The Depot

We were traveling, though I could not say who we were. The sensation of company filled the space around me—voices half-heard, movements at the edge of vision, the particular weight that air takes on when it is shared with others. I knew I was not alone. I knew that whoever traveled with me had been traveling with me for some time, that we had a destination, that our purpose was clear even if I could not name it. But when I tried to turn my head, to see the faces of my companions, they slipped away like water through fingers.

The RV swayed gently as it moved. It was old—mid-nineties, the kind with an engine that rumbled with mechanical honesty and a sleeping compartment that jutted out above the cab like a forehead. The interior smelled of dust and fabric and the particular staleness of vehicles that spend most of their time parked. I was seated somewhere in the back, or standing, or lying in the overhead bunk. My position kept shifting. The RV held me the way dreams hold their dreamers—loosely, without commitment to physical law.

We were going to a dog show. This knowledge arrived the way all knowledge arrived in these spaces—fully formed, without origin, as true as gravity. I did not question it. I did not know what dogs we were bringing, or what category they would compete in, or whether I had ever been to a dog show before. But I knew that this was our destination, that the roads we traveled were leading us toward some venue where dogs would be judged and ribbons would be awarded and we would participate in rituals I did not understand.

The light outside the windows was the amber of late afternoon, though it had been late afternoon for longer than late afternoon should last.

We stopped for the night on a friend’s farm. I did not know whose friend, or which of my invisible companions had arranged this hospitality. The RV shuddered to a halt, and the engine’s rumble faded into the particular silence of rural places—not true silence, but a quietness made of wind and distant birds and the settling of things that had been in motion.

The farm spread around us in the fading light. I stepped out of the RV and my feet found packed earth, the ground that comes from years of vehicles and boots and the weight of agricultural life. Nearby, a structure of corrugated tin roofed over an open space where farm implements waited in patient disarray. A tractor with rust climbing its fenders. A plow that had not been used in seasons. Coils of wire and stacks of wooden posts and the accumulated equipment of a working farm, all of it loosely stored, all of it waiting for purposes I could not guess.

Beyond the implements, a garden. The soil had been recently turned—I could see the dark richness of earth that had been brought to the surface, the neat rows that spoke of intention and preparation. But nothing had been planted. The garden was potential only, black soil arranged in lines that promised vegetables or flowers or whatever seeds would eventually be pressed into their depths. It waited, like everything else on this farm, for something that had not yet arrived.

The farmhouse was a split-level, the architectural style that had flourished in the late seventies and early eighties. It rose from the landscape with the particular confidence of houses built in that era—neither grand nor humble, simply present, a shelter that did not apologize for its angles or its earth-toned siding. Windows glowed with interior light. The sound of voices drifted from somewhere inside.

Many people were staying in the house. I understood this without counting, without seeing faces. The farmhouse was full in the way that holiday gatherings make houses full—bodies in every room, conversations overlapping, the kitchen producing food at a rate that seemed impossible. My traveling companions had dispersed into this crowd, or they had never existed at all, or they were simply somewhere I could not see.

I knew, with a certainty that felt vital, that the house had only one working toilet.

The knowledge pressed against my awareness like a warning. One toilet, for all these people, and there was a specific way to flush it—a sequence of actions, a particular technique that would convince the mechanism to function. But no one in the house seemed to fully understand this. I could hear someone struggling with it now, the sound of a handle being pressed and released without result, the particular frustration of a bodily need meeting mechanical resistance.

This was important. I did not know why it was important, but the single toilet and its mysterious flush occupied a space in my mind that seemed disproportionate to its mundane nature. It was a problem that needed solving. It was a vulnerability in the infrastructure of this gathering. It was something that everyone depended on and no one could reliably operate.

Night fell without transition. The amber light that had followed us on our journey simply ended, replaced by darkness and the cold clarity of stars.

I found myself standing in the garden.

I did not remember walking there. I did not remember leaving the farmhouse with its struggling toilet and its crowd of unnamed guests. But here I was, alone among the rows of turned soil, my feet pressing into earth that was neither warm nor cold. The temperature was neutral—the air held no opinion about comfort, offered no sensation beyond its own existence. I stood and breathed and felt nothing except the presence of the ground beneath me and the sky above.

The stars were brilliant. I had forgotten that stars could look like this—not the dim scattering visible from cities, but the full weight of the galaxy pouring light across the darkness. The Milky Way stretched overhead like a river of luminescence. Individual stars burned with colors I could almost name. The sky was not empty; it was crowded with light that had traveled unimaginable distances to reach this garden, this farm, this moment of standing alone in tilled soil that had not yet been planted.

I heard the coyotes in the distance.

The sound began as a single voice—high, wavering, the particular yip and howl that coyotes use to locate each other across miles of darkness. Then another voice joined, and another, until the distant hills were alive with their calling. It was not a threatening sound, exactly. It was a sound of presence, of announcement, of creatures acknowledging their existence to each other and to whatever else might be listening.

The farmer was suddenly standing next to me.

He had not approached. He had not walked across the garden or emerged from the shadows between rows. He was simply there, the way the knowledge of the dog show had been there, the way the single toilet had been there—a fact that required no explanation. He was a stranger, but I trusted him. His face was weathered in the way of men who work outside, and his hands hung at his sides with the relaxed confidence of someone who belongs to the land they stand on.

“They’re coming,” he said.

His voice was calm, matter-of-fact. He was not warning me. He was simply stating what was true. The coyotes in the distance, their voices rising and falling in the darkness, were coming. Whatever they represented—and I understood, without understanding how, that they represented something beyond their animal selves—was approaching this farm, this garden, this moment of standing beneath stars that had witnessed the birth and death of worlds.

I wanted to ask what we should do. I wanted to ask who they were, what they wanted, why their approach felt like something that had been scheduled long before I arrived at this place. But the farmer had already turned away, had already begun walking toward the farmhouse, and I was following him without deciding to follow.

Inside, the house was chaos contained. People moved through rooms with purposes I could not track. Someone was still struggling with the toilet—I could hear the handle, the rush of water that did not quite accomplish what water was supposed to accomplish. The kitchen blazed with light, and pots steamed on the stove, and the farmer walked through it all as though none of it concerned him.

Then the gunshots came.

They were distant, like the coyotes had been distant. Sharp cracks that carried across the flat farmland and entered the house through walls that suddenly seemed too thin. One shot, then another, then a rapid succession that might have been three or four or more. The people in the house paused, their conversations interrupted, their movements frozen in the particular stillness that gunfire brings.

The farmer stood in the kitchen. He looked at me—or he looked at where I was standing, which may not have been the same thing.

“They’re here,” he said.

The words carried no more weight than his earlier announcement. They were coming; now they were here. The progression was natural, inevitable, the simple mathematics of distance and time. Whatever the coyotes represented, whatever the gunshots meant, whatever was arriving at this farm on this night—it had completed its journey. The announcement was made. The rest was no longer his to control.

I opened my mouth to respond, to ask the questions that had been building since I first heard the howling in the hills. But the farmhouse was already fading. The kitchen light was dimming. The people around me were becoming transparent, their forms dissolving like smoke, their voices fading into a silence that swallowed everything it touched.

I woke.

But I was still dreaming. I understood this immediately—the particular quality of light, the way my body felt both present and absent, the knowledge that I had traveled from one place to another without any of the mechanisms that travel requires. I had woken from the farm into something else, from one layer of dreaming into another, and the transition had left me stranded.

I was in a rail depot.

The space around me was vast and echoing, the architecture of an era when train travel meant something grand. Vaulted ceilings rose overhead, supported by columns of stone or metal or some material I could not identify. The floor was polished to a shine that reflected the lights above. Benches lined the walls, wooden and worn, the kind of benches that had held generations of travelers waiting for journeys to begin or end.

But the depot was empty. The benches held no one. The ticket windows were dark. The platforms beyond the great arched doorways were silent, no trains waiting, no conductors calling departures. I stood in the center of this emptiness and felt the weight of absence pressing against me from all directions.

The clock was the most prominent feature. It hung high on the far wall, a great round face with hands that should have told me what time it was, what hour of what day, how long I had been traveling through these dreams that would not release me. But the numbers on its face refused to resolve. I stared at them and they shifted, became symbols I did not recognize, became spaces where numbers should have been. The hands pointed somewhere, but the somewhere they pointed to had no meaning I could grasp.

The party I had been traveling with was gone.

The RV, the unnamed companions, the journey to the dog show—all of it had been stripped away. I was alone in a way I had not been alone in the basement or the waiting room or the garden with its brilliant stars. This was a different kind of solitude, the kind that comes from separation rather than isolation. Someone should have been here with me. Someone was missing.

Melissa.

Her name arrived in my mind like a bell being struck. Melissa. My wife. The person I had built a life with, the person who knew my routines and my fears and the particular way I took my coffee. She should be here. She was supposed to be here. The fact of her absence was wrong in a way that transcended the wrongness of everything else—the empty depot, the unreadable clock, the dreams that layered on top of each other like sediment.

I needed to find her.

The urgency built in my chest, replacing the neutral observation that had carried me through the other dreams. This was not detachment. This was not watching from above while faceless figures worked to save a body that might or might not be mine. This was panic, real and immediate, the kind that comes when something essential has been lost and the means of finding it remain unclear.

I began to move through the depot. My footsteps echoed against the polished floor, the sound bouncing off distant walls and returning to me changed, distorted. I checked the benches, as though she might be sitting there, waiting for me to notice. I approached the dark ticket windows, as though someone might emerge to sell me passage to wherever she had gone. I walked toward the platforms, toward the arched doorways that led to tracks where no trains waited.

Melissa. Where was she? How had we become separated? I tried to remember the last time I had seen her—in the RV, at the farm, somewhere in the spaces between dreams—but the memories would not form. She was simply absent, had always been absent, had never been part of the journey that brought me here. And yet I knew, with a certainty that admitted no doubt, that she was supposed to be with me. That her absence was a rupture in how things were meant to be.

The clock continued to display time that was not time. The depot continued to hold its emptiness around me like a shell. I called her name, but the word dissolved before it reached the walls, swallowed by the same silence that had swallowed everything else.

I was lost.

The knowledge settled over me like a weight. I did not know where I was. I did not know how I had arrived at this depot, this hollow monument to journeys that no longer occurred. I did not know how to leave, how to find my way back to the farm or forward to wherever I was supposed to go. The dog show had evaporated. The coyotes had come and gone. The farmer’s announcements had been made and fulfilled. And now I was here, alone, searching for someone who was not here to be found.

The panic did not subside. It held me the way the unseen thing in the pool had held me, the way the junk in the basement had held me—firmly, completely, with no indication of when or if it would let go. I stood beneath the unreadable clock and I felt the absence of my wife like a wound, and I did not know what to do except wait.

Wait for a train that would not come. Wait for a face that would not appear. Wait for the dream to shift again, to carry me somewhere else, to release me into whatever came next.

The depot held its silence. The clock displayed its mysteries. And somewhere, far away, a body continued its work of surviving, unaware of the distances its dreaming self had traveled, unaware of the searching and the panic and the desperate need for someone who remained, despite everything, just out of reach.

I waited.