I Covered a Great Distance Without Effort

The seats faced backwards although the train car was headed forward. The engineers designed it that way intentionally: the cushioned seats at the front facing in toward the rest of the car,—passengers’ faces, a Japanese flower arrangement of faces. The platform began receding. Whoosh. Not in the sense of being unconscious or knocked out, but I was coming to see, that is, to understand an endurance test deep inside that things could have gone differently, the furniture. It could have turned out completely different. That’s within the realm of possibilities, as if the election were in our favor somewhere else, in the United States of Atlantis.— I left off just as I was going to make a mental note in that regard, that we were carried along, passively, in motion without walking or running, spastic reflex in the legs —To sit down in one city, stay seated an hour and a half, and then stand up in a small town Milton Bradley must have modeled its tiny green Monopoly houses and red hotels after