With syncopated bumps, rail against rail, against wheels, you return to the
station where you embarked, destined for demolition, its grand glass roof
clouded by bird shit, its red ballast tank gone grey, the tops of its tracks
tarnished by a veil of rust, the trains are too rare -- a few lines in the
posted notice summarizing everything -- stripping it, their green train cars
zebra striped with networks of brown and grey obstinate rust from acid rain,
while through the open window the changing night air rushes in and in its
turbulent pleats bring to the nostrils of a solitary sleeping traveler a new
invisible landscape through which he, immobile, pierces: prairies condensed into
humid effluvia, velvet green of the deep forest, humus, moss, stagnant bodies of
water, asphalt exhaling in nocturnal vapours the vestiges of daytime heat which
we smell every time we take an old night train where the world sleeps, mute and
closed, rolled back from its escape, the light appears to everyone until
obscured by the wall of the compartment, there stretches a vacillating,
momentary stained glass window that glows again after it disappears behind the
flap of dark sky which frames the window: aflame in the passage of deserted
stations that we burn, shooting stars, scathing lines, galloping, sweeping,
consuming in passing the surface of a black and white photo affixed under a
glass, locked against the partition and that you strive to see though it is
invisible in the obscurity and illegible in the light, obstinate, because it
reminds you of the beam of light which split the obscurity of the darkroom,
illuminating images, moving and indistinct bare skin, pushed back, creased, with
tangential reliefs, bulging and morphing without end the livid apparitions in an
X-rated film who inscribe the roll of their bodies entangled, pressing against
the fourth wall, swells of inscrutable images projected against swells of
un-figurable bodies, one against another rendered visible, imaginary bodies
against illuminated bodies, annul each other, their characteristics interfere,
and whose memory brings within the turbulence the body odour within the darkroom
which falls between empty arms, and soon in the obscurity of the next
compartment the woman you witnessed to be sleeping will be dead, whose sleep
already realises the possibility of murder because you know she will not notice
you with her eyes closed, unconscious, her simple aura takes on all the
different patterns of humanity in succession, inanimate like the unconscious
life of vegetables, trees, a life very different from our own, bizarre, and yet
over whom we hold the advantage, holding them in our eyes, in our hands,
refugeed, enclosed, summarized in their body, we are given the impression of
possessing everything: their life dedicated to you, exhaling out like a light
breath, in their sleep we rot to dream of their death and rot in their view, she
whose name we repeat, Albertine, in the rhythm of coursing wheels, Albertine,
metal against metal, Albertine, rail against rail, percussive, in the verse that
will abandon your heart and deepen within you... You go to sleep, in one instant
you do not know where you are nor what you are, all turns around you in
obscurity, things, rooms, nights; the rolling ceases, you are stretched out
alone in bed in a train whose destination is some border, which will not be
reached until dawn; you go to stand upon your feet, opposite you, in the frame
of a window, you see a woman, she is naked, turned around, in a compartment
flooded with light, some centimetres from you, the window's support cuts across
her mid-thigh, her arms are chained by the wrists to one part or another of the
baggage rack making a V, her long hair running down sinuously to her waist, you
perceive behind her body and occluded by it another body, you see a hand running
through the tresses of her hair passing over her head toward the back, until it
surrenders at the nape of her neck, a face appearing in profile and descending
in slow motion along her nude body, lips pressed against her, you follow the
slow descent until it is complete and turning away the face presents itself to
you, eyes closed: these closed eyes you see without them seeing you and without
knowing if you're sleeping or awake and if this truly is the face of the one you
have named Albertine, the face which eclipses in this way the stranger's body...
The image so violently, suddenly illuminated vacillates, shifting itself to the
left, seeming to slide into the bits of darkness which surround it: this body,
this face fleeing, getting swallowed up, you break out now that the train has
begun to take you back into the night, you uproot to this little bit of yellow
light divided up in the darkness all around and toward which you want to grab
reaching your arms forward, but the bodies, slip away, slip away, soon they will
disappear entirely, it's as though a black curtain has drawn itself, harshly,
over the window, disrobing you of a luminous world, closed forever... With a
long howl which in its approach brings itself forth in a low-pitch to a piercing
whistle, a train passes close by, driving before you a blast of air rattling the
walls, the bunkbeds, the window pane, you; from the barrel of the P .38 at the
end of your arm a tongue of fire has sprung forth, the bodies, the light, the
bodies, have vanished but the dazzling shadows reappear, and the crucified body
glides onto display a new, alit in its frame of hot translucent matter... Pull
the trigger again? Your vision explodes, scattering itself, extinguishing itself
immediately from deep the night where it seemed to have been buried forever,
laying itself down, so quickly and furtively, at your feet, and you empty your
entire clip into that fugitive window over and over again, before which, closing
like a theatrical curtain, the last wagon of a parallel train stops where you
have lodged yourself finishing the disappearance, these two late shots fired
haphazardly trail crimson across the window, opening to your eyes, like an
immense elongated stage, a surface criss-crossed with rail switches glistening
clearly in the darkness from which a single sound is intoned... You want to
rise, finished, to go find the one you believed to be sleeping in the adjacent
compartment, the one you thought you tore apart with all the bullets that, into
the night, you really shot into a mirage, into a mirror, assassinating your
sleep, escaping into the night, ne dorme plus... When a stroke hit against the
partition, then a second, rattling your heart, and the horror of a another, a
third ringing out, drilling into your cranium until it breaks your eardrums with
its muffled, syncopated strokes. Ça va, que tout son s'épouvate? With a tremor,
a metallic groan, the silky rustle of air, you feel yourself slip into the night
and, with intermittent strikes shaking, chassis stroke upon stroke through the
gaps between the rails, your heart falters anew...
Villa Medici, January 1st 1995
Flight AA 44, April 14/15th 1999.
{Hart House Library, April 14th 2018
Ivy Bank House, August 7th 2023}
