Thomas Bolt’s essay “Estación Origen MADRID” begins with the narrator in the back of a van, bleeding out from his stomach, where he has been stabbed. The essayist flicks the reader back and forth in time – one moment, the narrator is strolling down the Puerta del Sol, the next, he’s still shivering in the back of the van, and the next, he is looking out at the Nova Scotia coast, where the sun is so bright that “if you looked away and back, sea and sky reversed.” With Bolt’s prose, moments are drawn out. Sensory images linger. Time is fluid.
–My sister’s birthday is coming up. With her own money, she has purchased everything she needs, almost everything she wants, so I tentatively buy her scented soy candles because I know she likes to light them on weekend mornings. The candles arrive in the mail packaged in paper, bubble wrap, paper shavings, and more bubble wrap. Layer by layer, I strip them until only the glass jars are left on my desk. One smells like passion fruit and pineapple, the other like bergamot and mandarin.
When the narrator loses his way in Madrid, he is stabbed and left in the back of a van. His train tickets flutters down. Time is punctured in the symbol of this train ticket, as the narrator subsequently muses on how the course of events in his life has changed. He will not go to Seville as he originally planned. In a dense paragraph, Bolt invents an entire possible future in which the narrator has not been stabbed, a future in which he continues on his travels. By the end of the essay, the train ticket returns:
“So I live in Madrid. I’ll die another time. I planned a trip, bought a ticket, booked a room; that future was stopped by a stranger with a knife. Another future took its place. Here, have a look: I keep the ticket in my wallet, the way you’d carry a snapshot of some elderly relative looking impossibly young—younger than you are now.”
The essay is vibrant and nostalgic, though everything takes place in the present tense, and it is not until the end that the reader understands just how much time has passed. Every person the narrator meets has their own personality and their own story, though the presence of each character feels fleeting as the narrator jumps from point to point in time.
–Next weekend, my mother and I will go to the Porto’s in Glendale to buy strawberry shortcake, pan dulce, and crème brulee. By then, my sister, who loves sweets so much her hair and nails might as well be sugar sheets, will be back from a business trip in Boston. On the kitchen table, there will also be seaweed soup. We’ll sing to my sister in Korean. My parents will present their gift while I bring out my candles.