The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,78

bags and food containers sprinkled over the track gravel, the rusting iron overpasses, the graffiti-covered switching boxes, and a lone, stubby brick control tower with wooden doors chained shut. There was a spare beauty to all this decay, it was the empty and harsh landscape of an unsettling dream; these were spaces you were not meant to see, like the hidden air ducts and trash chutes of a glittering mansion, where cobwebs and dust and rat droppings collected freely and concerned no one. Her aesthetic lived in barren places like this, and she missed them. Here the wind, rain, and sun are free to shape and cook the steel and cement into sculptures that celebrate forgetfulness. She took a small notebook from her backpack and tried to quickly capture the manic, twisted essence of electrical lines, the bounce of the trash in the wind, the fluid shape of the rust patterns, until Keenan proclaimed, “Everything is really dirty here,” and her reverie and her concentration were broken.

The train slowed to a walking pace and a valley of smooth concrete walls suddenly opened alongside the tracks, stretching more than a mile in the distance, with several bridges vaulting over it. “What’s that?” Keenan asked.

“It’s the river,” Araceli said.

“That’s a river?” Brandon said, perplexed, until he noticed the bottom of the chasm held a narrow channel of flowing water with perfectly straight edges. “What’s it called? Why is it made out of cement? It hasn’t rained, so where does the water come from?”

“Too many questions,” Araceli said.

“Too many?” No one had ever told Brandon such a thing.

“Yes.”

Brandon looked at the river and saw that a giant with a paint can had covered the top of the valley with a mosaic of sparkling elephant-sized letters, spelling words in mongrel greens and tainted yellows that pulsated inside a pool of gray-blue swirls. Or at least it seemed a giant had painted them. He wondered if he should ask Araceli, then decided against it. Probably it was a giant.

“Hey, look, there’s people down there,” Keenan shouted, loud enough to get the attention of the four or five other adults in the car, who looked up from their newspapers and laptops just long enough to glance at and quickly forget the familiar sight of the soiled caste who lived by this stretch of track.

“Los homeless,” Araceli said.

Brandon pressed his nose against the glass and looked downward, spotting a line of shelters between the train tracks and the river, teetering house-t ents of oil-stained plywood, sun-bleached blue tarpaulin, frayed nylon rope, and aluminum foil. They looked like ground-hugging tree houses, improvised assemblages built by children and taken over by tubercular adults. A few humans sat on chairs in between their creations in this village as it followed the curve in the tracks, their roofs a quilt of tarpaulin and wood forming a long crescent dotted with the occasional column of smoke. Brandon searched for the sources of these fires, and spotted a gangly man in aviator glasses tending to a kettle on a grill. The train rolled slowly toward the man, and for a few seconds Brandon was directly above him. He bore a long scar on his cheek oozing red and black liquids. A battle wound? Brandon wondered. A cut inflicted by a knife or a sword? A month earlier Brandon had finished the last volume in a four-book series of novels, The Saga of the Fire-Swallowers, and as he sat in the train with his nose pressed to the glass, the violent and disturbing denouement of that epic narrative seemed the only plausible explanation for the existence of this village of suffering passing below him. These people are refugees; they are the defeated soldiers and the displaced citizens of the City of Vardur. The novels were a fantasy tale for young-adult readers set in a world of preindustrial stone villages. His father had bought the entire set and read them some years earlier, leaving them forgotten on a shelf for his oldest son to discover, Brandon’s fascination growing with each chapter he spent in the company of its villains, a cult of rugged men and boys who engaged in the ritual eating of flames before and after battle. There was something about this homeless camp that seemed to belong to the ancient times described in those books, a way of life untroubled by electricity, or modernity in general. In truth, Brandon never should have been allowed to read the Fire-Swallower books, given their graphic descriptions