Lyrics at the beginning of each section are from 'Bowl of Oranges' by Bright Eyes. Translation of the French is at the end.
___
I came upon a doctor who appeared in quite poor health,
and I said, “There’s nothing that I can do for you
you can’t do for yourself.”
___
Margot sat sprawled in a train station crowd, her back to a pillar and her feet extended, waiting for someone’s shiny shoes to catch them and fall with nothing but bare palms braced for impact. She put the Venus in Venus fly trap. Her crooked teeth hid behind painted lips, and the rip in her skin was covered in brown ringlets and the gaudy pearl noose that dangled from her neck.
There was a man between her fingers—a doll made of sackcloth and ashes, its face painted with ink. It was a form of ill-fated voodoo; ill wishes for boredom and wrongdoers. That crude face only barely resembled Dr. Neuhaus, but it was the thought that counted. She'd drizzled black over it with a shaking hand. He’d broken open her head and stitched it back together--searching for something that had never existed--and left behind a puzzle-map of skin and thread.
Her train pulled into the station. There was always that morbid moment as she was facing it head-on—what if she was on the tracks, and not against the pillar? What if she was to hold still? What would that last breath feel like?
Would it ever come?
The train halted, screeching like the bats that hid up in the rafters. Margot slipped the doll in her purse and waited, eyes cast on the concrete as people brushed past her. When only a coughing businessman was left, she brushed the dust from her skirt and stepped onto the train, the air inside stuffy with breath and fabricated heat. She rolled a strand of hair between her fingers as she passed by compartments with open doors, and their occupants gazed vacantly out at her.
The door to compartment forty-six was closed. She pushed it open with her shoulder and there was a mouse-shriek of terror—she would have blamed the hinges if a boy was not sitting there, with one hand pressed to his heart and the other fanning himself with the dinner menu. “My God,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry, it’s just…”
She stepped awkwardly into the compartment, setting her things on the seat across from him and clearing someone else’s newspaper out of the way to make space for herself. “It’s just what?”
“…I thought I was alone—you know how that is—and. And.” He looked at her, searching for something, though she wasn’t sure quite what. “Well, you don’t know who I am, so I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
She looked at her feet. “I don’t.”
He smiled weakly and set down the menu. “Do you like the window open, uhm…”
“Margot Rosenfeld. And you can open it if you like.” As he tugged at the blind string, his fingers shook—they were slender and pale, much like the rest of him. From his suit to his gray eyes, he appeared drowsy and washed out--but for his hair, which was thick and black. It was an unsettling contrast. “And what’s your name?”
“Oh.” He looked at her, with the corners of his mouth twitching. His eyelashes were like spider legs. “Miles…Miles Sinclair.” Margot offered her hand. His was frail and cold. “Where are you going—with your ticket, I mean? To where?”
“Elsewhere.”
“Me…me too.”
The train began to pull forward, and the people on the station platform began to shift, freeze-frames of life in all its ubiquity. The newspaper headlines held by men in benches blurred into one heartbreak and, when the train broke free of the station doors, the sun was too bright to make out the city below.
Miles was shaking. Margot reached inside her purse and popped open the tin that held all of her medication. She held a cream-colored tablet over to him.
“What is it?”
She smiled. “It’s not legal in the city.”
He gulped it down gratefully. “I’ve had too much of that today, you know, but it can’t do anything bad for me—can’t it? The doctors say it can, but they’re all liars. All of them.” He frowned. “Aren’t they?”
Inside her bag, she crushed the doll’s head with her fingernails, homicide hidden by leather. “They are.”
“Do you…do you go to school here? In the city?”
“I don’t go to school.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry—I thought you were my age, I’m sorry.”
She laughed. “I should be in school, but I’ve been sick. So I learn from books and things. It’s more interesting, anyhow.”
“You’ve been sick?” He gulped. “Er, I don’t mean to be prying or anything, Miss Margot, but I worry for sick people—I really do, I’m not a gossip or…or anything like that. I haven’t got anybody to gossip to.”
She flicked her hair and smiled in the way that made people visibly relax. Miles simply twitched. “Insomnia,” she said. “I don’t sleep. And when I do, I don’t dream.”
“That’s awful,” he said, looking at his feet.
“It’s not so bad. I get more things done, anyhow.”
“Like what?”
“I taught myself French.” Margot didn’t mention the pile of twisted canvas in her closet—the skeletons of people she despised, stuck with needles and bobby pins like little arrows in fallen deer.
“Je ne sais que un peu Français.” His accent was beautiful, flawless—the sort of French that the movie star couples who whispered it in each other’s ears wished they could hear. “J'ai apris en l'école, mais…mais je ne suis pas en la course maintenant.”
“Pourquoi?”
“The teacher…I…I don’t like him very much.” Miles’ shoulders sagged. “At least…at least not anymore.”
“What happened?”
“Things…things got odd.”
His eyelids began to flutter and came to a rest shut. The purple rings around them stretched as his face relaxed and he fell asleep, chest slowly pushing his tie out from behind his vest.
Margot counted to twenty before she bent forward and dipped her fingers into his pocket. His wallet was thick and fat and had small slips of paper falling from it—train tickets. They all left the city but eventually looped around on themselves and came back. Some were purchased immediately after they arrived at their destination; others were spaced several days in between.
Once, he’d made it to the coast. He’d come back five days later.
The tickets fell like thick snowflakes onto the floor as she thumbed through pictures of people she didn’t know and notes from people she’d never met and membership cards for clubs she’d never been invited to.
Just as her fingernails stumbled upon the promising green of dollar bills, the compartment door opened.
___
"I don't speak much French." His accent was beautiful, flawless—the sort of French that the movie star couples who whispered it in each other’s ears wished they could hear. "I learned it in school, but...but I'm not in that class anymore."
"Why?"
