Amtrak 234

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Amtrak 234 Copyright 2013 by Herb Schultz All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Major Terata Publications, New York www.majorterata.com This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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Cary Hayes was having difficulty recalling some basic facts where he was, how he got there, how long he had been there, why he couldnt move or speak. The last thing he remembered was nothing. It was as if he had awoken from a dreamless slumber of unknown duration to find himself completely incapacitated. Cary had seen enough movies and TV shows depicting the fates of comatose accident victims to surmise he might be one himself, but with one astonishing twist: although everyone around him doctors, nurses, orderlies, family, friends, colleagues believed he was permanently lost to unconsciousness, he could in fact hear and understand everything anyone said, and see any gesture they made whenever they moved close to the hospital bed, and stepped within range of his vision. He decided he was paralyzed and not constrained by straps and pharmaceuticals. He was utterly incapable of ordering the movement of any part of his body. The people who came to the hospital to visit him, and those who checked the tubes threaded down his throat, and those who wiped away all the leaky bodily fluids each person who came in contact with Cary simply did not seem to know he was completely aware of things happening around him. It was though he had been reduced to a machine limited to processing inputs, incapable of producing outputs, like a black box on a computer flowchart diagram with no arrows pointing out from it.

He couldnt see himself of course, but Cary had a pretty good idea of how bad he must look, how severely injured he had become. Several times in the course of each day, hospital staff would enter his room, which he learned was in a place called the neuro intensive care unit NICU to do maintenance on all the new extensions affixed to Carys broken body. He heard

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them speak of IVs and ventilator tubes, catheters and something called an NG tube, essentially a conduit for food to keep the shell of Cary alive. In his extreme peripheral vision, he could make out a bundle of wires that presumably were part of the telemetry system mentioned by someone who looked like a doctor. One day, a solitary orderly complained to no one in particular about having to once-again change the dressings on the stumps where Carys legs used to be. Jesus God! I have no legs? Until hearing this horrid news Cary had remained optimistic that his paralysis might be some kind of temporary affliction, perhaps triggered by an infection or the ingestion of a rare poison that might one day be reversed. Now he feared recovery as much as he feared remaining paralyzed.

Years earlier, Cary had been disgusted with Congressional intrusion into the sorry case of Terri Schiavo, a comatose Florida woman whose husband Michael wanted to remove her feeding tube. Michael insisted Terri had often stated her desire to be spared the grim existence of a comatose patient should she ever fall into such a state. Congress arrogantly disagreed and tried to pass laws to intervene. Certain Senators somehow knew by osmosis that Terri Schiavo had retained the capacity to understand the events around her. That Terri the apparent vegetable was in fact sentient, as was so clear from her wandering eyes. At the time, Cary found the intrusion unseemly and decidedly unscientific, but as he lay in the hospital bed he wasnt so sure these self-righteous politicians had been wrong about her cognitive state. And because of that Cary harbored even greater disdain for them now. It was one thing to force-feed a brain-dead entity it was quite another to punish a sentient human being by prolonging solitary confinement within her crumpled body. Cary often wished someone a member of his family, a rogue orderly, a careless child to pull the plug on him like they finally did for Terri.

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Several days had transpired since Cary awoke before he finally learned to which hospital he had been incarcerated. A nurse inspecting the NG tube leaned in close enough for Cary to read his badge, which was embossed with the name of the town in which the medical center was located: Valhalla, NY. Cary knew that the original Valhalla was the Valley of the Slain in Norse mythology, the home for Vikings gloriously killed in battle. Cary wondered whether indeed hoped that he had performed some glorious act prior to winding up a vegetable; before his body was slain in a battle the particulars of which were still unknown to him.

Carys wife Lee, accompanied by their only daughter Sage made the hour-long drive almost every day to Westchester Medical Center from their home in Dutchess County near the Taconic Parkway. Reviled by architects and aesthetes as McMansions, the large, tidy houses flanking the Taconic in the southern reaches of the county were in high demand from people who worked in Westchester and New York City. Some chose Dutchess County because they could not afford to live farther downstate; others resided there for the Currier & Ives charm and horsy snobbery. During those weeks (months?) Cary was totally unconscious he assumed Lee and Sage had wrung out the shock, grief and anguish that would have initially followed his predicament. Now that he
a. Westchester Medical Center

could hear them, his familys conversations seemed fairly

normal and innocuous. They never cried over his pitiable condition, nor did they express emotions befitting a tragedy befallen a loved one. Cary concluded they had participated in Grief Counseling 101 and had followed the hospital psychologists guidance on how to act and speak in his presence. Lee talked to him matter-of-factly about the kind of day she had, and of her plans

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for the rest of the week. She complained of the high prices at the market, and seethed at the nagging incompetence of the claims Nazis at the insurance company. Lee remarked often of the hair-raising traffic conditions on the Taconic. From experience, Cary knew the Taconic Parkway was particularly treacherous south of the junction with Interstate 84 where lanes converged, north- and south-bound divided by little more than a low-slung guard rail. None other than Franklin D. Roosevelt, chairman of the Taconic State Park Commission in the 1920s insisted that bridges on the Taconic be narrow and rustic in nature, and that interchanges be tightly configured. Many of the 86,400 seconds of each of
b. The Taconic Parkway

Carys days were consumed fretting that Lee and Sage might one day end up like him should they suffer a nasty encounter with a jagged rock outcropping.

When she visited Cary, Lee brought along her iPod loaded with what she thought were Carys favorite albums. Playing familiar music for her husband was part of the therapy recommended by hospital staff. Lee made a list of dozens of albums that she asked Sage to download. The albums in Carys collection were vinyl LPs unsuitable for transfer to iPod, and besides, most of Carys records were too warped from having been warehoused in the hot attic for decades. Like too many middle-aged people Cary had drifted away from the music he cherished as a young man, never bothering to replace his record collection with CDs. Later, in his thirties, Cary started to listen to opera in part to appear more musically sophisticated to his older business associates. He spent thousands to build up his collection starting with basics such as Cosi Fan Tuti, Pagliacci, Il Barbieri di Sevilla, La Boheme, moving on later to less wellknown works like La Wally and Mitridate Eupatore. Cary was particularly fond of Wagner,

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especially Die Walkre and its intense The Ride of the Valkyries, recognizable to many as the song accompanying the helicopter raid in the movie Apocalypse Now. Just as William Tells Overture conjures up images of the Lone Ranger, The Ride of the Valkyries recalls the insect-like helicopters strafing a Vietnamese village situated on the Mekong Delta. From reading the libretto of Die Walkre Cary discovered the Valkyries were women warriors of Norse legend whose name means Chooser of the Slain. The slain heroes who
c. Ride of the Valkyries

qualified to go to Valhalla.

But now, lying in bed smelling the stink of his own bed-sores, the memory of stuffy opera reminded Cary just how much he missed the music of his youth indeed how much he missed everything about his youth. And once he went down the rat hole of complete and total self-pity, Cary missed everything. He missed the feisty working meetings with his business colleagues and the partying that followed in the evenings. He missed traveling the country to engage clients at huge corporate events, schmoozing with hundreds of people. And the solitary trips he took to the edge of the Hudson River to watch barges negotiate the channel and jet-skiers scar the waters surface. He missed being intimate with Lee. Lee

He was sure his wife, if she hadnt already, would soon find a male companion to fulfill her desires. Fulfill. Her desires. A companion. Her desires. Lee.

Sadness descended upon Cary like a miasma, and he drifted fitfully to sleep.

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Cary awoke from a sublimely realistic dream, encouraged that the images conjured within his broken brain might provide much-needed insight into that fateful day his normal life ended and the journey to Valhalla began. He wanted so badly to believe his dreams might unlock critical memories otherwise inaccessible to him when in a conscious state. Oh, how Cary hoped the dream, as realistic as the buzzing fluorescent light above his head he was forced to endure each day, could provide a clue to the provenance of the accident that had torn him asunder. Like all dreams, this one was particularly obtuse. Characters inhabiting the dream appeared to be composites of various people Cary knew from the distant past, including friends from high school and college he had not encountered for almost 30 years.

As if Lewis Carroll had scripted the dream, action jumped from place to place, starting with Cary and Sage ambling up broad, imposing steps hewn of white granite into what looked to be a museum or an embassy. The stately building was fabricated from dense, colorfully-veined stones cut from a rich quarry. Each massive block had been meticulously hand-cut and set closely against its neighbors such that not even a razor blade could be forced into the seams between any two. The weather in the dream was crisp and clear. Once inside the building Cary and Sage stood in a grand entry foyer, gawking at the high ceiling and the walls of deeplyburnished wood. Colorful tapestries hung from ceiling to floor.

Dozens of passageways led off in all directions from the foyer to other rooms which in turn led to hundreds of others. It was as though the building contained an infinity of duplicates of

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itself, like a Beaux-Arts Mandelbrot Set. After wandering for some time from room to room, Cary and Sage exited the building through a door marked with the number 540. After passing through the door, father and daughter stood among strangers in an elevator car that moved briskly in both vertical and horizontal directions, switching abruptly between the two vectors. When the elevator doors finally parted, Cary, alone, walked out onto a vast expanse of lush green lawn and looked up at a crystal-clear azure sky like that on September 11, 2001.

September 11, 2001. Aka. Nine-eleven. Cary was in a conference room that day discussing a new product with far-flung business colleagues, some occupying conference rooms in other cities, some flex-working at home, multitasking between email and eBay. A half-hour into the call someone on the phone interrupted to report a breaking news item about a plane striking the World Trade Center in New York City. Certainly a small, private plane, reported the confident TV newscaster, aware that a collision by a commercial airliner was all but impossible in a jet-age of computer-instructed aircraft. After all, as the government desperately argued later, no one had ever imagined that fanatic suicidal hijackers would purposely fly a plane into a building. Cary watched the stunning news unfold on a TV monitor in his companys lunchroom, struggling to parse the image of a single, smoldering World Trade Center tower following the demise of the fatally-gashed South Tower. It was as if the lone North Tower
d. North Tower stands alone

were a Siamese twin who knows his own death is imminent because the sibling to whom hes been tethered since birth has just passed away. For all of 28 minutes and 31 seconds, the world looked upon not the Twin Towers, but a single structure, once denounced as an architectural

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outrage, but now seen as a noble, mortally-wounded warrior fighting to stay erect as long as possible so its thousands of occupants the charges entrusted to it might escape a horrid death.

Cary had never previously analyzed his dreams in order to unshroud mystery or peer into a possible future, but in his current condition he was desperate to receive some form of revelation. On the strength of the unusual dream Cary allowed himself to be convinced that whatever incident had consigned him to a hospital bed had happened on a sunny, late-summer day. Maybe even on another September 11.

Thirteen year-old Sage visited her father a few times a week after school and sometimes on the weekends, describing to him what she had learned in Oceanography or Biodiversity or some other course of study that didnt exist when Cary went to school. Sometimes Carys precocious daughter would sit for hours interacting with her iMac laptop or texting friends on her impossibly thin iPhone. Cary wondered whether the name of every device Sage owned started with an i and if he still had legs, he would kick himself for not having invested in Apple when they were at rock bottom before catapulting to one of the worlds most valuable companies. Watching his daughter fiddle with the devices, Cary started to question whether these fantastic technologies that enabled everyone to join in on a vast, virtual social network might instead encourage isolation. An isolation that would only further the need to immerse oneself in the network. People seemed lonelier, and compensated for it by sinking deeper into virtual reality.

On her visit today the day after Cary experienced his dream Sage seemed to be in a more serious mood than in visits past. She had not brought along the laptop or the iPhone. Instead, she spoke directly to Cary as though she believed he could really process information.

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Sage noted that after six months since her fathers accident, she wanted now to move ahead and complete the photo-essay project for school that had been interrupted that fateful day. Sage recalled for Cary that her assignment involved shooting photos of all the major mansions along the Hudson River, adding that she felt ready now to go back again to the Mills Mansion in Staatsburg to retake the shots that were lost in the accident which destroyed her camera and practically every moving part of Carys Saab. The car was broken into a million pieces, she said, adding that no one at the time believed a human being could survive such a horrific accident. How strange it seemed to Sage that she escaped the accident with just a few bruises while Cary had wound up legless and in locked in a coma. I know youre going to wake up someday soon, Dad, Im sure of it. And youre gonna drive again, too. Well get you a car with a special steering wheel.

Cary was overwhelmed by the revelation of the circumstances, at last, of how he had gotten here. He was satisfied to finally grasp a thread of information: an automobile accident made sense, although Cary did not remember being at the Mills Mansion. Soon Carys thoughts moved on to the reality that precious Sage had been involved with him in a terrible accident. He was troubled that the violence of it all would have a lasting effect on Sage, but ultimately Cary was relieved daily knowing she was healthy and in one piece.

Cary was consoled to have learned to some degree the provenance of the events that led to his fateful condition. He didnt yet know the answer to the haunting question, why me? but for now, he felt oddly relieved.

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Billy Rubin awoke groggily on a clear crisp summer morning following another fitful night sprawled out on an uncomfortable utilitarian army cot set between rows of motorized EZGO golf carts, each one tethered by a thick umbilical cord to an electric battery charging system. The front legs of the army cot were folded under, enabling Billy to sleep on a slant so the accumulated acid in his stomach would stay put for the evening. With a habit of drinking distilled spirits boasting proofs exceeding 100 and doing so right up to the moment he crashed on the cot Billy was a victim of acid reflux disease. Truthfully, it was more like a self-inflicted wound than a disease. After several disturbing incidents in which he involuntarily bolted upright out of a dead sleep caused by the rush of vomit up his esophagus sometimes inhaling some of it his lungs Billy decided he would no longer lay horizontally like a normal person.

For thirty years Billy had worked as the sole assistant to the greenskeeper at the Dinsmore Golf Course, a public state-run facility that was once the private property of three wealthy 19th Century Industrial Age families. Today Dinsmore attracted the once-in-a-while golfer the kind who wears sneakers, backward-facing baseball caps and wife-beaters. Unlike at trophy courses in the Northeast such as Winged Foot, Baltusrol and Shinnecock where meticulous greenskeepers lovingly comb parallel swirls in the sandtraps, taking care of a course like Dinsmore mostly involved repair and preventative operations. Insufficient staff and budget ensured the course was less than immaculate. At several spots on the golf course red traffic cones

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sat in gaping woodchuck holes to warn against the accidentally severed Achilles tendon and prevent lawsuits against New York State.

Billy harbored no secret desire to tend a course that might have once hosted a US Open or a PGA championship, nor did he envy the uniformed crew-members riding state-of-the-art mowers down fabled fairways of golfs major contests. He admired Dinsmore, the third-oldest golf course in America, because it presented a sense of what the sport was like at a time when golf clubs had fanciful names like mashie and niblick. When a 200 yard drive was exceptional. Well before the development of massive earth-moving equipment capable of reshaping the landscape to conform to an architects rendition of hills and swales. A century later Dinsmore remained anachronistically in total harmony with the land upon which it had been laid out.

e. Dinsmore Golf Course and Clubhouse

Baruch Rubin was born in 1948 to elderly Jewish parents who in the autumn of life had given up hope of having children. The Rubins lived in the heart of the Borscht Belt Fallsburg not far from the Concord Hotel. Now a hollow shell waiting vainly for redemption through legalized casino gambling, looking for a savior in some never-before-heard-of Indian tribe, the

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Concord was in the 1950s a fabulous destination owned by a different kind of tribe that operated the resort for urban Jews who traveled the 90 miles from New York City to enjoy kosher food, fun-n-games and top name entertainment. Young Baruch and his parents accompanied by aunts and uncles and cousins would on special occasions spend a day at the Concord. The old ladies had their nails done while a Yiddish-speaking magician entertained them with sleight-of-hand. The old men played
f. Concord Hotel c. 1950

cards and smoked White Owls. Unsupervised, Baruch would wander from the main grounds and amble up the hill to visit the Monster, the resorts championship golf course. The 7,650 yard course posed a devilish challenge of watery hazards, narrow fairways, and ancient trees that sent errant drives deep into the woods.

It was on one of these family outings that Baruch met up with Billy Casper who was putting on the Monsters massive practice green. Casper had recently won the US Open that June at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck. Casper is a ghost to most golf fans born after
g. The Concord "Monster"

1980, but he enjoyed a top flight career,

winning the US Open again in 1966 over Arnold Palmer in a playoff. He was getting ready to play in a charity golf event arranged by Jimmy Demaret, the golf pro at the Concord, and no

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slouch himself, having amassed a string of professional golf wins, including three Masters a feat matched to this day by only a handful of players.

Baruch, a shy boy facing an imminent bar-mitzvah, mustered the courage to ask Casper for an autograph. Baruch didnt think to bring something to autograph, so Casper reached for his wallet, pulled out a crisp $5 bill, and signed it warmly, to Barook. Right away, Baruch called himself Billy, and insisted everyone around him do so as well. Billy Rubin admired the style of Casper and his contemporaries Orville Moody, Gay Brewer, Miller Barber, and many others with first names no longer bestowed upon boys. They smoked on the course and drank deep into the evenings, grabbing a few hours of sleep prior to their morning tee times, sometimes halfrunning to the tee box following a cursory warm up. Some professional golfers even hung around for the weekend at the clubhouse bar if they missed the cut, something unheard of on todays tour. As a flabby child unfit by the standards of the
h. Billy Casper in his prime

time to play the sports preferred by his

peers, and having no Jewish athletes to idolize, Billy most closely identified with golfers of the sixties who spurned exercise and clean living.

Billy tried to take up the game of golf in his teens, found he lacked the fundamentals of that intricate, elusive motion called the perfect golf swing, and gave it up. He moved away from Fallsburg to pursue a degree at Ohio State University, arranged and paid for by his father who believed putting some distance between Billy and his insular Jewish community would

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broaden his opportunities. Other than acquiring a taste for pork and suffering some fraternity hazing, Billys opportunities did not broaden. By January that year, he was back in Fallsburg. Eager to earn some cash, Billy answered a classified ad seeking summer-only help maintaining the Concords 2,000 acres of property. After a few weeks of mowing the grass around the pool and shuffleboard courts, Billy was reassigned to work on the Monster. With time, he became friendly with the members and many of the hifalutin guests. He had his picture taken with Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sam Snead, Machito and Tony Bennett. By the time he was posing with the likes of Burt Convy and Dick van Patten, the world had changed. It was now less expensive and timeconsuming to fly to eternally sunny Orlando than it was to drive up potholed Route 17 to the graying, deteriorating Jewish Alps. The number of visitors to Monticello and
i. Machito's album at the Concord

surrounding communities plummeted, Monticello Raceway became a ghost town, and the Concord tightened its belt. Billy was laid off. He started to spend time at the Trotter Bar, becoming well-acquainted with such luminaries as Jack Daniels, Jim Beam, and Johnny Walker. Soon he was sloughing off most of his unemployment check on booze, beating a path toward out-and-out alcoholism.

In 1976, a childhood friend of Billys, Ehud Cohen, later known by the waspy name of Edward Cowan, died in Rhinebeck, NY a tony village of antique shops and historic buildings. Billy and some of his remaining extended family traveled upstate to attend Cowans funeral. After the Catholic funeral ceremony for Cowan had converted while living in Philadelphia Billy read an ad in the paper looking for an assistant greenskeeper at Dinsmore Golf Course, a

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short drive from Rhinebeck and not out of the way on the trip back to Fallsburg. He stopped in, recited his credentials and won the position.

As the assistant to Dinsmore Golf Courses greenskeeper, Billy Rubins first job of the morning was to relocate the holes, a task that entailed traveling in a noisy John Deere utility vehicle around to each of the 18 greens and boring a new hole with a special auguring tool. But before Billy could begin his assignment he had to check the sheet indicating into which quadrant of the greens the new holes were to be bored. And before he could check the sheet, he had to consume the contents of a 24 ounce bottle of Olde English Malt.

As if performing a hair transplant operation, Billy would extract a six inch cylindrical core of closely-cropped grass and packed soil from the green, forming a new hole, and then hed tamp it into the existing hole, capping it off. The boring action reminded Billy of pulling the cork on a bottle of wine, and that image got him thinking of drinking. Truthfully, it didnt take much to get Billy thinking of drinking. From the moment he rose from the tilted army cot until he returned to the golf cart garage at night, Billy contemplated the circumstances by which he would imbibe his next drink.

Just as Billy was about to head out onto the course a foursome of golfers approached him. The first golfer, a chunky man with slick-backed hair the color of Cordovan, greeted Billy, remarking, Hey, I havent seen you at the Beekman lately. Dont you go out anymore? He glanced toward his companions with an ever-so-sly grin. The golfer was referring to the Beekman Arms, a Federal style establishment located in the heart of Rhinebeck that billed itself as the Oldest Inn in America. The Beekman Arms bar certainly looked like it belonged in the oldest inn in America: poorly lit, dark wood, low ceilings and hand-hewn wide-board floors.

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Because of irregularities in the manufacture of the boards, women in high-heels could become temporarily shoeless after jamming two inches of spike into spaces between the boards. The anteroom of the bar boasted a huge fireplace.

Billy swallowed a burp before responding on his recent absence, Uh, no, uh, Ive been busy, yknow, working extra hours. In fact, Billy had been barred from
j. Beekman Arms - Oldest Inn in America

the Beekman Arms after throwing up in front of 20 tourists leaf-peepers from Kentucky who came to enjoy the fall foliage in the nearby Berkshire Mountains. As it happened, some mischievous Dinsmore golfers led by Cordovan-hair bought him innumerable rounds of incompatible spirits like Cognac, Sambuca and Limoncello which he used to wash down bowl after bowl of nuts and trail mix set out on the bar. Knowing he had gone beyond the point of no return, Billy wobbled toward the exit, getting as far as the roaring fireplace before puking a gusher. Some of the
k. Fireplace in the Beekman Arms

vomit splashed onto the Timberlands of a few shocked leaf-

peepers. The rest of it puddled up on the hot stones of the fireplace where it began to sizzle like an omelet.

I gotta get going fellas.

OK, Bill. You let us know if you want to go out sometime, responded the golfer. A big grin split his face. Im buying.

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Billy set out in the John Deere for the 15th green, the farthest from the clubhouse. It is on this green that golfers seem to find themselves when a summer thunderstorm strikes stranded the maximum distance from the parking lot. Today, however, there would be no storm; the skies were 9/11 crisp and clear. On days like this Billy would often recall a quite different day years prior when a vicious storm blew across the Catskill Mountains into the Hudson Valley. Billy was raking a sandtrap when he spotted the likes of Armageddon on the horizon. Just before bolting for the nearest shelter he felt his hair stand up, swelled with static electricity. Then Billy felt a violent jolt as though someone had struck the soles of his feet with a two-by-four. And not some economy-grade pine board from Home Depot, but a length of sturdy, unforgiving hardwood. A golfer and another greens-keeper died that day from the lightning strike, but Billy survived. He stood up shakily, a wisp of acrid smoke rising from his head.

He didnt know it at the time but the immense power dissipated by that rogue bolt changed Billy in a most strange way. Shortly after his encounter with the lightning strike, Billy began to experience the ability vaguely at first, stronger later to visualize events happening despite his being nowhere near them as they unfolded. It was not dj vu, nor did he have premonitions of the future. It was simply an ability to see current events as they happened to someone else, somewhere else, as though his brain were wired to a nearby surveillance camera. The first such occurrence came a few days after the lightning strike when a golfer reported to Billy that a twosome ahead of him had driven their golf cart across the third green. Billy responded that he had already reprimanded the offenders two tattooed twenty-something punks in sneakers and cutoff jeans although he could not explain how he knew what they had done. The third green was not visible from the greenskeepers garage. Nonetheless, Billy quite vividly saw it happen. The two punks at first denied driving across the green, then demanded to know

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how the fuck Billy could know it. As they tore out of the parking lot, Billy too wondered how the fuck he could know it.

Billy soon discovered that if he concentrated on a person or a place, he might be able to intrude like an invisible interloper, a fly on the wall, unable to affect anything but capable nonetheless to observe events. It was not a skill Billy tried to exploit and although he considered it a kind of gift, he was not always thrilled to possess the ability. Not all the visions were pleasant. One time, Billy saw a golfer taking a runny shit against a tree by the 17th tee. Another time he saw the grill room cook masturbating in the produce cooler, a porn magazine splayed open on a case of iceberg lettuce. After that nauseating vision, Billy refused to eat anything from the kitchen that came with mayonnaise.

Today, on this beautiful morning as Billy prepared to bore a new hole into the 15th green, a northbound Amtrak train running on tracks along the Hudson River just a few hundred yards from the golf course, blew its ear-splitting horn. Suddenly, compelled by the intrusion of the speeding train, Billy saw an Amtrak conductor arguing with a would-be passenger at the Rhinecliff Station, the next stop on the scheduled run from New York to Albany. Disinterested in becoming distracted with the vision, Billy promptly got back to the task at hand boring a new hole for the 15th green just as a powerful urge to take a shit snuck up on him.

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Amtrak train number 234 was finally ready to leave the Rhinecliff station at 8:31 forty minutes late which meant it was right on schedule. A hybrid of public and private enterprise, Amtrak had suffered years of government neglect in the management of its budget coupled with an asinine business model that forced highly-profitable routes to subsidize losers that snaked through the empty states and districts of powerful, partisan Congressmen. The train could have left the station a few minutes earlier but one of the conductors had engaged in an argument with a New York City-bound passenger attempting to board with a cat. The cat was ensconced discretely in a carrying bag, the kind with a meshed side, but the conductor would have none
l. Rhinecliff Train Station

of it. No animals allowed on board (except of

course the venerable seeing-eye dog). Lengthening the delay, a fellow rider came to the defense of the cat owner and his contraband, but relented when the conductor threatened to bar her as well. After September 11, relenting was the only sensible choice when dealing with an official representative of the National Transportation complex. The woman figured there was no sense having her name etched onto a permanent terrorist watch list suffering pat-downs and potential cavity searches henceforth over the defense of a cats right to travel by rail.

With two blasts of the horn, Amtrak 234 pulled out of the station leaving behind another irate customer, this one with his cat in the bag, and his bag by the river. After departing

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Rhinecliff, the daily Amtrak 234 run continues non-stop along the east bank of the mighty and scenic Hudson River (if fallen trees, freight trains and bureaucracy stay out of its way) to New Yorks Penn Station, traveling 100 miles in 100 minutes. For all of Amtraks aggravations, the regions frequent commuters preferred riding a train to driving a car into the City. In fact, it was not unusual in times of inclement weather for a driver en route to New York City to advance perhaps 20 miles in that same 100 minutes. Once Amtrak trains get to Poughkeepsie they share the track with the Metropolitan Transit Authority which has priority, forcing Amtrak onto sidetracks whenever there is contention for the rails but until then,
m. Amtrak 234

Amtrak 234 would highball for the next 15 miles. The track courses through narrow lanes blasted out of ancient granite outcroppings, and across causeways over tidal basins. It runs next to the former estates of Industrial Age barons and early 20th Century titans Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Morses, Roosevelts. Passengers sitting on the starboard side have excellent views of West Point and the Palisades, and may see a decommissioned lighthouse or the ruins of an island castle. If they knew when to look, passengers could catch a glimpse of Sing Sing prison. After Amtrak
n. Bannerman Castle

relocated its New York City terminal from the elegant

Grand Central to the architectural abomination of Pennsylvania Station, trains crossed into Manhattan over the Spuyten Duyvil, a waterway separating it from the Bronx. Some people believed the name Spuyten Duyvil derived from the Dutch for Devils Whirlpool which

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certainly seemed reasonable, especially when the estuarial tides ebbed and flowed. Others believed the name came from a story by Washington Irving about a Dutchman who, during the British attack on New Amsterdam promised to swim through the turbulence en spijt den Duyvil in spite of the Devil.

Amtrak 234 was moving at top speed as it roared through a rock cut, the Mills Mansion to the west, Dinsmore Golf Course to the East. The engineer knew he would likely be directed to slow or even stop south of Poughkeepsie in deference to the MTA trains
o. Spuyten Duyvil

sharing the tracks. And the incident with the cat owner had added to the delay accumulated since leaving Albany. Prior to reaching Poughkeepsie would offer the last opportunity to make up some lost time, so the engineer amped up the throttle balling the jack in railroad parlance.

This stretch of track runs through a largely-uninhabited swath of publicly owned land. Most of the access roads to destinations hugging the banks of the Hudson pass over or under the tracks, but there was one narrow lane that snaked toward the Mills Mansion, crossing the tracks at grade, a simple sign stating RR planted at the intersection. Which was not entirely unusual; at the time, there were approximately 150,000 public grade railroad crossings in the United States, of which only 35,500 had gates and 25,000 had flashing lights. As for the number of wigwags in place, the National Transportation Safety Board could only guess.

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Three Hudson River mansions on Sages list Olana, Clermont and Wilderstein were in the can. Over two weekends, assisted by the chauffeur services of her father Cary, Sage had finished shooting photos of the first set of ten stately mansions for her school term project. Everything was on schedule.

As a teenager, Cary grew interested in photography and when he turned 17 he moved on from a cheap Kodak camera to his first SLR: a Mamiya-Sekor outfitted with a screw mount lens. With the help of a friend from school, Cary learned how to work black-and-white chemistry. Cary believed all the greatest photography ever produced was black-and-white. He shot so many images that he began rolling his own canisters from a bulk reel of Tri-X 400 ASA film. Like an anal-retentive accountant, Cary filed his negatives in a binder each plastic page accompanied by an annotated contact sheet. He shot pictures at dusk and at dawn and during dark thunderstorms when the light was optimally ominous. He submitted his work to local contest and won a few blue-ribbons not unlike his rural friends who snagged a similar accolade for showcasing a sheeny-coated heifer. Carys interest in photography continued unabated into adulthood; over the objections of his new wife Lee who wanted to finish the basement for a family room, Cary instead constructed a well-outfitted darkroom instead.

As a purist, Cary questioned the first generation of digital photography, uncertain whether it could ever rival the quality produced by film and wet chemicals. Deep down, he hoped digital would never surpass film, but as a student of science Cary suspected the

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technological hurdles were inevitably surmountable. When Sage was about seven, Cary succumbed and bought a digital camera and no sooner had he popped it from the clam-shell packaging that he discovered the wonders of pixels. How liberating it was to take photos without having to consider whether a particular shot might be a waste of film. And the software that came with the camera enabled Cary to produce results that would have taken hours to achieve in his darkroom. He continued to do wet chemistry for a while out of guilt perhaps for contemplating abandonment of a centuries-old process that had served so many so well but within months, Cary dismantled the dark room and hired a contractor to build out the family room Lee wanted.

Carys experience with digital was so positive that he happily handed over the camera to Sage to mess around with. She took to photography wholeheartedly and quickly exhibited a flair for composition. Soon Sage was shooting hundreds of photos at a time, choosing interesting and sometimes challenging subjects, and often speaking of becoming a photo-journalist. She envisioned traveling to troubled and exotic parts of the world to capture images destined for publication in the pages of The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic.

On this day, Sage and Cary were en route in Carys Saab 9000 to the Mills Mansion in Staatsburg, the fourth mansion on the list that also included the Vanderbilt and FDR estates in Hyde Park, Locust Grove in Poughkeepsie, Boscobel in Garrison, J.D. Rockefellers Kykuit in Sleepy Hollow, and Lyndhurst and Washington Irvings Sunnyside, both in Tarrytown. To date, Sage felt her best work had been done at Olana, the home of Frederic Edwin Church, a leading artist of Hudson River School of landscape painting. Church owned a significant property offering panoramic views over the Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains and the Taconic Hills.

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Original plans to build a Victorian house on the summit gave way to a radical change after Church came back from an extended visit to the Middle East. Church was taken by the Moorish architecture and sought to incorporate it into the design of his future house, named Olana which in Arabic means our place on high. The plans for Olana came directly from Church who collaborated with famed Central Park architect, Calvert Vaux. Olana was visually stunning with its stylized windows, tessellating tile patterns, rich colors of green, brown, yellow, purple, ochre and salmon, and metallic adornments. Photographers and
p. Olana

painters for decades found Olana a compelling subject, as did Sage.

In contrast, the Mills Mansion was a boxy example of Greek-revival architecture, conservative and staid when compared to the flamboyance and eccentricity of Olana. In a contrived TV commercial, Mills Mansion would be Microsoft and Olana would be Apple. As one of the lesser known estates along the Hudson, the Mills Mansion attracted few visitors, which made it much easier to do a timeless photo shoot, absent cars, landscape equipment, and obese tourists in shorts and fanny packs. Cary and Sage arrived at the site around 7:30 in the morning
q. Mills Mansion

as Sage wanted to capture a westward view of the mansion

overlooking the morning fog rising from the nearby Hudson River. She planned to shoot for about an hour, after which Cary would drive her to school. On this bright, crisp September morning, the Mills Mansion was extremely flattered by the rich sunlight streaking through century-old oaks and elms. The marble front looked the color of curry. It was as if the building

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were trying desperately to compete for Sages affection against its showy, up-river rival Olana. Sage took several dozen photos, each stored within a microscopic area of the cameras memory card, from positions all around the building, wrapping up the shoot from a spot down by the edge of the Hudson.

Cary had already wandered down to the spot by the rivers edge. As a Pisces he possessed a mysterious life-long fascination with bodies of water drawing him to rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, ponds, canals. Water had a magnetic pull on Cary. Sometimes hed loll for hours mesmerized by the seductive movement of windswept waves and wakes left behind boats like an event horizon. Sometimes when visiting sites along the Hudson Cary would remain long enough to observe the currents of the estuarial body of water change directions; logs and ice floes moving past south toward the Atlantic Ocean might reappear later propelled by the tide back north toward the Adirondack Mountains.

Sage sat down quietly to the right of and slightly behind Cary, out of his line of sight, trying not to interrupt his moment of solitude, but she startled him anyway.

Oh! Hi, hon, blurted Cary. How did you make out? Did you get all the shots you wanted?

Yeah. I dont like this building as much as the other ones though. Its like, whoever made it didnt wanted people to feel, yknow cozy or something. It kinda reminds me of where the president lives, yknow the capitol, or like the Lincoln Memorial.

Cary was pretty sure Sage was smarter than she sounded. Her grades were solid enough, but he was convinced that standards had dropped precipitously since the days when he attended

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school. Sage was taking honors courses that seemed to Cary to be far less difficult than the bonehead regulars classes that members of the football team opted for a generation ago. Still, he had to admit that Sage was engaged in a fairly rigorous photo-essay project at the same age as Cary was when his assignment was to write a brief paper about the time community leaders in his hometown of Geneva, Ohio announced with great fanfare their so-called Declaration of Lunar Ownership. For some reason, the town elders had laid claim to the moon.
r. Declaration of Lunar Ownership

Cary could hear the groan of a tugboat engine growing louder, and soon he saw the prow of a barge emerge from behind a stand of trees on the rivers edge. The tugboat was pushing the barge upriver, the captain maneuvering the hulking steel block between buoys to remain within the narrow lane dredged from the relatively shallow Hudson. Cary wasnt a nautical buff, but he found it relaxing and satisfying to watch big ships ply the river. Sage looked up from her camera and took notice of a hand on deck
s. Barge on the Hudson River

wearing a yellow slicker.

I had a weird dream last night with this yellow man in it, she said without looking at Cary. I kept trying to go into some building and he wouldnt let me. It was really weird.

Hmm. You mean he had yellow skin?

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I think so, or maybe his clothes were yellow, I cant remember exactly. He kept standing in front of the door and said I couldnt go in. Not today anyway.

It probably means something, Cary replied, assured that it didnt mean a thing. You know, maybe you want something but cant get it. Like youre searching for something. Im always having dreams where I just cant get someplace. I was walking and walking but never getting where I wanted to go.

Sages cell phone started playing a tinny-sounding song, an alarm indicating the time was now 8:30. Dad, can we go now? I really have to be in home room by quarter to nine, and I have a bunch of texts I didnt even get to answer yet.

OK. OK. Jesus, text messages. Cary stood up a bit too quickly and experienced an unsettling moment of vertigo. He noticed his back was wet from the dew on the grass. I remember what a big deal it was when our grade-school teacher let us listen to the radio to hear a NASA liftoff, or the World Series, Cary noted, recalling a time when World Series baseball games were played during the day. He struggled to imagine what it would have been like if every student possessed a Wi-Fi-connected device in the classroom no one would have learned a damn thing, thats for sure. And cheating? Forget about it.

Sage said nothing. She simply manipulated the small black cell-phone with her thumbs, both moving in a coordinated fashion as though she were playing an African kalimba. Sage was several steps ahead of Cary. The pair trudged up the hill, around the mansion, past the wheelchair access lift that kind of spoiled the front view, back to the Saab. Sage packed her camera case in the skimpy back seat along with the 12 pounds of books stuffed in her backpack.

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Cary backed his car out of the Mills Mansion visitor parking lot and drove down the narrow, ill-maintained driveway made up almost entirely of asphalt patches applied over the decades. Cary marveled at how a state with the largest tax burden per capita in America could do such a poor job. At least his convertible Saab absorbed the potholes and hummocks well.

Sage fingered her kalimba-like cell-phone, replying in quiet concentration to a backlog of text messages. Cary flipped on the radio to NPR just as the brief Word for the Wise program came on. He had taken an etymology course in high school and became fascinated with how often the roots of words hid in plain sight. Today the word for the wise was marmalade, which as the female radio host noted derived from a Portuguese word meaning quince, and not as some people believed from Marie malade French for sick Mary because Mary Queen of Scots supposedly consumed marmalade to cure headaches. Cary preferred to believe the debunked etymology; it seemed too good not to be true.

Sage was now making a call on her cell-phone, conversing quite animatedly. She halfwhispered something about ink. The mention caught Carys attention and rekindled his fear that Sage might one day get a tattoo. Or worse that she was secretly sporting one already. Cary cringed at the concept of a big, garish tramp-stamp permanently etched above his innocent young daughters butt-crack, or a lascivious image indelibly applied to an even more intimate body part. He quickly dispatched the thought; too gruesome to contemplate. Cary settled back into the anodyne news report on NPR as he absent-mindedly drove through a serpentine passage blasted out of the rock 100 years ago, one that intersected at an obtuse angle with another passage for a single railroad track.

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Crap! barked Sage out of the blue. Cary, startled, looked over at her. I lost the sig Cary didnt hear the rest of the word, and maybe Sage didnt utter it, for at that precise moment Cary had driven onto the unguarded tracks into the path of Amtrak train 234, high-balling at 70 mph.

The engineer would testify much later that he had properly blown the horn two long, one short, one long as required in advance of crossing the road, but doubts were raised on cross-examination as several passengers on board recalled otherwise. A spokesperson for Amtrak was quoted saying, Signals mean different things at different places. We dont yet know if there was confusion or a distraction. Perhaps Cary and the engineer responsible for Amtrak 234 had broken a number of laws that morning, but one law stood unflaunted: F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration or per Isaac Newton: Mutationem motus proportionalem esse vi motrici impressae, et fieri secundum lineam rectam qua vis illa imprimitur.

The train continued nearly a half mile after striking Cary and Sage before coming to a stop, during which time the Saab pinned to the nose of the engine jettisoned most of its parts list along both sides of the rails. The convertible ragtop was the least prepared to endure the collision, ripping clean off within seconds. By contrast, the 120-ton locomotive would require little more than a dab of paint.

Dozing passengers were abruptly wakened by the cacophony of the screeching brakes and crunching metal. They watched out the windows in horror as pieces of the auto flew off into the adjacent woods. Frantic 911 calls went out from dozens of cell phones. A few jaded commuters grumbled about yet another delay.

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Within a brief ten minutes the first of more than 100 law enforcement personnel, firemen, ambulance crews and newscasters arrived on the scene. It was a toss-up as to whether officials from the NTSB and their tape-measures and clipboards would beat the injury lawyers to the crash site.

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Gently rubbing his spasmodic lower abdomen, Billy race-walked toward a stand of trees behind Dinsmore Golf Courses 15th green but he didnt make it in time, and soiled himself. The volume accumulated in his baggy pants would have defied the flow of the flush had he gone to the bathroom back at the clubhouse, as he now knew he should have done. Any normal person would be crestfallen if they shit their pants, but Billy had long ago transcended whatever shame was associated with losing control of bodily functions. He was a lush, and he acknowledged it. Embraced it even. Lushes shit their pants. Lushes puke on things. Thats the way it was.

Billy stripped off his trousers, threw the stained shorts into the woods, looked about tentatively before wiping himself off with a rag torn from the ball washer, and pulled his trousers back on over his bare ass. After taking extra special care to zip up, he ambled sheepishly back to the green where the hole borer was still screwed into the ground awaiting extraction. Just as Billy grabbed the handles in preparation to yank out the borer he was startled by the near-simultaneous sounds of a train blasting its horn, a hard impact, steel crumpling, glass shattering and a screech of metal-on-metal that lasted for nearly a minute. He knew immediately the cacophony indicated a collision involving an auto and the Amtrak train he saw departing the Rhinecliff station moments earlier. And he knew exactly where the accident had occurred: the only grade crossing along the Amtrak route absent warning lights and automatic gates. Billy had crossed the tracks there many times although not in a dozen years.

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The rutted lane passed by the Mills Mansion, terminating at a secluded spot along the Hudson River where Billy used to deliver beer and liquor to under-aged kids who worked at the golf course during summer breaks. Some of the teens waited tables or worked the prep line in the grill room; others hosed down golf carts and refilled ball washers with soapy water. On the weekends the kids would pool their money and place a booze order with Billy the usual fare: Colt 45, Bacardi, Smirnoff, Yago Sangria leaving him with enough cash to buy something for himself. At that time, Billy was downing a bottle to a bottle-and-a-half of vodka a day plus a sixpack. The deals with the under-agers allowed Billy to fund a couple days of imbibing. One summer, Billy bought liquor for the teenaged son of a doctor who played nine at Dinsmore every Wednesday afternoon with two other MDs and a pharmaceutical rep. The kid traded Quaaludes stolen from his fathers office for the liquor. And when the ludes became increasingly difficult to steal, the doctors son made drugs-for-liquor deals using amphetamines and Valium as the new currency.

Punished by his addictions, Billys body aged 40 years over the course of 15. His hair turned white and thinned down to a few greasy strands across his crown; his nose came to resemble a scrotum, mottled with purplish veins; plaque on Billys remaining teeth grew thick, and glistened like Miracle Whip. And Billys skin, which appeared reptilian from the extended time spent in the sun, took on a yellowish tint like a Crayola crayon labeled maize. In the more recent years Billy had backed off somewhat from consuming the massive quantities of drink at the zenith, but he still met the definition of a problem drinker. He had begun to recognize the insidious social impact of his condition. Billy nearly lost his job (and his freedom) when the golfing doctor discovered the Quaalude-for-liquor connection, deciding after virulent threats not to press charges. And Billy was saddened and ashamed at the pariah status he had attained at the

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Beekman Arms and other local establishments where he had ruined the ambiance with his drunken antics. He harbored no doubts that the frequent pains in his side stemmed from severe damage to his bottle-scarred liver, but he could not and did not want to stop drinking completely. Drinking had become so woven into the fabric of his daily life, an activity so necessary for life to be normal, that Billy could hardly imagine slogging through an entire day without alcohol.

But at this moment alcohol was not on his mind.

Billy climbed into the John Deere and sped off across the fairway at the vehicles top speed of 15 mph, driving around a fence marking out-of-bounds onto the county road running parallel to the golf course. He turned onto the rutted lane, and as he approached the unguarded crossing he spotted a sea of sparkling glass. It wasnt until he got to the fateful crossing that he could take in the full effect of the collision: the Amtrak train idling on the tracks flanked by automobile detritus about 1,000 yards to the south. (Having spent so much of his life around the links, Billy calibrated distances in terms of golf holes; the train appeared to be about two par 5s away.) As Billy drove the Deere alongside the tracks on the bumpy gravel access road, rakes, a weed-whacker and a garden hose flew out the back. He had to swerve often to avoid striking pieces of the car. When he glimpsed what appeared to be a severed bloody limb in a ditch, he abruptly steered his shocked wide eyes forward and continued on.

As Billy approached the crash site the pandemonium revealed itself. Passengers on board Amtrak 234 craned their necks to observe the activity through scratched windows, the women covering their mouths with their hands, the men standing shakily with their hands in their pockets. The Amtrak conductors stumbled around outside the train lacking apparent direction. One conductor listening to a voice on a walkie-talkie turned toward a clutch of passengers who

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had disembarked and shouted loudly, Everyone back away! Get the fuck away from the train! We have to back will you fucking move? We have to back up the train! Billy recognized the agitated man with the walkie-talkie to be the conductor he saw minutes earlier the one who barred the cat-owner from boarding in Rhinecliff.

The engineer of Amtrak 234 blew the horn and moved the train back about ten yards so as to disconnect from the remains of the Saab that were wedged beneath the locomotive. Billy and the others looked down the tracks in unison upon hearing the siren wails of the first responders. The New York State Police got to work managing access to the wreck site, knowing that without strict control the multitude of ambulance drivers, fire crews, local police, press people and gawkers would create a Gordian knot of gridlock on the narrow gravel path. Billy pulled the Deere to the side as an ambulance approached, escorted by a State cop. From his vantage point, Billy had a partially obstructed view of the crumpled vehicle; the passenger compartment was all that remained. Engine, wheels, roof, trunk all had been shed over the 1,000 yard span leading back to the crossing. He was quite certain that whoever was driving the car had been killed instantly, pieces of his or her corpse strewn among fenders and bumpers and drive train. Then Billy overheard a conductor advise the trooper that a person remained strapped into the only intact seat left, alive and remarkably lucid. With his view obscured Billy shuffled closer to get a better look, but his jockeying was interrupted by a very intimidating State cop whose imposing figure was amplified by the forward-slanting Smoky-Bear hat atop his crew-cut block of a head. Just to look upon at the troopers chiseled face was enough to bring a grown man to tears. Get back, sir, he instructed Billy in an even tone exhibiting professionalism and respect. It was also clear from the tone that resistance was futile. Still, Billy felt the need to speak up.

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Uh, Officer, I uh

Sir, I dont want to have to tell you again. Get back on the train. Now.

I wasnt on the train, officer. I came over from the golf course. I think there might have been more than one person in the vehicle. Billy said vee-HICK-el as thats how every real cop on TV said it.

How do you know that?

I was driving my cart along the path here and I thought I saw Billy gulped slightly a leg or arm, yknow, back along the tracks about 500 yards.

Whats your name, sir?

Billy Rubin. I work at the

The cop motioned to a colleague to come over; he said a few words to him. Mr. Rubin, please take Trooper OBrien here to the location where you think you saw a body part. Billy and Trooper OBrien got into the John Deere and proceeded north. Billy began to worry that maybe what he saw was a dead animal, or something that was never alive to begin with. The cops would consider him an addled jerk who wasted valuable time. Then Billy felt horrible for hoping to be vindicated by finding a human body part after all.

OBrien abruptly hopped from the moving cart, apparently spying something of interest. The cop tilted his head onto his shoulder and spoke into a microphone pinned to his shirt. Ive got a limb, here, looks like part of a leg. OBrien walked into some high grass and bushes, using

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his feet to bend aside the thick foliage. Billy stayed back in the cart. Suddenly the cop stopped bushwhacking, and bent down out of sight. A second later he stood upright and shouted into his shoulder, Ive got a victim here! Barely alive! 500 yards north look for my signal! OBrien stepped sprightly from out of the weeds onto the gravel path and waved his arms frantically. Billy saw several officials stationed by the locomotive scrambling into an ambulance and taking off at high speed in reverse as there was insufficient room on the narrow path to turn the vehicle around. Trooper OBrien thanked Billy for his help and told him to leave the scene.

By this time a number of resigned passengers were walking away from the site of the catastrophe, some carrying luggage, some vainly pulling wheeled suitcases that refused to roll on gravel. As Billy prepared to take off in the John Deere a man in a suit offered him $10 to drive him to the nearest public building. Another passenger made the same offer and soon Billy richer by the equivalent of three bottles of cheap vodka was transporting five expensivelydressed NYC professionals willing to sit atop wet bags of fertilizer rather than to schlep across the rolling fairways of Dinsmore Golf Course all the way to the clubhouse high on the far hill.

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After disgorging the five suits who had abandoned the idled Amtrak train for a ride to the Dinsmore Golf Course clubhouse with hopes of getting to Manhattan before the end of the business day via alternative transport, Billy Rubin swung his John Deere utility vehicle around to the path leading back to the 15th green. He still had a hole waiting there to be relocated. Just then from the east a helicopter swooped directly overhead and across the golf course, stopping Billy in his tracks. He watched it hover in the distance over the crash site before slowly descending behind the curtain of trees. Even after the helicopter disappeared from sight, by virtue of his clairvoyant gift, Billy continued to see it. His bizarre ability to see events unfold from afar, the ability he acquired after being struck by lightning, afforded Billy the opportunity to witness the pilot maneuver the helicopter down between the tight rows of trees lining the tracks.

He saw the rescue personnel recoil from the dust and bits of gravel kicked up by the whirling chopper blades as the pilot touched down. And with reluctance he saw a body strapped to a gurney, head clamped into a padded restraint, face concealed by gauze and bandages, an IV bag hanging on a hook, sheets splotched with blood. Billy assumed the sorry person strapped to the gurney was the accident victim to whom he earlier directed Trooper OBrien; a victim in extremely critical condition having been thrown from the Saab into the bushes, both legs clipped off in a violent confrontation with Amtrak 234.

The struggling ambulance crew horsed the gurney across the tracks in front of the menacing locomotive. From their strategic locations near the carnage, TV reporters who had

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been broadcasting live all morning about the tragedy and the unforgivable lack of safety devices installed at the intersection of the tracks and the lane, directed their cameramen to capture the medical team loading the gurney onto the helicopter. A female reporter breathlessly updated her audience: Behind me this medevac helicopter will shortly transport the mangled victim of this mornings tragic accident between a high-speed Amtrak train and an automobile to Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla.

The rotor began to spin the blades faster as the helicopter pilot prepared to take to the air. The reporter, increasing the volume of her voice to compete against the elevated noise, shouted, At this moment weve been told that the victim is still alive but in critical condition. She placed a finger in her ear and ducked down like everyone does when a helicopter takes off or lands, as if she would be decapitated otherwise despite the fact the blades were a good fifteen feet above her head. The name of the victim is being withheld pending notification of the family. As weve been reporting this morning, another passenger in the car survived the crash, apparently without sustaining any serious injuries. A remarkable and positive outcome to an otherwise totally tragic event.

Billy observed the whole commotion as if he were seated in a box seat high above the crash site. He watched a local policeman marking down measurements on a notepad while several State police talked and laughed among themselves, and a half-dozen TV crews each jockeying for the premier position offering the most lurid background possible. Billy saw the ambulance team load the accident victim onto the helicopter, and the helicopter lifting off from the gravel access road, rising with trepidation as it passed uncomfortably close to the overhanging tree limbs and thick power lines. Upon clearing the treetops, the helicopter dipped

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slightly as the pilot transitioned from the vertical to the horizontal, making his way back east across Dinsmore Golf Course flying just a couple hundred feet above the undulating fairways. It appeared to Billy as though the pilot was preparing to strafe the clubhouse which reminded him of an iconic scene in Apocalypse Now and called to mind the gripping music that accompanied the attack on Vietnamese villagers: Wagners Ride of the Valkyries.

t. Helicopter raid in "Apocalypse Now"

When the chopper disappeared behind the ridge, Billys attention was summarily drawn back to the crash site where by virtue of his ability he could see a person no one else at the site could: the passenger who had escaped the wreck with barely a scratch, sitting somberly in a state of shock inside the caf car of Amtrak 234, away from prying reporters and morbidly curious onlookers.

And what Billy heard the passenger say and the consequence of that statement would forever be seared in Billys memory.

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Cary awoke from a languid and luxurious dream in which he made love to his first girlfriend, rewound to a time when he was 19 years old and she was a virginal 16. The girlfriend was nearly as tall as Cary once was in real life, a trait of subtle eroticism that Cary ranked nearly as high as the dimples in the small of her back. In his dream, details of the love-making seemed so real hues and shades, moans and shrieks, even the aromas of sex. Cary was reminded of the first episode of the TV show Star Trek The Menagerie in which the vegetative Captain Pike was permitted by the aliens to experience in his mind an illusionary life as real as real life. Cary regretted waking up. Why couldnt he fall into a permanent fantasy dream state instead of lying immobile yet fully conscious of all his morbid surroundings, unable to communicate?

Cary was no longer stationed in the Neuro ICU. He now idled away in a semi-private room, his condition stabilized to that of a robust house plant. As long as he was watered daily there was no reason to believe he should ever die. Each day dragged on as every day before it. With the exception of Lee and Sage, Carys visitors dwindled to barely one or two a month, which suited him just fine. Whenever a visiting business colleague made a side trip to the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, he (it was always a male colleague) would speak perfunctory small talk for a minute then fiddle with a BlackBerry until the lack of a strong signal and the smell of urine compelled an abrupt exit. Of course, no visitor was aware that Cary could see and hear them, and so they interacted with him as they would a caged hamster. Truth be told, it made no sense to Cary why anyone would bother to visit. He postulated that the visits were to

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assuage guilt or to atone for sins lest God foist Carys predicament upon them as well. Or maybe the visits were made out of simple morbid curiosity?

Lately, Cary was more lethargic than ever before. He sincerely hoped he was experiencing the beginnings of a mercy killing initiated by a sympathetic orderly and carried out with toxic chemicals, slowly and methodically. If this were true, Cary wished his body to be disposed of as soon as he died so that no one could conduct an inquiry that might cause trouble for the orderly his guardian angel-of-death. But, as anyone could plainly see Cary had not executed a living will; there was no way now to prevent some invasive probing of his corpse should the circumstances of his death appear even a wee bit odd. Fuck it all. Eyelids heavy but forever open, Cary tried desperately to fall back into that wonderful dream with his tall, forever16-year old girlfriend. Oh, to press his flesh against her supple body and stroke her long, straight hair that smelled of patchouli and lavender; to intertwine his restored swimmers legs with hers; to bury himself deeply in the declivity of her femininity.

Cary was almost there when he heard someone enter his room. The way the person shuffled slowly, each sliding step accompanied by the squeak of tiny wheels suggested he or she was neither a regular visitor nor member of the hospital staff. Cary caught a whiff of urine.

Im sorry if Im disturbing you, sir, announced the stranger. My name is Billy Rubin. I know you can hear me, and see me too when I get close to your bed.

If he were capable, Cary would have bolted upright. Immediately an avalanche of thoughts ran through Carys mind leaving a wake of dissonance and confusion. Is this a dream and have I lost the ability to distinguish it from reality? Did someone run a test on me that

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revealed my cognition? Is this Rubin guy trying out a new therapy on me? Or is some fucking orderly busting my balls in a gambit to elicit some laughs from his buddies? Ever the pessimist Cary landed on the ball-buster explanation over time, orderlies assigned to the vegetable wing lost the ability to distinguish their human charges from fish in a bowl.

Mr. Hayes sorry, I noticed your name outside the door I was at that train wreck last year. I used to work at the golf course, Dinsmore, when the train hit your car. I saw what happened and heard what you said.

This was no ball-busting orderly. This guy knew something and Cary was decidedly interested in what he had to say. Train wreck? I said something?

Cary had lain motionless in a hospital bed for so long sores stinking, feeding tubes threaded down his throat (and later permanently embedded directly into his abdomen) hoping each and every 86,400-second day that someone would step forward and say directly to his face, This is why youre here in this shitty condition. At no time had any of his family, friends, coworkers and care-givers revealed the circumstances that led him to Valhalla, other than the time Sage briefly vaguely mentioned the car accident. Maybe someone had said something pertinent before Cary woke up, but since then, nothing. How gypped he felt being confined to hell-ona-mattress without an inkling of what devastation had been visited upon him. Cary considered the possibility that his new visitor possessed a special ability endowed by God Nah. What God? to communicate with people like himself - all input and no output. People essentially dead but denied a better place in hell.

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Billy shuffled up to the side of the bed to enter into Carys narrow field of vision. Cary saw a man with yellowish skin who looked like he could be 60 years old or a hundred, pulling along an IV bag mounted on a hook on wheels. I got the cirrhosis of the liver. Billy said srosis as if running the syllables together might lessen the seriousness of the condition. Thats why my skins so damn yellow. I had half my liver removed last week. Im in a room on the floor right above you. Dont look good for me though I really need a new liver but Im way down on the list. Cary could not get over how yellow Billy was. It was surreal like he was a cartoon character. Cary had never before laid eyes on someone in such an advanced stage of liver breakdown.

Billy continued, I know youre gonna believe what Im about to tell you, because you have a special ability like I do. Everyone thinks you cant see or hear, but you can. And I can see and hear things too stuff far away from me, like I was right there even though Im somewhere else. Billy explained the lightning strike that induced his special skill, and recited a couple of mundane examples. Cary wished Billy would get to the accident.

Im sorry, Billy said, looking down at the floor, let me get to the accident. I heard the train roaring down the tracks faster than usual, then a huge crashing sound, then a long screech. Billy imitated the onomatopoeiac sound: Eeeeeeeech! Cary mentally shook his head.

I figured it had to be a train hitting a car at that unguarded crossing. Me and lots of people complained about that crossing for years, but you know the government. They never do a goddamned thing to fix a problem until a disaster occurs. Then they spend a hundred times more money than it wouldve cost to fix it in the first place. Billy shuffled away for a moment and returned with a chair. He sat down heavily, like he had just dropped a bag of bricks.

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Wow. I feel like shit. Billy exhaled hard and Cary smelled urine again. Anyway, I got over to that crash scene fast. I was the first person there, yknow, not counting the Amtrak passengers. Cops and ambulances showed up right after I did. They wouldnt let me get close. I helped them find a person who was thrown out of the car. I guess at first they thought there was just one person involved because thats all they saw sitting there in the car.

Cary was even more grateful now that Sage had come away from the wreck unhurt considering that she had been thrown out of the car. Thrown out of the car as a gargantuan locomotive dragged it along railroad tracks. Before hearing Billy Rubin tell it Cary assumed the accident involved another car, and that Sage happened to be on the lucky side of the collision.

Billy continued, The cops made me leave, so I drove back up to the clubhouse. And as soon as I got there a helicopter flew over the golf course. I saw them take away a young girl. I guessed it was your daughter. Turns out the passenger that got thrown out of the car was in really bad shape, but you were miraculously fine just a couple of bruises and scratches.

Whwhwhat? At first confused, Cary became indignant. He formed the mental question, What the fuck is this? A sick joke?

No. Billy said quietly. I saw it just like I said. I have this strange ability from getting struck by lightning. I saw the medics take you to one of the cars on the train, and you were just sitting alone.

Suddenly Cary recalled some of the scenario Billy just described seated alone in the caf car, his mind going crazy thinking of young, precious Sage and her mangled body.

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I saw you in that caf car, all alone, in shock and sadness, continued Billy, and I heard you say these very words: I would give anything in the world to change places with her right nowanything. Billy looked in Carys eyes. Thats a quote I swear.

Carys brain raced.

With tears brimming, Billy added, As the helicopter flew back over the course toward the hospital, I saw you on the gurney. Just like you are now.

Cary wanted to let out a deep breath but could never do so as long as the ventilator operated. But relief came anyway. He felt tortured no more. Cary had indeed done something glorious after all. He had been a noble Viking warrior, slain in battle. A glorious warrior chosen by the Valkyries. It all made sense now. Another Valhalla awaited him.

Billy shuffled toward the door with his squeaky IV rig just as a steady clarion beep signaled flat-line.

The End

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