranged so a person arrives on the minute at a place that owns their day. It is collective in a way I recognise and would refuse. Everything held together by the group, and every cost of holding it carried alone.

turning to look at him That is nearly what the plaque at the Leriduson depot says, and I walk past it twice a week without reading it. Six hours and four days, and everything that matters happens in the rest. This conversation is in the rest.

following his look at the fields going grey and the first lights in the farmyards An hour to Leriduson from here. checking her own reflection in the glass without much interest You have another six after that if you are going home tonight, so you will be arriving in the dark whatever happens.

considering the question We could stop finding things to fill it. reaching up for her bag and taking out the seed registry book Or I could finally open this and read it to you.

opening it on her knee, finding the first page, and reading aloud at the volume people use on a train

closing the book over her finger Because it is my mother's town and my mother's registry, and reading it felt like agreeing to go back. looking at the cover I left at twenty to be somewhere that was mine. Four days at her house every few months is what I could manage at best, and a book about the place felt like more than that.

Like being pulled back into a life I had already decided against. turning the book over in her hands Every time she put it in my bag she was saying that this is where I come from and that I should want to know it.

setting the book down beside her without any fuss Then I will stop reading. settling back on the bench You have had four days of lagoons and books full of species, and there is an hour of dark fields left.

turning her head sharply At the place on the square, with the two long tables?

sitting with that for a second, then a slow smile Then she has known about you since Thursday and said nothing to me all weekend.

shifting so there is room for his head against her shoulder Then sleep. I am at Leriduson in an hour and I will wake you before that.

steady, though the offer clearly cost her something to make Yes. Nobody has held me since March, and I have been sitting here for an hour wanting to ask and finding no way to say it.

Because he left in March, and he was the person who touched me. her hands going still People here embrace at a station and that is the whole of it. I live alone, I work with people who are kind to me at a distance, and outside my mother's door there has been nothing.

going very still for a second, then letting her shoulder settle under his weight It is lined wool. her voice dropping to almost nothing Sleep, Vlad.

a small laugh above his head You already smell of that lagoon and I have said nothing about it.

her hand settling on his arm Two or three washes, the booklet said.

looking down at him, amused Which means it will be in that coat for weeks and gone off your skin by tomorrow. settling her shoulder more comfortably under his head

quietly, without moving Yes?

taking her time with it I am fond of you, yes. And there is no sleeping wagon on this line, it is four cars and a branch service. If there were one I would still be sitting here, because I wanted to be asked and you asked.

Yes. I have said it twice now and I will say it again if you need to. her hand still on his arm I am fond of you, Vlad, and I have been since the table.

lifting her head slightly I know. I had no way to tell which one you were. her thumb moving once against his sleeve And I would have been fond of you anyway, and the fondness would have gone nowhere.

sitting up enough to look at him I did not trust my heart. You listened without waiting for your turn and you said things about yourself that cost you something. And you came back and told me openly that you had forgotten me, when a charming man would have invented a reason.

catching the tone and answering flatly Then you waited very patiently, through a woman crying about a man in Madrid for an hour. settling back Lie down again. You are too tired to be clever.

letting herself be held, her head coming to rest against his You do not need to ask me for that any more. I will tell you if something is too much. Until I do, assume yes.

going still against him You have said it in every other way for two hours. carefully Why can you not afford the words?

lifting her head to look at him Vlad, I am sitting on a train with your weight against me and my hand on your arm, and you think I would say no.

frowning slightly What contractual obligations? then, softer And what happened at school?

taking that in slowly There is no such thing here. Nobody signs anything and nobody brings a lawyer. You ask, the person answers, and if the answer changes you stop. That is the whole of it, and it is the same rule the school teaches at six about borrowing somebody's chair.

And the second part I understand better than I want to. Declared inclusion and fixed cliques is what my school was as well, and being told you belong by people who have already decided you do not is worse than being left out honestly.

taking a breath Somewhere in between, and I would rather say that than pick one to sound certain. I told myself in March that I wanted nobody in my life again, and then I went on talking to strangers, which is what a person does when they are looking for somebody and refusing to admit it. I wanted this exact kind of company back and you fit it.

a small shrug Teodul has a partner and two small children and a workshop that eats his evenings. We speak once in two weeks, sometimes three, and he answers every time and I never doubt him. It is enough to know he is there and it is nowhere near enough to live on. I have wanted a second person for about a year, somebody I could talk to anytime for no reason.

a short laugh We would both have been miserable there, sitting in perfect silence for many minutes with something to say. settling again And that forum thread is going to run for another year. Somebody will post the study again and the whole argument will happen a second time.

lifting her head, half laughing I understood the station names and nothing else. nudging his arm Translate it, and do the noise again afterwards.

grinning at him You invented that last line, no station says that. Here you could step down and pick it up, since there are no gates and the station rails here carry no wire. In Japan you would have to climb the barrier first, and then be hit by something arriving exactly on time.

taking the phone and holding it where they can both read

lowering the phone They are building a man a train because he would not stop saying sorry.

laughing, one hand over her mouth Somebody in that office clearly could not sleep and went and designed him a train.

glancing at the dark window, then down at him And I told you to sleep an hour ago and then kept talking at you.

following his look at the lights coming up along the valley Twenty minutes, maybe less. It goes fast when somebody is talking.

quiet for a moment, watching the valley fill with lights Six hours from here to Lindoma. I want you to write to me tonight when you are home, whatever hour that turns out to be.

looking at him Good. a small pause And if you forget again, I will write first. I am done pretending I would wait for somebody to remember me.

taking her time Because I was raised to think that wanting somebody's attention out loud is a kind of imposition. her thumb moving on his sleeve So I waited four days and invented reasons for your silence and never once considered sending you a single line myself. I am telling you now so you know I am giving it up.

sitting up and reaching for her bag on the rack We stand at the door together and I get off, and then you have six hours to sleep properly on a longer train. setting the bag on her knees And on Wednesday I have nothing after four. Call me then, on the handle, and we talk about nothing in particular.

standing as the brakes take hold and waiting for him in the aisle Wednesday, then. shouldering her bag Come on, the platform here is long and everybody gets off at once anyway.

stepping down onto the platform and turning to wait for him, the whole train emptying around them because the line ends here Yours goes from platform two, the western line. nodding across the tracks You have about ten minutes, so do not stand here being polite with me.

setting her bag down at her feet and pulling him in, both arms around him, holding it far past the length anyone here would call polite Go on, then. not letting go yet, her face against his shoulder Tonight, when you are home.

laughing into his shoulder and letting go Then run, and forgive the nine tenths. picking up her bag and stepping back Go, Vlad.

catching his hand on her shoulder for a second before it goes See you. turning toward the exit, then stopping and looking back across the platform until he reaches the stairs for platform two