One Hand Clapping by Barry Fields

At the station, my friends stand in a line pretending to be clapping but using only one hand. Their hands flap silently, ridiculously. A woman is looking at me through the window of the train, a goddess my friends say. She beckons to me to join her. I don’t know where the train is going. I hop on anyway.

As the train begins clanking along the tracks, I look out the window. No one is there. I wonder where they’ve gone. It’s disconcerting. The train picks up speed.

I live near the coast in a vast latticework of busy streets and avenues. My current location on Google Maps shows no streets or cities, no landmarks at all, not even the railroad tracks, as though existence itself has ceased.

“Who are you?” I ask the woman. I’ve never seen her before, but she looks familiar.

“Your guide,” she says. She’s tall, Asian, with heavy earrings that elongate her ear lobes and she wears an elaborate headdress over dark, curly hair.

“What’s your name?”

All she says in response is, “I’m here to show you the way home.”

“We just left. I’m sure I can get back on my own.”

“We’re not going back,” she says.

She’s talking in riddles. I don’t like it. After a while, I say, “I don’t have a ticket. Can I buy one on the train?”

“There’s no conductor,” she answers.

We enter a short tunnel and emerge into a panorama of pastures and rolling hills, as if we’ve gone through a wormhole. It’s spring, although it was still winter at when we left the station. Dogwoods and red leafs are flowering. I’ve never seen dogwoods and red leafs. I shouldn’t know their names.

Something’s not right.

The train passes a town a half mile distant from the tracks, built in a circle around the upper slopes of a hill, like the old hill towns of Italy. It even has a stone defensive wall. Behind it a church bell tower rises above the buildings that cluster around it. Wildflowers in yellows and reds bloom in the meadow.

“Where are we?” I ask the mystery woman.

“On a train.”

“I don’t recognize this place. How did we get here?”

“By staying on the tracks.”

Some guide.

I have the wanderlust. I want to travel. I was tired of the city, its roads and buildings, my house and job. Tired of myself. I suppose I’m getting what I wished for.

“Where are we going?” I’m trying to get a straight answer out of her.

She rolls her eyes. “I told you. Home.”

I point out the obvious. “Home is back that way. We have to be going somewhere else.”

“Why?”

I lose patience and raise my voice. “Because we’re moving in a straight line away from where we started.” I calm myself and continue. “Anyway, I’ve had enough of home. I don’t want to see it again.”

“You’re not going to see it again. You’re going to see it for the first time.”

Rational discussion must not be her strong point. Google Maps doesn’t show us having a position anymore. My strange companion says that’s normal. I don’t believe her. The countryside is pretty. We must be located somewhere.

We shifted to the past. Events that already happened.

Our seats faced forward, and across from us sat two teenage boys, busy with their phones. I tried to find out from them where we were headed.

“Excuse me. Are you twins?”

They looked up from their screens.

“No,” one of them said. “We’re not related. We don’t even look alike.”

“Well, I thought you were twins,” I said. “Where are we going?”

The look they exchanged suggested they were talking to an idiot. The one on the left answered, “There’s only one place to go.” They returned to their phones, thumbs busy.

My guide was reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was going to ask what it was about when the wheels screeched and I lurched forward. The train came to a stop. We were still in a field, but cows surrounded the train, thousands of them.

The doors opened and everyone got off the train. By the time I got outside, dozens of people were milking the cows. No one had a pail and the milk sloshed onto the grass, making white puddles before being absorbed into the ground.

“This one’s for you,” my guide said. The cow’s udder was bloated. It mooed like it was asking me to relieve it.

“I don’t know how to milk a cow.”

She showed me how to grab the teats and squeeze downward. I got on my knees and did it. Milk squirted out. Untold gallons of milk from all these cows splashed onto acres of grass and flowers. I moved on to another cow. All around me, people were milking and cows were mooing and before long the milk made a white lake on the grass over the saturated earth.

The whistle sounded and everyone sloshed back to the train. My pants were drenched from kneeling. The twin boys took their seats with wet pants. Not the woman I was traveling with, though. She wore a short, pleated dress. A silver halo glowed around her head, which I hadn’t noticed it before. Or maybe it hadn’t been there. I guessed she really was a goddess. The train began moving. She picked up her book. I forgot what I’d wanted to ask.

Outside, the empty white lake glistened in the sun. “Where did all those cows go?” I asked.

She looked up. “Home.” She returned to reading. She had this thing about going home.

The train sped on through another tunnel. At the other end was a desert, like in Utah or Arizona, with red and yellow sandstone pillars and dry canyons and mesas. A couple of Navajo Indians were herding sheep. The ground was barren and there was nothing for the sheep to eat. They seemed well-fed.

Landscapes don’t change at the snap of a finger, but no one in the carriage seemed bothered by it.

“What do you see out there?” I asked the twins.

They looked up. The one nearest the window said, “What’s always there.”

I asked my companion the same thing. “Tell me what you see,” she said. I told her. “Nice try,” she said.

I realized that no one had any luggage with them. I asked the woman about it.

She said, “You keep thinking there’s someplace to go.”

Goddess or whatever, she couldn’t have been more annoyingly obtuse. Maybe that was the point. With wanderlust, you want to be somewhere other than where you are. I didn’t seem to be anywhere, which was kind of interesting to think about. I decided I didn’t need to get off before the end.

We stopped at a station and got off.

The town looked like an old western movie set, except that the businesses lining the streets had no signs. It seemed like a stupid way to run a store or restaurant or whatever was behind the doors.

I realized who she was. Tara.

“You’re going shopping,” Tara said.

“Good. I need a toiletry kit and clean pants.”

My pants had dried with big purple blotches on them. The stains should have been white. “It’s like my ideas of what should be don’t count anymore,” I said. “Maybe they never counted to begin with, and I only thought they did.”

Tara smiled for the first time. “There’s hope for you after all.”

While waiting on line outside a store, the present imposes itself again. I don’t mind the change. The past was okay, but life has sharper edges in the present. It’s more real, somehow.

Above the door is a small sign that says Gift Shop. I watch people coming out the door. One shows off a heavy gold platter like a trophy. It must be worth a fortune. A man exits holding a wooden box, its lid fastened. He’s got a big grin. I’m looking forward to my turn.

“What are their prices like?” I ask.

She points to the sign. “Don’t be thick. It’s a gift shop.”

Inside, the man behind the counter welcomes us. He looks like a football player, especially wearing a Cowboys uniform, helmet included. The store has narrow aisles and high shelves packed with antiques, knick-knacks, jewelry, machinery, electronics. The football guy takes my height with a tape measure.

“I’ve got just the thing you need,” he says.

He rummages in the back room and returns with a duck in his arms, which he hands to me. “Here’s your gift.”

“What? This?”

Tara gives me a nudge. “Don’t be rude.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Feed it this.” The man pulls out a bag of bird food from behind the counter.

I’ve been had. I want a gold platter or a new phone. Pants if nothing else. Definitely not a duck. Tara grabs my arm and pulls me out of the store.

The train whistle announces our departure. Travelers stream along the crowded street, all walking in the same direction. Before piling onto the train, I look at the tracks in both directions. They make a perfectly straight line that goes on forever. Not a single curve. My guide assures me that the way we’re going leads home.

It’s an unusual world I’m in, where time swings without warning, a straight track takes you to the starting point, my cryptic attendant speaks nonsense, and geography shape-shifts. I give up trying to make sense of it.

What a wonderful trip I’m taking!

The duck eats the food I give it, flies onto the seat, and settles in my lap. I would ask its name, but I understand now its name makes no difference. Besides, ducks can’t talk.

At the next stop there’s no town, not even a station. Everyone but Tara and me gets off, the twins included. When the train picks up speed, a luminous emptiness replaces the landscape outside the window. The cities, towns, meadows, and deserts—all the scenery that obscured what’s been there all along has vanished.

I turn to tell Tara I see it now but she’s no longer there. I’m on this journey alone.

No matter.

The skyline of my city forms on the horizon. I recognize it, even though it’s never looked like this before. The train stops for a moment at the station. I jump off holding the duck. No one gets on. The trains lumbers away, the caboose eventually shrinking into the distance.

The duck waddles at my side through unfamiliar streets, the ones I was bored with. I’ve come back from wandering renewed. What a joy of discovery my home is. We reach my favorite park. The duck quacks goodbye and paddles out to join others swimming in the pond. I’m glad he’s found his place, too.

My wife comes to my side and we kiss. I didn’t know I was married, but of course I am. We have a strong connection. My friends are lined up on the other side of the pond, clapping with one hand. The thunderous sound reverberates across the water, ringing in my ears long after they stop.