The freight trains keep me awake at night…
The freight trains keep me awake at night. I can hear their malicious thundering as I am trying to sleep, a hollow, cavernous sound, starting quietly, barely audibly, then mounting to a thick bassy roar that shakes the foundations of my room and knocks leaves from the cherry tree outside.
I live about a mile from the base of the Tower. Its buttresses fly out from the central core like cathedralic oaken roots, diving into the cold ground and anchoring themselves to the bedrock a thousand feet below. It never sleeps. Dozens of freight cars are hauled up it every hour, each weighing about as much as a small ocean liner, packed to the welded seams with iron ore and sealed shut against the cold night air and, later, the vacuum.
That’s what the old soldiers used to call space: the night. “I’m going out tonight,” they’d say, uncertain whether they would come back to the welcoming pressurized warmth or float, blitzed and eviscerated, outside forever. “It’s a nice night for death,” they’d say, hiding the cowed fear that chattered at their heartstrings behind a desperately acted veil of bravado; a veil that was oh so thin. Starry, starry, night.
I will never go outside again. For me the daylight, the warmth of unfrosting mornings, the feeling of an atmosphere of air comfortingly blowing and weighing on my face. No more of that dead blackness. I am hiding now at the bottom of a pit, ensconced beneath the tropopause, safe in the knowledge that I am walking on the seabed of an ocean of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and that there are miles upon miles of gas above my head.
But it gets to me still at night, when you cannot see the air. When the blackness outside is disturbingly confusable, through half-open eyes, with the stellated void. When the silence just before dawn is chillingly similar to the total quiet that breathes between the stars.
So I do not mind that the trains wake me. I am happy when their rumbling rescues me from the brink of sleep, drags me back from the edge of a terrifyingly bottomless dream. It is good to hear their sound, any sound, when I wake up doused in sweat and they chase the terror from my mind; the fear that I am back there where there is no sound, no light, no warmth. It is dire coincidence that the most ancient fear we know, that of dark and silence and the unknown, preys on the brave who venture into space. It vanquished me and cast me back down.
So I lie awake at night, listening to the trains climb the Tower, dragging themselves laboriously upwards, back where I will never go.
