To the End of the Line

A terrible metallic taste flooded Riga's mouth. It started in the back of her throat and snaked all the way up to her front teeth, pushing against pursed lips. She clenched her jaw to keep from vomiting and threw her arms around her stomach. Muscles spasmed, joints popped, and she doubled over. The world around her pulsed in puffy blotches, but a harsh glare pierced her vision. It was a rude awakening.

Riga jerked her head up and pushed away shaggy bangs. She swallowed the terrible taste, then squinted.

This isn't the lecture hall. Where on earth—

Linoleum floors gleamed and flashed a garish Cheshire cat smile. Riga reached her arms to steady herself against a chrome-encased tabletop. Her ears adjusted quicker than her eyes; she heard plates clattering and ice cubes clinking.

A restaurant.

She swallowed again and swayed in her seat; the skin of her calves stuck to the vinyl of a booth banquette. She looked down at her legs. Instead of her favorite denim cutoffs, she saw baggy basketball shorts. The scent of coffee—black, burnt, watered-down—swept over her, and her stomach turned again, still queasy from the rude awakening.

A diner.

"Cherry or key lime?" A middle-aged woman loomed over Riga and balanced a plastic tray in one hand, her apron stained by the coffee Riga smelled.

Two slices of pie sat atop the tray like king and queen, surveying their diner kingdom from on high. The cherry pie oozed JELL-O red syrup. It dripped down the slice's edge with provocative torpor, then languished on clumps of broken crust like a lounging siren. Nausea from before melted away, and Riga's mouth began to water.

She wanted that cherry pie—desperately. Instinctively, she reached for it.

Before she should lift it off the tray, her throat closed, and the metallic taste flooded in again. With a clicking sound, the diner twisted and rolled around her, folding in on itself as if she were the epicenter of a complex origami. She blacked out.

Riga awoke abruptly and wretched, trying to spit out the vile taste that coated her tongue. Her vision cleared quickly this time, and she saw mature trees, rubber mulch, a swing set—a suburban playground.

Half a dozen kids were lying on their backs by a jungle gym with bicycles strewn about in casual piles, haphazard but carefree. Two girls were singing. Someone was telling a joke. The air was humid. She looked down and saw grass stains on her knees.

The boy telling the joke called out, but Riga's gaze was drawn to a redhead applying pink lip balm. The aroma of artificial cherries swam through the summer air and saturated Riga's senses. It smelled of sticky sweet first love and Valentine's Day and dancing close in the gym—in the middle of the floor, by center court, so the chaperones couldn't see. She watched the redhead press her lips together and the odor intensified. She couldn't look away.

Her mind raced.

I know what this is. I know what this is. I prepped all year for this. I can do this. I'll prove them wrong. Just focus, Riga.

She closed her eyes and reached out her fingers to graze the redhead's hand. When her throat started to close this time, Riga braced herself.

The clicking sound returned. The edges of reality fractured and folded themselves into tiny shards—polygon puzzle pieces of the playground, the pile of bikes, and the redhead. The half-life of reality less than an instant and infinitely divided.

Riga held her breath and plugged her nose. She didn't know where it would take her next, but she knew one thing: this train wouldn't stop.

The hop was faster this time. Riga regained consciousness just as a new thought unfolded before her. She placed a hand over her mouth to keep from throwing up. With her nose plugged, the metallic taste was bearable.

I'm getting the hang of this.

Riga was waiting in a hotel lobby. Two suitcases sat at her feet, and she nervously picked the ratty couch cushion beneath her. The air was filled with a haze of smoke. Her hands were sweating.

Next to the couch, a tawdry slot machine whistled and threw cheap neon lasers across the lobby. The glitzy words "Double Wide Cherry" were illuminated. A man hacked, spat, and slammed his hand down on the bright, blinking button, then cursed loudly when the icons stopped spinning. Even from three feet away, Riga could smell beer on the man's breath.

Bright, blinking cherry icons bordered the garish machine and glowed a seductive cerise in the hazy, hopeless room. The man looked up at Riga with a sickly grin.

Disgusting.

Riga felt a pit in her stomach, an unease towards the man and his grin and his beer breath, but she wasn't afraid of him. This wasn't her fear. The longing for the cherry pie, or the redhead—those weren't hers either. These weren't her thoughts.

She inhaled, and the smoke that filled her nose reminded her of the tobacco pipe her grandparents shared every evening on the wooden porch by the edge of the creek. She could almost hear the crickets. The beer on the man's breath smelled like the fresh malt barely they harvested in early summer. She could almost feel the sun on her forearms; her father drove the combine while Riga and her brother ran ahead with the dogs to pull up foxtail and ragweed. The walls of the hotel hobby began to quiver.

No, no. Stay focused. Find the track. Ride the line. You can do this.

She shook her head and stood quickly. The man continued to watch her and the walls continued to quiver. She ignored his gaze, strode over to the slot machine, and placed a hand on a pair of blinking red cherries. The scene folded in and out again, and Riga kept her consciousness this time.

She was sitting next to her sister on the edge of a pool. The sun felt hot on her skin, and she looked down at her arms, surprised to see freckles that she knew weren't hers. Her sister handed her a cool glass, slippery with condensation, with two straws stuck inside. She took a sip. A Shirley Temple.

The sweet, bubbly soda slipped down her throat and tickled the back of her mouth. She opened her lips and smiled, relieved. Her thirst was quenched—a thirst she didn't even know she had.

A maraschino cherry bobbed on top of the glass, and Riga was overcome with conflicting emotions. She longed for the cherry, just as she had for the pie and the redhead, but she looked at her sister and felt such tenderness. Such love. A warmth overcame her, and she plucked the cherry from the top of the glass, reached out a freckled arm, and handed it over.

But that act of selflessness wasn't Riga's. She didn't even have a sister.

The next thought had barely enough time to open. Riga was sitting in a dark basement in front of a computer screen. Two teenage boys navigated YouTube and Riga squinted in the screen's halo. It glowed eerie and idolatrous like a golden calf inside its black box pen. On-screen, a woman tied a cherry stem into a knot with her teeth; they were too white and bared. The woman wore a tight shirt that was cut low. The boys snickered, but Riga felt sick—she felt the pit in her stomach from the hotel lobby begin to grow.

But before she could feel shame, a sharp pang stabbed her back, then a tug at the center of her spine. No clicking, no folding, no blackout this time. But the metallic taste washed over her in a terrible, sickening wave. She was wrenched out of the scene like a fish caught on a line and she tumbled through space, drowning in an acrid ocean of steel and aluminum.

She sputtered and stumbled onto the floor of her lecture hall, hit the ground, and barreled into a desk. Riga's head was screaming, and she barely had time to register the stunned looks of her classmates before nausea overcame her and she rushed to a trash can and threw her head inside.

When she came up, her head spun. Slowly, her vision unblurred. She could make out the lecture hall. It was just as she had left it. A podium stood at the front of the hall next to a wide, black screen. A man with a bald head and an EEG cap lay flat on a cushioned table. Wires connected his cap to a series of monitors, and a drip line ran from his arm to an IV bag.

Riga caught her reflection in one of the monitors. No bangs, no freckles, just her—ripped denim shorts with patches sewn on, plaid button-down, loose ponytail. Just Riga, the harvester's kid. A comforting feeling of rightness washed over her, followed by an unnerving sensation of having moved so casually through the mind of another.

The only thing different in the hall was that now, tables and chairs were overturned. Instead of trainees in their seats listening to Dr. Loana and taking notes, they were clustered on the front row chattering frantically. Some looked concerned, others excited. But they weren't fussing over Riga. In the middle of the crowd, she saw him.

"Axel!"

A boy with shaggy bangs and long, freckled arms was slumped over in a chair like a rag doll. Dr. Loana tilted his head backward and opened one eye. It rolled back in an unnerving arc.

"Oh no, Axel!"

Riga pushed through the crowd.

"Back off! You've done enough, harvester. Get out of my classroom." Dr. Loana reached an arm out and shoved Riga back into the crowd.

She was shocked; she'd never been pushed by a teacher before. Riga backed away but didn't leave.

Another student broke through the line with a portable defibrillator and thrust it into Dr. Loana's arms. He snatched the defibrillator, ripped the adhesive off two pads, then stuck them to Axel's chest. Riga covered her face in her hands and dropped to the ground.

"I didn't mean to—"

Excruciating moments passed in silence as the defibrillator assessed Axel's heart rhythm. When the machine beeped loudly and a green button lit up, Dr. Loana smashed his hand down on it like the gambler on the cherry slot machine. A loud clicking noise filled the air, then Axel's began to rise and fall in a steady beat.

Dr. Loana leaned over him, but Axel jerked upwards abruptly, knocking into the professor's nose and sending his glasses flying. Dr. Loana cursed and jumped back. Axel's wide eyes scanned the room.

"Holy hell. Look at your faces. Did I almost die or something?"

At this, the class erupted in applause. With an exasperated sigh, Dr. Loana relaxed his grip on the defibrillator pads and they clanged to the floor. He leaned back on his heels, pinched his nose with one hand, and felt the floor for his glasses with the other.

Color slowly returned to Axel's face—a pink tan color that befitted someone who spent childhood summers on the playground and poolside. He sat upright and looked pleased with the cheering students gathered around him, if not a little confused.

He steadied himself against an overturned desk and rose to his feet, then took a mock bow.

His student clearly alive and well, Dr. Loana turned his attention to Riga.

"In all my years! Riga, you weren't supposed to train-hop into your fellow classmates! That's what he's for." He made an exaggerated motion to the man lying, still sedated, on the cushioned table with the EEG cap. "He's a volunteer, vetted by the council. He's trained… for God's sake, he's insured!"

"I swear, I didn't mean to! I just—"

"Wait a minute," Axel tossed his bangs out of his face and rubbed the back of his neck. "You train-hopped? Into me?"

"I know," Riga sputtered, "Axel. Oh, Axel. I'm so sorry. I'm just— I didn't—"

"So, you were in my head?"

Riga shrugged. "Cherry pie at a diner, a Shirley Temple by the pool... Sound familiar?"

Axel blushed and shrunk backward. "Holy hell. You were riding my train of thought."

"I swear I don't know how I did it. I was trying to ride his." She looked at the man on the cushioned table. "I don't even know where your train of thought came from!"

Realization dawned on Axel and Riga at the same moment, and perhaps some of the more astute classmates as well. Riga flushed and grabbed her shorts. Her favorite denim cutoff shorts had miniature cherry patches sewn across them; they dotted her pants like the freckles on Axel's arms.

She gasped. "You were checking out my..." She stopped short and looked around the room, suddenly very self-conscious.

"Oh crap. I am so, so sorry, Riga! I never would have— I didn't even mean— It was just, like, a second—" He gave up and covered his hands over his face, which was now as red as the cherries.

"I mean, it's OK!" She said a little quicker than she should have.

Dr. Loana interrupted. "This is exactly why I told the committee not to teach train-hopping to first years. This kind of mind movement, it's delicate. It's intimate. And you all… you're too... immature. And you certainly don't have the right pedigree for this, Riga. Didn't I tell you to get out of my class?"

Axel stood taller. "But she did it, didn't she? Did anyone else even come close?"

The other students shrugged and looked at their feet. Dr. Loana pressed his fingertips to his forehead.

Riga stepped forward, a little bolder now. "Yeah, I did it. I mean, I totally did it. I hopped like four cars. Wait—the diner, the playground, the lobby, the pool, the basement… Five! I hopped five cars!"

Axel blushed again and Riga bit her lip.

Probably shouldn't share his private memories with the whole class.

"Sorry, again." She mouthed.

Axel gave a dumb grin.

"Please, professor. Let me stay. Let me prove I can do this."

Dr. Loana pressed a towel to his nose and sighed. "Train-hopping isn't about riding cars, Riga. It's about getting to the end of the line. And you jumped the whole damn track."

He walked to the front of the room where the man with the EEG cap lay. With a finger, he followed one of the wires to a large monitor. "At the end of each train of thought, at the end of the line, that's when you find it—the final destination, if you will. The train hops wildly from thought to thought, and if you're skilled, you hop along with it."

Riga couldn't help but smile and steal a glance over at Axel. He was smiling, too.

He doesn't look too mad about it.

"But that gets us nothing," Dr. Loana caught the glance and raised his voice. "You've proven nothing, Riga. But when you get to the end of the line, that's when you find what we call—"

"The ember," Riga interrupted. "The heart of pre-thought. I've been paying attention, professor. We find the ember, the place where the train is going, and that's where we see it—the hope, the fear…"

"… the plan." Dr. Loana finished.

"I know. And I know I can do this." She looked to Axel, who was still grinning. She set her jaw and gave him a nod. He nodded back. "Let me prove it."

Dr. Loana paused a moment, still holding a towel to his nose. The rest of the class looked on—silent, attentive. Finally, he gestured to the man on the table. "Alright, harvester. Give it a go. On the sanctioned volunteer, please."

Riga licked her lips and took a deep breath. She was just about to plug her nose when Dr. Loana offered one final piece of advice.

"And this time, Riga, when you ride his train of thought, ride it to the end of the line."

A terrible metallic taste flooded Riga's mouth. But this time, she was ready for it.

I can prove them wrong. I can do this.