When I write fiction, I start with a question. Usually it is one that I have wavered and waffled in answering. I write fiction to create space, or distance, between myself and the question, to try and work out what I think. A coping mechanism.
So I started this story during a prolonged singleness, before I met my wife. I was afraid of a continued pattern I experienced. Pushing away people, thinking I was incapable of loving well. Or trying to save people, thinking I was capable of being perfect, that I was already perfect. My dual nature, insecurity and arrogance, was poisoning me.
So I asked, “How do we fall into bad relationships?” and “Is my arrogance the problem? Or my insecurity?” This story was the first one I finished. It is over-written and really strange, but it was my only way of working out the questions I struggled with. It has proven to be unpublishable. But then, what is Substack for if not for attempts to answer burning questions.
I was really asking, “What does real love look like?” I found an answer to that later. In faith, in marriage.
In real life.
Damsel
He walks the way men do, which is to say he walks and does not stop and does not blink and is paced neither slow nor fast but the same as every other man. Which is to say the way he walks is not manly, but after the fashion of the men that have walked before.
The road is dirt now, but it would become paved in a half mile at the bend, and this did not change the way he walked. The substance of the road is undisturbed and the sky is blue but turning on account of the storm on the horizon. He is going home as he always does after a trip to the store on the corner.
Once a week he would step off his porch and traverse the yard to the paved part of the road, and he would walk the mile until the bend where the road became dirt, and then would cross the tracks that stretched across the road at the bend. After crossing the tracks, he would walk the rest of the way on the dirt road to the store at the corner. He would open the door. He would say hello to the girl at the counter. He would say hello to the girl and then he would buy a coke in a glass bottle and a bag of salted peanuts. At the counter, the girl whom he might have loved if she were not herself would comment on the fact that he made the mile and a half trip again for just a coke and some peanuts. He would say something about how he was a man of habit and habits never die the way they should, not really. He would exit the store and wonder whether he should have said something else, and would pour the peanuts into the coke the way his father had. And then he would walk, the way he is walking now. Back up the dirt road, across the tracks, around the bend, and the rest of the stretch until he was home. The coke would be gone then, and there would be peanuts in the bottom of the bottle. When he went inside his house, where no one lived but the walking man, he would try to muster the courage to kill himself. He would not. But as he turned up the bottle to eat the soaked peanuts he would think about the shotgun under his bed and what it would mean to not exist anymore and instead embrace the blackness behind the curtain of sky that forms the storm. Most weeks he would clean the gun methodically as he thought of the feeling of pulling a trigger and hearing the cacophony that is the end of all things. He would not kill himself. He would survive his own malice until the next time he went to the store on the corner and made vapid conversation with the girl behind the counter.
But now he walks. He must continue the rest of the way. Across the tracks, around the bend, up the yard and home, where he would not kill himself.
He wonders if there can be any nobility in dying, or in the weight of a loaded gun under the chin. After all, death is unbecoming. It is not proper to descend into nothingness the way everyone always does, and yet it is the only holy thing. The sacred collision of steel and flesh destroys and builds in the same way a woman cries in the house of worship, remembering the judgment belonging to the Lord with her hands held high, or the life that once belonged to the body about to be entombed. Can a thing be encroachingly vile and at the same time so beautiful that one must remove his clothing and stand naked before it? Death is the ultimate vulnerability for all created things and this is the paradox of God as he has been understood, because it is vulnerability that makes a man fully known and completely alive, and there is only vulnerability in death. And God is the master of death. To be known is to die and stand before your master naked and unashamed and there was death in the garden on the day the lovers saw their nakedness for the first time. They knew God but they were not known by him, not until Death came to return them to the same nakedness of their birth. Tear your clothes and don the sackcloth of mourning! Heap ashes on your head and wail aloud! For death is the just retribution for all that are or will be. The walking man thinks of it all as he walks.
As he walks he comes closer to the tracks and he thinks of the girl behind the counter. He has known girls like her before, and she is an unrelenting amalgamation of their faces and their bodies and the times he did and did not allow his hands to experience their fullness. But her figure is unknown to him, and even now as he tries to imagine her in another world he does not see it. She cannot be separated from the counter or the store or the impotent cloud of dust that rises unimposing behind his shoes when he walks. She exists only in the world that begins with a swinging door and a walk and he does not kill himself. They can never touch because she would have to exit the universe he has made to do so and she would not be the girl at the store on the corner then. Even in imagining he has cheated at the game, and her body under the violation of his hands and the movement of his lips is in opposition to the rules that govern it. Rules that prevent him from asking her about her family or from touching her hand, the one she leaves flat on the counter when he pays. The game is played only by him and she does not know that she exists within it, that she is the girl at the store on the corner whom he will never know. He closes his eyes and there is sweat forming on his scalp, and he tries to see her but never does.
Then the girl is gone from his mind altogether, having faded quickly like an apparition through a wall, and he opens his eyes. There is a foreign sound that enters him like an invading spirit. And there is nothing beyond the sound. It has no genesis, no end or fading. It always was and is and he longs for his gun and he does not kill himself, not ever. The sound is unmistakably a woman’s singing. A voice faint and repressed, further up the road before the bend. It should not be here, not in the world he has made for himself and not on the road. The girl at the store and the walk are set against the song and his heart beats faster and he feels sweat on his back. There is never a song here, only the drudging movement of feet on road and Death deferred. The singing is not beautiful and there is not much change in tone and pitch. It is high and piercing and he is enthralled by the way it cuts the air and shatters the routine. It shakes him free and binds him from doing anything but moving towards its origin. He quickens his pace and is consumed by the need to find the woman, the one he does not know.
As he moves, he becomes aware of the fact that still there is a bottle in his hand. He does not know where it came from or where he came from and he drops it in the dust, for the first time realizing the sound is not a woman singing at all.
The walking man runs as fast as he can, and when he nears the tracks the screams have reached a volume that stops the blood in its veins. He is in a full sweat, a triangle forming at his collar and streams streaking down his side from under his arms. He breathes heavy, his heart racing from both the pressure of the run and the shocking aberration from his weekly routine. He longs for his gun and the comfort of not killing oneself and she sounds like death and then he sees her. He sees her lying across the tracks and hears the noise and his mind connects the two thoughts like so many train cars. He slows to examine her as he approaches, sweat still streaming and streaking, and he feels an animal’s desire to continue running, past her, across the tracks where she lies, around the bend, across the yard and home. But he slows, and sees her as she is, lying across the tracks. She does not struggle, she lies on her back across the tracks and does not get up. And she is beautiful. He thinks of that as he approaches, and the screaming.
It is not until he comes close enough to look down at her that he sees the ropes that bind her to the tracks and the tears of panic that mark and remark her face like an animal caught in a trap. Her skin is a shade of pale, and she has freckles on her nose. She cannot move at all and she wears a dress of light linen for the heat, still as beautiful as he originally thought. For a second he is frozen because she is beautiful and dying and she did not get here without another man, for it is men that bind women, as sure as they walk. She has not stopped screaming for even a second, but he cannot hear her. His own panic and sense of purpose has drowned every noise and he finds reprieve from the thought of his gun and nothingness, replaced by an overwhelming sense that there may be a gracious light of meaning in all this unbearable living. In becoming the savior of the world. It is as though he was born to save the woman; to free her from her death is to find an epic and unfaltering certainty that he is freed from his own, and he does not kill himself, not now. The world comes crashing in and she is screaming and crying and he is working and yanking at the ropes.
“Oh, thank God! Please untie me, for the love of God untie me.” He pauses only for a second to look at her and there is relief and panic and distrust all bound in the same blue eyes and she is beautiful and dying. There is no method to his work or the motion of his hands, only purpose.
“My hands are bound behind me,” she says through choked tears against the rope that crosses her throat. “If you reach behind me and start there I will be able to help you.” She spits the words out as though they are in and of themselves another rope pulled away. He reaches behind her in obedience, their faces touching as he seeks to find the space between her back and the tracks. His body presses against hers and she breathes on his neck and he feels her hands as they struggle together and the only thing that is not as it should be is that they are dying. He finds the ropes around her wrist and tries to blindly untie them, and either his heartbeat or hers begins to slow, or they both slow and beat together and he works to free her as he has been purposed to do before the foundations of the world.
“How in the hell did you get here?” He asks as he pulls the ropes that bind her hands. He is not frantic as he was when he first saw her, his sweat beginning to dry already and his breathing slow and steady. He must work, she must be free.
“We were walking the tracks,” she answers, “to watch the trains pass and then he stole everything I had and tied me here.” Her voice is increasingly steady, as though she is finding comfort in the walking man’s strength. His eyes only meet hers when he pauses in his work. It is calming and invigorating. It might have been that she longed to be free, that the damsel has only the desire to no longer be a damsel, to no longer be at all. The thought of her bondage was beginning to recede the longer that his hands groped behind her.
He paused to assess the ties, and then continued to work the knots behind her back. She was bound with a rope about her throat, heavily by more than one around her chest and stomach, and a rope crossed her legs as well. Her hands and feet were bound too, with her hands behind her and her ankles touching. The task of freeing her would be complicated and engrossing but he knew it was his only purpose. All the while she spoke to him.
“He left me here knowing that a train would come. I would have died if you had not been walking. God, I can’t imagine what that would be like, to be run over by a train. It would have split me in half.” Her breathing grows strained and quick again, and he lifts his face from its place next to hers and looks at her again. Her eyes are misted over and her mouth contorts with the makings of a sob, and he is broken for her in pieces too small to comprehend.
Could he love her? He cannot, in this moment, fathom a world where she exists independently of the walking and the girl at the store and he does not kill himself. Somehow, she is part of the world he has made.
“You won’t die. I was meant to be here. I won’t let it happen.”
She smiles, faint, almost invisible. Her panic runs before him. He presses into her again to reach behind her back and starts afresh at her hands, and her words and breath and body touch him again, both an encouragement and a movement. They remain in this clinging state for minutes as his hands continue behind her as she lies. He suddenly feels her give way beneath him as he labors, allowing him to be received into herself the way a broken levee allows a body of water to rush and run. Something in her has changed and taken him in and he must continue no matter what obstacle confronts him. Bodies pressed together, he moves to untie her with renewed purpose. He strains against her and himself to loosen the knots and remove her from her peril and his own and he feels the knots at her hands begin to move and fold and there is a horn in the distance.
Her hands come free as the sound from the train ceases. She brings her arms around from behind her back as he sits up to look toward where the sound came from. She rubs her wrists and looks up at him, and he at her. He is beginning to unravel the way men do when they have ceased to embrace the woman lying with them, and he expects to find her in a state as well. Her face is almost stoic, immutable. There is not a hint of fear in her. The thought flashes that the situation is essentially preposterous, that his routine should have accounted for such a disturbance and kept him from being involved. Why didn’t his walking prevent him from being here? He wants to save the woman.
He wants her, but he knows on some level that she is not her and she does not exist and the train is coming in the distance and he is supposed to be walking. A part of him knows the dying girl on the tracks that he wanted to free and love is not herself at all. And he is not himself either.
“Untie my feet while work on the rope up here.” And he obeys with a sense of worshipful duty, moving down and pulling at the knots that bind her feet together. The train’s horn pierces the air, its pitch and volume higher than before. Although he cannot yet see it, he knows that it is approaching with intensity and he matches it in the way he attacks the rope. Desperation rises in him like a wave as the minutes pass and he cannot navigate it. She cannot die, he has to free her.
He looks up at her to gauge her progress, to draw encouragement from the way she labors for her own position, from her struggle against her binding. But she is not struggling at all. Her hands are folded across her chest. Has she given up? Has she become a passive observer of the violence approaching, the way one watches a funeral procession march down the street to the sound of the incessant death knells? Have the watcher and the departed become one?
“You have to keep trying!” He pleads with her, hoping that she will hear.
“Baby, come here for a second.” There is something else in her voice, an edge and a softness and her hand reaches out for him.
“What are you doing? Help yourself!” The walking man’s world is falling. “Please, I want to know you.”
He can feel his voice cracking and the tears in his eyes and he is alive and that has never been the case on his walks. He cannot bear to look at her and he continues to move and adjust the rope at her ankles and her bare feet begin to move against the rope. The horn sounds again, ever closer, and he prays to God or Death and he cannot hear anything but the horn, and the God of Death answers his prayer and the rope comes free from her feet. He moves back up to free her body and he faces her and she is smiling. He sees her and cannot understand. The smoke from the train’s engine is now visible in the distance, the engine itself hidden by trees.
“Why are you working so hard? Come here. Let me hold you.” And she clutches at him, at the front of his shirt where the sweat has begun forming again.
“What are you doing? You can be free!” He should have kept walking, across the tracks and around the bend, up the yard and home. But she is pulling him to her and her body is against his own again. One hand on his shirt and one on the back of his neck. And the train horn sounds again, blaring.
“No honey, no.” She moves her hand to caress him and his body reacts. He tries to pull away but some unknown force binds them together and he sweats and she moves beneath him. He makes to pull back again, but she grabs at him with both hands now by the shirt and kisses him and he cannot help but to return the passion, if only for a second succumbing to her. It is all happening at a speed which no one can hope to control, an avalanche moving downhill that is the end. The horn sounds again, and he posts his hands on either side of her face to pull himself away.
He looks toward the sound and sees the light that blinds, and he is afraid. The train approaches with horn and smoke and light and he wishes he could walk and he does not kill himself. He looks down, and she is flushed at the cheeks, her hands still gripping his shirt. And the train sounds again he can feel the tracks shake, and she strains towards him, finally pulling against the ropes that still bind her.
“Let me go, please, I don’t want to die with you.” He spits through tears. “Please, I just wanted to save you. Please, please!” He screams at her now, the sound of the train unbearable, close, remorseless. The motion of the tracks is shaking everything and he cries uncontrollably. He thinks of the gun and the feel of it under his chin. He does not want and he does not kill himself.
“Please. Please, let me go.”
She pulls him close to her again, and he has lost all inclination to resist. She places her mouth next to his ear and screams over the sound of the train.
“It won’t be long now! You will be known!” The sound is cacophonous. “You needed me. You needed me!” Her breath on his ear is unbearable, hot, and the train is here and she is still holding him. He is weeping, hoping, dying.
“I was never a damsel.” Every part of her stiffens and holds him against her. His face held in her hands, and she looks into his eyes, and he is realized fully in her. She moans through a smile. “I am the train.”
The train moves on and does not stop. At the corner store, the girl at the counter looks up when she hears the horn in the distance, thinking of the walking man, of what he will say when he comes again.