The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

She had thought that as she grew older she would grow more certain of herself and what she wanted to be.

He has suffered too many tedious evenings, amazed at how they can speak so long about so little.

This has always been the Captain’s way; undemonstrative, demanding, but always there. Present. Ready to catch her if she fell.

She is stronger than she looks. Stronger than she feels. She remembers the furnaces in the glassworks, the way her father plunged the glass into the burning heart of them. There, that is what she needs: the burning in her chest, her own furnace that she is carrying with her. She needs to hold her hand close to its flame, to feel the power that drove her to cast her old life off, that guided her toward this train.

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.

Sketches crowd around the words, as if he never has time to even turn to a blank page.

There is something crouching behind his words, she thinks, and she has the sensation that whatever it is, it is not meant for her.

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 had felt a sense of vertigo, a slipping of her certainties.

She has never been able to resist the lure of a bookcase, and wanders over to it, running her hand over the titles

as if he wants to stop her from looking, but she has already pulled on the cloth, giving in to the contrary streak that compels her to want anything she is told she cannot have.

“And you, it was as if you heard the thunder calling, and wanted to be out in this world though your mother was leaving it.”

In their telling, she has become beautiful, brave, though no one has described her to Weiwei in a way that makes her seem real. She wonders if she should be sad too, but she can’t seem to work up the proper feelings.

he has to run after each thought before it bounds away from him, leaving bright trails that he must follow or lose forever.

I do not presume to understand the meaning of the Wastelands … or to propose, indeed, that there is meaning to be found …

certain that we would be stopped; just as certain that we were unstoppable.

We began to understand, then, that she had found what she was looking for after all; that the Wastelands girl we had known is as much a part of the landscape as the Captain is of the train. We understand that they will never be parted.

I keep it open at the author’s portrait, so that he might see the world he once described now loosened from its bindings.