A/N: All aboard! All aboard! Next stop, Struggleville...

Nothing Like A Train

Chapter 2: A Certain Slant of Light

"Nothing like a train to take you far away…"
— Vigilantes of Love, Nothing Like a Train

I walk through the train station toward the platform, our agreed-upon meeting spot. I press my lips together, clench my jaw.

As I walk, I feel my chest tighten too, but that's involuntary. I try to focus on what I need to say but the words won't come, organize themselves properly. They are masters and I am their vassal; they no longer serve me.

I feel like I am standing in front of one of the Orthodox icons I saw during an afternoon off a couple of days ago, visiting a church.

An old priest saw me standing there and came to explain the icon, an icon of Mary holding Jesus, to explain the conventions of "writing" (the priest's term) an icon. He pointed out that one reason the icons can be unnerving is that they typically reverse perspective. Instead of perspectival lines running together in the distance, in the space of the picture, the perspectival lines run apart as they move toward the distance, situating the viewer at the spot where the lines converge, outside the space of the picture.

"You see," the priest said in heavily accented English, the odor of the censor clinging to his black robes, his heavy silver cross, "when you look at an icon, you do not look into it; you are not the judge. No, it looks into you; you are being judged." He shuffled away to let that sink in and I tried to understand it.

I saw what he meant but it did not come home to me. The icons were sacred, but they were also, at the same time, cartoonish, at least to my profane eyes. I stood and looked at Mary and Jesus, or was looked at by them, for a long time. I lost track of how long.

But I feel the priest's point now, it came home: it feels as though the long platform I am walking along opens out onto a world I do not fully understand, as if I were about to be looked into, about to be judged.

I see her. Sarah. Sarah Walker. My pulse races. My heart flip flops, gasps, a fish out of water. I can't do this. I need her so much. But that is why I can't have her. I need her too much, or in the wrong way, or...something.

She has a suitcase with her. Funny, when I imagine her, that's almost always true — there's also always a suitcase or a gun. She's standing next to the rails, ready to leave, leave quickly, expecting us to leave as a couple. I grind my teeth and work my jaw. I feel like I am walking backward, moving to encompass my own destruction, a mixed-up soccer player dribbling in front of his own damn goal about to square up and shoot in ignorance of that fact.

Except I am not ignorant. I know what I am doing. I know what I am giving up. Sarah is caught in a certain slant of light, Czech light, long, soft and yellow. Her gold hair glows. Her blue eyes, the focal points of my life for two years, glow too when she sees me.

And then I see her check herself. She moves in the slant of light.

I have no suitcase; she, Queen of Suitcases, must notice. I'm dressed, I now realize, like a spy, not like Chuck Bartowski. She expected a suitcase, jeans, Chucks, not an overcoat, dress slacks and black leather shoes. Clothes à la Bryce. — We've both had to cope with Bryce's death alone. I wonder how she's done it. I have had no time to think about it or process it. Maybe that's what Beckman wants. I guess I've already been to his funeral, as has Sarah. Premature lamentation. But did Bryce have another funeral?

I see Sarah recover herself. Smile. But her eyes are troubled now, ripples in their blue.

I reach her. She has tickets, two, in her hand. Waiting for me. Waiting for us. We've both waited two years for what is now not going to happen. Because of me, this time — not her. I am about to pump the brakes, veer aside. Lose in this game of chicken we keep playing with each other's hearts.

I can tell that she is not just waiting for me, she is waiting for a kiss, an Incident kiss, but one that will leave neither of us uncomfortable, a kiss that will solemnize us, realize us. A bridal kiss minus the ceremony. She is waiting for me to kiss her, kiss her out of the shadows.

I do kiss her. But the kiss is quick, perfunctory. Robotic. I used that word to insult her when Jill was in town. Now I seem mechanized. I pull back and I see a stab of fear in her eyes. That is rare, that stab of fear. I realize I have only ever seen it when she was looking at me or thinking of me. I can scare Sarah Walker. I have no time to dwell on that.

"Not the kiss I was expecting..." Disappointment: I see her deflate.

And then I fall apart. I start trying to explain but my thoughts are sticky, gluey. I can't put them in a line, get them to move. I lose the words for my feelings and my feelings swamp me, unnamed and billowing, unsyllabled chaos. My mouth moves. My mouth is moving. As if my lips could teach themselves my mother tongue. I see my reflection in her blue eyes, a film of me on her pain, the blue of her eyes becoming bluer as the emotional color intensifies the chromatic color. The blue of Blue Christmas. The blue of the blues. I am hurting her, my stupid, thoughtless ramble, hurting worse than I had to hurt her. I speak like I am reading from a punch-card script fed into my vocal processor by the Intersect. Primitive tech. Except what I say not only lacks the appropriate emotion, it lacks the appropriate logic. Word salad in a salad spinner. Sound and penury, signifying nothing.

She tells me that this, us, is simple, real. Desperation is unconcealed in her voice. She is beginning to believe me, really believe me.

Real.

She and I have danced around that word for two years as if it were a tormentor's Maypole. Round and round, reeling, real and unreal. From reel-to-reel to real, too real. She was always just out of my reach, always a step or two of dubious twilight beyond me, never mine.

Always today lost and tomorrow to be won.

And now that she wants me to be hers, is ready to be mine, I refuse. I lose.

I can see in her eyes that she is reaching certainty. The doubt is gone. I am not going. She knows. She understands.

"Chuck?"

"I can't, Sarah. I have to do this. Go — have a good life, please."

As I say the words I glance up and the Intersect overwhelms me. I flash.

Two men in the distance, in the middle of a crowd, pushing toward us but cut off. I know them. The Intersect knows them. I know them. File pictures are spit into my consciousness. CIA, both of them, the men. But double-agents, both of them. They are loyal to the Ring. They see me. See Sarah. They push toward us but the crowd is thick.

Sarah stares at me. She has not noticed the flash. Her eyes are full of tears but none have fallen. I have never seen her more nakedly vulnerable. I have never seen her so hurt.

The train begins to move. I grab her arm and the handle of her suitcase. "Ring agents, Sarah. The Ring! Coming for us."

I toss her suitcase up the stairs as I move alongside the car, my other hand around her arm, dragging her with me. She neither looks at me nor at the men. She is looking at nothing, somnambulistic.

We were standing close to the train's end, next to the final car. I pull her up onto the steps as the men break free of the crowd.

But they are too late.

We are on the train.

The train has left the station.

I pull Sarah to me, my hands under her arms; I secure my grip on her. She still looks lost, hopeless.

"You weren't going to come. You said no. You chose that," she gestures vaguely behind us, to Prague, my training, "you chose that instead of me."

The tears in her eyes fall at last and, unblinded, she sees.

She yanks herself from my hands. Without looking at me, she grabs her suitcase and leaves me standing outside the door to the passenger compartment.

I freeze.

I was not prepared for this. I intended to say no, say goodbye, leave her.

I said no. But not goodbye. And I did not leave her. Except I did.

And yet here I am, with her. I open the door to the passenger compartment. She is on the other end, wheeling her suitcase behind her. Fast. Her head is down.

I don't want to draw attention so I do not speak. I hurry after her. I chase her through several cars until we reach a sleeping car. She stops in front of a bedroom compartment.

When she looks back at me, I see her cheeks wet with her tears. Her bottom lip is trembling. Her eyes are no longer vulnerable, though. They have become blue one-way mirrors. I see her eyes but not her. Not any longer. She sees out; I can't see in. She's shut herself up.

When I get to her, she speaks. "Find your own damn cabin, Chuck."

"I can't, Sarah, you have the tickets."

She puts her hand in her coat pocket and takes the tickets out as if she were surprised to find them and had no idea what they were for. I see that we were to share a cabin.

We were to be together. We were supposed to be together. She gives me a look, helpless and angry, and then shrugs. She shoves one both tickets at me. I take them. "Don't talk to me. Stay the fuck away from me." Her flinty voice makes me wince but I try to hide it. She's never talked to me like that.

I get no time to respond. She opens the door and pulls her suitcase inside. She throws it on the bed and walks to the window, her back to me. I enter and close the door.

"Sarah, I…"

"We're done talking, Chuck. We're just...done."

When I was in high school, I dated a girl, Bobbie, a girl I liked a lot. A lot.

We were both on the school's Brain Bowl team. She was the captain but I was the star. We won several matches, each televised locally, and the team was in the car, Bobbie and me and our two other teammates, our faculty advisor driving.

We were on the way to the match to decide Los Angeles County champions. I had asked Bobbie out after one of the team's first practices. She said yes and we went out several more times.

Just before we got into the car to go to the final match, I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. Bobbie...declined. It seemed she had no desire to go on any more dates either. So, I got to sit in the car, pressed against her in the backseat, after a break-up. I had been useless in the match and we lost. And then I got to sit pressed against her all the way home, not only rejected but blamed for the loss.

It was the worst day of high school.

I want so bad to be back in that car beside Bobbie.

This is so much worse. Infinitely.

Sarah has her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her white-knuckled grip on herself eloquent, snarling volumes of invective. I sit down.

What am I supposed to say? I can't take it back. I said no. I refused to run before I ran.

Once, twice, three times I open my mouth to speak but shut it each time. I have no idea what to say.

She stands there. I sit there. What was that line of Gertrude Stein's — about LA? There's no there there. Sarah stands there. I sit there. And there is no there there. Just Sarah. And me. Our separate miseries.

There is a knock at the door.

I look at Sarah. Her knuckles whiten more. She will not face me.

"Do you think they managed to get on the train? The Ring agents?" I ask, keeping my voice neutral. I know they didn't but it's something to say.

Sarah wheels, faces me. "Open the door and see." Her voice is low and dangerous. "Don't bleed on my stuff if they shoot you." She is still holding herself in her own arms. An embrace for one, no place in it for me. I stand up and go to the door.

My emotions are across-the-berth from me as the door. My misery is here but it is a detached presence, a whimpering part of me off in a corner. Sarah squeezes my heart as she squeezes herself, but I can only see that it is happening, not feel it.

"Yes?"

"Conductor. Tickets."

I crack the door. The man standing there wears the uniform, so I open the door and hand him the tickets. He scans them with a hand-held device. I notice the notation on the tickets.

Honeymoon Berth.

Oh, God. She reserved us the honeymoon berth.

I finally look at the compartment as I turn and close the door. It's large. Beautiful and ornate. Chilled champagne on ice. Strawberries and a silver cup of thick, dark chocolate. A congratulatory card.

There are flower petals on the bed. — How did I miss them? Sarah threw her suitcase on them. Some had been blown onto the floor. I had stepped on them.

Stepped on them.

Oedipus stabbed his own eyes because he could not bear to gaze upon what he had done.

Sarah stomps to her suitcase. She spears the handle, hauls the suitcase off the bed, grabs the champagne bottle and vanishes into the bathroom, locking the door.

She leaves me alone.

For two years, she's vanished from me, locked me out.

You'd think I'd be numb to it by now. But despite my muffled feelings, I know I am not. And at last, I recognize the something, the so-much-of-something I have been feeling as today grew closer and that I felt as I left the cab.

Despair.

The most common form of despair is not being who you are. Who said that? — Kierkegaard. I probably should have read more graphic novels and less Kierkegaard.

But who am I?

Of course, faced with that question, the Intersect abandons me too. It stops its almost constant low whirring in my head, like the cooling fan of an old laptop, spinning tinnitus in my brain instead of ringing in my ears. I am quiet inside for a moment, empty.

I walk to the window and look out, standing where Sarah stood. For the first time, I see and hear and feel the movement of the train.

The Czech countryside darkens. That certain slant of Czech light that made Sarah glow is gone.

I have been judged, whoever I am. The lines of perspective converge on my heart like bullets. I'm broken — now I've broken her.

Beckman didn't fix me. My training didn't fix me. I have to fix her, fix me, fix this.

A/N: So, yeah. There. Sigh.

Remember, the trip's just started...

"But this is worse than Pink Slip!" — Yes. But better too. They're together, if not together. They have to face each other. And the Ring knows they're on the train.

See you sometime soon-ish with the next chapter. Thoughts?