all comment. He followed the conductor to the platform between cars. The conductor pointed to a corner of the tiny platform and said, "Vomiting's done in there on newspapers. I'll get passengers out the other way."

"Can I begin now?" Stern asked, not wishing to violate any vomiting protocol. Without answering, the conductor walked back into the car. Stern realized he had no paper and returned to the smoker, where he asked a man for some. "I'm not feeling so hot," he said, and the man said, "All righty," and gave him a section he had already[Pg 101] looked at. Stern spread it out in the corner of the between-cars platform and tried to vomit neatly and with as little fuss as possible. It occurred to him before he started that perhaps he might vomit forth the ulcer and then kick it off the platform, rid of it forever, but then he went ahead, and when he was finished, his stomach remained bloated with pain. He searched the floor now, looking for coffee grounds, but there was no trace of any, and in a sense he felt a little disappointed. He remained on the platform with the newspapers, guarding the area, as though to prove he didn't want to evade responsibility. He remained crouched next to the newspaper, and he wondered what happened to people who died on the between-cars area. Did they have a special procedure for getting them off the train? Were they taken off on stretchers, keeping up the ruse that they were still alive, or were they simply carried off in special body bundles?

[Pg 101]

When the train stopped, the conductor diverted people in Stern's car to the other exit and then came back to Stern. "I guess you can go now," he said. "Try and do this before starting out or after getting there."

"All right," Stern said, and walked off the train, relieved that he did not have to go through a special trial for vomiters and that he was still allowed to use the train.

The sun was going down as Stern got into his car, and he wished now that there was some way to let the kike man know that this was a day in which he had just vomited and had gotten official confirmation of his ulcer and that, just for this one day, it was all to stop. He was to stop hating Stern and Stern was to be allowed to just put the man out of his mind. He was to be allowed to ride home just like any other man coming home to his family.

In a way, though, the ulcer that raged within him and the train vomiting seemed to release him and give him a[Pg 102] tiny flutter of courage. He drove toward the man's house with the feeling that he had 

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