The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

He is ill at ease in the company of fellow travellers and has no wish to cultivate new acquaintances. He has met many such travellers in the course of his journeys, at those hotels and inns in which European languages are spoken and the food—while a thin imitation of proper nourishment—can be eaten with familiar utensils. He has suffered too many tedious evenings, amazed at how they can speak so long about so little. Though they could be among the grandest of mountains or cities, their horizons remain barely wider than the walls of their own estates.

“What need do we have for those dusty classrooms?” It was what he always said when they were on the train—“All this,” he would say, wonderingly, stretching out his arms to encompass the landscape outside. “We have all this.”

“Try not to look too much like you’re giving them the evil eye,” murmurs the Professor. But she can’t smooth her features into the mask the Company likes.

“Our names will be remembered,” he had said to the engineer. Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

Surely it is better to understand everything about a place one visits, not simply the parts that are deemed suitably comfortable or correct.

An insistent, irresistible urge is rising inside her. She can feel the release, the relief of giving in, like dropping the precious object you have always been so afraid of smashing.

It is this reliance on others that is unbearable; this helplessness in the face of incompetence and idleness.

She has read his other books, his Cautious Traveller’s Guides to Beijing and to Moscow and to other places she has never been, and in all of them his own certainty is emblazoned on every page. See this, go here; this is the history, the meaning, the truth. But the guide to the Wastelands is different; his certainties fall away; the more he looks, the less he understands. No wonder he could never find his way back to who he was before.

She has always found it reassuring to see a narrative emerging, her thoughts finding an order as words on the page.

A world always just out of reach. I grasped at it only to feel it slip through my fingers.

“Contrary, that’s what your daughter is,” her mother used to complain to her father. “To do a thing simply because she’s been told not to, it’s just too provoking.” But she had never meant to provoke, she just couldn’t help wanting to see what happened, so that later she could scribble it down in her diary, fix it in place and try to make sense of it in the privacy of her room.

The crew keep the curtains closed. Best not to see or be seen. Best not to think of how small they are; how the train, stopped out here in the vastness, is not as great as they tell themselves, as they boast to the passengers. All boasts are meaningless here. All promises waiting to be broken.

It seems that her life has always been driven by chimes and clocks and timetables but not now, not out here. Here she has lost the certainty of time.

Howls from somewhere close by. She hears them and thinks, Something is being consumed—and it fills her with the mindless, primitive urge to flee.

But she wishes she could enjoy such unexpected freedom. Instead, a wave of loneliness washes over her.

They force us to read the Wastelands as we would read a book in a lost language; a series of signs which we cannot hope to decipher.

She feels her own feet start to move as the kitchen boys begin their chant, like another line of percussion beneath the music, “We’re crossing, we’re crossing, we’re crossing,” and the porters take it up too, and the stewards, and the passengers, they take up the years of superstition, the ritual—boundaries have to be marked, after all, and what is it about a line that brings on the urge to leap over it?

There is a kind of ecstasy in the faces of the people in the carriage. This is why we have our rituals, she thinks. This is why they are needed—so that we can lose ourselves for a while.

The notebooks on his table are growing thick with his remembrances, with everything he had seen outside, with ideas that proliferate; he has to run after each thought before it bounds away from him, leaving bright trails that he must follow or lose forever.

He saw her on the train, in the storm, and then again on the outside, and now all these signs, this life bursting from the train … She was the harbinger, pointing out the truth to whoever would read it.

But it is not just Grey who doesn’t understand, it is Elena. Elena who watches and mimics and believes that this means that she understands how people work, but there are cruelties she doesn’t grasp, like the urge to trap and display, to possess for the sake of possessing.

The stowaway’s eyes gleam in the dim light, as though she is underwater. “Not yet,” she says. “Not yet. Just a little longer.” She takes Weiwei’s hand and pulls. “No,” says Weiwei. “But the train will help us.” The vines around them shift and curl. “We will look for Henry Grey,” says Elena. “We will play our game.”

The traveller may experience a peculiar phenomenon—a dread of arrival. This may manifest in a dangerous lethargy; the traveller sits by the window, unable to tear their gaze away. They await the sight of the station with anxiety; they do nothing to prepare their luggage or their dress. After all their days and nights onboard, they are afraid of what it means to be still.