Two Trains Running

Annie snorted in disgust. “Stick around! You’ll hear crazier’n that. I realize most people here just got their brains back, but ain’t none of ’em geniuses. They’d be better off tryin’ to figger out what to do ’bout the fritters, or somethin’ practical, ’steada studyin’ on what’s to come and why.”

“Tell me ’bout the fritters,” I said. “Nobody ever wants to talk about ’em. They just say they’re dangerous.”

“I don’t really know what they are. They look like apple fritters and they float around in the air. They got some kinda poison’ll kill you quick.”

I gave a chuckle. “Must be all that deep fat fryin’ it takes to make ’em.”

“You think they’re funny?” Annie soured on the conversation. “Now the rains come, won’t be long ’fore you find out exactly how funny they are.”

I had to admit Annie was right—listening to a bunch of hobos philosophize, the majority of them with less than high school educations, wasn’t all that entertaining. But philosophizing was a natural outgrowth of life over Yonder. Most people spent six or seven hours a day working, and most had a relationship of some type that served to pass the time; but there was usually idle time, and even though everybody’s curiosity—like my own—seemed to have been diminished, the question of where-the-hell-are-we was bound to pop up whenever you let your thoughts drift. Talk to a person more than once, and they’d tell you how they stood on the matter. My informal poll showed that about a third of the residents believed we had passed over into some borderland of death and were being tested to determine where we would end up. Maybe a quarter believed that railroad yards back in the world were areas where the borders between dimensions blurred, and that we had switched tracks, so to speak, and no test was involved. About twenty percent adhered to Bobby’s computer game theory, but I think this number was skewed because Bobby was evangelical about the theory and had influenced a sizable portion of the punk riders to buy into it. The rest of the people had more individualized theories, although they generally played off one of the three main ideas.

One of the strangest and certainly the most explicit of these theories came to me from Josiah Tobin, a fiftyish man who still had the nasty-looking gray Moses beard he’d worn when he’d been a hobo known as Froot Loop, and was a member of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a group of tramps, a gang of sorts, who’d thought of themselves as big time macho badasses, but were mainly dead-on-their-feet drunks. The irony of this was that Froot Loop was gay. The FTRA would never have initiated him if they’d been aware of his homosexuality. Once they found out, they chose to ignore the fact rather than beat the crap out of him and drum him from the ranks, which establishes to my mind how badass they actually were. Anyway, I was doing my laundry one afternoon, letting my clothes dry and sunning myself, lying shirtless with my hands behind my head, watching the clouds, while Josiah was doing the same. He’d pushed his beard aside to expose his scrawny chest, and the untanned portion resembled a permanent pale bib. We fell to conversing about this and that, and eventually he told me what he thought had happened to us.

“Way I figger,” he said, “there’s more universes than they got zeros to count ’em. Trillions and trillions of ’em, and they all ’bout a hair apart, so it’s easy to slip over into the ones is close to your own. I’m talkin’ real easy. Like you know how it is when you lose your keys or somethin’—you know just a second ago you set ’em down on the coffee table, but they ain’t there. Well, you ain’t wrong. That’s where you did set ’em. What happened is you slipped over into a universe where you set ’em somewheres else. Hell, you might stay there the rest of your life. You with me so far?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Keep it comin’.”

“Now the universes close by,” Josiah went on, “they’re a whole lot like the one you in. Might just be one or two things differnt, like where you put your keys or what time your favorite show comes on the TV. But the farther away the universes get from your universe, the weirder they are. One a billion universes away, it might be so differnt you wouldn’t be able to understan’ nothing what’s goin’ on. Still hangin’ in there?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Okay. Every once in a while there’s a crack opens. I ain’t talkin’ ’bout a crack ’tween universes. I’m talkin’ ’bout a crack in the whole damn structure. Things fall through them cracks, where you think they go?”

“Yonder,” I said.

“Or someplace like Yonder. I figger there’s bound to be more’n one of ’em. How them places start up…I don’t know. I’m studyin’ on it, though.” Josiah lifted his head to look at me. “Whatcha think?”

“I like it. Makes more sense than Bobby Forstadt’s theory.”

Josiah snorted. “That computer game horseshit! All that goes to show is how Bobby spent his time back in the world.”