Atlantis: Three Tales Read Free

“So you got here after all!” In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. “How’s everybody down at the school?”
    Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart—far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. “Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin’ him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!”
    Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train’s several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother’s knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there’d been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday’s consuming sea.
    Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades,insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he’d heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over . . . well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! “Hubert,” Sam asked, “
where
is the sky . . . ?” thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the—after all—ridiculous question.
    But at the ramp’s end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They’d stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. “They put that there—for folks like you.”
    Sam looked.
    The hall’s arched ceiling was watery blue—tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter’s triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head.
    Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns.
    Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight—a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing from spurious waters, if not the pointer on some turn and bankindicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war’s close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he’d watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet—blam! blam!—on the earth’s red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others,