"You have a remarkable effect on people." she says. She lights a black cigarette and nearly catches the edge of her long, black sleeve on fire with the match.

"You think?" I say.

"No, I mean it seems like you drive people insane. Completely ****ing insane. If half of what you say is true." she says.

"Boarding to ...!!!" screams the captain, or some guy in a blue suit, and she takes a long last drag off the cigarette and tosses it off the platform. We run back to the dining cart.

At night the middle of the country is an endless darkness, beautiful and inviting. Somewhere invincible coyotes feed on weak, peyote driven weekend patrons of their spiritual seeking. Probably. At least this is what I have to imagine to keep me on the train any longer. My legs have cramped and my beard is growing in.

"It's all true," I say, "everything I've told you. But it's a story now. It may as well be fiction. It may as well have not happened. I could have made it up and it would be just as important. That's the thing about love. It's like magic. If you think about it too much then magic becomes math."

She stares at me and cracks her knuckles again, pulls out her computer and switches over to my side of the booth.

"What I'm saying," she says, "Well, what I'm saying is that I think you're pretty careless."

"That's why I'm on this train." I say.

"So what's in New York?" she asks.

I stare out into the black, spider filled night. Spiders the size of DT's driven nightmares, the size of gods so unsightly and huge that names can't contain them. I stare out into nothing. The dining cart is my purgatory. She must be my Beatrice, if I'm Dante.

And goddamn, is this comedic. Not sure how divine.

"Nothing." I say.

I stare out the window into the abyss but the abyss doesn't stare back; it eyes girls in miniskirts floating away towards purple clouds lined in hepatitis infected needles and cotton candy infected with menstrual strain. The abyss is dedicated to itself. The abyss, I've found, is just like the grown-ups - it needs something to hate, something to resent to survive. It feeds.

Like the coyotes, the monsters, the canyons full of devils.

"There is nobody and nothing in New York. That's why I'm going there. I want to go somewhere I have no interest in being. Only then can I escape my own intentions." I say.

"You sound sincere. Do you want to watch a movie?" she says. She says that I look very tired, that I look like I need to sleep. "It's okay," she says, "you can sleep. I have no interest in hurting you."

"I believe you." I say. "You seem... too hurt to be angry at me."

"Oh, I am. Somebody hurt me, like they hurt you. Worse, though. You have no ****ing clue. Can I ask, though," she says, "what are your intentions? The ones you intend to get away from, right?"

"I think I intend to save my life. But my life is poisonous, it seems." I say.

"You're quite dramatic. But then, like, I guess we all are when we're as tired as you." she says.

And I stare into hell as it passes, black darker than black, deeper than infected tongues that ride twenty miles down coal mines my ancestors dug for booze.

"I'm a writer." I say.

"I guessed that." she said.

"Let me ask you," I say, "if I told you to run away with me, would you?"

"Too late. I'm already running." she says.

"Now really," she says, "just sleep. Whether or not it's true, everything is only a dream when you're waking up."

Interesting read.