With the next thunderous tick of the clock, I leaned forward and strained to hear a distant clack or whine or whistle over the roar of the ocean some thousands of miles away and the subharmonic moan of the desolate land around me. I wondered if maybe the train wasn't just a dream I'd believed in to stave off the menacing cold and solitude. I began to despair of ever sitting inside a warm, lighted car and showing my pass to the conductor. I became more and more certain that the train I was waiting for was an illusion invented for my own comfort, a myth to justify the wind piercing my coat. I stood on the trainless platform, alone, without the words I had dropped or the fantasies that kept me warm. I didn't resume my sentence. It was already lost in the raging, deafening night.

For the third night in a row I sat with my imitation moleskine notebook as my date for the evening. I don't know why I always feel the need to document every boring, frightening, or desolate experience I endure. I'd rather just forget about them. I finished describing my night in Wabern, resuming where the ink had frozen in the pen, then flipped back to the beginning. First entry: Megan is a girl who drinks SoCo because it was Janis Joplin's drink of choice. I closed the book and rubbed at my stubble, trying to determine whether I looked rugged or just slovenly. Straightening up, I surveyed the other denizens of the hotel bar. They were trendy, sporty, with clothes and expressions suggestive of an advertisement for an overly sweetened rum drink. Every girl was hot, and none was attractive. They were all intently playing billiards or laughing and clinking glasses in cramped booths. They were not sitting at the bar. I consulted my beer about whether I should label on the top or the bottom outside corner of each page before I began numbering each one.

I was up to one hundred and sixty-three when two guys walked in and sat next to me at the bar. They ordered two Becks and clinked the bottles earnestly, making sure to lock eyes while swallowing the r in prost!. Americans. They talked low and fast, leaning together. I caught sentence fragments that didn't seem to connect. They touched each others arms and hands. Gay couple sat down next to me I wrote, then hastily turned the page for fear they'd see it. The closer one abruptly spun on his barstool to face me. Hey, don't I know you?

Uh. I said.

Yeah, I'm Mason. I think you're in the room next to ours. We talked when you checked in, remember? You dropped a train ticket or something in the elevator. I knocked on your door to return it. You said you were here on business and it turned out we'd run into each other in Berlin before, at the Free University. I roomed with Maverick. After you told those French guys what it means in English, they called him Ocowboy' for the rest of the term.
Oh. I said, making a face that I hoped made it look like I recognized him. Yeah. Probably.

Right. he said, turning halfway away from me again and poking the ice in his drink with the straw.

Well, Chris and I about to go to Rose's. Wanna come along?

Uh. I said again.  I looked at the blank page. Ink was bleeding through from the other side. What was Rose's?

Sure. Sure! I said, trying to muster enthusiasm.

Cool.

The sign above Rose's just said Bar, and the walls were covered with pink shag carpeting. I hadn't known Mason was gay, or I'd forgotten. It wasn't in my notebook's account of my term at the Free University. We sat down and Chris immediately began pointing out swallowable men. I hoped I wasn't turning red every time he said that word. He disappeared into the crowd while I ripped up paper napkins under the table. Then I realized a little pile of tiny tissue squares that was probably accumulating under my chair and that it probably looked really strange from across the room so I stopped.

Mason didn't acknowledge Chris' departure or my fidgetiness. He asked where I had been and what I studied and after the martini I'd told him all about my first kiss and after the gin tonic I couldn't really remember which parts of my autobiography I'd revealed. Both of us getting sloshed, we somehow started a discussion of the supposed inherent absolute goodness of God. I said God had to be good because it was a logical contradiction to define God as necessarily inherently good and then argue that maybe he's actually not good because you'd be changing either your definition of good or your definition of God. Mason swizzled his drink with a transparent plastic sword and shook his head. He said, You talk about God like an atheist.

What? I just said God must be good!

Yeah but you talk like a mathemetician. You don't really believe in God, do you? You want to think someone's holding you when you're alone. You want everything to connect and make sense and have a justification. But you don't buy it, do you?

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. The same feeling of waking up that morning in the Holocaust memorial washed over me, and the airless, trainless platform. The empty smell of the snow.  I shivered and asked how did we even get on such a boring topic. He laughed and poked me with the plastic sword. I leaned toward him involuntarily. Suddenly a bright light flashed before my eyes.

Two Euro, zwei, I sell you a Foto picture! A bearded Turk with a Polaroid loomed over us.

Sure! enthused Mason, throwing his arm around me and pressing the side of his face against mine. The air disappeared from my lungs and my eyes turned toward him, wide. The camera flashed again, and Mason paid the man, who then thrust the smeary plastic square into my clammy hand.

I kept staring at Mason's mouth while he talked. It was redder than I'd noticed before and his cheeks were reddish too. When I looked up at his eyes again, he was gazing at me. Let's get out of here. he said. I laughed at the cliché and said okay but he was still gazing at me. The uneasiness returned, sharper this time. Was Mason coming onto me? Was I enjoying it? Was I turning gay? Where were we going? Wait, what about Chris?

He does this all the time. Mason assured me. He'll come home tomorrow morning looking all disheveled and complain that the studs in this city just can't get enough of him. He's ridiculous.

He looked at me for a long moment again. I couldn't look away. After a moment he stood up and I followed him through the smoke to the door.

The train was fluorescent and nearly empty. Mason inched closer to me at each stop I didn't feel drunk anymore. I tried to regulate my breathing and found myself gasping for breath. He seemed not to notice. Putting a hand on my shoulder, he leaned towards me — I assumed for a kiss and tried frantically not to panic, until I realized his lips were almost brushing my ear as he whispered something about the girl at the other end of the car. I feigned rapt attention in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that I was blushing madly. Mason was motioning toward the girl's headphones and then suddenly he started singing.

Someone please call the surgeon...

I was confused but I knew the song so I sang too.

...who can crack my ribs...

Mason nodded and joined back in.

...and destroy this broken heart...

We stopped and looked at each other, unnerved by the eerie coincidence. The lyric wasn't destroy it was repair. A cloud of awkward silence formed between us. I giggled involuntarily.

Suddenly the bashfulness dropped from Mason's mouth and before I knew what was happening he was standing on my toes and his tongue was pushing past my lips and I was letting go of the handrail and my hands hung at my sides and my mind froze and a voice announced our stop and the train jerked to a halt and I fell into Mason's arms as the doors glided open.

Mason guided me by the hand out of the train station, up the echoing stairwell, and down the dark hotel corridor. Our rooms were adjacent, but somehow I had assumed he was taking me to his room. When we stopped in front of mine instead, I was momentarily confounded. As he stared at me expectantly, I realized that using my room made much more sense, since Chris wouldn't be barging in at dawn with braggadocious complaints about the high demand for his sexual assets.

Fumbling for my key, I remembered the mess I'd left in the room. Would Mason notice the wet towels on the floor? Should I try to clean up the used coffee mugs before he noticed them? Should I offer him a drink from the overpriced minibar?

I looked into his face as I turned the key in the lock, preparing to gauge his reaction, but he was gone. My eyes darted around the empty hallway and caught his door as it swung shut. The lock clicked.

I left my keys dangling from the lock of my own room and walked over to the shut door. I didn't knock. My eyes swam. I looked at my watch; it was 2:17 A.M. I felt very tired all of the sudden, and not knowing what else to do, I walked back to my door and opened it. Then I went inside and locked it behind me.

I had been awake for what felt like days but once in the room I picked up all the towels from the floor and carefully folded them, and washed both of the dirty coffee cups and placed them on the table, straightening the two chairs as well before getting into bed. When I lay down, though, my eyes stuck open. I switched on the TV and muted the reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger. I couldn't stand hearing Chuck Norris dubbed over, so I put on my headphones and scrolled down to the song we'd sung on the train. I let the song repeat, replacing the soundtrack of every rerun and commercial until I faded into staticky dreams.