The shop sold no notebooks. I went in because there was a train in the window, carrying a house on its roof.
It was a very small train. Through the house’s lit windows I could see someone washing dishes. Every time the train rounded its tiny track, a woman opened a window and threw a broken plate at the engine.
I had been trying to write a radio play for six weeks. My characters sat in rooms and explained why they were unhappy. This woman appeared to have passed that stage.
“What does it cost?” I asked.
The person behind the counter had bark for skin and a leaf caught in one eyebrow. Their name badge said Silt.
“To watch, three coins. To use anything, one memory worth as much to you as the thing you take.”
“I could make the whole play myself.”
“You could.”
“The train is just an idea.”
“Then use another.”
Silt pointed to the terms on the wall. One visit lasted one waking hour. To leave, I must give up the part of the dream I had not claimed. To claim something, I had to say, I will use this. Anything claimed was paid for, and there were no refunds.
“Try a small thing first,” Silt said.
I picked up a spoon from their counter. “I will use—”
The name of my first landlord began to slip away. I could see his face, but the name that belonged above it had gone blank.
I stopped speaking. The name came back, as unpleasant as ever.
“An unfinished claim can be stopped,” Silt said. “A finished one cannot.”
I put down the spoon. I paid three coins.
Silt pulled a chair from the counter. “Sit. You won’t fall.”
I woke standing on the train.
It was large now, traveling through a country of wet hills. The house rode on a broad flat car behind the engine. Its kitchen window was open.
“You!” the woman shouted. “You’re new.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then find out where this is going.”
Her name was Joza. She had been washing up when her house was lifted onto a train. There were four other people inside: her husband, two boarders and a man who had come to fix the stove. They all wanted to get off.
I climbed through the window. Joza gave me a towel, which was a reasonable welcome to somebody entering by her sink.
“Where does the line end?” I asked.
“It ends when somebody decides we’ve reached the interesting part.”
She pointed at the engine. “Visitors can make the ride worse. Want a chase, and it speeds up. Want a crash, and the track starts breaking. But they can’t wish it stopped. We have to find our own way off.”
I liked her sentence about reaching the interesting part.
“I will use this,” I said.
For a moment the room shook. Then I knew the sentence belonged to me. I also knew I could not remember the night of my first performed play.
I remembered its title. I remembered the theater, the damp coat I wore, the cheap meal afterward. But the part I had carried for years—the sound of people laughing at something I had written—was gone.
Joza watched my face.
“What did you pay?”
“Nothing important,” I said.
She handed me a second towel. “The first one is for dishes. That one’s for your eyes.”
I decided I needed to leave. In the hall I found an ordinary door onto the train’s rear platform. I said I would not claim the rest of this dream and stepped through.
I woke in Silt’s chair. Twenty minutes had passed.
On the shop counter lay a notebook. I wrote Joza’s sentence in it. Silt said nothing. The exchange had already been made.
“Can I have the memory back if I cross it out?” I asked.
“No.”
“Can I visit again?”
“You have forty minutes left.”
At home, my morning advertisement waited unfinished. It was for a laundry that wanted people to know it collected blankets. That was paying work. The play competition closed next week. The prize would pay for months of writing, if I won it.
I looked at the train in the window. Joza was climbing through the roof hatch with a rope around her waist.
I sat in the chair again.
When I entered the house, the stove man had already climbed onto the roof. The boarders were helping Joza lift the hatch. Beyond the train ran a path crowded with trees.
“We can lower ourselves onto the next station roof,” she said. “The engine won’t stop, but it’s slow on the curve.”
“That ends the story too soon.”
Joza looked at me. “It ends my ride.”
I had a better plot. The train would speed up. The stove would explode. Joza would save the boarders, lose her husband, and arrive somewhere strange enough to sell a play about it.
I told her the first part. She stood with one foot on the stairs.
“You’re one of them,” she said.
“One of whom?”
“The visitors. They always need something worse to happen.”
I closed the roof hatch. The train’s wheels began to turn faster. I had not understood she meant me. Joza had known. She hit the hatch with the flat of her hand.
“Open it.”
“Just hear me out.”
She did not. She went to the kitchen and opened the window. Her husband brought the rope. The boarders cleared the sill. They were leaving another way.
The scene was good. It was better than the one I had planned. All I had to do was take it.
“I will use—”
My sister’s face blurred in my mind.
She had come to see me last autumn. We had eaten oranges over the sink because neither of us wanted to wash plates. I could still see her thumb peeling the skin. I could not see her smile.
I stopped.
Her face came back. I stood very still until I could remember the whole visit, including the argument about whether I should get a regular job.
Joza had one leg through the window. Her husband held the rope.
“I’ve opened the roof again,” I told her.
“Why?”
“So you can choose.”
She went back up the stairs. At the next curve they lowered themselves onto a station roof, one at a time. Joza waited until the stove man was safely down. Then she dropped the rope beside him and jumped.
I watched them walk along the roof toward a stairway. None looked back at the train.
I went out through the rear door, claiming nothing else.
Silt’s clock showed three minutes left. I did not spend them.
That night I finished the blanket advertisement. I wrote that the laundry would collect blankets too large to argue with. It was not Joza’s line. It was not a prize-winning play. When I read it aloud, I laughed at the picture of myself losing an argument to a blanket.
I called my sister. She asked whether I had found a regular job yet.
“I’m doing an advertisement,” I said.
“What for?”
I read it to her. She laughed too, then told me the collection price needed to be in it.
I put the price in.
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