Does it ever sound like the steady clack of steel wheels on rails that pass through a chasm or a city? And if the proof ever sounded like a freight train rumbling toward you, would you ready yourself for it or just try to get across the street before intersection is blocked for another ten minutes? And why look for it when it’s nowhere to be found? His mind is somewhere near just that question (near but not in words) as he drags a widdled pencil across a page, the graphite tracing out a curve that cuts from the already present origin on the page out and up the cartesian plane. Same old logarithm, Gene thinks as he watches the curve pass through an inversion where the change in length will forever be greater than the change in height, and his mark drags off to the edge of the paper. He knows the line will keep going and going, long after the pencil has been worn down to a nub, and even long after he is gone. The line, like the train, like the approach to proof, never stops. It never ever stops, not even long enough to let you hop on. So he just draws the line as far as it will go and takes an abstract shortcut, labeling the x-axis “Life” and the y-axis, “Truth.”

He looks up from the world of his notebook and out into the world that he is trapped in, one in which there really is a train wailing and rumbling along. In Louisville, most of the cars are massive hollow beasts, big enough to fit trucks in, and drilled all full holes. If you turn your head in synch with them as they pass, sometimes you can see the contents, but that they are hollow makes them wince and complain all the more as the metal bounces and shifts. Without weight to settle them, too, they bounce around like unruly elephants in a line never letting go of the tail in front of them with their trunks. From his pile of busted limestone—the same responsible for the filtered water that makes Kentucky bourbon sweetness—Gene looks to the rails that crisscross this rusty city more than maybe the circuits on any one of his machines. How strange, Gene thinks, to study the design of machines that will learn, that will think, in a city where the machines have already taken everything away. He smiles at the rails, aforementioned train already in the distance, and then looks to the piece of graph paper in his lap. Life. Truth. His cheeks press up under the frames of his glasses as he whispers, “It’s an asymptote.” And you will never have the proof, no matter how long you live.

Having lost too much already, Erica and the baby, now fate lands him in the middle of a place where it seems the only sustenance that surrounds is the cold metal that oxidization thrives on. They call it the rust belt, this portion of America that the most despised (in Gene’s mind) Ayn Rand once proclaimed the glory of a United States broiling invention and spewing profit, a United States that would be rich on the back of laborers toiling beneath the gaze of rich men in top hats and not a United States that was yet to awake to destroying it’s fisheries, it’s livestock, plucking out the strings of that national guitar, the Mississippi delta, run dead with phosphates and fertilizer draining. If he was to work on the future, how was it to rise out of this smoggy darkness, punctured by flaming distillery burn-off towers and empty warehouses. How was a shining new Xanadu built of brilliant encoded pattern-recognition machines meant to ever rise above this simple kingdom of rust?

She leans up on his shoulder and says, “Let’s do it. You want to do it?”

“Uh… right now?” Gene has just been listening to one of his favorite sounds gifted his apartment. When storms come in from the South, they inevitably cause the oversized lid on the art deco street lamp to clunk under its own loose weight. He liked to leave the door open as the winds kicked up. Hell, he liked to leave the door open to invite the storm inside; yes—for a cup of whoop-ass. That was the pleasure: open the door to the danger, let it come in. For him, the streetlamp had become a kind of novel bell; impending storm coming. She’d probably not even noticed it, he realized, her chin straining up to rest on his spine and shoulder.

“The thing is…”—how to put it—”I don’t want to fuck you while the storm is coming in…”

This is a way-bold statement for their budding relationship and he sees the surprise she can’t hide from her face. Had he said the word “fuck” in her presence yet even? He’d no idea. But her face is not marred by shock; it is genuine uncertainty he sees. He twists his neck around and smiles—nothing menacing here—and she giggles. Then he turns away from the screen door, the clunking of the street lamp, the sky split in half between bright blue and rolling gray, and wraps his arms around her. She lets him take her in and in her way, a way she hopes he notices, she presses her face against his chest and stares thoughtfully at the front moving across their little city. She does like storms that arise, too. He squeezes her and after a nervous breakthrough says, “I want to fuck you when the storm is here—when it’s banging on the windscreen, in full effect.”

She decides to play the straight man, “Oh, I see…”

He squeezes. “You know it.” He bends his head down and quiet, “You better think the storm is me.”

She leans back from him and waves her hand Scarlet before her face. “Oh goodness.”

He won’t live up to it, so he smiles too.

Shara sees the stumble and knows she must recover lust. “I’ll wait for that, you monster.” She waits, his face is creasing in a way that’s coming around, and then she adds, “You fuck me like the front of weather.” There’s a long pause of eye-looking and she adds, “I can’t predict the weather.”

But the weather is coming.

He’d come from a place where the roads were named #46 and #124 and they went north and south and southwest and through dales and farms hilly but rolling, not too rocky; and now, looking up to the tops of the clear-cut highways of Kentucky, sheer rock walls of fifty feet, dripping with quick cold small waterfalls on dreary days—what road number was this? A man must walk down so many roads before you call him a man. They can be counted; are counted by the mad. What number was this road, this highway carrying him into a life of science and investigation? The sun slamming white on the windshield seemed as unyielding as it had in Georgia and Tennessee, just as white and bright and blinding on this clear July weekend, and yet, as usual, the world quickly changed around him; the pace so obviously rapid. Nothing at the arrival would resemble the departure, regardless of the smell of country air. Still, the smell of the air rushing in through the open window smells just the same. Just the same as always. And the color of a summer sky, perfect day, never changes.

Of course, the road had an actual number, but this was not what he wondered. He saw a map of the United States, the world, in his mind. Like any particle of gas in a chamber, his path could be tracked and shown to be different from any other. There was a line that traced the northern hemisphere illustrating his striations and bounces and chaos. Surely no other human path could match it; snowflake indeed. He was unique and as the movement and dynamics of everyone he knew washed over his mind and he saw the mess of it all, he realized too that he was unique and meaningless somehow at the same time.

It did not bother him, this meaninglessness. It was never made real for him, not the vacuum wind of air being sucked out of the cabin of the truck where through the just-rolled down window he flicked his cigarette. No, the air was not the ghost. The air, for all its flora scent and beneficence, let him go, but the ghost followed him, rode in the car in the empty passenger seat. He knew it and knew it well and though sometimes it could seem cold, more often he bathed himself in the warmth and comfort of the anonymity of its missing. He knew well the insecurity of standing in front of people and talking and seeing in their faces their disapproval. He much preferred the knowing that if unidentified to anyone, he was never someone to be taken notice of.

“I don’t mind doing this—it’s just that I would like to understand it.”

“You will,” Gene says, as he looks up to eye the CCTV camera on the corner of the ceiling of the porch.

“Do you know someone who lives here?”

Gene looks slightly surprised, then looks around and shakes his head, “No.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not the point?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know anyone in this building, but I do know that they have a security system with the camera outside the front door and all and it makes them feel safe…”

“And?”

“Look, if you’re going to employ me in your services, you need to understand a very basic principle.”

“Okay.” When she says this, she tosses her hair over her shoulder, like she does just about every two minutes. And even though he sees it for what it is, he can’t help but helplessly watch as she does it. It’s a tick—the sign of a present irritant and at having to wait for his various obtuse “explanations.” Still though, he keeps tying the balloon to a rock, and tries to take a deep breath because every time she does toss her hair, little particles of sweet-smelling womanliness cast off into the atmosphere and he just has to catch a few. But he returns to reality after tying of the knot on the balloon string. He’s made the placement just right and the balloon floats up just in front of the camera, blocking its never-sleeping eye.

“See?”

“Uh… you blocked the camera.”

“Yeah!”

The racket was intense and he stepped off the pedals and the seat of the bike to straddle it, to lean on the handlebars and just watch the steel behemoth roll by; a steel segmented worm on wheels that on several passing cars carried massive steel sets of train wheels—a train carrying train wheels. What luck, Gene thought. He listened as above the rumble and bells of the railroad crossing signs, high-pitched squeaks would emanate from the wheels on the track. He wondered at those sounds; were they the sounds of the wheels pressing into the rails as the train rocked to and fro? He wondered, leaning on his bike’s handlebars, if he could get close enough to the train, lit only by the red flashing lights of the crossing and the sodium yellow of street lamps, if he could get close enough to the train to see where the high-pitched squeaks of metal-on-metal were coming from. He wondered if he could put his fingers between the wheels and the rail and what it would feel like to have them unrecoverably crushed?

He wondered, as he looked as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tipped and stamped like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he could feel a difference in the weight of cars that passed over gaps in the tracks. He could feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and slowly strobing red lights. All the sensations together felt heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would’ve looked by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to where the sound goes.