22) I woke up from under a hail of luggage. The motion of the train that had lulled me for a time had ceased. There was screaming and moaning. Out a tiny window I saw the rocky ground where the night sky should have been. I was intact, as is only right. I scrambled for my backpack and crawled from the broken car to the outside. Bodies were scattered in the scrub. There was upset. Hurt. Names were called. Where was so and so? Have you seen this one or that?
I could not help. And I was unticketed. Events, wrecks like these call for greater attention to detail. I could not wait around. I had to flee.

I had managed to sleep long enough to dream a stupid dream about farming, running a big green tractor, leaving furrows with something I dragged, something attached to the machine. I dreamt that I hit a series of rocks. My tractor idled to a stop. I went to check it out. I climbed under the furrower, what the hell. The tractor began to roll forward. I was interlarded, mixed into the soil. I died in my dream. Is that supposed to happen? Not by the ordinary rules of dreaming.

Water has gods. Breath and rocks have gods. Fire, the stars, trees, even the lowly jackal have gods. Gravity does not. Nowhere, among no people, have I found a god of gravity. Is it that we never notice it until, through its agency, we fall down? Or are hailed upon? What haunted, addled people. Yet gravity was somehow missed. It is between me and the earth, our problem. Perhaps I am losing my mind just a little bit. Walking, walking is good. I've nowhere to go. Walking is good.

So I walk, uncertain as to North. I leave the calamitous wreck behind. Even in the lee of a wayward rise I could still hear the cries of the injured. I began to whistle through my cracked teeth. Cracked teeth? So I was injured, too. I am interested.