9 comments/  12985 views/  8 favorites

Vista Dome

By: Adrian Leverkuhn



November 1948 

Oakland, California 

Bleary-eyed and doing his best not to fall asleep, John Crossfield cast a weary gaze on the departure board above the ticket counter for the tenth time in about as many minutes, then, looking at his Hamilton wrist watch, he hoped against all reasonable expectation that today's train would be called on time. It was almost too much to hope for - not after having traveled halfway around the world over the last eight days - but exhaustion did strange things to a man. Hope and reason are strange bedfellows, not always incompatible but often at odds with one another. 

A metallic screech, then the hoped for announcement: "Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen! Train number 18, the nine-forty California Zephyr will commence boarding in ten minutes for Stockton, Sacramento, Elko, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago and points in between. Please check that you have your travel documents ready for the conductor at boarding gate two. Again, we will begin boarding train 18, the eastbound California Zephyr, in ten minutes. Would Captain Crossfield, Captain John Crossfield, please report to the boarding gate at this time." 

Not surprised but more than a little annoyed at this breech of privacy, Crossfield snapped-to and walked across the station toward the gate, all the while ignoring those curious eyes that followed his progress, and he soon spotted two US Navy Shore Patrolmen standing just ahead of a crisply starched ensign Crossfield saw standing near the train's conductor. The ensign and patrolmen fired off sharp salutes as he approached, then the ensign handed Crossfield a packet containing, he assumed, his travel documents. 

"Captain," the clean-shaven ensign said, "here are your final travel arrangements and papers. All the way to D.C., sir. Can we help you out to the platform?" 

Crossfield returned the salute and looked at the man's name tag, and the telling lack of campaign ribbons. "No, ensign. Thanks. I've only got these," he said as he hefted a tan leather briefcase in his left hand and a small grip in his right. 

"Didn't you just come in on the Clipper, sir?" 

Crossfield nodded, looked at his watch again. "Ninety minutes ago." 

"Cuttin' it kinda' close, sir, but I guess that's the drill." 

Crossfield nodded at the ensign's cloying familiarity, yet felt once again more than a little annoyed. Perhaps he was just tired, or perhaps it was that post-war 'lack of immediacy' he'd heard so much about lately, but this ensign seemed almost insubordinate. 

The conductor cleared his throat and shuffled a bit: "Uh, sir, I'll need to run you on out to the platform now, before the other passengers." 

Crossfield nodded. "Need any of these?" he said, holding up the sheaf of just delivered tickets. 

"No, sir, I reckon they're good, don't you?" the conductor asked as he pushed open the heavy oak door leading to the platform, and Crossfield followed the patrolmen and ensign through the door. 

As the men approached the train, they stopped. "Well, have a good journey, Captain," the ensign said as he and the two patrolmen snapped-to again. Crossfield returned their salutes, then turned to follow the conductor out along the ramp beyond. He fought off the need to sleep as he walked until at last they burst out into sunshine, and he squinted into the humid mid-morning sun that blazed off gleaming stainless steel passenger cars that seemed to stretch out to infinity in either direction. 

"Captain, you're in the Silver Planet, the observation car, Room A." 

"A sleeper? In the observation car?" 

"One of the new ones, yes sir. Technically, I think they call it a Drawing Room. Just a real big bedroom. Oh, the car has a dome, too." 

"A dome? Really?" 

Yessir. Call 'em Vista Domes. This one belongs to the Western Pacific, and it's brand spankin' new, too. Her third or fourth crossing, I think." 

The conductor spoke with pride as he indicated the approaching car. "There's a hostess aboard now too, as well as sleeping car attendants, and they'll see to your needs as soon as we're underway." Puffed-up with more than a little self-important irony when he said "underway" to a Navy captain, the conductor stopped by the porter manning the observation car's boarding door, then asked Crossfield once again if he needed any help. 

"No, thanks," Crossfield replied, his mind now fixed on the prospect of sleeping for the next year and a half. 

"Well then, have a good trip, Captain." Crossfield nodded his appreciation and handed the man a crumpled dollar bill. 

Crossfield turned to the porter, an old black man who looked older than Moses; oddly the porter wasn't wearing a Pullman Company uniform, but instead wore CB&Q livery. "Right this way, Cap'n," the porter said as he led the way up into the blissfully cool air conditioning. The car indeed smelled brand new; the teal blue carpet, the lighter blue and stainless walls, all positively gleamed. He smiled his appreciation and the old porter took note. 

"No finer cars in the world, Cap'n, than these new Budd cars. This one's Western Pacific, too, not Pullman like some of the sleepers." 

"Really? What happened to the Pullman Company?" 

"Oh, still 'round, just changes, some sort of anti-trust nonsense. Not much difference these-a-days, anyways. No sir. Well, here we go, Cap'n. Room A. Lounge on back a ways, dining room two cars forward." 

The door to his compartment was open and Crossfield walked in, smiling once again at the relative opulence of the compartment. Not much bigger than the captain's stateroom on a submarine, this room was, however, very well appointed - and that air conditioning! Oh! Bliss! 

"Will you be taking your meals in the dining car, Cap'n?" 

"You know, I've been awake for a couple of days. Only thing that sounds good right about now is some shut-eye..." 

"I'll be around soon as we pull out, Cap'n, get that set right up for you. Let me hang that coat up now..." 

Crossfield took off his jacket and handed it to the porter, sleepily slid his overstuffed briefcase into the little closet by the head, then poured himself onto the teal blue sofa, arranging the proffered pillow behind his head as he stretched out - only half awake at this point. 

He felt a jolt some time later, and noted the train was pulling slowly away from the platform below, but Crossfield was asleep before the train had cleared the inner yards. 

+++++ 

He remembered smelling food of some sort - when was it - late afternoon? Some time later raucous laughter woke him, but all sense of time was gone by then and he was soon asleep - again. Sometime in the depths of that first night, his bladder finally signaled 'red alert' and he stumbled into the head to do his business under blueish night lighting; only then did he look at his watch and see that it was well past four in the morning. His dry mouth tasted sour, his lips were cracked and peeling; running a quick DR plot in his mind he figured the train was crossing Nevada's high desert plateau as it closed on Salt Lake City, hence the dryness, and as suddenly as his mind had done the math he was desperately thirsty! 

And he was still in uniform - but wait - his shoes were off. Feeling a jolt of dread he flipped on the overhead light, and his shoes were... nowhere to be seen! 

"What the Hell!" He opened the closet and saw his briefcase - and his shoes - but they had been shined, and recently. He checked the briefcase: still locked. He dialed in the combination and opened it: the contents, folders marked 'Classified' and 'Top Secret', were undisturbed. He closed and locked the case, slid it back into the closet and pulled out his shoes. They were competently shined, but certainly not 'spit-shined', and he thought ahead to the shine stands in Washington's Union Station - and to the meetings beyond. 

Then in a flash, it all came back in a rush: while stationed in Japan, evidence of advanced planning by Soviet nuclear researchers had come his way. He'd read Kennan's 'X article' in Foreign Affairs and understood that America's policy toward the Soviet Union would henceforth be one of "containing Soviet expansion", but countering strategic moves by a nuclear armed Soviet Union would be quite a different matter than blocking a conventionally armed force. On picking up bits and pieces of rumored Soviet progress on a nuclear weapon and putting the pieces together, he'd fired off a letter to the Chief of Naval Operations; unbeknownst to him this letter had wound up on Dean Acheson's desk, and thence from the Secretary of State's office to the Oval Office. He'd been breathlessly summoned for a face-to-face with Acheson almost two weeks ago, and his travel orders had been cut within hours. Now, after almost three years in Japan studying the effects of blast damage and radioactive fallout in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was after almost three years abroad finally headed stateside. This rail journey was the last leg...and he was tired, dog tired. 

Crossfield sat down and looked at the backs of his hands; no rings adorned fingers, there was no wife, no children, his parents still lived on the family farm in northeast Pennsylvania - but he hadn't spoken to them since leaving for Japan, and that was that. There was no one, for all intents and purposes, in his life, and it had been that way - almost out of necessity - since his last year at Annapolis, in 1936. He'd chosen to study physics. Nuclear physics. And with that choice his life's course had been irrevocably set. He fought to reconcile his love for the farm he had grown up on with the directions his life had taken, but he always came up short. 

Why, he wondered? 

Well, it had always been a simple calculus. With rumors of a German nuclear effort coming to light in 1938, in time very nearly every military physicist in the U.S. had in due course been routed to either Los Alamos or Oak Ridge, and with that simple twist of fate Crossfield spent almost the entire war on a high plateau northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. By 1943 he was in charge of efforts to predict what effects nuclear detonations would have on the wings and various other control surfaces of the B-29 Super Fortress bombers slated to carry the proposed bombs. 

Now, staring at his hands as this glistening train rushed through the night, he was as suddenly deep again in the smoldering aftermath of his life's work. His involvement in aerodynamic modeling lead to further immersion in the physical aftermath of the bombings, and as a result he'd been assigned to catalogue the physical devastation in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he'd measured both the seen and implicitly unseen physical destruction in every way he could conceive, but none of what he'd seen and recorded had made the slightest emotional impression until one rainy afternoon he'd run across a small Catholic convent north of Hiroshima where hundreds of survivors were being treated for radiation sickness. Cancers, what he assumed were cancerous lesions of unimaginable virulence, were running rampant through the survivors within the ancient stone courtyard he'd run across that afternoon, and it was soon apparent that as far as he could tell no one was researching any of the almost apocalyptic and totally unforeseen medical consequences of the blasts. The few surviving physicians and nurses, mainly Japanese but there were a few interned physicians in the mix that day, were completely overwhelmed, not least of all by their complete incomprehension of what what had happened. And that wasn't so surprising, was it? They had no idea what they were confronting medically, no one did. 

Soon Crossfield was befriending who he could in that local, beleaguered medical community, and within weeks he was collecting as much medical data as he could lay his hands on. What kinds of medical problems arose, and at what distance from 'ground zero'? Mortality rates vs time vs distance from 'ground zero'? How long and at what strength was radiation measurable in crops and water supplies? And in various human tissues? No one had thought to measure these variables before because the effects of a nuclear detonation on a human population had simply been unpredictable before their use, yet to Crossfield the effects he witnessed in the months just after August 1945 seemed vital to a complete understanding of what had happened, and of more importance, what could be expected in future nuclear exchanges. 

Still, to John Crossfield, the devastation and it's attendant human suffering had always reduced to a rather simple utilitarian calculus: what benefits accrued to the United States, and at what cost? It had always been as simple as that. His world was rendered in blacks and whites; he had little time for shades of gray. 

At least until that first rainy afternoon in the copper-hued hills above Hiroshima. Everything was different after that, but he was slow to feel the changes in himself. Everything he'd assumed was right - mom, the flag and apple pie - had been inverted by what he learned that day, and in the weeks that followed. 

+++++ 

His hands still shook when he dared think of the faces he'd seen that afternoon in the clouds. Sitting in planes and trains headed stateside after three years in Japan, after three years of demon-haunted nightmares filled with blinding flashes and melting flesh, he felt himself at an uneasy end to this part of his journey, and feeling grossly ill at ease with the world he once thought he'd understood so well. 'Something's wrong with this picture,' he heard himself say to himself time and time again. How could so much productive genius come to such an end? Was the power unleashed in August 1945 all that mankind really reduced to? Endless cycles of cultural-immolation? 

He had no ideas how to account for the change in himself, really, but recently he had grown more concerned about his own place in this new order of the universe - as if in the aftermath of a blinding flash the emptiness of this new world had been - and was continually being - revealed. Yet all he felt now, as this train sped through the night, was the pressing need to run as fast as he humanly could from those burnt, scarred ghosts. 

+++++ 

In his rumpled slacks and white dress blouse, he opened the door to his compartment and looked down the corridor. As suddenly, the porter's head popped out from his own curtained compartment: "Mornin', Cap'n. You feelin' hungry? You want I could fetch you a sandwich, or some coffee?" 

Crossfield stared at the old fellow for a moment while he collected his thoughts, then nodded. "That'd be fine. Yes, thanks." 

"There's no one in the dome this time of night. You want I should bring it to you up there?" 

"I guess so. If it's not too much trouble." 

"No trouble 'tal, Cap'n. You head on back 'til you come to a stairway, then head on up. There's lights on the overhead. I'll be up there in a few minutes." 

Crossfield nodded. "Got it. Thanks." He turned and almost fell down two steps, then walked aft through a small lounge area, then back up two stairs into the observation lounge. All he saw was the gently curved end of the car, the windowed walls lined with plush, overstuffed chairs, but no stairway. A light flicked on somewhere and he turned to his left; he saw it now, saw the gently curved if very steep stairway that had to lead up into the night, to the night under the Vista Dome, and he clutched the stainless rail and made his way up into the darkness. 

There was a girl, a young woman perhaps, at the forward end of the seating area, and she was bent over a clutch of papers and books, apparently studying and lost in thought. He slid into the aft-most seat on the right side of the car and bent nearer to the glass of the dome, and peered out into the inky blackness. There was no moon, but soon he could make out his old friend from Academy days: Orion, the hunter, high and deep in the southern sky. He smiled at the figure, and felt once again that infinite smallness that came upon him when he thought about his place in whatever order there might be to this God-forsaken universe. 

+++++ 

The old porter arrived a few minutes later, carrying a triple decker club sandwich on a large silver tray, complete with cup, saucer, a small stainless steel pot of coffee and a pitcher of ice water. "Here ya go, Cap'n. Want some more light?" 

"My God in Heaven, look at that water! You're a mind reader!" 

"It's this high desert, Cap'n. Comin' up from sea level, gets me every time." 

"Got that right," Crossfield said as he downed a glass of ice water. "Say, I didn't catch your name?" 

"Polk, sir. Name's Polk. You want, I can turn down your bed now?" 

"That'd be fine, Polk. Say, who's... what kind of uniform is that?" 

"Up there? Yessir, that's somethin' new this year. Call them gals Zephyrettes. Kind of a hostess, but a nurse too, but mainly for the kids and old folks." 

"A nurse? On a train? Well, I'll be...that's a first." 

"Ain't that the truth. This old world's sure changin' fast, lots of firsts these days." 

"Yes, I suppose it is. Sometimes I think too fast." Crossfield didn't know where that outburst had come from, but the honesty of the feeling caught him off-guard. Even the old man seemed unsure how to respond to the conviction his words carried. 

"Well, I'll go tend to your room now, Cap'n. Sunrise in about an hour. Worth sittin' up for." 

"Thanks, Polk." 

Crossfield attacked the sandwich, then returned to the ice water; his throat burned in the icy rush while he studied patterns in the condensation on the icy glass. The coffee was another matter. He had grown used to the strong navy brew, that potent cup found in any U.S. Navy facility anywhere in the world - and he loved it - but this stuff was hot, weak, and he soon pushed it aside. In due course he yawned, leaned back, and felt sleep coming on once again. 

And as they always were, his ghosts were waiting for him. 

Always waiting. Burning, withering, melting into odd, Dali-esque shapes... 

Fingers pointing. Accusatory fingers, right out of Dickens. 

He woke with a start, glimpsed rosy-fingered dawn in the sky ahead as he became aware of someone else, someone new, and that someone was standing over him. 

And looking more than a bit concerned. 

"Are you alright?" a young woman said, professional inquisitiveness plain on her face. 

"What?" Crossfield whispered. 

"I think you were having a bad dream." 

Crossfield sat up abruptly, rubbed his eyes, shook dusty cobwebs from his dank, sleep-addled mind. He looked around, remembered the train, the sandwich. "Sorry. Hope I didn't disturb..." 

"You were screaming. I think it's safe to say half the people on this train heard..." 

"Oh, Jesus. Look. Really, I'm sorry..." 

"I know it's none of my business, but who's Tetsuko?" 

"What?" 

"Tetsuko? You were calling her name... over and over." 

Crossfield looked at the brightening sky, then at the young woman. She was half sitting on the arm of the chair just ahead, her legs in the aisle and her arms crossed on the chair back, her small, sharp chin resting on her arms. There was concern in her eyes, of that he was sure, but there was something else. Almost mirth, like she was in on a joke being told at his expense. 

"She's a nun," Crossfield finally said. "Was, anyway." 

"A nun?" 

"Yes." 

"Is this the one about..." 

"She wasn't a joke." The question he saw in her eyes held him, and suddenly Crossfield noticed the woman was the "Zephyrette" - the nurse - Polk had pointed out. "She was... a nurse, I guess you might say." 

"Was?" 

"She - died. Gone... now... I..." And as suddenly Crossfield felt himself begin to cry, gently at first, then less so. He looked down and away, tried to hide... 

But there was no hiding now. Whatever or wherever he'd been hiding...it really didn't matter now. The pain he had so successfully hidden away in the night was out in the open now, the dam had given way... 


Vista Dome



"We'd better get you to your room," he heard her saying, then he felt her hands under his arms, lifting him gently, guiding him up... 

He followed her down the steep stairway, then forward, until Crossfield was aware of Polk again, and of being helped into his compartment. He was on the bed now, felt his shoes being removed, collar unbuttoned and the tie around his neck being loosened, a cool compress placed across his forehead. 

He had to get a hold of himself, and right now! He cleared his throat, took the washcloth and cleared his eyes. "Sorry," he said. "I don't know where that came from." 

"What's your name?" He heard her ask, but there was something new in her voice that hadn't been there a few minutes ago. What was it? Compassion? Something new, but what? Was it simply professional concern? No, he was sure there was something else, but what? 

"Crossfield. John. Captain," he said mechanically, and he caught himself before reciting his service number. 

He heard her laugh a bit, but a light-hearted expression of understanding came though nonetheless. "It's alright, Captain. The war's over..." 

"No. It's not. No, it's not over at all..." 

She wiped his brow with another cool compress, then: "Tetsuko? Would you tell me about her?" 

Crossfield struggled with the idea of talking to someone about what had happened, what he had seen and experienced. Just about anything he might possibly say about his time in Japan would be classified "Top Secret" or beyond, and soon, so he really couldn't tell this woman anything beyond the merest generalities. Yet he felt he needed to talk to someone, that he'd been holding too much in, too much and for far too long. 

So Crossfield nodded his head. "I'm not sure how much I can tell you, but I'll tell you what I think I can." 

And so he began to talk. 

He'd always been a sort of "wunderkind", almost a savant, but particularly gifted at math, then physics. He'd won his appointment to Annapolis solely on the strength of this gift, and of course many of his professors were working at the Naval Research Laboratory developing radar and sonar technologies, and they had nabbed him upon graduation - a few years before the war broke out. It wasn't long before his reputation became known to men like Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller, and late in 1941 he was transferred to the newly created Office of Scientific Research and Development, then to the ultra-secret S-1 Committee, the so-called 'Uranium Committee'. At a time when most of his classmates were struggling to attain any rank above 'Ensign', Crossfield had been, two years after graduation, summarily promoted to Commander, simply because this rank gave him almost unimpeded travel privileges, and during the early months of the war getting around the country had become unimaginably hard to do. He had bounced between Washington, D.C., Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Berkeley, California, working where he was needed, but by mid-war, he continued, he was posted most of the time to New Mexico and working on the then-theoretical aspects of what would happen in the moments after an atomic explosion, most especially on what stresses might be experienced on the delivery aircraft. Soon he was shuttling back-and-forth between the high desert and Seattle, working with Boeing engineers as development of the B-29 Super Fortress concluded. 

She was, he noted, a keen listener, and appeared very interested with what he was telling her, so he decided to press on, to get it all out. So, after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and right after Japan's surrender, Crossfield had been dispatched to Tokyo to make the first ground-based bomb damage assessment of the event. This was of course the world's first "atomic" BDA, or Bomb Damage Assessment, and while he had been tasked to record the physical devastation in painstaking detail, it was during this posting that he first encountered Tetsuko, or Sister Mary Madeleine, on a walk in the hills outside of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945. 

+++++ 

On his arrival in southern Japan in late September 1945, the first thing Crossfield noted was an almost overwhelming US military presence in the area, but what struck him most of all about this was that the personnel were almost always 'Military Police' - U.S. military police. A Japanese film crew trying to record the scene was detained, their reels of film confiscated. Anyone outside of the U.S. military recording or measuring anything, anywhere within the confines of the city would summarily find themselves in a world of trouble, and fast. So Crossfield was assigned a driver and a freshly minted U.S. Naval Academy ensign to help carry out his initial observations and measurements. 

The driver was a short, somewhat pudgy, freckle-faced kid from Bremerton, Washington with the unlikely name of Hieronymus Bosch; he'd been assigned to Crossfield because he was an MP, but also a skilled photographer. Bosch had taken to shooting images of fire damaged areas around Tokyo soon after the armistice was signed and American personnel had moved ashore, and he had a keen sense of how to move through the local populace without creating tension and, more importantly, avoiding conflict. It took Crossfield about a minute to size up Bosch: he was smart as could be but had never developed the confidence to fully utilize his intelligence. 

The Academy graduate, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. J. Winston Stafford III was a classic in Crossfield's eyes. Entitled, effete, almost boorishly patrician looking, Stafford stood six foot five and might have weighed 145 pounds on a good day, but his pale skin and patently sickly demeanor struck Crossfield as ample evidence that the kid's good days were few and far between. What saved the day was Stafford's almost insane sense of humor and a "can do" attitude that had more than likely gotten him into the Academy in the first place, and then seen him through the four years of Hell that followed. The word was, almost gratuitously, that Stafford wasn't quite the sharpest tool in the shed, and if under your command to plan accordingly. The latest fitness report Crossfield had seen seemed to imply Stafford had a knack for getting into trouble, and could at any given moment grievously offend a small rock. 

Once the group was formed, they were quartered at a naval base, one which had until quite recently been manned by forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and more than a few Japanese were still working at the base when Crossfield and his team arrived. There was as yet no BOQ - Bachelor Officer's Quarters - on the base, so the three were quartered in adjacent rooms in a spartan barracks-styled building that would have seemed right at home on any naval base anywhere in the world. Soon Crossfield's team was criss-crossing it's way through the ravaged city's rubble-filled streets taking measurements and photographs of anything and everything that even remotely appeared to have been effected by the blast. 

"And then one day," Crossfield said in the morning quiet as the California Zephyr rolled across Utah, "out of the blue, Bosch said something quite odd. And interesting. At least to me." 

He'd mentioned that all Crossfield seemed interested in was the city. The physical destruction. 

"'What about the people?', Bosch asked that day. And I didn't know what to say to him. In fact, I really didn't have any idea what was happening to any of the people there. The injured... the dead...you couldn't... well... they were almost nowhere to be found." 

"What happened to them?" 

Crossfield looked at her, realized he didn't even know the girl's name, but he did recognize the quiet revulsion on her face. He'd seen it before. First, on the faces of American diplomats and other government personnel who'd come to tour the scene - on the expressions of the faces on men and women who weren't used to the perplexing look death took on the battlefield. The real meaning of atomic warfare, Crossfield soon learned, took on a new, sharply defined relief in the metallic hues of Hiroshima, and that was simply because no one was prepared for what they found beneath the rubble. No one ever was. 

Then one morning he'd seen that revulsion in the mirror as he shaved - on his own face, in his own eyes. And now, here on this train, this girl's eyes had become a mirror of his own. 

"I hate to say this, but I don't even know your name," he said after a pause. 

"Clair, Clair St Cloud," she replied, but there was no pleasure in those eyes now, no mirth. 

"You're from France?" Crossfield said. 

"Swiss. My father's parents lived near Geneva. My grandfather was an architect, he moved here to study with Frank Lloyd Wright, and then decided to stay. They settled in San Francisco." 

"You grew up there?" 

"Yes." 

"I'm sorry. You obviously don't need to hear..." 

"You're wrong, Captain Crossfield. I think...", she began, but her gaze trailed off with her words. She seemed to measure her next words carefully, against Crossfield's need, and her own. "Maybe I'm way off base here, but I think everyone needs to hear what you have to say." 

Crossfield chuckled. "That'd be a fine way to end up in prison, Miss St Cloud..." 

"Clair," she said. "Please." 

"Clair." He was surprised how good that name sounded, or more precisely, at how good that name sounded - to him, but maybe that was because he'd seen so few girls the past - what? - three years? Or would nine years, or thirteen years be more accurate? Had he ever really taken an interest in girls before, or had he simply been more infatuated with the infinite dancings of protons and neutrons in their precisely defined orbits? 

"Are you alright, John?" 

"Sorry. Guess I faded out there for a moment." 

"What were you thinking about?" 

Crossfield closed his eyes, because he knew he couldn't hide what he was feeling from Clair St Cloud. 

Then he felt her fingers running through his hair, and the pure shock of physical intimacy destroyed whatever inhibitions he might once have had; he felt himself trembling, felt his face in his own hands and how foreign they felt, then he felt her hands on his and as suddenly he knew everything was as it should be. There was order in every universe, and he was finding his place in the one he shared with Clair St Cloud. 

+++++ 

"So. Where did you meet Tetsuko?" 

"One day, late October, early November, 1945, not that it matters, Stafford got our Jeep and we drove out of the city. North into the hills. There was drizzle, maybe just a mist, but I remember those hills looked like something out of a Chinese watercolor. Shades of gray and green. Everything was shades of gray..." 

And they'd come upon a dirt road marked by a sign with a red cross, and Hieronymus Bosch had taken that road so obviously less traveled. They, the three Americans, those Three Wise Men, had driven up into the mist, deeper into the gray light of day, until they had come upon a wall. A white wall, rendered blue by the mist, capped by the sweeping lines of a sloping blue tile roof, a solid wall, held up by ancient timbers, timbers white with age, timbers that stood as muted sentries might guard a fortress. 

They stopped in the pale shadow of the wall, conscious of it's age, of it's obvious sacred nature. The three talked it over, then got out of their Jeep and approached a broad wood gate, their holstered Colt 45s suddenly feeling conspicuously out of place. There was a small bell hanging beside the gate, and Stafford pulled on the affixed lanyard two times. 

Footsteps in the distance. A grating of metal on metal. 

An opening door. 

A face. Old. No, ancient. As ancient as the timbers that sustained this fortress in the mist. A woman...a nun, in habit. 

There was something about her eyes. Kindness, perhaps, was a word that first came to mind, but perhaps there was a spirit of forgiveness in the mist, because ultimately there were no truly appropriate words to describe what those Three Wise Men saw in the pale blue light that afternoon. 

Without a word the ancient-eyed woman opened the gate and motioned the men to enter, and stepping across the threshold was like stepping into a dreamscape where time had stopped countless centuries ago. Mist held no provenance in the courtyard beyond that gate, and the air inside seemed pure, clear. But there were distant footsteps on loose gravel, leaf-borne sighs as autumn winds breathed through golden trees, and there was a scent not unlike the seashore. Iodine. Iodine, and bandages. 

Death. The Three Wise Men felt it almost immediately. Death was all around them, waiting, watching. 

They moved through another gate, into another courtyard. This one was larger, and apparently much older. There were walls of precisely carved gray stones, huge, unyielding to time and season, the unmistakable traces of a Buddhist past defined by the orderly rows of trees within. 

Then they saw the cots. Row after row of cots. Pale bodies aglow in the sheen of failing light and fading life, open-mouthed incomprehension and wide-eyed horror, all surrounded by dutifully attending women in habit, changing dressings, bringing cups of cool water to fevered lips. 

"So there, behind those walls," Crossfield said into the morning, "were they sick from Hiroshima." There was, he sensed, too much shame in dying such an undignified death, so the sick and the dying walked into the mountains to die behind those old walls. To spare the survivors such memories. 

"Oh, my God," Clair St Cloud said. "But, was the old lady... Tetsuko...sick too?" 

"Yes. And no." 

Crossfield felt sorrow for the look in Clair's eyes, because he didn't know how to describe what he'd learned that day. There was the woman that had been Tetsuko, the woman who had found Christ and dedicated her life to His teachings, the woman who had sacrificed and learned new meanings of love, and forgiveness, during her journey, and how he too had seen the strength of Will that had allowed this woman to open the doors to her world - to this Bringer of War. Then there was the woman borne of Hiroshima's need; the savaged, gale-blown visage Crossfield had first seen, her green-gold eyes flecked with infinite sorrow, islands in an inland sea where love and forgiveness held no sway over death. 

"God, what it must have cost her to open that door. To look at me and not hate me." 

"But, she was a nun. What else could she..." 

"I know, I know. But that's the easy answer, isn't it?" 

Because there was more to Tetsuko-san's grief and sorrow than the simple explanation of self-pity - or even the easy gravitas of hate. There was a complex harmony in the dance of lightness and darkness that she held in abeyance, just as there is in the interplay of love and hate. And it was all there, all alive in the inland sea of her eyes. The woman she had been, and the woman she had become, molded in war's unhinged forge. 

"She could have just turned us away, been done with us, but I think she wanted us to see...the truth of our labors, and hers." No, Crossfield said to himself. She wanted me to see. Me to open my eyes. So, did God act through her? Did this thing called God want Me to see what I had helped bring to this world? Or, as reason dictates, had the universe simply conspired to put me in this place, at this time, for no other reason than to let me find a monastery in the rain? To find death. To find meaning and purpose in...death? 

Clair was looking at him again, and there was deep concern in her eyes. "Perhaps she was a teacher? Aren't nuns teachers?" 

"Some are, I guess. I don't know if she had been before..." 

But yes, Tetsuko had become a teacher that day. And while she had much to pass on, there wasn't all that much time, was there? She had shown these Three Wise Men, and the children of all men, humanity decaying along predetermined rates, all within her own inland sea. The sepsis of untreated third degree burns beckoned here, the inexorable replication rates of radiation induced mutations over there, the lack of sanitary facilities, the absence of knowledge, and ultimately, the finality of exhaustion despair hopelessness. These were the 'things' Sister Mary Madeleine had time to teach that day. 

"...but one day, maybe a year later, I learned that Tetsuko means 'Lady of Steel'. Well, that's one meaning, anyway. But appropriate, I think. We learned that at her funeral." 

"She died? From radiation?" 

"She had been in the city the night before, and was walking back out to the monastery when the, well, you know. She wasn't far enough away to be killed quickly. She was far enough away to linger." 

"You spent a lot of time up there, didn't you?" 

"Some, yes. I lingered, too." 

"What did she teach you? That first day." 

"Me? My eyes. To open my eyes." 

+++++ 

Clair stayed with Crossfield all that day, and Polk brought them lunch as they approached Salt Lake City, then dinner after they'd crossed into Colorado. He told her what he could of his remaining time in Japan, of taking medicine and other supplies to the monastery, of Sister Mary Madeleine's life, and death, and sometime late in the evening their talk moved on to other things, things like how he was now thirty one years old and hadn't been with a girl since high school. He talked about the simple trajectory of his life, what his current mission was, and how he had grown sick of all he'd seen, and what he had become. They talked of the choices they'd each made over the years, the good and the bad, those they'd yet to make, and talked of destiny, the possibility of change, and at one point Crossfield was sure he loved this woman, but then it occurred to him that he really had no idea what love was. He'd felt an inseparable bond to Tetsuko-san, and eventually to Bosch and Stafford, but those were ties borne of impossible circumstances, not a longing for the infinite. Still, when he looked at Clair in the light of their time together he felt something he'd never experienced before, and the pure shock of the emotion was unsettling in the extreme. 

Sometime in the early morning, just as mighty Orion was ruling over the heavens once again, they'd made love. There had been tender kisses, then the infinite longing of impossible emotions, and finally, deep, deep sleep. 

And when the sun rose the next morning, when Chicago was not so very far ahead, John Crossfield awoke only to find that she was gone. 

November 1958 

Chicago, Illinois 

"Well, I'll be damned! Polk? Is that you?" Walking along the platform at Chicago's Union Station, a nervous walk deep within that peculiar subterranean world, ever awash in the deep, penetrating rumbles of dozens of caged diesel locomotives, John Crossfield approached the California Zephyr's Silver Planet observation car and immediately saw the old porter who had accompanied him to Chicago ten years ago. 

"Why, it's the Cap'n! Holy smokes! How long's it been? My-oh-my!" 

"Been a while, Polk. How've you been?" Crossfield held out his right hand. 

"Fine, Cap'n, just fine." Polk took Crossfield's hand and shook it warmly. "You ridin' with me today?" 

"Yup! All the way to Frisco!" 

"San Fran-cisco! Got your ticket, or you gonna play hobo today and ride up top?" 

Crossfield handed his tickets over with a grin. 

"Room A again!" Polk exclaimed. "Well, I'll be!" 

"Took some doing, Polk, that's for certain." Crossfield was amazed at the old man's memory even as he recognized the pale beginnings of milky cataracts in the old man's eyes, but Polk was still standing tall and looked as strong as ever. "Well, I know the way." 

"Okay, Cap'n. I'll see you after we leave the station. Watch your step now." 

Crossfield climbed up the steep stainless steel steps and turned left down the narrow teal-toned corridor that led to Drawing Room A, and as he approached the door he was instantly awash in memories of that long ago day...and that night...but he stepped inside and swung his small grip up into the luggage bin above the small toilet compartment. He turned and looked at the teal colored upholstery covering the swivel chair, and the roomy sofa with it's fold-down bed...it all looked the same to his practiced eye...even the silver-embossed California Zephyr stationary and postcards stacked neatly under the window in their own little cubby looked unchanged. 




Vista Dome



He sat in the chair by the window and looked across the platform at the Northern Pacific's "North Coast Limited", it's cars resplendent in two-toned green, and he watched fascinated as a trolly of fresh produce - including the NP's justly famous, huge baking potatoes - were loaded into the dining car across the platform. It always amazed him that the food on these trains was better than in most restaurants. 

Crossfield jumped back into the present as the train jolted into motion and the overhead lights flickered momentarily, but moments later the westbound California Zephyr was underway, pulling out of Union Station and heading away from downtown Chicago. The train rumbled and swayed left and right as it made it's way slowly through the yards south of downtown, and Crossfield pulled back sharply from the window more than once when an oncoming diesel rumbled past - seemingly mere inches from his chair.  

"So, Cap'n, what you been doin' with yourself all these years? Still in the Navy?" 

Startled once again when the old porter entered the compartment, Crossfield turned and smiled at Polk: "No, no. I went back to school, here in Chicago as a matter of fact. I'm moving out to the Bay Area now." 

Polk nodded and intoned "yessir" a few times as Crossfield spoke, then launched into his spiel about turning down the bed after supper, and wanting to know what time 'the Cap'n' would take his meals. Crossfield smiled as Polk went on, caught up in the pre-war nostalgia such service represented. How much longer would it last, he wondered, with the new upstart airlines sweeping aside the railroad's well-established passenger services like dust off a porch? The Zephyr crossed a river and picked up speed as snow began drifting by the window, the train now roaring westbound for Iowa, and on it's way to Denver and the coast. 

Crossfield asked Polk how long he'd been working on the Zephyr. 

"Well, sir. I've been with the company since twenty nine. Yessir, nineteen twenty nine. Long time. But it's been a good life, Cap'n. Mighty fine. Couldn't have asked for nothin' better, no sir." 

"Do you live in Chicago?" 

"No sir. Oakland, these days. Used to live in Saint Louis, when I worked for the Pullman Company. Well, I got to move on. Takin' care of the next sleeper too, this trip. I'll come get you before supper time, Cap'n." 

"Alright, Polk, and thanks." After the old man withdrew, Crossfield stepped out and walked aft towards the lounge, then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a uniformed Zephyrette coming down the stairs from the Vista Dome. He felt his heart racing, his mouth was suddenly very dry, and he wondered what he'd say... 

When the girl turned around Crossfield's wasn't quite sure if he was disappointed - or relieved. It wasn't Clair St Cloud, but this girl's smile was just as sweet and real enough and she brushed by gently on her way forward, the perfume in her wake a hammer blow of memory. He grabbed the handrail and walked up into the dome, saw that it was empty, and as quickly turned to go back to his compartment. 

"May I get you something, sir?" 

Crossfield turned, looked at the girl in the Zephyrette uniform. "Excuse me?" 

"Do you need something? To eat, or drink?" 

"No. I..." He staggered under the weight of her sudden familiarity. 

"Are you alright, sir? I'm a nurse, if there's anything... But you see, you seem a bit pale." 

"No, I'm alright, and I'm a physician." 

"Oh, yes doctor. Are you in this car?" 

"Yes. Why?" 

"Well, when there are doctors onboard we like to know, just in case." 

"Ah... I understand. Look, uh, I hate to ask, but could I get a Coke or something?" 

"Yes, doctor." 

"John, okay? Just John. John Crossfield." 

On hearing his name the woman seemed to recoil as if from a blow, and to grow a bit pale herself, but she turned and went to the bartenders station and fixed his Coke, then placed the glass on the bar, pointing to a stool. 

"Were you in the Navy?", she asked. 

"What? Uh, yes, but how...why do you ask?" 

"Oh, it's nothing." 

Their eyes met. Her's were evasive; his were uncertain, of that much he was sure. 

"Well, could you excuse me, Dr Crossfield. I've got to go help the porter. Perhaps I'll see you later?" 

He stood. "Certainly. Look forward to it." He watched as she walked away quickly, admiring her form and the way she walked, suddenly sure that he had seen her before. He returned to his Coke, shook his head and smiled, then returned to his room and pulled some papers from his valise and started to read. 

Just before noon Polk knocked and stuck his head in the curtained doorway. "Cap'n? Second call for lunch. I've got a table reserved for you, just in case." 

"Thanks, Polk, but I'm not..." 

"Cap'n, you lookin' mighty tuckered. I think some lunch might just do you some good." Polk was grinning, holding the door open, his meaning clear. 

"Oh, alright," Crossfield said, standing. "Lead on, Polk. Onward, into the breech!" 

They made their way forward through two sleeping cars, and then into the dining car, where Polk led him to an empty table and pulled out his chair. "Steward will be right with you, Cap'n." 

"Right. Thanks, Polk." Crossfield turned to see the old porter scuttling his way forward, so he turned his attention to the menu. 

Lost in aimless speculations about club sandwiches versus rainbow trout, Crossfield felt more than saw Polk pull out the chair opposite his, then looked up to find Clair St Cloud sitting across from him at the table. 

+++++ 

"Hello, John." 

Crossfield looked up at Polk, who smiled ever-so-slightly before turning and walking aft, and only then did her voice register. 

His eyes turned again to Clair's, to those eyes he thought he remembered so well, from what suddenly felt like another lifetime, and in a blink he was thirteen years old - again, or was he thirty, again? There was his heart, beating like a marching drum in his temples, but even more interesting was how hot it had become; he knew he was on the verge of breaking out in a torrential sweat, and that only made the feeling worse. 

"What?" Crossfield said. 

"John? Hello?" 

"My God. Clair! What...how...are you? When did you get here?" 

"I'm fine, John. Got on in Chicago. And you?" 

"I'm a little surprised," he said. He looked away from the insinuations in her voice, looked out on passing early winter landscapes that arced by at speed, at fallow fields of corn only recently harvested, but then he was aware he was trying to hide his eyes from the reflection he saw in the window. He was trying to hide his feelings - again - only once again there was nowhere to hide. Not from her. She knew all his secrets, didn't she? 

"You ran into my sister this morning," she said pointedly. "She told me you were aboard." 

He looked at her hands. No rings. His heart skipped a beat. "I see. So, you didn't know I was on this train?" 

"No, John. How could I?" He sensed hurt; he felt stupid, ridiculous and obtuse. And evasive. 

"Do you still live out west?" he asked after a moment. 

"Yes, but my grandmother...she passed away, last week. We came out for the funeral." 

"I see. I'm sorry." 

"Rebecca, my sister...you told her you're a physician?" 

"Yes. After Washington. You remember? I was headed back there?" She nodded, holding his eyes in her own. "I just couldn't go on with it anymore, not after Tetsuko-san. It, life, had become a lie. It was disfiguring...me. So, I did what I felt was right; I resigned my commission, and somehow talked my way into medical school. The University of Chicago. Did my internship and residency there as well." He watched her eyes and the way she responded to his words, and he was suddenly quite aware that he could see the machinery of her mind turning over as he spoke, yet there was something new, something he had never noticed about her eyes. Something odd...unsettling. 

"Do you live there now?" She crossed her hands on the table as she spoke, looked down at them. Crossfield too looked at her hands. Her fingers were so fine boned, her skin so ethereally pale, such an extreme contrast to her blue eyes and copper colored hair. To his unpracticed eye she seemed at once exotic and comfortable, like a rare stone in a casual setting. She was still beautiful, but now there was a hardness in her eyes he didn't remember. Hardness, or was it calculating? Quicksand...he was walking into quicksand... 

"No," he said at length. "I've taken a position in San Francisco. Stanford. But the rumor is we'll be moving down to Palo Alto soon, so I've rented a place down the peninsula." 

But her hands were visibly shaking now. Crossfield looked up, saw tears forming in her eyes, watched as they welled and started to run down her cheeks; startled, suddenly quite unsure of himself and what he'd been thinking in the echo of a hearbeat, he took a handkerchief and dabbed her face, then put his hand on hers. 

"Clair?" 

"John, I..." Again, something in her eyes caught him, held him in a vice of caution. 

"We need to talk, Clair." 

"John, I know, but things are, well, they're complicated." 

"Why did you leave. You didn't even say good-bye. I didn't understand. I still don't. I don't know what you felt, how you feel..." 

Her eyes were like a frightened animal's, unsure, hunting for a way out one moment, then sure of her safety the next. She nodded, looked away. "I know. I'm so...sorry, John." 

"I thought for the longest time that I...that I loved you, Clair. " 

At that, she turned, looked him squarely in the eyes. There was sudden serenity on her face, a preternatural calmness in the air around her. He was taken aback by the transformation. Serenity? Perhaps certainty was a better word than serenity. He sensed that she had suddenly grown certain of her course. 

So, with his speaking the obvious, there had come certainty? If that was what he saw in her eyes now, what had she seen in his? At the mention of the word 'love', she had grown certain of herself, and certain of John Crossfield. Was she a...predator? 

And inside that moment she stood, all decisions made, no more tears in her eyes. "Meet me here," she said, pointing sternly at the table, "at five this evening, for dinner." 

Then she left him. Again. 

Crossfield was taken aback by the authority in her voice. "She'd have made a damn fine admiral!" he said to no one in particular, then, without ordering lunch he too stood up and retreated aft to the safety of his compartment. 

+++++ 

The afternoon was impossible. He sat in his room watching an early winter's storm batter marled fields full of stubbled corn, snow slipping silently, horizontally, past his window. In the distance, white clapboard farmhouses with amber glowing windows disappeared under drifting white waves, yet as he watched his reflection superimposed on the passing landscape all he could think about was of a future that, until just a few hours ago, had seemed all but impossible. But his bemused ramblings were of course quite mad, his wanderings the ravings of a hopelessly, relentlessly immature loneliness. 

And her eyes. What was it he had seen? A manic, trapped feeling? Then sudden resolution? But could he trust himself to understand what he'd seen? Had he seen certainty, or the pure, unadulterated ambiguity of a predator closing in for the kill? 

He felt lost, inadequate to the moment. And as always, alone. 

He wasn't a romantic, after all. He was, had always been, a scientist. 

And then Goethe's Werther slipped into his consciousness. Goethe...the scientist, the romantic. The poet who'd made his Faust relevant to every nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. But no, Crossfield knew he wasn't a romantic, wasn't in the slightest way a Goethe. He was, if anything, an inarticulate cynic when it came to women and presumed affairs of the heart. 

Then, clarity. Another day or so on this train and he'd be in San Francisco, joining Shumway's new team on the cutting edge of cardiovascular surgery. Did he have time for Clair St Cloud and her impossible ambiguities? No, of course not. He thought of the way she had pointed at the table in the dining car, how she'd told him to come back to dinner, how she was beyond making assumptions, quite adept at calling the shots. Did he have time to deal with someone so demanding, so uncompromising? 

No. 

Once again without thinking he focused on his reflection in the window, his pale visage superimposed over the blue winter light that lay beyond. He looked at his eyes, and the steely purpose he imagined he saw there. Then he heard the harsh command in her voice, that pointing finger, and he felt a cautionary dread fill the room. 

No. No room at all for that nonsense. "We'd drive each other mad!" he said aloud. 

Polk knocked and stuck his head in; he looked at Crossfield lost in thought and withdrew, shaking his head and muttering as he walked aft. A few minutes later Clair's sister, the Zephyrette, knocked and stuck her head in and looked at Crossfield, then quite unexpectedly she came into the little compartment and sat next to him. Without missing a beat she handed him another Coke. 

He shook his head and looked at her, waiting for her to speak. 

"Doctor...uh, John? Are you alright?" 

"You are kidding, right?" 

"All right. I guess I deserved that." 

"So, you're the kid sister? What's your name again?" 

"Yup, that's me. Rebecca, the kid sister." 

"The wise-beyond-her-years, the all-knowing, all-seeing kid sister?" 

"You got it, doc." 

"I knew it. What's on your mind?" 

She smiled at his direct manner, and his obvious uncertainty. "You've got a big night ahead of you. I thought I might say: 'Keep an open mind and think before you speak'." 

"Always a good idea. Why the concern?" 

"Listen, she's talked to me about you. A lot. After...that night. Whatever you two talked about, whatever happened between the two of you, something changed inside her. Something big. She was always the headstrong free spirit in our family, always the explorer, pushing boundaries. After you...I don't know. She quit her job, quit nursing, went back to school, and now she teaches at Berkeley, writes poetry. A lot changed, but to me she's been fragile, almost broken." 

He seemed taken aback. "Broken?" 

"I'm sorry. I don't know quite how to describe it." She seemed confused, almost reluctant to go on. 

"I saw something. In her eyes." 

"Yes. I know what you mean." 

"Something dangerous," he said, almost under his breath. 

"Dangerous," she echoed. "Yes...sometimes I think so too..." 

"Has she... have there been... other..." 

"Nope. Not one." She knew that one was hard to swallow, on the surface, anyway. She stood. "Listen, can I get you a sandwich, something besides your fingernails to nibble on?" 

He looked at his fingers; they were pristine, a surgeon's vanity. He laughed. "Sure, I don't think I ate lunch. Sounds good." 

"Be right back." 

Crossfield shook his head and turned to the window. 'Well, that's two remarkable girls', he said to the reflection in the passing landscape. 

When she returned, he asked her to sit again, and they talked shop for an hour: where had she gone to school; why work on a train; was there a long list of suitors waiting for her back in San Fran? She'd gone to school in Los Angeles, she loved to travel, and no, she spent way too much time away from home and besides, she wasn't ready to settle down just yet. 

"So what about you?" she asked. "Where'd you go to school?" 

"Annapolis. Then the University of Chicago." 

"Shabby schools." She looked at him anew, sizing him up again. 

"So I've heard." She noticed he had a shy, boyish grin. 

"Internship?" 

"Stayed there." 

"Yikes! I've heard that's a toughie, too." 

"It was a nightmare. One long, unending nightmare." 

"That good? So, I'm assuming you didn't go for gynecology? So...was it...dermatology?" 

"Cardiology. Then thoracic surgery." 

"Wow. You fix broken hearts. That...suits you, John." 

He looked puzzled. "Oh?" 

"You spent the night with her, then you left her. Broken hearted." 

"Oh. I see." 

"What...? Oh. So, that's not how it happened, is it?" 

"Oh... Maybe it's best we just skip it." 

"Okay. So, what's next? Why California?" 

"Taking a position at Stanford, some pretty exciting stuff going on. Good people, too." 

"I'll bet. So, there are no Mrs Crossfields lurking in the closet?" 

He laughed at the absurdity of her question, the absolute ridiculousness of the reality behind his laughter, the naked loneliness of his life since that night on this Zephyr so many years ago. No, he'd turned away from all that in the desolation of Clair's disappearance, he'd walked away in shock and fallen to the stark, simple pursuit of knowledge, and to developing his skills to almost superhuman perfection. 

But what was going on, really? Had he simply been running away, or had he simply been atoning for the sins of his intellectual fathers? Or was he running away from any kind of relationship that would force him to confront his demon-haunted dreams again and again. 

Did the pain of that brief nocturn betray him, or sustain him? 

"No. Not hardly," he finally said. "No Mrs Crossfields lurking in the shadows." 

"May I ask you...a personal...question?" 

He didn't know what to say. All he could manage was a blank stare. 

"The thing is, John...well...do you love her?" 

He blinked, hard, and his throat constricted. "I don't think I've ever loved anyone before, or since," he said ever so quietly. 

"That's not quite an answer, is it?" 

"Perhaps. She was... important. Something of a... turning point." 

Now it was her turn to stare in disbelief. "Why do I find that kind of hard to understand, John?" 

"My life is kind of hard to understand, Rebecca." 

"Okay, let me try again. What did you feel? When you saw Clair this morning? What went through your mind?" 

"You do like to ask personal questions, don't you?" 

"I have my reasons. I hope you don't mind." 

"Okay, I think I get it," he said, shaking his head at her tenacity. "Well, I think on the one hand I felt lucky. Lucky, like a future I'd never thought possible was suddenly opening up, right then and there. On the other hand, a lot's happened the last few years that makes going into any kind of relationship almost impossible. So, I guess it's complicated, hard to understand. I know that doesn't make much sense, but there it is." 

"Oh, I think I understand, but this isn't exactly a simple, uncomplicated situation, is it?" She looked at him, saw what looked like pain drift across his face... like clouds across an open prairie. 

"It doesn't seem all that complicated to me." 

"Well, I mean, you met this girl on a train ten years ago, you talked for a while, you had a very intense emotional experience, and then you never saw her again. And you never tried to find her, to see her again? Yet you say you've never loved anyone before, or since. It doesn't add up, John. Sorry. It just doesn't." 

"No?" He looked out the window, nodded, mesmerized by his reflection superimposed on the bleak landscape outside. "Nothing in my life ever has." 

"What? Added up?" 

His reflection met his stare as he said, "Things rarely add up for me." 

"Really? Annapolis, Chicago? Medicine? I don't get it, John. What didn't add up for you?" 

"Clair." 

"Clair?" 

"Sounds silly, I guess, but..." and his voice cracked as he stumbled through his thoughts, "there haven't been many people in my life...people like her." 

She looked at him and suddenly it all came together. Lost in life, overcome by events, consumed by intellectual pursuits, and lonely...oh so lonely. And out of the blue, Clair. A lightning bolt to the heart, then... nothing. Clair had bolted, true to her free-spirited form, and as always, leaving scattered human wreckage in her wake. And John? Back into the void, only he'd never known the chain he had unwittingly become a part of, and so, back he drifted into his race against time and loneliness. Alone again, and all she could see before her now was that after all these years he'd grown resigned to his solitude, perhaps even welcomed it, so he'd never seen this coming. Who could? 




Vista Dome



Yes. Now she understood what he meant. She took his hands in hers and looked at him. 

He turned, looked at her. He couldn't read what was in her eyes, but the warmth of her skin on his was pure electricity, and he couldn't see where Rebecca ended, and Clair began. 

"John. Go slow tonight. Don't force anything, don't jump to any conclusions. Okay?" She squeezed his hand, then let go abruptly and left the compartment. He didn't see the tears forming in her eyes, and quite possibly he'd not have been able to see them through his own. 

+++++ 

Polk called dinner a few minutes before five, and Crossfield walked forward to the dining car. He entered and noted that this car, too, had a "Vista Dome", and that whatever was being cooked in the kitchen smelled just like his idea of home. Roast chicken, potatoes, spinach...all filled the air with an infinite warmth, but then again, just about everything about this train was like a trip into some sort of weird, collective past, like the hopes and dreams of an entire continent had crossed the land on these silver rails. And his hopes and dreams? Hadn't they too been borne along these very same rails? 

But that was yesterday. 

What lay ahead? 

Well, it certainly didn't hurt that Rebecca St Cloud was standing beside the stairs that led up to the dome. She was really quite attractive, he saw, stunning in her wild, cinnamon-haired way, and he looked into her gray-green eyes attentively, looking for some signal of what might lie ahead. 

"They're upstairs, John. Go on up," she said. She was a short, thin beauty, not as stunning as Clair - but somehow more wholesome looking. But where Clair was now deep and sternly calculating, Rebecca was openly, disarmingly empathic. 

"Right," he said with his most engaging grin. He moved forward toward the curved stairway when the word 'they're' snapped into consciousness. He stopped, turned, looked at Rebecca, and almost fell away from the penetrating stare that met his eyes. He felt his world shudder and reached out to hold onto the smooth stainless rail that led upstairs, and his head tilted quizzically when he tried to read what was in Rebecca's eyes. 

She pointed up the stairs and silently mouthed the words 'Go ahead'. 

He pursed his lips and nodded, felt the way ahead was along the razor's edge of a most uncertain future. 

'They' were already seated at the forward end of the dome, with their backs to him, so he walked carefully to their table, holding onto grab rails as the car swayed over a switch. The little girl beside Clair was, he guessed, maybe five or six, but then he saw the characteristic rolls on the back of the girl's short neck, the too large ears, and his heart began to sink. He approached the table, and put his hand on Clair's shoulder; she gave a little start, then turned and looked up at him. 

John Crossfield swayed to another quick sideways motion of the train, then sat and looked at Clair, and at the little girl by her side. 

Yes. Down Syndrome. Unmistakeable. 

"Hello, John," Clair said tentatively, her eyes trained on his. 

"Well, hello. And who have we here?" 

"Yes. John, this is my daughter, Mary Madeleine St Cloud." 

On hearing Tetsuko's Christian name, Crossfield took in a deep, very sharp breath. He felt gut-punched, but looked at the little girl, held out his hand, and said "It's very nice to meet you, Mary," as gallantly as he could. He could feel Clair's eyes measuring his every move, gauging the qualities of his reaction to the girl. 

Yes, he felt he was being measured, as if for a fine suit. And it was unnerving. 

Crossfield's eyes danced between the two 'girls' across the table, yet he felt a sense of hesitance when his eyes met Clair's. What was she afraid of? 

Of his reaction? 

Or of her own? 

Yet there across the table was a disarming, wide-eyed innocence in Mary's eyes. 

And an eternity hung in the air, apparent. Suddenly all he could think of was his very nearly continuous exposure to low level radiation all around Hiroshima over the months before he met Clair, and the possible implications of that exposure. Could it be...? 

"Are you Captain John?" Mary asked. "Mom tells me about Captain John all the time!" 

Crossfield hesitated, looked at Clair, noted the subtle nod of her head. 

"Well Mary, yes, I guess I am." 

She beamed, her pleasure spilling over and filling the dome, then she slipped out of her chair and came to Crossfield and hugged him. 

His tears came out of the blue, and he wrapped an arm around the girl, pulled her close while he struggled with the sudden shifts his life was taking. 

He looked up out of the Vista Dome into the swirling snow as he came to grips with his emotions, but all he saw was the inky darkness beyond the glass, and in time he looked across the table to Clair. 

Her hands were steepled over her nose; a single tear welled in her right eye and spilled down onto the starched white tablecloth. The teardrop spread out slowly, not quite like a ripple across a pond, more like the tumbling crash of emotions cascading through his mind. As Crossfield watched, she took in a sudden sharp breath through her fingers, but she did not break eye contact. Now, however, he could feel a million questions in her eyes. 

Or was it just an answer he saw forming in her blue pools. One single answer. 

Mary pulled away and looked at her mother, then to Crossfield. "Mom cries a lot, Captain John. Don't you think crying's silly?" 

"Sometime's it is, Mary, but sometime it's the right thing to do, too." 

She regarded him wide-eyed, as if he'd just sprouted a second nose. "Really?" 

"Really." She had her mother's penetrating eyes, he noted. Or, were they his? 

And then, without missing a beat, she asked: "Do you like macaroni and cheese?" 

"Love it. What about you?" 

Mary nodded, said "Yup!", then looked back at her mother, but Crossfield regarded Mary more closely as she looked away, then suddenly - almost instinctively - he was looking at her more professionally than felt comfortable. Her lips were blueish, her fingernails too, and without thinking he took her right hand in his and pressed on a fingernail and watched as blood too slowly rebounded into the nail bed. Now she was looking back at him, regarding him quizzically, suspiciously, and then she stepped away warily and went back to her seat, taking her mother's hand in one fluid, natural motion. 

Crossfield looked from Mary to Clair, saw her look away. 

Of course he knew that many Down Syndrome kids were born with congenital heart defects, but treatment options were limited, and as suddenly he could better understand the quiet questions in Clair's eyes. She was, after all, a nurse. Or had been, once upon a time. 

But now...she was a poet? 

A poet? 

Where had that come from? What kind of war had Clair waged in her own heart? 

+++++ 

In his compartment two hours later, he was lost in thought, going over in his mind all that had happened over dinner... How Clair had led the conversation ever so gently to his paternity, how she'd let Mary come to her own understanding of who Captain John really was, and what that might mean for all of them in the years ahead. 

He'd marveled at the austere purity of her words, been entranced by the elaborate traceries she wove with her fingers under the dome of the night, and he'd suddenly understood how Clair could be a poet. Outside, bitter cold winds swept the prairies of Kansas, and somewhere in the night Colorado's Rockies lay ahead, yet Clair St Cloud was the master of this moment. She was the concerned mother one moment, measuring and assessing his suitability as a father the next, and then she was the wild, unbroken spirit he'd met ten years ago. 

The nurse, and the free-spirited poet. As impossible to reconcile as the cold winter storm raging outside with the warmth in her eyes. The contradictions were overwhelming, too. She would ask a question, brighten at his response, then collapse into poses of domineering certainty the next. Mindful of his thoughts and feelings one moment, then dismissive of them within the span of a single heartbeat, subordinating his role within a series of utilitarian calculations. 

Now, sitting in his darkened compartment, he'd grown increasingly angry. Clair was, it now seemed to him, unilaterally mapping out a future for Mary that now included him, and it was as if she would countenance no other outcome to this unplanned reunion. She believed, he presumed, in la forza del destino, the impossibility of chance encounters. Everything was written in the stars - if one had but the simple grace to see. And John Crossfield had better get with program...or else! 

A gentle knock on his compartment door, and Polk stuck his head in. 

"Can I make up your bed, Cap'n?" 

"No, Polk, I think I may just sit up for a while." 

"Awright, Cap'n. I'll be by to check in a bit." 

Polk closed the door; Crossfield turned and looked at his reflection in the pale blue-green night light and drifted away into the night. Then, while lost in the frosted glass, he saw the compartment door open again and a most feminine form slipped in. He turned, expecting a confrontation with Clair to materialize from the ether, but there was Rebecca St Cloud, the wise-beyond-her-years, the all-knowing, all-seeing kid sister. 

She held a drink in her hand, and placed it in his. 

"You look like you could use this," she said. 

"And this is?" 

"Drambuie. On the rocks." 

He took the drink, placed it on the little table under the window. 

She took in his evasiveness, almost decided to retreat, but pressed on. "Doesn't do much good if you don't give it a chance, John." 

He picked up the drink, sniffed it tentatively, then took a sip and rankled his nose. 

"Sorry. Not much of a drinker." 

"I'd have never guessed," she said through a bubbly chuckle. "So, how did it go tonight?" 

"I was going to ask you," he replied. "Quite a surprise." 

She shrugged. "They're locked in their compartment. Light's off." 

"Indeed." 

"I wasn't sure she should break it to you...I wasn't sure this was the best way..." 

"I'm not sure there could ever be a good way," Crossfield said. "I wouldn't know how to, so I certainly can't fault her." 

"Really?" 

"Really." 

"You're not mad?" 

"Mad? No, not really. Perplexed, more than anything else, I suppose." He sighed, still trying to fathom the evening's cascading implications. "I guess I still can't understand why she just left... Oh, I forgot. That's not the official party line, is it?" 

"I suppose not," she said. "What did happen?" 

Crossfield spend an hour recounting his time with Clair ten years ago, and he was surprised how easy it was to talk with Clair's "kid sister". He spoke briefly, hesitantly, about his assignment in Hiroshima, the hastily planned mission to D.C., and then he talked about Tetsuko-san and his personal recollections of surveying the human wreckage in and around the shattered city of Hiroshima. 

And as suddenly he expressed his deepest fear. 

"The first thing that ran through my mind when I saw Mary," he began professorially, "was that some sort of radiation induced mutation might have caused her condition. There are no definitive statistics to warrant such a conclusion, but then again, I've turned away from that area of study." 

"Do you think it's worth looking into?" she asked. 

"Why? There's not anything that can be done about it at this point, and any kind of concrete interpretation is probably, well, decades away. I'll end up feeling responsible one way or the other, no matter what the current literature says..." 

"Responsible? As in, guilty?" 

"I...that was...is my gut feeling. Yes." 

She reached out, took his hand. "Don't, John. Don't do that to yourself. You didn't...it's not your fault." 

"It's not that easy..." 

"Yes, John, it is. It's not your fault. It's not your fault that she bolted from you, either. That's always the way she's reacted to... 

"To what? Commitment?" 

Rebecca chuckled again. "Wow. She really got to you tonight, didn't she?" 

Even in the darkened compartment he felt her eyes boring in. "I've not been...well, yes. Meeting her all those years ago was, as I said, one of the most important things that ever happened in my life. And I finally managed to stop thinking about her just a few years back..." 

"So tonight was more than just a shock?" 

"You could say that." 

"And Clair? Did you get a sense that..." 

"That she's going to run away again?" 

"Well, no, but I was going to say that's the way she's always reacted to serious events in her life. We were all surprised how she rallied around Mary. I think my mom expected her to put Mary up for adoption." 

"Oh? What would you have done?" 

"This isn't about me, John. Still, when Clair told me she was pregnant I was still in nursing school. I moved in with her, stayed when she went back to school for her master's, then her PhD." 

"Really? Where's she teaching?" 

"Berkeley." 

"You all still live together?" 

"With my travel schedule, and her teaching, it works out." 

"So you've been there, with Clair and Mary..." 

"Yes. The whole time." 

"Mary's heart? What's going on with that?" 

"Not sure. Just that Clair has taken her to a clinic recently. Do you think something's wrong? I mean, something serious?" 

"That would be my guess, yes, but that's just a hunch at this point." 

She nodded her head, looked away, yet she still had a firm grasp on his hand, and he found himself wondering why. More curious still, he found himself comfortably adrift in the perfumed aires of the moment. His eyes moved slowly across the line of her face, her patrician nose, then slowly down the line of her arm, eventually lingering on the curves of her thigh. Yes, he was taking in all of Rebecca St Cloud, and very confused because he was liking what he saw, and felt. He was, in the heady mists of the moment, quite surprised to conclude that she was as pretty as Clair - in a most subtle way - and she certainly appeared the more level-headed. As his eyes settled on her legs he thought how goddamn inappropriate these thoughts were becoming, and shook his head, tried to clear his thinking. 

Then he was aware that she was looking at him, and he grew acutely mindful that he was still staring at the line of her legs, yet her hand never left his. 

He felt her other hand caress his cheek, and he looked up, into her eyes. 

He saw concern there, compassion, empathy. Perhaps the whisper of a tear forming. 

He felt more than saw a tremor pass through her, then she leaned forward and kissed him gently. 

He responded. 

Her lips parted. 

He placed his hands on either side of her face, ran fingers lightly across the nape of her neck, felt the impossible lightness of her tongue on his. 

'What am I doing?' he asked himself. 'Where can this possibly go?' 

She pulled away. "I'm sorry, John. I really am. I had no intention..." 

"I understand." 

"This must be the most confusing..." 

A gentle knock on the door. 

Rebecca stood, moved to the door. She opened it, and Crossfield could see Clair St Cloud standing in the brightly lit corridor. He could see the surprise of bitter recognition on Clair's face, in her eyes, and he saw her spin and walk away. Rebecca took off after her, leaving the swinging door to Crossfield's compartment beating to the heartbeat of another lifetime, the heartbeat of another family's presumed dysfunction. 

He wondered what the devil had just happened, but something else hit him within the crystalline air of that moment: he found himself staring at echoes of Clair's eyes and wondering if this was the first time Rebecca St Cloud had come between Clair and her destiny, and if so, had the last few hours all been just a game. 

And of more importance, on the brink of so many momentous decisions, why had he let this happen? 

Deep in the night, unexpected thoughts of Thomas Jefferson filled Crossfield's mind; he saw Jefferson's letter to Maria Cosway in his mind's eye, and Clair's haunted eyes reading the letter. Jefferson's 'Dialogue of the Head versus the Heart'. Lost in love for her, feeling better suited to death than continuing on among the living, Jefferson rationalized his choice to leave Cosway and return to America, even as he recognized the choice to live without her love was to embrace death. 

Sometime in the night sleep came for him, and he fell into a dream. 

All was darkness, everywhere. Cool, damp darkness, and water. 

He was standing on a rocky shore. In the darkness of his dreams. 

He saw a boat, a small boat, paddling his way. A single boatman rowed. 

Ah, the River Styx. 

"I'm dead," he said into the night. "It's about time!" 

The boat drew near, he heard the hollow collision as the boat hit the rocky shore, and the boatman beckoned wordlessly. As soon as he was aboard the little boat, the boatman pushed off and he steered back across the river. As his eyes got used to the darkness he thought he recognized Thomas Jefferson rowing the boat. 

Soon he could just make out a single point of light ahead, then a distant shore. 

The air, he noticed, was warmer. 

The hard outline of an opposing shoreline appeared ahead. Rocks, sharp, jagged rocks loomed in shifting mists, illuminated by the single point of light. Deep shadows lay between the rocks, and rough shapes suddenly emerged - and as quickly disappeared into dark shadows. 

The shoreline loomed, he felt the bottom of the boat grinding across sand and rocks, and he stood as the boat stopped. Jefferson looked sad, resigned to his fate, and not at all sympathetic. 

Crossfield turned, looked at the bright white light ahead, and clambered out of the boat and started to walk as a moth to the flame. After what felt like hours he came to a deep pit and he walked to the edge and looked down. 

The were seven rough concentric levels spread out below, and scenes of unimaginable carnage of worsening severity on each deepening level, and only then did he notice Jefferson was still by his side. The old man seemed mesmerized by the tortured souls writhing below, and then by the brilliant light hovering above the pit. 

Yet he could recognize the light for what it truly was: the spark of destruction that man had unleashed above Hiroshima, and deep within the light, the madly spinning form of Clair St Cloud... 

He woke with a start, felt sweat running down his neck, and he looked out the window. The city of Denver crawled by slowly, then, as the Zephyr wound it's way through foothills and canyons, the train began the arduous climb up into the Rockies. As mountains rose into the early morning sky, his reflection in the glass kept him company, but in his eyes he saw Clair St Cloud spinning in the light and Thomas Jefferson regarding his letter to Maria Cosway, and Crossfield found himself wondering if he was not better suited to death. 

+++++ 

Crossfield packed his belongings as the Zephyr made it's way slowly down the Feather River Canyon, and on into Sacramento, California, and as the train approached Oakland and the bay beyond, Crossfield found himself lost within the icy grip of the deepest despair he'd ever known. Neither Clair nor Rebecca had returned to his compartment that first night or since, nor had he chanced to venture out into the train, aside from one short walk up into the shocking winter light under the Vista Dome. 

It was odd, too, how he found it so easy to think up there, looking out on the world as it slipped by. There seemed to be one rhythm of life "here" on the train, and another, syncopated beat outside - though this was just barely visible to Crossfield. People walking in towns, doing their daily business and barely looking up at his passing train, and then all those cars moving along winding roads that paralleled the tracks from time to time. This layering of worlds, visible as sedimentary strata of realities, all moved to other rhythms, and at more than one point it felt to Crossfield that his life, his reality, was now held in abeyance - as long as he remained on this train. If only he could stay onboard forever, he told himself, things would be fine. 




Vista Dome



"Fine, yes," he heard himself say aloud. "Hide, evade. Isolate myself further. Why not become a monk?" 

And so Crossfield's separate rhythm continued, just as the California Zephyr continued westbound. Polk brought his meals to the compartment, and while he'd picked at them as best he could, Crossfield was lost within conflicting waves of presumed guilt and an almost somnambulant inability to focus on anything but his reflection in the glass. He focused on his eyes, but so easily on the dark circles that had formed around them, but now Clair's eyes were there too, and they followed his everywhere he looked. The blazing white covered plains west of the Great Salt Lake, the climb into the Sierra, the descent to Sacramento, the fertile Central Valley...such vast emptiness, such a vast collection of realities, and with each passing mile the more divorced from reality he felt. 

Finally, he made out the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges in the distance, felt the train slowing for street traffic in Oakland, and he suddenly knew that that "other world" out there was closing in. No matter how fast you run, the consequences of our choices were always there, always waiting. He could see the station's platform's ahead, red-capped porters already standing by to help people with their luggage, and as the train slowed to a crawl the weight of the world seemed to press in from every direction. 

He sat for a long time after the train came to a stop, and looked out on happy family reunions as they broke out on the platform below. He watched as Clair and Mary were greeted by, he assumed, her parents, and with a feeling of cold dread locked around his heart he watched his future walk off through the terminal. 

She never once looked back. 

Polk came to the open door and leaned in. "Can I help you with your bags, Cap'n?" 

"Not much to carry, Polk. Thanks, though." 

"Okay, Cap'n. You take care." 

Crossfield stood, handed the old man his tip. "It was good to see you again, Polk. Maybe next time?" 

"Yessir, Cap'n. I'll be here. While longer, anyways." The old man started to turn, but stopped. "Cap't, could I ask you something?" 

"Sure." 

"I got a granddaughter, she's going to college, first year, wants to be a doctor." 

"Oh? Good for her!" 

"Well, thing is, she don't know nothin' about bein' no doctor. You reckon you could talk with her sometime?" 

"Sure thing, Polk. I'd be happy to." 

"Really? That would be great, Cap'n!" 

"I don't have a phone number at home yet, but here's my office number." Crossfield handed over a business card. "Let me get settled in, so have her give me a call in a week or so." 

"I sure will, Cap'n," Polk beamed. 

"By the way, Polk, what's her name?" 

"Loretta, Cap'n." Polk took the card Crossfield handed him like it was a precious thing, then took Crossfield's hand and shook it. "Golly, Cap'n, thanks. I mean it. Thanks. I been worried about her. She needs a hand." 

Crossfield smiled and watched the old man leave, then turned away and grabbed his two bags, looked out the window one more time. After a moment he turned back to the door. 

Rebecca St Cloud was standing in the corridor, looking at him, that gentle, empathic smile on her face. 

Crossfield dropped his bags. The sight of her was like a sunburst of joy. Despite all he'd thought about the last twelve hours, that was the reality of this moment, and he was powerless before the honesty of his reaction. She must have seen it in his eyes; she came to him and fell into his arms. Crossfield breathed her in and was immediately - and once again - lost in the heady aires of her perfume, and she turned her face up to his and they kissed again, longer and deeper than before. 

When at last she broke away, he looked down into her tear-swept eyes. "Was it that bad?" he finally asked. 

"Well. I'm homeless, if that's what you mean." 

"Yup. That's pretty bad." He held her in his eyes for a moment, lost in her soft beauty, all decisions made. "I've got a little place down in Menlo Park staked out. Would it be too forward of me to ask if you'd like to bunk-out down there for a while?" 

She bit her lip - her eyes atremble - as she looked at him, measuring the seriousness of his offer. "I'm hungry, John. Know anyplace where we could grab a bite?" 

"Nope, but I reckon we can find something." 

"Yup. Reckon so. Maybe we can just make it up as we go, eh?" 

He took her hand and they made their way from the train. 

"Yup. Sounds good to me. We'll make it up as we go." 

+++++ 

A few weeks later, on a crisp December morning, Clair St Cloud called John and Rebecca, and asked if she could drop Mary off for the rest of the weekend. She came by later that Saturday morning, and Mary seemed excited to see Aunt Rebecca, though she was more than a little reserved around 'Captain John'. Clair was bright and animated, and went over what she had packed for Mary. She was headed, she said as she headed back out to her car, to Big Sur for a conference, and her baby-sitter had called at the last minute, canceling, and the parents were in Seattle for the weekend. 

"Glad to help," Crossfield said to this new reality, looking at her eyes as she spoke. "Anytime." 

Clair started to reach out, to touch his face, but she caught herself and pulled back. "It was nice to see you again, John. On the train. So nice, so very unexpected." 

"Yes, it was." 

She held out her hand. He took it. 

"Well, goodbye then," she said, turning and walking down to her little cream colored M-G convertible. 

She drove to downtown San Francisco - not to Big Sur, and wound her way to California Street, to the Stanford Court Hotel, then to a room on the seventh floor. She looked around the elegant room, walked to a large window and opened it, looked out over the city and the bay beyond. 

Clair St Cloud sighed, then went to the bed and opened her purse, took out a bottle of Seconal and looked at it for a long time, regarding it with curiosity. She looked around the room, found a glass on the bathroom counter and filled it from the tap, then walked to the bed and took all the pills. When she began to feel light-headed, perhaps even light enough to fly, she ran for the open window and flew off into the midday sun - and into the cool embrace of her beckoning clouds. 

+++++ 

November 1963 

Oakland, California 

Soft white clouds scudded in low over the bay, occasionally enveloping islands and bridges in cool mist, the waters of the bay dappled with sudden bursts of pure sunshine as clouds raced through the Golden Gate. Gulls circled above and dove into the churning waters behind busy fishing boats, while insect-like tugboats led a huge aircraft carrier between Alcatraz Island and Fisherman's Wharf towards Oakland, towards John Crossfield and his daughter, Mary. 

Train number 18, the eastbound California Zephyr was loading in Oakland, and Crossfield held his daughter's hand as he helped her up the stainless steel steps that led up into the Silver Planet, the domed observation car at the end of the train where so much of their history together had been born. An ancient Polk handed the 'Cap'n' her wheelchair when the frail young woman was up on the landing, and Crossfield wheeled her down the narrow corridor to Drawing Room A. While they settled in, and as the Zephyr pulled slowly from the station and made it's way through the city, Polk came and talked with Mary while Crossfield rolled her wheelchair back to vestibule and stowed it in a luggage cubby. Before Polk left to work his way through his assigned sleeping cars collecting tickets, Polk spoke softly to Crossfield when he returned: 

"Miss Rebecca...she workin' today. I reckon she knows you two are onboard." 

Crossfield's jaw clenched; it had been several years since he had laid eyes on her, and the memory of Clair's suicide came back in a blinding flash. "Luck of the draw, I suppose. When's lunch, Polk?" 

"Eleven, as usual, Cap'n. You want I should make a reservation?" 

"No, Polk, why don't you just bring us a couple of hamburgers and Cokes. Whenever it's convenient." 

"Alright, Cap'n." He looked at Mary again before speaking, this time quite softly, almost under his breath. "She don't look so good, Cap'n. She doin' alright?" Crossfield shook his head; Polk put his hand on Crossfield's shoulder. Polk's grand daughter Loretta was in her first year at Stanford Medical School, and living at Crossfield's house to help out with expenses. The two families had grown close over the last couple of years, especially after Crossfield had taken an active role in helping Loretta through the tougher parts of her pre-med sequence. "I'm sure sorry, Cap'n," Polk said as he looked at Mary. "Well, you let me know if you need anything." 

Crossfield nodded, appreciated his friend's concern. When Polk was gone, Crossfield sat beside Mary and together they watched the bungalows and warehouses of East Oakland give way to the eucalyptus covered slopes of the Coastal Foothills, and while the train wound it's way through hills and canyons to the fertile Central Valley, Crossfield talked about what was passing by outside the train. Mary asked questions from time to time, but for the most part she just held her father's hand and looked up at him when he spoke. Sometime before noon the train crossed a river on a noisy metal bridge, and then pulled into Sacramento's Union Station. The platform was deserted, he noticed, but inside the station huge throngs of people stood transfixed. 

Polk entered carrying two plates and put these down on the small fold-out table just under the window, then returned moments later with two glasses of Coke. 

"Something's going on out there, Polk. Everyone's in the station; it's like they're all staring at something on the walls." 

"I'll see if I can find out, Cap'n. Got to help a few folks just got on get settled in first." Polk closed the door and disappeared down the corridor once again. 

"Sacramento's the capitol, isn't it, Daddy?" 

"It sure is, Mary. I'm not sure if we can see the capitol building or not. Maybe after we leave the station..." 

He heard the train being called on speakers outside the train, probably on the platform, and then he saw a few people in the station turn and make their way out on to the platform; Crossfield saw that almost everyone appeared to be in shock; a few people - both men and women - were crying. Perhaps ten minutes later, after the Zephyr pulled out of the station and turned east toward the Sierras, Polk came and stuck his head into the compartment. 

"Cap'n, there was something on the TV. President Kennedy, in Dallas. He's been shot." 

Crossfield stared at Polk in disbelief. "What?" 

"Mister Kennedy, Cap'n. He been shot." 

Crossfield saw that there were tears in the old man's eyes, and that much at least was easy to understand. Kennedy represented a real break with the old old ways, and a lot of people were ready for that kind of change. Crossfield considered himself a Roosevelt Democrat, always would be, so the impossibly close electoral battle between Kennedy and Nixon had rattled him. Still, President Kennedy had, to his way of thinking anyway, acquitted himself reasonably well so far in office, but the idea that the president, any president from any political party, could be shot struck him as ludicrous beyond reason. 

"Was there any word on his condition, Polk?" 

"Some folks are saying he was shot in the head, Cap'n. That a priest been called." 

"Dear God." 

"What is it, Daddy?" 

Crossfield turned, saw that Mary wasn't looking out the window any longer. 

"Did something happen to Mr Kennedy?" she asked. 

"Yes, he's been hurt. Something happened in Dallas." 

"Is he okay, Daddy?" 

"I don't think so, honey, but I don't know for sure." 

Her eyes filled with tears, her lips trembled . "Oh Daddy! Why? Wasn't he a good man?" 

"Don't matter none," Polk said. "Good men get killed all the time, darlin'. It ain't written nowhere that only evil men get killed." Polk looked from Mary to Crossfield, then shrugged his shoulders. "I guess he was just tryin' to change things some people didn't want changed, so they had to go and kill him. Maybe it's just all this hate in the world..." 

"I don't know, Polk. Maybe it's that simple, but I just don't know." 

"Why is there so much hate in the world, Daddy? I don't understand." 

Crossfield dried a tear on Mary's cheek, ran his fingers through her hair. "Neither do I, Mary. And I hope I never do." He saw Rebecca St Cloud out in the corridor and she whispered something into Polk's ear. He stiffened, then turned and walked away. 

She stepped into the compartment, and Crossfield's eyes narrowed. He'd not seen her in almost five years, and though he rarely talked about her with Mary he was almost certain his daughter understood that something bad had happened between her father and aunt. 

"What is it, Rebecca?" 

"We heard on the radio. Kennedy is dead." 

Mary broke out in deep sobs, and Rebecca rushed to her seat, knelt close and hugged her. Crossfield stood and walked from the compartment, turned and walked down to the bar under the dome. He found a subdued covey of people gathered there, talking about events in Dallas and wondering, like everyone else, what was going to happen next. 

He ordered a ginger ale and walked back to his compartment; Rebecca was waiting for him in the corridor. 

"Polk's in there with her. She's calmed down some." 

Crossfield nodded his head, but he said nothing. 

"You're not going to talk to me, are you, John?" 

"What's there to talk about?" 

Her eyes narrowed; Crossfield folded his arms protectively across his chest. 

"She looks awful, John. What's happening?" 

"The walls of her heart, the septa, are malformed, and they're beginning to, to leak, very badly now." 

"And there's nothing you can do?" 

Crossfield shook his head. "Nothing, short of replacing her heart." 

"Can you do that?" 

Again, Crossfield shook his head. 

"So. You're taking her to see your parents? Where do they live?" 

"Still on the farm. North of Philadelphia; we're going for Thanksgiving." 

"Do you think...think you'll ever stop hating me?" 

"I don't hate you, Rebecca." He stared into those lovely eyes, unsure what to say, then: "You frighten me." 

She recoiled, speechless, disappointment clear on her face. 

Crossfield looked towards his compartment: "Well, I've got to get back..." 

"John?" She reached out, grabbed his arm. "I'm sorry. I fell in love with you. I don't know how or why, but I did. Can't you at least forgive me for that?" 

"Forgive you!?" Crossfield very nearly shouted. "How can I forgive you...when I can't even forgive myself!" 

Rebecca St Cloud literally threw herself into Crossfield's arms, she hugged him with all her might, but soon realized his arms hung limply by his sides, and she pulled back, looked up into his eyes. 

"I'm sorry, Rebecca. But...no, I just can't..." 

"Could I at least spend some time with Mary?" 

"Sure. I'm sorry, sure. Go ahead." 

She went into the compartment; he turned, walked back to the stairway that led up to the Vista Dome...where all these spinning gyres had started fifteen years ago. He paused, took it all in, then walked up the steep stairs into the light, looking at the clouds overhead as he climbed, then at the Sierra Nevada mountains looming ahead as the California Zephyr arced along a broad curve. He stopped when he topped the stairs, looked at the seat Clair St Cloud had been sitting in all those years ago, and he thought of Mary, and Tetsuko. But there was Clair...always Clair. 

Then in his mind's eye he fought off the overarching vision of an impossibly large flash of light above the city of Hiroshima, then he saw John Kennedy, his cold, shattered body in Dallas, and of like an equation on a chalkboard, it all came down to Mary's last question. 

Why was there so much hate in the world? Sitting under the Vista Dome - looking out on such a pristine landscape - it was hard to imagine so much hate loose in the world. 

Then he was staring into echoes of Rebecca's question: Why couldn't he forgive her? But was forgiveness really the issue? If it really was as simple as she claimed, that she had simply fallen in love with him, what was there to forgive? So, wasn't the real issue his inability to forgive himself for being angry at Clair, and for falling in love with her sister? 

Crossfield looked at his reflection in the dome and felt revulsion. For himself. His mind filled with an inconsolable rage as he realized he hated himself. Hate, for what he was, and for the role he had played shaping the ragged confines of the cage humankind created for itself. 

Could the survivors of Hiroshima ever forgive the people who had rained the fires of creation down on their heads as dawn broke? Could Americans never forgive their own divisions long enough to stop killing one another? Was it really as simple as old Polk believed? Would the dialectic of good and evil truly command every human endeavor - for all time? Were humans simply puppets on unseen strings, moving to the music of the spheres? Was Free Will a farce, or were good and evil the constructs of simple-minded children, children doomed to always live in the dark, watching the shadows on the wall? 

The Zephyr was approaching a small mountain town in late afternoon light; all was golden-hued optimism, the air seemed pregnant with subdued possibility. As the train slowed for a crossing, Crossfield looked out the dome at two schoolboys fighting in a schoolyard, dust rising from their feet as they circled one another, waiting to land the next blow. A few hundred yards further along, he looked down on a young couple walking along a creekside trail, holding hands. Fighting, loving. Living, dying. Humans would never be perfect, never, but why was there so little room in this thing called life for simple forgiveness? 

'What hope is there,' he asked himself, 'without that one, simple act of faith?' 

Here, up under the dome of the sky, in the clear light of day, the answer had never seemed so obvious. He looked back at the small town as it receded from view, looked back on all the good and ill that he had seen in this life, and he wondered if to forgive was a show of weakness, or a sign of strength? Wasn't that what Tetsuko-san had shown him inside her misty fortress in the clouds? Hadn't she, against all odds, opened the gates to her world for him? 

Her's had been an act of love, the very essence of strength. That was how she had met her world's need. 

How would he meet his? 

+++++ 

Crossfield stood in the doorway to his compartment, and once again recalled this was the very same compartment he had been in with Clair, back in 1948, and that now he was looking at Rebecca and Mary. Mary, the last part to Clair he would ever know, and Rebecca - so similar to Clair, yet so utterly different. Mary was on the sofa, the same sofa, now lying on her side, her head in her aunt's lap, while Rebecca traced little circles in her niece's hair, looking out the window as she did, lost in thought. 

So many reflections. So many important moments, there in that glass. 

The sun was setting behind their car, and deep shadows blotted the pine covered slopes of the eastern Sierra. Now the immense high desert that led to Salt Lake City lay ahead, and beyond that far horizon...another home, from another time. 

He slipped into the compartment, went and knelt before Rebecca, and slowly took her hand in his. He kissed her fingers one by one, saw tears well in her eyes. 

She looked down at Mary, then at John. 

"Do you have time," he whispered, "to come back east with us?" 

Rebecca St Cloud nodded, smiled, but more than anything else, Crossfield sensed deep peace in her eyes. 




Vista Dome



And John Crossfield felt the resolute strength of Tetsuko-san once again, felt in his heart what it had cost the old woman to forgive him, what it meant to open the gates of her monastery to the enemy - even as radioactive ash swirled around the trees and flowers of those sundered grounds. Maybe she too had felt peace when she let go of her despair, let go of her hate. 

Maybe one day, Crossfield said to himself. Maybe one day he would completely let go of all his anger and despair, but until then he would try to forgive. Himself, most of all, because without that one first act all others would ring hollow. 

He looked at Rebecca, and at Mary, at all he had in this life to be thankful for. Perhaps, he said to himself, it takes strength, too, to be thankful. 

So, he would be strong. For Mary. For Rebecca. So that he could at long last be thankful. 

And finally, he would try to be strong for Clair. So much of his life had been defined by the bright light she had shared with him, even if ever so briefly, and though he had never really understood her life, and the demons that eventually consumed her, it was clear to him that his life would forever revolve around their brief time together. 

So, despite all the forlorn hope for a love he had ultimately proven himself unworthy of, the mistakes and false steps that had led them all to this point in time, he lived the life Clair St Cloud had bequeathed him. He had Mary, for however long he could hold on to her, and he knew now he would have to reconcile his diffident anger at Rebecca with all his human fallibility, and somehow, someway, become worthy of love. 

Of Rebecca's love, And Clair's. 

He felt Rebecca's soft skin on his own, the warmth of her being coursing through his consciousness once again, and he felt Mary's hair running through her fingers, onto his. 

In that moment, and perhaps for the very first time in his life, he knew, really knew, what it meant to feel love. Perhaps, too, in that brief, crystalline moment, as if in the blinding flash of creation, John Crossfield finally understood just how much he had to be thankful for, and just how fleeting and precious time really is. 

It would soon be Thanksgiving, after all, and there was so much to do. Because really, just as Dorothy said on her return from Oz, there's no place like home, and feeling his skin on Rebecca's he understood at last where his home would always be.  

(c) 2014 AWAL