Forgetting Adam (2)

2.

Adam thought he might be dead. He didn't hurt anywhere, if that was any indication. He wasn't asleep either, he was sure. He remembered tripping off of the rail and then everything went black. But he wasn't unconscious: the cement columns to either side of him were solid to the touch and he could feel a cool breeze, with a touch of dankness to it, like his grandmother's basement. He was confused. Maybe he hit his head on a railroad tie as he fell. There had been a train coming in the distance. Maybe the train struck him as he lay unconscious. Either way, he was still drunk. Fear was rising in his throat and after a moment, resting a hand on one of the columns, he leaned over and vomited whiskey and beer onto the scuffed paving stones he was standing on. He wiped his mouth and tried to dispel his rising sense of alarm--he had never thrown up in a dream. He looked around. He was on a road.

It led into the distance behind him, disappearing over the horizon. It cut a straight path through the flat landscape like it was conjured up in straight-edge ruler's dream. Dull green prairie grass, waste-high, tumbled in waves across the plains on either side of the road. The light was failing but the sky above Adam was devoid of any setting sun or any clouds. It was as if a painter had muddied his sky-blue with a puddy gray and haphazardly pushed his brush against the canvas.

In front of him the road ended at a wall beyond the two columns he rested between. The wall was black, pitted, and made Adam queasy when he tried to follow its lines as they ran off into the distance on either side of the road. He couldn't be sure, but he thought the wall curved slightly, like it was one immense circle. It was a short wall, only eight feet tall. Where the road ended, there was a brown wooden door.

Adam thought he heard thunder over the wall, as if he was inside a house hearing distant thunder through closed windows. His heart started to beat very fast, and he thought he might be having a heart attack until he recognized the pain in his chest as heartburn. Looking at the door, he wondered at the acid rising in his stomach. If he was dead, he wondered, why did he have heartburn? Why was he still drunk? And if he could feel these things, why couldn't he feel the bruises he should surely have from tumbling off of a railroad tie? And if he was hit by a train... He stopped himself there, and tried to swallow away the rising bile.

Thunder rolled beyond the wall again. Adam looked up and thought he saw light crackling some distance inside the walled circle, like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. The fizzle of the crackling light reached his ears moments later. He took a step toward the door, not knowing where else to go or what else to do. As he approached the door he could feel the ground beneath him shake and then a louder clap of thunder reverberated off of the invisible barrier above the wall.

Wiping his mouth again, and swallowing the taste of vomit and bile at the back of his throat he tried to push the door forward since there was no latch or knob or handle to speak of. The door didn't budge.