Bob Dylan, Me, and the Runaway Transformation Fate Train

[Note: All track titles link to songs.]

Track 1: Visions of Johanna

My eyes are closed and I am dreaming. I must be. I know it, because she’s there, standing before me, robin’s-egg eyes soft and welcome. I know it, because she holds my hands, warm flesh against my flesh. In life outside a dream, it could never be.

She mouths something to me, but no sound. What is it? And yet, I know. I lean toward her, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to hear her voice, don’t want to hear those old familiar words that once sang us through our tender mornings. I cannot stand to hear her now, here, because I know when I open my eyes, life will be life again, and she will be dead again.

Now it comes, that phantom crooning like she used to do from our kitchen:

“A beautiful morning with you, beloved.

The sunshine shines on you, beloved.

Oh won’t you come and face me, beloved?

And kiss and love and embrace me, beloved?”

Her dreamface dissolves. My heart cracks. Another vision of Johanna.

Track 2: The High Place of Darkness & Light

The left side of my head smacks against something, tears me from sleep. My eyes shudder open, and impressions fly at me one after the next. First, there is light. My head is against a window. I am sitting up. And outside the window, a world moves rapidly by. I turn to look forward. Rows of seats. It seems to be a passenger car on a train, and except me, it’s completely empty.

I think a moment. How did I get here? When did I board a train? I close my eyes, focusing, but nothing comes except slight pain in my left temple where my head must have bumped the window. No memory of a train. No memory of wanting to go somewhere. I reach into my pockets looking for a ticket. Nothing in my coat pockets, nothing in my pants pockets. No ticket, no wallet, no passport, no cash, no keys. How could that be? I’ve hardly left the apartment in years, and never without my wallet and keys. My neck and shoulders tense. Something is wrong.

I stand up, turn left into the aisle, and begin walking up-train. There’s gotta be someone onboard who can at least tell me where we’re headed. As I walk, I peer left and right out the windows. The landscape is desolate and odd, a desert patched with something resembling gorse. Not like any place I’ve seen or been before.

When I get to the door adjoining the cars, I press the latch to open it. Nothing happens. I press again. Again, nothing. I try to jerk it open, but it doesn’t budge. I start pounding. “Hello!” I yell. “Hello! Is anybody there? Can somebody help me open this up? Hello!”

I am startled when a voice from the back of the train car pierces the air in a long, nasal, midwest drawl:

“Not gonna do much good to go on yellin’ that way.”

I turn around. There in the back where I just was, a man sits staring at me. His dark, curled hair is vagabondish and askew. Black sunglasses hide his eyes.

“Thank god,” I say, and start toward the back of the car. “Maybe you can help me. I just woke up on this train. I have no idea how I got here, no ticket, not even a memory of boardi…” I pause and gape as I draw close. That nose, the thin, sad cheeks, vulpine mouth. I know him. Can it be? Can it? He sits still, staring at me behind the dark sunglasses.

“Are you…” I start to say.

“Yes, go ahead,” he replies.

“Are you… Bob Dylan?”

He smiles under the sunglasses and expels a puff of air from his nose. “In a manner of speakin', you might say so. I guess you might. You can call me Bob, if you like, though in this capacity, I mostly go by Robert Zimmerman.”

“I see,” I say. I do not see. The strangeness of the last few minutes is a lot to take in. First, I wake up in a train car, no recollection how I got there. Now, here’s Bob Dylan a.k.a. Robert Zimmerman, the only other person in the train car, enlisting me in conversation. Johanna loved Bob Dylan.

“Look,” he says, rubbing his nose and leaning forward. “I know you have a good plenty of questions. You're smart to. And somethin' else I know is you ain’t got much time. The clock goes tick tock.” He wags his pointer fingers back and forth as he says ‘tick tock.’

Not much time? Time for what? I almost ask, but he beats me to it.

“It’s cryptic, yes. But, look out that window there.” He points and I look. “Notice anything?”

At first it looks like the same gorse bush and desert landscape, but then I notice something has changed. “The train? Is it going faster?”

“Bingo,” he says. “Runaway train. And it ain’t slowin' down anytime soon.”

“Ok,” I say. “Well, so what? Then we get wherever we’re going faster, right?”

“Yes, and that’s what I’m here to prevent.” He pauses as he says this, pauses as if arrested by some great heaviness, then resumes. “There are some things you need to know. Some you don’t. Here’s what to know. Time is runnin' out, and if this train arrives at where it’s goin' before you complete what needs completin', it’s over. You’re dead.” He pauses. “I’m hired to make sure that don’t happen.”

“Hired?” I ask. “Who hired you?”

Bob Dylan removes his sunglasses and cocks his head as if to say, “Come on.” As he looks at me, my throat tenses, and all at once I know, not knowing how I know, just knowing, even if that knowing makes little sense. Johanna, my woman, three years dead.

“Johanna,” I say. “How can that be?”

Bob Dylan nods. “Johanna, because she loves you. Beyond that, there’s no sense in explainin’ or even time to try if it was wanted.” He continues. “Where we are now, it ain’t no natural place. It’s stuck right between things. The high place between darkness and light. Not quite life, not quite death, just the middle. And there ain’t nothin' solid in this place. So, if you’re lookin’ for somethin’ to stand on or someone to make a deal with, good luck. But what this place does mean is that folks that are already halfway between livin’ and dyin’, they get to make a real choice one way or the other which way they go next.”

I’m lost. Johanna, because she loves me. Darkness and light.

“A reminder,” he says, “that time ticks by. I can’t answer everything for you.” His compassionate but severe eyes are fixed on mine. “Lemme say this: You already been livin’ like you're dead. You know how that goes. And you could choose the real thing here, if you want. But Johanna’s arranged it so you might make another choice. So, if you want it, the clock won’t stop. We gotta move now.” He stands and extends a hand.

You already been livin’ like you're dead. You know how that goes. Yes, I do. I look out the window at the lifeless desert sands and parched gorse. I think of the apartment I never leave, the vases without flowers, the nightly visions of Johanna, the gray waking hours that seem to lengthen with the days. Three years gone by like that. Another choice. What could that mean?

Bob Dylan’s hand is still extended expectantly. Outside, the landscape speeds by. I raise my head and then my hand.

“Ok,” I say. “I’m with you.”

Track 3: Shelter from the Storm

Bob Dylan smiles. “Well, alright.” He turns, tilts his head to follow him, and we walk down-train. At the end of the car, we pass through a door that leads us to a compartment stationed just before the next train car. The door to the next train car is metal, gray, and windowless. Above it is a sign that reads HEAVEN. Bob Dylan lifts his right hand and gives three knocks.

“Knock, knock, knockin’,” he says. “Now we wait.”

I look to my left. There’s a window here, and I peer out onto the fast-passing landscape. The gorse is thinning now, leaving the landscape more desolate still. The train has picked up speed.

Despite being between cars, there’s relative quiet in this compartment. Some squeaking, some low vibration, that’s it. I try a question.

I say, “So you moonlight here as some kind of Charon?”

He turns to me, sunglasses resting again on the vulpine cheeks. “Something like that, sure. Though I’ll say it’s more like Virgil for Dante than Charon for anybody.”

“Mm,” I consider this.

Soon, a loud hissing comes from the door, and the entrance to HEAVEN opens up. Bob Dylan looks at me now. “Time to replay the past.” When I glance beyond him, I see what he means. Instead of a train car, the door opens onto a scene of a dark cafe crowded with chairs and people, mixed mutterings, and a stagelight that illuminates a stool at the front of the room with a guitar beside it. I know the place. I know the time. It’s the night I met Johanna.

“Bob,” I say, but he looks at me and holds a finger to his lips. My breath gets heavy and pressure grips my throat. I look away. I can’t stand to see it. “Do not turn away,” Bob Dylan says. “Do not turn away from the thing you fell in love with.” I look back reluctantly.

I was sitting on the left side of the room that night. I look to see if I can see myself. Just as I make out the side of my face, Johanna walks into the spotlight, puts the guitar around her neck, and approaches the microphone. As it did that night long ago, her radiance touches me again now—touches me not in a way that shocks so much, but more in a way that lets breath come easy. She begins to strum. She’s about to sing. I know her voice will change something in me. My throat softens, sadness comes, and in a gesture almost too subtle to sense, Bob Dylan moves just one inch closer to my side.

She smiles out in the crowd, her robin’s-egg eyes dancing with joy, then sings:

“‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood

When blackness was a virtue, the road was full of mud

I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form

‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give ya shelter from the storm…' ”

Her voice spreads generously into the room. It arches forward, like red flowers arching for the sun or the rain, thirsting both to feed themselves and make an offering of their radiance.

“She invoked something fine in you then,” Bob whispers under the music. “What was that?”

I keep watching, my face salty-damp. “I didn’t know it that night, really,” I say. “That night, all I knew was I needed to meet this woman. Later, I found out why. Yes, she invoked something in me. Her voice. Not lust really, though I had that. It was something much rarer. Something like attendance. Like I’d unknowingly been a gardener all my life, but because I never had a bed of flowers to tend, I never knew. I never had a place to put my heart.”

Bob Dylan nods.

“That night, I approached her after her set. I wanted to get on one knee, wanted to behold her. Instead, I simply said, ‘I don’t know how to thank you for your music, but I wish to.’ I remember her eyeing me, maybe scanning for sincerity. She must have sensed it, because she said, ‘Well, how ‘bout you buy me a drink and just come be with me awhile on that couch in the corner?’ And that’s just what happened. We sat for hours, the cafe people moving around us, sometimes talking, sometimes quiet, gazing at each other. I felt her opening toward me. All I wanted was to look at her, to give to her, to tend to her.

“The next morning, I jumped out of bed, swept up in an impulse. I went to the floral shop and bought up succulents, peace lilies, monstera deliciosa, and red flowers to fill all the vases in my apartment. I was making my home into a garden she might one day enter.”

I sigh. Johanna is singing the final verse, and I listen to her closing words:

“‘Come in’ she said, ‘I’ll give ya shelter from the storm.”

“Time to move,” says Bob Dylan. He reaches forward, grabs the car door’s handle, and slides it shut. We are momentarily cast in darkness. Then a light illuminates the compartment again. I look up, and the sign above the door has changed. It now reads, “LONESOME DEATH.”

Track 4: Hattie Carroll

The door hisses open, and the train car has transformed back into a train car, much like the one I awoke in. I step inside, following Bob Dylan along the aisle down-train. To the left and to the right, the windows reveal the same barren landscape, except now the gorse is completely gone and it’s just desert sand. The light of the day has softened into a late-afternoon pastel. The train’s speed has doubled.

Bob Dylan gestures forward with his hand, and when I look, I see that about halfway down the car, there’s a collection of four seats facing each other with a table in between. In one of the seats, a dignified older black woman sits wearing a dark dress, brimmed sun hat, and a necklace of pearls. She looks at me and gestures hurriedly. “Clock’s ticking, man!” she yells.

When I get to her table, she bids me to sit across from her. “Hello,” she holds out her hand. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Hattie Carroll.”

I take her hand. “Hello.”

She smiles at me, lifts a cigarette to her mouth, exhales, and then tamps it out in a glass ashtray. “You know, I used to empty ashtrays for a living.”

“Oh?” I say.

“But then Robert came along, told me about this job here on the runaway transformation fate train. Now, I spend my days filling ashtrays!” and she starts laughing. “Smile of fortune.”

“Hm,” I nod. Across the aisle, Bob Dylan sits looking at the speeding landscape. He seems worried.

“Well, I don’t just fill ashtrays. Can’t a woman have more than one function?” she laughs again, revealing full bright teeth. “I’m also what they call a transition walker.”

She looks at me sincerely now. No laughter, no smile. Something is about to happen. She speaks: “Every ascent eventually descends. Every pleasure tilts to pain. Even in the high place of darkness and light, where you find yourself now, shadow gets illuminated and radiance dims in the shade. But there’s always a point separating opposites. A transition material. And some beings was meant to walk and see and mark that transition. Like me.”

She stops, regards me, then says, “Close your eyes and give me your hand.” I do, and she goes on. “Heaven lasted long for you and Johanna. But Hell came too. It’s time to walk that transition point.”

With my eyes closed, memory comes. “Yes,” says Hattie. “Let the memory come. Of Heaven first. That sweet courtship, long music nights, how you used to squeeze her hand before she went on stage. You loved her, and like you was born to it, you became an attendant of love, a love-tender, standing behind your woman, solid in your love, standing solid so she could face out, unfurl her own love into the world, a flower turning open and open, row on row of petals spilling forth.” And I remembered everything. Those first years, the home we built together, how she sang those mornings, “The sunshine shines on you beloved,” our windowsill garden, soil mixed with eggshells for the roses. I breathe in deeply. I want to stay.

Hattie Carroll’s voice then comes clear through my memories like a dark wind into a bright room. “But here, the transition point.” Yes. “What makes love fragile? What makes devotion fold? First, the little things. Money. Lack. Time. Who forgot to water the plants? Who didn’t empty the garbage? Little ways we peck at each other, but my how they accrue.

“Then the bigger things. Disagreement about having a child. Death of a cat. Death of her father. And then the drinking. And then the miscarriage. The pecking grows ‘til there’s nothing left of love but ruins.” Scenes flash through me now, fast and harsh. Too much to remember, too cruel to remember, the way we yelled, the way her radiance dimmed, our nights of discord, how we came to mistrust each other, the way I gave up, let the flowers die, the way we grew to dislike and then to even hate each other.

“How horrible to see this now,” I moan.

“Yes,” says Hattie, detached and clear. “How horribly human. Tragically human. And preventable.”

Pained, I nod and nod and nod.

“And what's left now, as is often the case in love’s seeming failure, is merely the litany of our own failures to radically apply our love, thoroughly, moment by moment, through and through, come hell or high water.”

Her words pass over me. I can’t grasp them, but my body squeezes, fists clench, and a great wailing comes from me. “Never!” I yell. “I never wanted that precious thing to die!”

“Sure,” says Hattie. “But it died first then. And again when she died, well, it was like a double death. A lonesome death. And it ain’t been back since, huh?”

No, it had not. I’d had no love for years, tended nothing but my own despair for years.

We remain in silence for some minutes. Then, “Time runs thin,” she says. “And you ain't done yet.”

Track 5: Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

I open my eyes. Hattie lights a cigarette and smiles. At my left, Bob Dylan stands and clears his throat. “Let’s go.”

I get up. Outside, it’s nearly dark. The landscape is indistinct, so it’s no help for gauging train speed, but the sense beneath my feet is that it’s only gotten faster.

We edge toward the end of the car, Bob going first. He slides open the door and we stop in the compartment before the next car. I look up, and above the door is a sign that reads, “SAD-EYED LADY.” Already, I know what this car brings.

Bob Dylan turns to me. His glasses are off again. His soft eyes touch mine. “So say it,” he says. “Before you go, say it just how it went.”

I sigh. I will. I speak. “I was late to our apartment that night. It wasn’t another woman, but she thought it was. Things were so bad between us then, I just didn’t want to be at home anymore.” It returns to me vividly.

“When I came back home, I was walking up the stairs, and even before I got to our floor, I heard the music blaring. I knew two things: First, that she’d be drunk, and second, that she’d be raging. When I opened the door, Sad-eyed Lady of The Lowlands was rumbling the speakers, and Johanna was standing in the kitchen door staring at me.”

My throat and hands begin to tingle. “Her face was so pale, and she looked bad, like someone had died. She was holding a bottle of wine in her hand. It was just three seconds before she started yelling, but in those three seconds, I stood there and wondered. Wondered what happened to the woman I loved. What happened to the care we’d once felt? How had the space between us come to be filled with such scorn? How had I stopped tending to her? How had I allowed it to get so bad? And then she spoke.

“‘Well, who is she?’ I told her there was no one, though I knew it wouldn’t make a difference. I tried to make a move toward her, but she lifted the bottle. ‘Don’t you dare come near me! Tell me, who is she? That girl from across the street? The one from the cafe? Who?’

“‘Johanna! Johanna, please! Can we just start over?’ I made another move toward her, but she lifted the bottle high above her head and made as if to throw it. ‘Start over?’ she said. ‘Start over! You walk in here, late on our anniversary, asking me to start over…’ Yes. I had forgotten it was our anniversary. Now I noticed her lipstick, her makeup, her dress.

“She kept yelling and came forward, and I backed toward the door. I remember at that moment knowing that if I wanted to, I could take a breath, find my ground, walk toward her steadily, and embrace her. I knew that I could do that, and maybe reach past the insanity and defenses and months of hatred, reach through and summon forth the woman I had fallen in love with, tell her, ‘Hey, I am here. I love you. Where are you? Won’t you come back to me’ I could do that. Or, I could give up and be done. I could put my hand on the door behind me, twist the knob, walk out.”

Bob Dylan nodded. “Well, and you did what?”

“You know what I did.”

“Say it.”

“I walked out. I turned around, and walked out. I heard the wine bottle hit the door just as I closed it. I ran down the stairs, into the night, found a hotel, and slept there.”

“And then.”

“Then the call came in the morning.”

“Uh huh.”

“The call came. They found her out by the train tracks. They think what happened is she went there, drunk out of her mind, was trying to balance on one of the rails, and fell, hit her head, and bled out.”

“Blood on the tracks.”

“Blood on the tracks.”

We stand in silence. I go on. “After that, it wasn’t even gradual. I just collapsed. I felt done with living. Done with trying. I barely ate, barely slept, hardly left the apartment. I couldn’t stop thinking about what might have happened if I had just run to her, grabbed her, snapped her out of it. I was devastated. It broke me.”

“It broke your heart.”

“Yes.”

“And you treated your broken heart like it was for collapsing.”

“I suppose I did.”

“It never occurred to you that maybe a broken heart is for livin’, breakin’ you open, makin’ you sensitive to the world?”

Looking at the floor, I shake my head. No. I had not considered that.

A loud hiss breaks our silence, and the door slides open. From the train car, I hear the familiar 6/8 time, the harmonica and organ, and then the voice:

“Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands

Where the sad-eyed prophets say that no man comes…”

“You do this room alone,” Bob Dylan says. “Better hurry. We’re behind time.”

“Yes.” I walk in, and the door stays open behind me. Ahead, the train car is lit artificially, except at the end furthest from me where there’s blackness. The music seems to be coming from there. I take one tremulous step forward, and a projectile speeds from the blackness right at my head. Ducking, I turn to see a dark bottle of wine just before it smashes against the back wall. I bring myself forward again, and another bottle grazes the side of my face. Then another comes, and another, and another. I dodge one, but the others hit me.

I cover my face and glance back at the open door behind me. Life has been so hard for so long. I’ve felt dead for so long. I could just make it real, could just go back, slide out the door, hide and wait in the compartment between cars until the train gets where it’s going and I can finally rest. Who would blame me, I think as another bottle hits the back of my neck. And then, the music crescendos:

“My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums

Should I leave them by your gate? Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?”

And in the might of this crescendo, I am decided. I turn forward again just as another bottle hits my shoulder. I will make it to the end of this car, come hell or high water. The bottles fly at me now in a steady stream, sometimes five or six at a time, hitting my shins, my chest, my forearms as they guard my face. One smashes on the ceiling above me head, and a spray of glass and black wine rains down on my scalp and face. I do not care. Bit by bit, I trudge forward. I am just feet away from the blackness at the end of the car now. Three bottles punch into my gut, and I keel over for a moment, but then strength floods my arms and legs. The bottles keep coming, but I pummel through them, screaming, pushing them aside. The darkness is just inches away. I reach my left hand through, then my left foot. One last bottle thuds against my forehead as I lift my right foot and twist my body fully across into the darkness.

Track 6: If You See Her, Say Hello

In here, the darkness is complete and the silence is thorough. I turn to look back the way I came, but the train car behind me has been blotted out.

I touch my forehead. Pain there. I breathe in, and as I do, I suddenly sense her here. Not physically. Differently. An energy, a familiar presence.

“Johanna,” I whisper.

Yes, me. There is no voice. The words travel by some other carrier.

“Come here,” I say in a voice that is tatters. Her presence approaches in the blackness, and I open my arms to embrace this version of her.

“Johanna, I am so sorry.” I never got to say those words. “I wish I’d stayed that night. Wish I’d loved you better. I wish I’d kept tending to you. To us. To our home."

Her words come again without voice. Yes, beloved. I wish that, too. I wish I’d known to love you better. I wish I’d embraced you first. I wish I’d known what we’d both lose.

I weep, press her presence close. An aura of faultlessness permeates the embrace. No blame, no ax to grind. Simple forgiveness. I hold her formless form.

“When you died, I didn’t know what to do,” I say. “I fell apart. I gave up.”

You thought a broken heart was for collapsing.

The same thing Bob Dylan said.

Beloved, your time is coming to an end. You must choose now. If you stay, you go painlessly, like a sleep. The dimness gets dimmer, then nothing. You are gone.

I swallow. “And if I go?”

If you go, you live. But you live differently. As an attendant of love. You forfeit despair, make it your mission to bring your care and tending into the world. You keep causing flowers to bloom, bring your kindness to all things in need of nurturing. And you do this with a heart fully broken, fully naked, fully exposed.

I sigh. Yes. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I know this is the way.

Then it’s settled.

“How do I go?” I ask.

Not like a rolling stone.

“What?”

Suddenly, her presence becomes substantial in my arms. Her arms squeeze my back. Her forehead presses against my forehead. I know what she’s doing. She is saying goodbye. I hold her close for a moment, just a moment, and then like that, she’s gone.

In the darkness and quiet, a faint sound emerges: a finger-picked guitar. A light comes on in front of me and illuminates a door and a small sign above it which reads, “NO DIRECTION HOME.” Not like a rolling stone.

The music comes from behind the door. I approach it, and it draws aside with a hiss to reveal open air and an awninged platform. It is the end of the train. I step out.

Sitting on a bench to the left, Bob Dylan plucks his guitar, humming something.

“Well, you did make it, then” he says looking up. “Though you don’t got much more than 3 minutes if you still wanna get off this train.”

“Oh?” I say. “How do I do that?”

He gestures into the darkness at the end of the platform. “You just kinda jump. Not sure how it works, exactly. You wake up and resume. Like someone pressed play after pressing pause.”

I head to the edge of the platform and look below. It’s a chasm. No tracks or ground. Like the train has been riding on nothing. I lean forward, but then stop myself.

“Bob, do you ever see the ghosts again? I mean, after an experience like this?”

He thinks a minute. “From time to time. Though always by coincidence. If they don’t need me, they don’t come back to the train, so I’ll see ‘em in strange places. Paris. Mozambique. Tangiers.”

I take this in. “Well, would you do me a favor? If you happen to see her while you’re traveling…” I pause.

He looks up at me and smiles. “I’ll say hello.”

“Thanks. I'd appreciate it.”

He goes on plucking and humming. I turn back and look into the chasm. An image comes to me: vases of full, red flowers. Slowly, I lean forward, and drop into the darkness.