Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

Still, I’d picked up a lot of anger myself in my own loveless home. Anger and hunger—I could hardly tell them apart. Slap, slap went my shoes, the products of electronic sorcery and of my unique, large feet. Whump, whump went my substantial, furious heart; I could feel my quadriceps bulging against my jeans.

I began to think about railroad schedules. One thing about being a coal and wood tycoon: you learn when the trains run. A half-empty freight would be leaving Washington for New York at 5:15 A.M., and it was usually on time. I looked at my watch. I had twenty minutes.

Sometimes I think God sent me to Belson and Juno. Twenty years of space exploration by three countries had yielded nothing worth having. I, a rank amateur, had found two paradises with hardly any effort. One was a genuine Eden with food and trees and pleasant air; the other its reverse, made for the likes of St. Simeon Stylites, Origen, Cotton Mather and me. Oh, the varieties of religious experience! I had five minutes to find myself a comfortable freight car and get aboard.

The station, being electronic, had nobody around. The train was there when I arrived; it hissed a bit, made those endearing heavy clangs that trains make, and looked energetic. I found a big open car with BELSON MINES clearly stenciled on it—one of my very own. I climbed up the ladder at the side, slipped over, and let myself down. There was some coal dust at the bottom and nothing else. No way to see outside. But what the hell.

I was still panting from the run and had a godawful stitch in my side. My left wrist was painfully swollen from the handcuff when I’d jerked Billy Bob. My feet hurt like hell. Suddenly I remembered that I was a human bomb of endolin! There was no need to feel pain. I got one of the plastic packs from around my left arm, took a pinch, swallowed it with a bite of a Mars bar, and in a few minutes I felt terrific. So much for pain.

After the train got started, with more noise and vibration than the Isabel made landing on Belson, I slept for about an hour. When I awoke the sky was beginning to lighten overhead. I climbed up the ladder and was able to perch somewhat uncomfortably on the side of the slow-moving car and watch the sun coming up over misty fields. Now that I had something to compare our Earth with, I enjoyed it even more. Only one sun and one moon and no rings either, but a beautiful planet and one to treasure. Where else would you find a Canyon de Chelly or a Pacific Ocean, a Florida Keys or an India? My heart leaped to see that sweet green of summer grass on Earth, and maple trees in leaf, cattle out in fields, and birds everywhere, determined busybodies in the morning air!

The train had a forty-minute stop in Philadelphia, at a power plant. There were a couple of railroad people there to refuel the engine and oversee the unloading of some coal, but I was able to get out for a break without their noticing me. I left the terminal and did a few simple exercises. My body was stiff and sore and I added a bit of endolin to my Mars bar breakfast. There was a water fountain outside the station—my first Earth water in nine months. The sun was well up, and warm on my face.

I found myself in a shabby part of Philadelphia—one of those “Big House Slums” you read about. Population falls so fast these days that there is ample space for the poor in solar-house suburbs and town houses in the cities. The problem is they can’t heat the places in the wintertime and the solars don’t work, and the houses were so cheaply made in the first place that they were now, there among the pacified hills of a former suburb, a tatterdemalion aggregate of fallen plastic shingles, ruined lawns, cracked glass roofs and vine-clotted breezeways. It beats sleeping in doorways, but it’s a depressing sight.

I found an open drugstore and bought a six-pack of club soda, some beef jerky, a box of cookies and a pack of brown hair dye. Sixty dollars and change. As I was starting to leave the store I saw a pile of Enquirer s, and sure enough, there I was on the front page. But without the beard, thank God. No one had taken a picture of me with the beard. And in the picture I looked rather well-groomed and serious. The headline read BILLIONAIRE OUTLAW FOILS COPS. I gave the man at the counter his two dollars for the paper. He didn’t even look at me. I left, reading.

It was comic in its way. I was called a “berserk eccentric” and a “financial maverick.” I especially liked “berserk eccentric,” which suited my mood: John the Baptist still slept in me.

Back in my coal car I proceeded to dye my hair, using a couple of the cans of club soda and wishing I had bought a mirror at that drugstore. What I did was pour half the liquid dye into the plastic can of soda, shake it up, and then work it into my hair and beard with my fingertips. I left it there for twenty minutes, while the train chugged its way across the border into New Jersey, and then rinsed it off with another canful. I’d have given a hundred dollars for a pocket mirror. I’d dyed a spot the size of a five-dollar piece on my left forearm, where it was at its hairiest, and I used that for a kind of control; when I rinsed it off after twenty minutes there was a patch of convincing-looking brown on my arm. I hoped that on my head and beard the results were as good.

The day was uneventful and warm. I lay around in the bottom of the car like Huckleberry Finn on his raft, or rode up on the side and watched the countryside go by and ate my beef jerky and Mars bars and drank the four other cans of club soda and had a pretty good time of it. It seemed more of a real journey than traveling halfway across the Milky Way had been.

Close to dusk, the train gave me my first view of the Manhattan skyline. It was breathtaking, as it always is to me. Yet I could have wept to know that the upper floors of all the tall buildings were vacant. It is saddening to see the city at such times and know that it was once a powerhouse and isn’t anymore, although those tall old buildings still stand there quiet and aloof from the streets below them. I’m crazy about the idea of New York. It’s one of the great inventions of the human spirit, like the fugue or the Pythagorean Theorem or the airplane—the apotheosis of the polis and still to me the world’s greatest city.

We came into Manhattan through the old Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel and climbed back aboveground at Thirty-fourth and Seventh Avenue, at the Coal Dock. What a dusty, smelly place to see New York from! Almost all the fuel for the entire city came in at that point, and there were heaps of coal the size of small mountains, with the dust from them penetrating the air everywhere; I felt I could get black lung in ten minutes.

There used to be a department store—Macy’s, I think—on Thirty-fourth Street; the old building was now used for coal storage. My train stopped there and I was able to climb down from the car unobserved. There were a lot of guards around, but they were there to keep coal thieves out; I merely nodded and walked past them. It was a quarter to eight and there was still some light in the sky. I found Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. A good many people were on the street but nobody paid attention to me. I felt fine—loose and easy in the body and pleasantly tight in the stomach. It was something like my first trip to the city that time I’d come to stay with Aunt Myra; I was an anonymous and rootless tourist, starting a new life, on my own in the world’s best place to be on your own.

There was a mirror in the window of a videosphere store at Thirty-ninth Street, and I stopped to see myself at full length. I looked like hell—like a raunchy and fragrant derelict-rapist. The dyed hair and beard were a shock, as was the coal dust smeared on my face. I was something to scare children with. One elbow of my shirt was ripped open; my pants were baggy and filthy with coal and soot; there was a stain from hair dye on my shirt collar; and the dye on my beard and hair was uneven, with dark and light clumps sticking out crazily. I could have slept on park benches for the next twenty years and nobody would have noticed me.