Mann could not let her go. His guitar, his old friend, had been traded at a pawnshop for a handful of crumpled notes. He picked up a ticket to nowhere except a vague feeling deep in his gut, pulling him across the tracks. The train rattled through the night, wheels clacking like a heartbeat, dust and chai drifting into his nostrils as he slumped against the filthy window, thinking about her.
He got off in a live, chaotic town filled with honking rickshaws and yelling voices. Asking now and then, he said, "Do you know a girl whose laugh sounds like a song, whose eyes cut straight through you?" Days passed, a sweaty shirt weighing on him more than heavy odds; hope was on the verge of fraying. Then he spotted her in a hospital ward reeking of antiseptic and terrific worry—hair all tousled, cheeks colored by hollowness, sitting beside a bed as if she were keeping everything together.
"Cassette?" he said, his voice cracking dry as a parched earth.
She looked and seemed shocked. "Mann? You—you-how?"
He fell beside her, clasping her cold fingers. "Was I to be stopped by a few tracks? I'd chase you to the edge of hell for, Cassette."
Love's a fool with a bag on his back,
Running blind down a rusty track,
A spark that flares in the dead of night,
A hand that reaches out for what is right.