Day 1,356

From my window I can just see the trains passing behind the trees. At night when I cannot sleep — which is often; I am insomniac, I fear — it is a small pleasure to lie there in the dark and know the ceiling is low overhead and that the trains will soon be passing. Their whistles, so long and so mournful, the bleating of a lost industry… they soothe me. Though I do not sleep, though my forehead is no less dry and crackling, I find some rest there, some munificence.

In the daytime they do not seem so real as at night. That they are large and dangerous I do not doubt; from my window I have seen two men shattered by the juggernauts, seen the red ruin of their bodies taken away in the slow white vans. But even the mystery of death is small compared to what shape bulks behind the whistles and the track-clatter in the dark.

Other nights I sit beside my window and look across the city, my eyes unfocused, my mind vague. Across the bay shines a red light that I like to watch, though by daylight I have never found the lamp.