THE C-TRAIN

Claire had already finished her soup. She tapped her spoon against the table.

“What are you waiting for, an invitation from Governor Schwarzenegger? Let’s go to California already.”

I stopped chewing. “Governor Schwarzenegger? Arnold Schwarzenegger? The actor?”

“Yes, the actor. Formerly Mr. Universe, currently Governor of California.” She frowned. “What’s your problem, man?”

Governor of California.

My spoon clattered into the bowl. It dawned on me, and I could not believe how careless I had been. I jumped from my chair and strode through the cafeteria looking for a newspaper, a clock with a date, a calendar. Anything. There was nothing.

I went back to Claire and took her by the arms. Her blue eyes widened.

“Claire, this may sound insane, but what’s today’s date?”

She studied my face, and for a moment she seemed genuinely afraid. When she answered, she spoke slowly.

“It’s March twentieth. Two thousand nine.”

My hands fell away from her arms. I sank into the chair.

I looked down at my hands. They were an older man’s hands, veined and weathered, and they were trembling. It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. Time had skipped fourteen years. The bearded stranger in the mirror of my penthouse had not been a man of thirty-five, but a man of nearly fifty. And Rachel, the woman I had once loved, was probably in New York by now. Of course the number had been dead.

But how? What had happened to me during those lost years?

For the first time, El Cholo’s question made sense, and it rang in my ears.

Do you know what’s happened to you, Francis Xavier?

That was the question that had terrified me. The question that needed an answer at any cost. And I was beginning to suspect the answer waited three thousand miles away, at the foot of a volcano.

“You frightened me,” Claire said.

She hadn’t moved. Her voice was quiet, and there was no anger in it, only a line, drawn clearly.

“Next time, just ask me. I’m listening.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t hold you like that again.” I drew a breath. “Claire, I’ve lost fourteen years of my life. I don’t know how or why. I have no money, no credit cards, no car, and everyone I once knew is probably gone. I can’t get to Mount Shasta on my own. But if you would rather not come with me now, I’ll understand.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Then something in her face softened.

“I hear you, man. Everyone I know is gone, too.”

“So you’ll still come?”

“Of course I’ll come. Do you really think I’d miss hanging out with an amnesiac on a crazy trip up a volcano? Not in your life.” She grinned.

“Thank you. Thank you so much. Now I’m going to shower and change, and then we’ll plan our escape.”

“Our escape?” She laughed nervously. “Man, the country may be in a serious recession, but it’s still free. All we have to do is find transport and walk. Besides, this isn’t an escape. It’s an adventure. Some people collect baseball cards. I collect adventures.”

At the information desk, I asked for a shower and a way to shave. The staff gave me soap, razors, and a change of clothes, and pointed me toward the showers. When I came out, in clean blue jeans and a white button-down shirt, a young man waiting beside a chair asked if I wanted a haircut. I nodded and sat while he clipped away my long, tangled hair.

“All done,” he said. “You look like a million dollars, mister.”

I walked to the mirror, and there he was again, the man I used to know: the chiseled face, the full lips, the deep dark eyes, and seven thousand dollars of dental work that had left me with permanently straight, white teeth.

I found Claire at our table, staring at her empty bowl.

“Claire, are you ready?”

She glanced up without much interest. Then her jaw dropped.

“Man, is that you?” Her eyes traveled from my head to my shoes and back again, and lingered a second longer than they needed to. Then she looked away and picked at her sleeve. “You clean up good. I thought you were a movie star or something.”

I noticed that I had noticed.

“Thank you, Claire. But please do me a favor and don’t call me ‘man.’ My name is Xavier.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, let’s get moving, X-man.”

I suspected that was as close as she would ever come to my name. I let it go and headed for the door. When I stepped outside and looked back, she was running to catch up.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re definitely new at this, X. Look what I got.”

She opened a duffle bag stuffed with cans: beans, soups, some kind of food supplement.

“Good idea,” I said.

She grabbed my hand and nearly dragged me down the street. “Our first stop,” she shouted, “the C-train!”

Her hand was small and rough with cold, and she didn’t let go until we reached the tracks.

I had no idea what she was talking about. Later, I would wish I had never found out. We jogged for nearly forty minutes before we saw it, rusty and endless, parked between tangled arrays of railroad track: the infamous C-train. The night was moonless and bitter.

“What time is it?” I asked.

Claire pulled back her baggy sleeve and checked her Disney watch. “Eleven forty-five. We have to get on soon. It leaves in fifteen minutes.” She squeezed sideways between two coupled wagons, scanning the yard for guards.

“Wait. We’re going to stow away on this thing?”

“Oh, sorry, your highness. I forgot to get tickets for the Orient Express.”

I was in no position to demand a ticket, but this was insane. It wasn’t even a passenger train.

“Claire, may I ask you something?”

“You may,” she said, a little annoyed.

“Why do you call it the C-train?”

“Because it’s a ‘Cargo Train,’” she said bluntly. “It leaves Boston at midnight, and if we don’t get caught, we might make it as far as Chicago before we change transport.”

She slid open the door of one of the wagons, tossed in her duffle bag, and climbed inside. Then she turned and held out her arm. I gripped it, and she pulled me up after her.

It was colder inside than out. Wooden crates were stacked into a labyrinth of narrow passages, and deep in the maze we found a hollow formed by huge boxes on both sides and one overhead. We crouched there, side by side.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside.

Claire’s hand found mine in the dark and held it. A flashlight beam swept across the open doorway, crawled along the crates, and stopped. I did not breathe. Her fingers tightened around mine.

“Anybody in there?”

Silence. The beam hovered, then slid away. The footsteps moved on down the line, and somewhere ahead a door rolled shut.

Neither of us let go until they were gone.

A whistle shrieked. The wagon jolted, groaned, and began to roll. Boston slid away behind us.

The cold arrived all at once. Within minutes my body began to shake violently. It felt far below zero. My teeth chattered so hard that I couldn’t speak.

Claire cracked a glow-stick and shook it. A pale green light bloomed between us, and in it I saw her studying me with a frown.

“Okay. Come here.”

Before I could answer, she pulled me against her and wrapped her arms around me.

“Don’t get any ideas, X-man,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m just keeping you from going hypothermic on me.”

“No ideas gotten,” I said. “And thanks.” I held her closer.

Somewhere between Boston and the rest of my life, the shaking stopped. For the first time since I had woken on that marble floor, I wasn’t cold.

And I wasn’t alone.