Night Journey

I and my bed and my ticket stub, my plastic urinals and glycerin suppositories, my underwear and books, all of us were moving through the night. The train ducked behind the high steel walls of a bridge over 101, the Silicon Valley artery. Corporate towers and artificial lagoons glowed in the all-night distance. Lights came at me from either side of the train, one window over the bed receiving San Jose, the opposite window by the sink absorbing Sunnyvale. The north and the south of things visible at once made me fold down the toilet cover and sit. So improbable, a room the width of the train, windows on either side. The two-story car deadended on this lower floor. Passengers made their way through the train on the upper level.

Beside the tracks, a barrio clung to life. Small stucco houses, old cars and two young Latino men standing in a driveway, taking in the passing train, faces open as front porches. Rows of apartments, tan and dark tan paint peeling, barely 25 years old and already exhausted in this land of the new. A young couple on a dark sidewalk, talking. In a generation or the neighborhood would take up the Gringo's obsession with trim, tight lawns. For now there was something better. Street life, affordable housing inadvertently created by the railroad which cut a working-class swath through neighborhoods where most property values doubled every few years. Trains, rumbling, sounding their horns, jarring the dishes, reminding the middle classes of their tenement roots. So the gringos had left, and Latinos had gotten a neighborhood.

Now the train slipped beside the night Bay. Distant suburbs bunched like glowing moss along the shores, swampy darkness in the foreground, the vast waters shimmering beneath the moon. Everything was turning, the night, the water, the track. On it went, the most ordinary sights...the Leslie Salt plant eerily floodlit like a penitentiary...street sweepers parked in formation saluting the City of Hayward...peeling clapboard houses waiting for arson in 4:00 a.m. Oakland. I hadn't slept, and I couldn't sleep, for too much was passing by.... And this was nothing but the Bay Area, home forever.

Everything was jerking and lurching with the rails. Moving from the sink to the bed, for safety I slid against the wall. I took a long time getting my leg brace off and maneuvering myself under the sheets, the bed tilting and jerking. The train returned to the edge of the Bay at Richmond, banking in S turns through Hercules, Rodeo and Crockett. In the exhausted night, I stared at the Amtrak ceiling. The rails hummed under the car, banged, hummed again, briefly exploded in a steel-drum staccato. Racing toward Sacramento, I could hear the straightness in the tracks. Three nights without sleep. I had thrown away a job, thrown myself aboard a train. Something rose through the rails, unaccountable...joy.

I had felt it even 45 minutes before, rocking through the freeway flatlands at Berkeley. The hills and campus rose in the distant dark, just visible between trackside warehouses and poles. On the high ground, all promise and permanence, the university, mother of the mind, alma mater. Fiat lux.

I wasn't entirely cynical about it back then, even as a senior when it was fashionable to be sick of studies. In fact, I'd been studying pretty hard that June night in 1968. When the Berkeley student union shut, I quickly walked across the campus, sticking to the lighted paths. Steam rose ghostly from grates and a faint mechanical hum emanated from buildings where generators, pumps and mechanisms kept Coca-Cola bottles chilled and laboratories alive. Moving through the darkest places, I occupied myself with thoughts of the defeat of nature, how night revealed the University's urban underpinnings, with Strawberry Creek and its redwood banks reduced to Central Park. I had been studying for the last final of college.

Striding up Spruce Street into the North Berkeley Hills, passing storybook houses, I recited the last of the verb endings for my Spanish III final. Was it too late to stop at Jim and Patsy's? Maybe so. Jim and Patsy, like all around me, were drawing inward, becoming couples, preparing to move on.

"Hey, man." This from someone up ahead. I'd passed Virginia Street and was about to cross Cedar Street when three young men walked toward me. They were black, two with bandannas covering their heads, one nattily attired like a racetrack gent. "You got any money?" At this I smiled and shook my head. Everyone in Berkeley wanted spare change. Something collided with my chin. It took a moment to accept that it was a fist. Something salty filled my mouth, along with a loose piece of something sharp. The night, my brisk stroll, everything had stopped. The young men stood waiting. One of them grinned proudly. He was showing me something. It was shiny, silvery like a cap pistol. Guns, real guns like the ones I'd seen on television, were dark, dull metal. I was not going to be fooled and stepped toward the safety of the street light. With the bang, which was not terribly loud, the step ceased. Things descended with the gravitational precision of a stage curtain. My puppet body slipped downward, strings cut. The head bounced, then settled in a field of black rocks, the view of an eye resting on pavement.

The head, my head, lifted slightly. Now it was flung, the back of it scraping over the hard roughness below. As the head jerked forward an action shot rolled into view, a foot kicking at my belly. Now I understood that this body, my body, was presumed to be dead, and it was being moved into the shadows, out of sight. The jerking continued, my unfeeling body advancing over the pavement. I recognized a kick to the stomach, not from the impact, but from the aftermath of diaphragm gaspings. Now there was air, welcome air, and with it the panicky knowledge that I had not been breathing. I moaned something, "help." Footsteps disappeared into the night. A moment, then another "help."

I raised my head. I had heard the shot and knew approximately what had happened, but there was no explaining why nothing moved but my head. Shock. Perhaps people felt like this in massive shock. People who were dying. "Help." There was so little air. Compared to the distant sounds of traffic on Shattuck Avenue three blocks away, my moans were barely audible. Too little sound. Too late. "Help." Worth another try, or was it? Perhaps it was better to conserve energy. This had been a sad life, and this was a sad end. I raised my head again. I knew now that I was positioned under oleander bushes lining a neighborhood church. I could see the sidewalk. But it was very late. There were no cars. No one walking. And I was very tired. Understandable that one could be sleepy after something like this. Rest was healing. And it had all been very sad...and it was night...and one had the right to sleep.

"Help." I was not going to stop. "Help." I was not. "Help." There were still possibilities. "Help." Even without enough air, or enough volume, this would have to do...futile, incessant.... "Help." A door banged open across the street. Footsteps. Feet scraping by me. The rough softness of a blanket on my neck. Someone crouched down slowly, the way old people did. "It's okay," he said, "an ambulance is coming." Which I could hear, because I was right on the ground where sirens skimmed over the earth, and could see when red swept lighthouse-style, over the pavement.

Inside the ambulance, the world was surprisingly bright. I told the white-clad attendant I was afraid of dying. "It's a good sign that you're talking," he said.

On a gurney in the student hospital, a police detective leaned over me. He understood, he said, so many drug deals went awry. Who was it, he asked? I told him I had been studying my Spanish. He asked me again, and now I understood that this was my body, my energy, my life. It would be spent or conserved. I would talk to this detective later, or I would not. When a photographer leaned directly over my face with a massive camera and exploded a series of flash bulbs inches from my eye, I decided this was the ultimate indignity and let myself sleep.

When I awoke it was morning and my divorced parents, unaccountably together, stood at the foot of my bed. Everyone was smiling, except for the neurosurgeon who told me about the bullet in the spinal cord. Yes, he said, I was paralyzed from the neck down right now, but perhaps not forever. I did not know what to say. And it was hard to speak with spinal fluid running out my nose. A nurse asked if I wanted my hands on top of the sheet or under the sheet. I thought she was mad. Until I tried to move my arms.