These Dreams of You

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The Belgian conductor doesn’t catch up with her until beyond Brussels, after more than an hour of the woman flitting into bathrooms and working her way through the train — at which point she finally acquiesces all composure. In an explosion of sobs she tries to explain to the conductor and British security official what happened in the taxicab in Paris, her long trek from Africa, the distance from her family and the dead cell phone and the incommunicado status of her life, never mind a dark foyer in the Garden of Eden where time drains out of the floor like water from a shower. For a panicked moment, she thinks she’s lost her passport.

Before she got back together with Zan and became pregnant with Parker, Viv lived by herself in the industrial loft section of downtown L.A., in a mammoth stone bunker from the balcony of which she could watch the trains roll in and out of Union Station between her and the sunset. The night she split up with Zan, as he was fleeing to Berlin — it was during the following two months that she had her affair with then Hollywood-based J. Willkie Brown — she watched from the landing the Southwest Chief pull out of the station and, grabbing nothing but her toothbrush, she jumped in her car and raced the train to Pasadena, arriving in time to hop on. She didn’t have a ticket then either. “Where are you going?” the conductor asked in Pasadena, and she answered, “The sunrise,” which turned out to be Flagstaff, she and the rest of the train’s staff drinking enough tequila to make her wonder ever after just how sober train travel is.