reader participation exercise: love
the following is an amalgamation of three months worth of posts that form a single long story. the story was an experiment in reader participation. below are the instructions that appeared on the first installment. I will indicate in the flow of the narrative below at what points the will of the readers was expressed, but I will omit other meta-information that was included in the original posts. it is presented as it was originally posted; it could definitely use some editing, but, in the spirit of scrach fiction, which is otherwise flung down and danced upon in a post of this magnitude, I have refrained.
[this is a love story. we will start off with six characters. after every installment, readers will cast up to two votes: one to remove a character, and one to keep a character. one vote to keep cancels one vote to remove. the character with the most removal votes will be removed from the narrative during the next installment. all rules subject to change as the story proceeds, but I convenant to stick to these two:
1. this is a love story.
2. the votes of the readers will be obeyed. ]
chapter 1: Champion, Colorado
Coral pushed through the double glass doors of the bus stop with her heart full of love. Love for whoever she might find there--though she had never ridden the bus before. Love for whoever she might meet at her destination--though she had never been more than a hundred miles from Champion, Colorado, and certainly not as far as Chicago. It was love that clutched her suitcase to her chest, hard plastic feet cutting into her stomach. Her love was beautiful and boundless, the love that shoots a horse with a broken leg or drives evil out by force. It was a love that frightened strangers, frightened even herself sometimes. Her love was too much for Champion, Colorado, so she was leaving, alone, for a big city that might have room for it all.
Raster had silver and blue and yellow paint markers, no black, no red, but he was doing his best on the rough fiberglass canvas of the back of a seat over by the broken Coke machine. He wasn't sure what it was going to look like when he was finished, but right now it was kind of like a blue and yellow tiger, only it had long ears like a rabbit, and it was running through something like silver rain and jumping. Raster hadn't painted in the eyes yet, because he didn't know why the tiger-rabbit was jumping. Maybe from hate, maybe from love, and no matter what anyone ever told him those were two very different things.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton kept her cross-stitch handy at all times. All times. You never knew when you might be suddenly abandoned and left to sit for who-knows how long. And when you are all alone, when everything that matters to you in your life is gone and you have to suddenly, say, board a bus to take you to a strange city, you have two choices: madness, or cross-stitch. Her cross-stitch bag was a kind of journal, a layer of colored threads that she had picked out of thousands because they were the colors she felt, beneath that a layer of her current projects--slogans, mostly, or angels. Then there was the false bottom of her bag, and beneath that, the cross-stitch pieces she almost never worked on, but which were always in the bottom of her mind like the bottom of the bag, one that said "fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker" and another that showed a dirty, filthy thing. In color.
Zebra had a cousin in Chicago, a cousin who worked for a big security company that patrolled O'Hare airport. Zebra's cousin said he could get Zebra a job no problem, that he knew a guy who could make sure they didn't run a background check on him. Zebra had to rob a lady to get the bus fare, even though it made his eyes tear up while the lady trembled and handed up her purse. And if she wondered why her mugger was crying, it was because he had made a promise to never hurt anyone anymore, but he had to break that promise one last time.
Drexel held the door for some chick in a tight animal-print skirt, and as she walked past him without a thank-you he tried to figure out what race she was. Damn beautiful--full lips and light-brown skin, dark eyes that narrowed at the edges. Not Chinese, not black, not Indian, not Mexican. All of the above, maybe? Drex would've followed her and talked to her, but she was carrying only a purse, and the only bus leaving for the next two hours was the special to Chicago. A woman walking like that, with her mouth set like that, taking a thousand mile bus trip with only a small black purse--she doesn't want any new friends. So Drex sat down across from the lady doing the cross-stitch, because he had to talk to somebody. He was a salesman, and even when he wasn't selling he had to be talking. Silence made him feel like the whole world was drowning.
"Is that a pig?" Drex asked.
The woman with the cross stitch looked up with a kind of panic on her face.
"How come it has wings?" Drex asked.
"It's an angel."
"An angel pig."
The woman nodded.
A loud metallic crash, the clang of a garbage can slamming into a cement pillar and bouncing off to rattle against the tile floor, made both of them jump. They looked up, and everyone else looked up except for the kid hunched over the back of one of the bus seats, and the whatever-she-was girl in the tight skirt was sitting herself down in a seat as if nothing had happened, but the way that garbage can was rolling it had to be her who threw it.
"Damn," Drex said. "Wonder what that garbage can ever did to her."
[Coral voted off.]
chapter 2: the fat damned hand of fate
Zebra saw the cop car pull up out the side doors, lights off. He grabbed his bag and headed for the other door, walking fast. Fucking A, fucking A, fucking A, he didn't want to go back, he didn't want to go back, he didn't want to go back. Maybe he deserved it, but he would run if he--
Another cop car pulled up outside the other exit. He turned to the front door--there were two more damn cops, stiff and pudgy in their bulletproof vests, running up to disappear on either side of the main front doors.
So that was how it was going to be. Big, dangerous Zebra, broke and hungry, and they were bringing out the entire Champion P.D. to take him down. Shit.
So much for running, man, they were going to be pumped up and he didn't want to get shot. So, Z., what you going to do with your last ninety seconds of freedom?
The girl sitting over by the coke machines was beautiful. Not merely hot--she was beautiful. He had seen her when she came in. She sat leaning forward, hair covering most of her face, except there where it parted to show a long neck, smooth skin, and a perfect ear.
The seats in the bus station were set in rows back to back; he crossed to the row behind her and sat, his back facing her back, and took a deep breath. He could smell stale cigarette smoke, and the faintest hint of the musky smell of hair that had been damp with sweat--the smell you would smell if you rolled over next to her in the morning. Zebra closed his eyes and breathed.
The doors of the room exploded in at Coral all at once. Clattering feet, rushing men, and she knew they had come for her, she snatched up her suitcase and leapt up on her seat, started screaming.
Two of them had their guns out, little, foul men, stupid and squishy, she turned her breath on them as she screamed and they were yelling back at her. "You can't have them! No!" Coral yelled. "You'll all be drowned. This town will be drowned. I won't let you take my babies!"
Then two of them charged at her and she wasn't so delusional that she didn't know what was going to happen, no, she knew the score, she jumped over the back of the seat and bolted for the exit, faster than she thought she could run, so fast, seats whirring by, suitcase still clutched to her chest, then--
The catch on her foot--some fat, damned hand--was sure as fate, and she felt her body toppling forward under the ruthless pull of momentum. The suitcase kept going, though, still yearning for the door--even then they sought freedom, even then they knew right from wrong and sought light over darkness--but then the floor hit her like a truck full on, a bright slam of pain, but she kicked back anyway with her free foot and felt a face yield beneath it, loosing her for just a moment to spring forward.
But another man was already on the suitcase, already scooping it up, and she felt hands grab at her from behind once more, so she did the only thing she could do, she grabbed the only thing she could reach--the thick white arm of a man staring at her from his seat, and sank her teeth into that corrupt white flesh with all the force of righteousness.
Drexel bent over his bleeding arm while the wild woman screamed as four cops held her down while the fifth brought out his cuffs. He didn't even know humans could bite like that for fuck's sake. Blood seeped between his fingers, and he clenched his teeth together for fear of making an undignified noise if he opened his mouth.
Across the room, a cop hauled the woman's suitcase up onto a seat and unfastened the zipper. When he lifted the flap he recoiled, and a moment later Drex could smell it even from twenty feet away. He couldn't see for sure what it was, but there was something furry in there, maybe a few different somethings, and Jesus God whatever they were had been dead for a while.
The woman next to him with the angel pigs opened her purse and held out a small yellow tube of ointment.
"You better put something on that. She might be infected."
chapter 3: the bus waits for no man
"Okay, people," said the bus driver, striding into the room. "The bus is here, and in three minutes the bus is leaving."
The young cop who was taking Drexel's statement looked up. "Hey. We're not finished."
The bus driver pointed to the oversized clock that loomed over the front door. "I serve one master," said the driver, "and I wait for no man." Doors swung shut behind him; outside, the bus engine rumbled to life.
Raster uncapped his pen even though the cop was still standing just a few feet away. It was time to go, but now he knew what the eyes of the tiger-rabbit were like. Like that woman when the cop grabbed her ankle: wide and feral, but not attacking, running away, and the silver slashes of rain burning like fire. His pen was quick and sure: a pupil-slash, then a small arc of panic at the back of the eye and Raster snatched up his bags and almost ran for the door. He didn't look back. He never looked back.
Drexel had a silky yellow bandage from the woman's cross-stitch bag hand-tied around his arm. He had struggled with the antibiotic, and without asking she'd stepped up and taken over. She had pinched the yellow fabric between white teeth and torn it with one sharp movement. Up close, she was younger than you'd think--she dressed like an old lady, but she was only maybe middle aged, or maybe not even that, underneath her shapeless white sweater.
"I've got to catch this bus," he said to the cop. "I can't wait until tomorrow."
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton took just as long as she thought she could take in the bathroom, composing herself in front of the mirror. There was a spot of blood on the white cuff of her sweater. She hadn't tried to get it out, she just looked at it, and felt a powerful desire to dig down to the bottom of her cross-stitch bag. In the mirror, her pale skin and drawn cheeks made her look, she thought, like the ghost of an old governess haunting a wine cellar. She didn't mind that at all. She snatched up her bag and headed for the bus. It was a long ride, and the bus would be nearly empty.
Zebra was a study in stillness, a chair, a cigarette butt, a thing no one could possibly notice or care about, nothing anyone would keep from getting on a bus because they wouldn't even notice it was there, and sure enough the cops walked right past him. The girl helped, sitting behind him, just as cold and still as he was. Every time he breathed he felt her, and he imagined that every time she breathed she felt him, and that kept him still and centered, letting everything flow around him. Then it was time, the minute hand clicked forward, and Zebra stood up and walked for the bus, not looking back at the girl. Follow me, he thought. I don't want to go to Chicago alone.
Kareena was the last one in the station. She rose, finally, and crossed the empty room, her footfalls loud against the cathedral-high ceiling. She would rather have gone anywhere but that bus, but the bus was where she had to go, and whatever else was wrong with her she wasn't the kind to shrink from her fate. The walls of the bus station were darkened with accidental water-stain frescoes of saints and devils.
Kareena always felt as if she were being watched, which was probably because she was always watching herself. But the sense was stronger than ever that day as she walked toward the door. She felt as if the whole room behind her was eyes, watching and passing judgment.
The bus door started to close, but she caught it with the flat of her hand, forced it back open, and stepped on.
"You're late," the driver said.
"Not late enough." She climbed three steps into the damp darkness of the bus.
[Raster voted off. I inadvertently introduced a new character in the person of the bus driver, so character count stays at five.]
chapter 4: fucking beautiful
When Raster glanced over at the woman in the back corner he knew instantly what she was doing. There was a forced nonchalance on her face, but the tension around her mouth made it a lie, and her eyes worked too intently on something no one else could see. The tiny turns of her head toward every little sound told him she was listening for anyone coming close. She was making art.
Raster felt a swell of fellow-feeling so sudden and powerful he rose from his seat. He'd met plenty of other artists, guys like himself, or girls even, but never a woman like that--the kind of woman who drove by without meeting your eyes, who had other people do her shopping. He had seen her shuffling by, written her off like she had written him off, but damn, now she was even beautiful, her bottom lip pinched by the white point of a sharp tooth.
Because he knew exactly how she felt, because he knew that her awareness of her surroundings came and went like a swimmer coming up for air, he could get close to her. He just waited for that pinch of displeasure around the eyes that said she was distracted by some problem with her art, and he could close the gap, moving soundlessly, until he was able to slide into the seat in front of her, unnoticed.
On any other bus trip Drexel would've been talking to people, but the bite on his arm hurt like the devil, and it made everything seem strange and dangerous, and that made him feel awkward. So he sat and hurt and watched uneasily as the bus lurched and growled on its way through some nameless little mountain town.
When the raggedy-looking kid a couple seats away got up and headed for the back of the bus, Drex sat up. The kid was going back toward the woman who had bandaged Drex's arm. Drex would've sat by her himself if it wasn't so obvious she wanted to be alone. He watched the kid in the reflection of a bus window. He wasn't going to bug the woman as long as Drex was on the bus.
She was really in the zone. Because Drex was able to rise up over the back of the seat and look right down at her, and she didn't look up. He expected to smell the tang of a paint marker but--
The woman was sewing. No, stitching. A white circle of cloth, and in the middle--
Blood. Embroidered goddamn blood.. The top of the circle was dark with it, and she was stitching down the outline of a heavy drop sliding, and the borders of three other drops were marked out in a spray across the circle.
It was the most beautiful, excellent thing Raster had seen in a long time, and he felt his cheeks getting warm. She would notice him as soon as she finished that line.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton's fingers plunged the needle through the fabric, deftly twisted it, sent it back. They were a blur to her eyes, but she felt the sure movement as they drew the edge of the blood, the blood she had to stitch because she had seen it and felt it and it had touched her and when she felt something true she had to make it with her own hands.
There. The border was finished, now to fill--
There were eyes, a man, leaning over her, looking down.
A surge of panic coursed through her and she stuffed her work into her bag, felt the bite of the needle in her palm.
The man was smiling, broad and delirious, and he started to speak when another voice interrupted him.
"Hey," Drex said. "I think the lady came to the back of the bus to be alone."
"Did you see that?" the punk asked him. The kid had this look on his face like he'd just found the Virgin Mary in his breakfast cereal.
"You better sit down."
Raster didn't know who the dude in the tie was, and didn't care. People like that talked shit all the time; he'd learned a long time ago to just let it roll off him.
"That was fucking beautiful," he said to the woman.
The guy behind him was saying something.
"I just had to see it," Raster said. "I knew from the look on your face it would be beautiful."
The guy behind him put a hand on his shoulder, so Raster turned around and punched him in the stomach to make him stop. He was going to hit him again but then he remembered that the guy had already been bitten and he didn't want to make shit worse for him so he just gave the guy's head a push with his hand and sent him stumbling back up the aisle.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton heard the air go out of the man she'd bandaged, saw him fall when the younger man pushed him. Her palm hurt and her ears burned, but her fingers felt the need to stitch more than ever.
The young man had seen her work--it was as if he'd seen her coming out of the shower. He had seen it and understood it. Loved it. And then the other man had tried to rescue her. Mrs. Emmannuelle Appleton had not been so near the swirling center of the bizarre energies of maleness since her husband had left her two years ago.
When the bus lurched to a stop it took her a moment to realize it wasn't just her insides staggering like that.
The bus driver reached over the fallen man and lifted the punk by jacket, hauling him back past the other passenger and into the door well of the rear doors.
"Where are we?" the bus driver demanded.
The punk looked at him.
"We're on the bus," the bus driver said. "And who am I?"
"You're the bus driver," the punk replied.
"You're damn right."
Raster's toes just barely touched the floor of the bus; the fucking driver was stronger than he looked, and his piggy eyes had the kind of intensity it wasn't safe to ignore. Even so, Raster was never smart when he was fueled by art, and he felt his fingers closing over the silver paint marker in his pocket.
"Who are you?" the bus driver demanded.
"Raster."
"You're nobody."
"My name is Raster."
"On my bus, you are nobody."
From the back of the bus, Raster heard a woman's voice. "Thank you." It was the woman with the cross-stitch, and she was standing up in her seat now, looking straight at him.
Raster smiled at her, but it was too late now, he knew what had to happen next; a flip of his thumb uncapped the marker in his pocket, then he brought it up and with a quick flick of his wrist put a silver 'X' on the bus driver's forehead.
"You have the mark," Raster said.
The bus driver slammed the kid back against the doors; they started to open but his body stopped them, so he yanked the kid back and the automatic opener finished the job, then he tossed the kid out onto the side of the road.
The kid landed standing, staring back at him.
He felt the two cool lines of drying paint on his forehead.
"I serve time," he said, "this bus serves me. No one makes me late."
"You have the mark," Raster repeated.
The woman was watching him, a shadow behind tinted glass.
Raster slipped the marker back in his pocket and lifted the hood on his sweatshirt. The lights of the last town back were visible back up the road. He started walking.
chapter 5: so far so good.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton reached down to help the man to his feet as the bus lurched back into motion. He was only just recovering his breath; ever since the other man had hit him, he'd been gasping like an asthmatic in his last throes.
The man tried to brush her hand away. "I'm fine."
Mrs. Appleton, suddenly and without premeditation, told the first lie she'd spoken for the past sixteen months. "I'm a nurse."
"I'm fine," he repeated, but stopped resisting as she helped him up and steered him into a seat, then found herself sitting next to him, quite close. "You can breathe again," she said.
He nodded.
"Your diaphragm," she explained, dredging up the explanation from where she had no idea. "Negative pressure on your lungs."
The tense cast of his mouth relaxed a little. He seemed to appreciate the science--and if it was wrong, as it might well be, he didn't seem to notice. He loosened his tie.
She gently touched the yellow knot of the bandage she'd tied around his bite wound from before. "Do you always have this much trouble when you travel?" She knew he had to travel often. Something about the easy way he'd sat across from her in the bus station and started talking.
"No," he said. "Usually it's worse. You should've seen me after my last trip to Tucson."
>Zebra had watched the stuff going on in the back of the bus through the reflection in the window, and once again he felt amazed that the one thrown off the bus wasn't him. His whole life, if there was one person the cops pulled off the corner, one person searched at the border, one person who his girlfriend called at random times to check on him even though he never cheated, it was him. So far so good. If he could only make it to Chicago, he'd have a chance.
On the down side, he couldn't smell anything but old cigarettes, even though the girl was in the seat in front of him. The bus was supposed to be non-smoking, but the signs were newer than the bus, and those old fabric seats, they never gave anything up.
The obvious thing to do was get down on the floor and slide under the seats. Lucky for him she wasn't wearing a skirt, so no one would think he was a pervert. There was some pretty unspeakable stuff on the floor, but the seat was kind of coming apart in a few places, and he used the stuffing as a sponge to wipe it clean.
Zebra had never in his life questioned the existence of love, but he also knew the other obvious thing, that usually it was a swindle, and usually you that was doing the swindling. But just because he'd never seen a great blue whale didn't mean he doubted they existed. He slid on his back until his head was close to the girl's boots. She wasn't wearing socks, more like short tights, with dark red and black tiger stripes. He liked the way the not-socks seemed to be saying to the world that there should be red and black tigers.
Down there she smelled more like wet leather--that would be her boots. But there was the other smell, clean clothes, and somewhere underneath it the faint smell of skin that he couldn't pick out but knew was there, enriching everything.
Kareena leaned her head against the cool window and felt the rumble of the road.
She had never really believed that you could escape judgment. Even though she didn't believe in a Judge. It was not something she could ever explain, but there was always the feeling that just moving through her days, working, eating, smoking, she was borrowing against an account that would have to be paid, but how and in what currency she had never had the faintest clue, only a certainty that it was nothing so vulgar as hell, or as childish as St. Peter with his book and keys.
So, though her sister's call had come as the worst kind of surprise, she had accepted the necessity of going with a sense of its inevitability. But she had expected that decision to alleviate the sense of judgment; instead, it had gotten worse, and ever since she'd sat down on the bus she felt that every cross and uncross of her legs was being noted and marked, and when she reached down to pull up her stockings, she thought she heard the click of an abacus.
The feeling of breath on her fingers, however, was quite unmistakable, if rather surprising. She bent double and looked beneath her seat. There was a young man asleep on the floor of the bus, a long, thin scar cutting through his eyebrow and up to his dark hairline.
[Kareena and Drexel tied for last place; both voted off.]
chapter 6.1: decisions
Four of Kareena's nails were long and scarlet, but one was broken, a ragged edge only just now healed beneath the soft pad of her fingertip. It was that finger, second from the end, that she stretched out to touch the shallow pale track of the scar. His brow fluttered as she touched his skin. The line of the scar led to his hair; she followed it. His hair was light as air; the skin was warm, and the tingle of contact ran up the soft underside of her arm into her torso.
Would that scar count for or against him? Would her touch weigh for her or against her?
Perhaps the decision was already made.
chapter 6.2: why everyone goes to Chicago
"When I was a kid," Drex said, "silence would make my mother weep. You could have three, maybe four minutes of silence around the dinner table, and then these tears would just roll down her cheeks and if someone didn't say something soon she'd be catatonic by the end of the meal."
Pretty women made Drex talk too much. Lots of salesmen he knew were like that--they could talk a golf-ball through a garden-hose, but there was no off-switch, and you'd have to gag them at a wake. Especially, man, get Drex nervous... Drex figured that anybody who was a born salesman just came into the world with the intrinsic belief that you could talk your way out of anything, so, the blood pressure goes up, the mouth starts going. Hence the effect of pretty girls. And if they were pretty enough, he would even forget to lie.
"I can't decide if talking makes us better animals or worse. It's how I make my living, I ought to believe in it, but how often do we have something positive to say that we need words to express? And, on the other end of things, could we ever talk each other into genocide if we never spoke? But, I don't know, talking is what I do. I guess I don't really want to know the answer to that."
There was another surprise, though, that this woman was touching off the pretty-girl reflex; he still couldn't figure out how old she was because when he first saw her he wrote her off as way too old for him but it seemed like she was shedding years the longer he talked to her or maybe it was just the way she looked at him, up and a little bashful as if she wasn't used to talking to boys, which took him back to being goddamn fifteen and made his pulse race like that, too.
"I'm not a man who likes to fly," he was saying. "If a place is worth getting to, it's worth taking your time to get there. I can fly if I have to, but it's not human, too many people shoved too close together, no room to pick and choose who you talk to."
"Why are you going to Chicago?" the woman asked.
"Funeral," he said. "Isn't that why everyone goes to Chicago?"
chapter 6.3: snow
The bus lurched as it slowed, as if unwilling. The lights of the road-side service station glowed ahead, a tiny bubble of light in the Colorado darkness.
The bus seemed to be going too fast, seemed as if it would crash into the glass-fronted convenience store, but the brakes caught at the last minute, the bus slowed sharply, and at last it stopped, snub nose almost flush with the glass.
"Eleven minutes," said the driver. In the mirror, he could be seen to raise two hesitant fingers to the silver 'X' on his forehead. His furtive efforts to wipe it away had done nothing but smudge it slightly, and if the voice that projected back to the back of the bus was slightly sharper than usual, then perhaps it was because the mark troubled him.
"This bus leaves in eleven minutes. It waits for no one. If your bodies need to take matter in or expel matter out, do it now, but do not be late."
The bus driver looked over the mostly-empty seats of his bus, but if he was looking for defiance or submission, he found neither. The humans in his bus were occupied amongst themselves, and did not seem to heed him. He pulled the door open with more force than necessary, and strode out of the bus to find the attendant who had not appeared and thereby jeopardized his departure.
The wind that blew across the empty highway was cold, and as the bus driver looked up into the empty night sky a swirl of snowflakes twisted past him and away, moving fast, as if late.
chapter 6.4: ice
Emmanuelle clutched her cloth cross-stitch bag to her chest as she descended the three steps of the bus. The wind that cut across the interstate was cold where her thick sweater was open at the neck, but she felt the cold as a far-off thing that was happening to someone else.
The salesman on the bus had watched her go; she saw in the dark mirror of the bus windscreen how he followed her with his eyes. It had been so long since she had gone out into the wild to expose herself to the wanting of strangers; she had forgotten the answering pull within herself. She walked across the asphalt, floating, almost, on the desire she felt in her hands.
She was headed for the bathroom, but the cold air and movement felt too clean, so instead she walked out between the pumps and looked up at the sky, a few dim stars far away at the horizon, the rest of the sky a featureless dark surface, swirling, now, with a few snowflakes.
Somewhere across the parking lot she heard a man's voice call out "Is there anybody here?" It was the bus driver, looking small and alone in the center of an empty lot. They were the only ones who had gotten off the bus. The asphalt beneath her feet was a little slick with frozen dew.
The lights of the truck swung into view around a curve in the road and brightened as the heavy mechanical growl of the engine grew louder. The growing light was the only thing moving, the growling engine the only sound. There was nothing in the world but the straining engine and the glaring lights, hurtling forward as if on rails, as if it was not piloted by a human but instead by fate.
Emmanuelle suddenly felt the chill of the air, and clutched her arms tight across her chest.
When the road curved, the truck kept going straight. The lights shone bright in her eyes as the truck came toward her, and something about the slip of the lights through the darkness told her it was sliding. She watched it come toward her, no change in the noise of the engine, no squeal of brakes, just the noise of the machine and lights grew to a flash, and a burst of air struck her, blew her hat off and her eyes closed. She stumbled back, turned by the rushing steel beside her, hearing the rush of metal through air.
She found her balance and opened her eyes.
The truck hit the center of the bus and carried it, the bus folding across the front of the truck with a concussive crunch. A small building exploded in cinder blocks and dust and set the truck and bus spinning sharply, trailer swinging into the clear, lit glass of the station office. Glass shattered, and all the lights in the station went out at once. In the darkness glass pattered to the ground and the truck's engine choked itself to silence.
chapter 6.5 cheese crackers
Drexel was upside down. He wasn't sure how he got there. It was dark. It smelled like gasoline, and a girl. His head was pillowed on something soft. Something wet dripped on his face. Another drop fell on his lips; tasted like blood. He wondered if it was his. He couldn't really feel his legs much.
"Hey," he said.
No one replied. He was pretty sure it was a person he was lying on.
"Hey."
A drop of blood splashed onto his upper lip and got into his nose. He exhaled sharply, trying to blow it out, but that hurt a little. "I always liked the smell of gas," he said. "It's, I don't know, reminds me of cheese crackers. Road trips."
The woman underneath him murmured something.
"What?"
"Hate fucking cheese crackers," she said, barely audible. He could feel her chest move as she spoke--his head was pressed into her stomach. It had to be uncomfortable, but he couldn't move.
"What happened?" he asked. "Why am I upside down?"
"Don't know."
"Are you hurt?"
"Don't know."
"I don't think I can move my legs."
"Me either."
"I think I should be in a lot of pain but I'm not."
The woman's hand came up and groped over his chest. Her hand was small, and when her fingers came to rest on his face they were thin and warm.
"You think maybe we're dead?" he asked.
"Don't be stupid."
He found that he could move one of his hands, and reached back for her. He found the rough fabric of her jacket. "What's your name?"
"I was trying to go somewhere," she said.
"I was going to a funeral. But there was something else I wanted, and I can't remember what."
"You're not going to get it now," she said.
"I guess not."
"Something didn't want us to get there."
"I guess this is what we get instead." Another drop of blood hit him on the chin. "Do I know you from somewhere?"
"How should I know?"
"I feel like I remember how you smell."
"That's just the gasoline."
Drex felt a little dizzy. He wondered what would happen if he stayed upside down like that for a long time. His fingers tightened on the fabric of her sleeve.
chapter 6.6: flight
The last thing Zebra remembered was flight. But as he returned to himself he was very much a creature of the earth. He was flat on his back, arms out at his sides, and on his stomach was a cinder block, balanced there as if someone had been concerned he would blow away.
He reached up and lifted the cinder block, setting it down with a hollow cement clunk on the asphalt next to him. Cold air swirled around his bare arms, small snowflakes spinning.
He was alive.
He stood up.
He was alive and unhurt.
Well, sure, he was bleeding. His arms were skinned. Oh, and there were a few bits of glass sticking through his pants. He pulled them out; that hurt a little, and his pants were kind of bloody. But he'd had worse. He'd had ten times worse. He could walk fine, even still had his goddamn wallet.
In the cold Colorado night, Zebra laughed, and as he shook with the force of it, glass tinkled to the pavement as it fell free from his clothes.
chapter 7: last things
Here is what happened:
1. Zebra, overwhelmed with the sudden irrefutable proof that his years as fate's whipping boy were at an end, leapt up onto the wreckage of the bus. He found a man's brown leather shoe sticking up through a broken window, the man still attached, mumbling to himself in the bus below. Conscious of the spreading smell of gasoline, Zebra kicked out the window,
("Hey," Drexel said to the woman. "Hey, I think there's someone up there. Come on. Stay awake. Hey." He felt cold air on his bare calf, and hands grab hold of his feet.)
grabbed the man's legs, and lifted him out. He knew the rules about not moving injured people, but he also knew the other rule, the one about how gasoline burns really fast and really hot, but not so fast and hot that it's not a really unpleasant way to die. When he was laying the man down in the frosty grass by the station--and who knew he could carry a man like that, little hundred-and-thirty-five-pound Zebra?--the man said something about how she was still in there, but of course she was, that was how Zebra found the guy to begin with, he was looking for her. he ran back.
2. Emmanuelle walked carefully across the frost-slicked asphalt to the beautiful wounded salesman and wiped the blood off his face, wondering why he had to suffer so much that day, and hoping that it would be over for him soon, but not all the way over, not still and silent forever over, but warm and comfortable over, hot cocoa and fresh pressed sheets.
3. Zebra lifted the woman out of the bus, and she swore at him, quietly, languorously, like a lover. He carried her tenderly, cradling her head--she was hurt in a lot of places--and laid her on the grass next to where a woman in a white sweater knelt beside the man.
4. The bus driver kicked the shattered windscreen of the bus inward; glass scattered. He climbed into the cab and grabbed the wheel, turned sideways like the world. "Time," he whispered. "Ever have I served you. Let me serve you still." the mark on his forehead burned.
and then:
"Is this even a place?" Kareena whispered into the darkness.
Even as a child she had fought first for control. She would defy with teeth even the kindest teacher. Better to reign in Hell.
But ever since she had stepped onto the bus there had been something at work, perhaps just in her own head--no, certainly, certainly just in her own head. But very much there: a feeling that the control over herself that she'd fought for to the destruction of nearly everything was, in the end, just another stupid abstraction.
So where did that leave her? In the cold, in the dark, in a spot between two faraway places she didn't want to go to? She felt a little dizzy, like the floor was sliding beneath her.
A man's voice in the darkness next to her said, "Yes."
"Yes," Drexel said. "It is a place. It's a small stone outbuilding. There is no light because the power was knocked out by the crash. We're lying on the floor." He felt the need to explain things to her very clearly and scientifically, because she was only just conscious again, and he wanted to encourage rational thought, and the faculties of the mind in general, as the prime bulwark against the woozy darkness whose appeal had, only just a moment ago, been growing in his mind as well.
"They have left us here," he continued, "pending the arrival of help, which we are to understand may not be swift, as there is no evidence of a phone ever working at this site in the history of human civilization."
"Why don't you talk like a normal person?"
"I always talk like this when I'm drunk," Drexel said. "Apparently also when I have lost a considerable amount of blood." But talking to her was bringing him out of it a bit, so he felt the possibility of speaking normally returning to him.
"Do you think all this happened on purpose?" she asked.
"On purpose how?"
"It just seems like, you know, that there was no escaping this. Not from the very start."
"I don't know. It's just one of those things."
"It's a funny place for dying," she said. "And pretty stupid, you know. A pretty stupid reason to die."
"Death is always stupid," he said. "Life, too, pretty much."
She tried to shift in place and felt pain down her back and her leg. "I suppose there's no getting away from it."
"The best stories I've ever heard about dying are all about not trying to get away," he said. "That's, you know, as far as endings go, that's about as good as you get."
Kareena moved her hand and found that there was a rough blanket over her. "I never believed in gods, not really, but I always felt them. I always felt like they didn't like me. Maybe they liked some other people less, but they definitely didn't like me. I don't know. I guess that's okay. I don't really feel cold anymore." She reached her hand over and found the man next to her. She grabbed onto his shirt. It was damp.
"When I first saw you," he said, "when I first saw you walk through those doors, I wanted to ask your name. I wanted to sit next to you."
"I wouldn't have let you."
His hand covered hers, soft palm on her knuckles, fingers wrapping. "I know."
She tried to move closer, but it hurt, so she just held onto his hand.
r.p.e. 1.8: mission control
[there will be one more post after this one, in which love will conquer all. here, Zebra submits to your judgment.]
Zebra stood in the swirling snow and felt a kind of kinship with the woman. From across the parking lot, he could hear the curses of the bus driver.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, still wearing her thick sweater, still with her wool cap pulled over her ears as if she'd just stepped off the bus to buy a hot chocolate. "I never thought about it before."
"Seems like everybody who might've known has been arrested, or thrown off the bus, or smashed up in that accident." A long, mournful wail came from the wreckage of the bus. "Or lost his mind."
"I feel like I should help someone, but I don't know how," she said.
"I'm going to go," Zebra said. "I'm going to walk back up that road. I've got a cell phone I stole from a lady's purse." He just went ahead and said it; it made him ashamed, but he felt that it was not a time to be hiding the things about himself that he did not like. "When I finally get something on it, I'll call. I want to get some help. Those two in the shed, I don't know what's going to happen to them."
"I guess that leaves me with him," the woman said.
He was howling like an animal, his voice cracking from the strain.
"I guess it does," Zebra said.
Zebra held out a cold hand, and she looked at it for a moment as if it were some foreign gesture. But then she seemed to remember, and she shook it suddenly, with both hands. "Good luck," she said. "It's been nice riding with you."
* * *
Zebra had lost track of how far he'd come, how many bends in the road, how many hills that rose like animals in the darkness. His feet were way beyond cold; his legs felt strange, like they didn't end in anything, they just rolled mysteriously over the asphalt. The snow still filtered down, and the ground gleamed a dull silver.
He'd never been so far from everything in his life. Always run from one dust-up to another, some time in juvie, some time in county, a little job here, a couple girlfriends there, always owing somebody money or somebody after him for something. But now only person who even knew he existed was his cousin out in Chicago, and his cousin wouldn't even be surprised if he didn't show up. No friends, no enemies, nothing, and finally, for the first time, a feeling as if fate had let him go.
A pair of headlights appeared on the horizon. Zebra stopped walking and shielded his eyes.
The car slowed, and pulled up next to him. There was a set of cop lights on the top, and a shield on the door. The cop got out.
"Mission Control this is Officer Glenn," he said to this shoulder. "Have identified a suspect matching the description. Over." There was no answering sound from his radio.
"What description is that?" Zebra asked.
"One of the boys back in Champion woke up in the middle of the night and remembered where he seen your face when he picked up that lady at the bus station. Seems he knew you. Seems you robbed a lady's purse yesterday. Been following that bus of yours since you came south at Grim Ridge" He leaned to his shoulder. "Mission Control, Officer Glenn reporting this fella robbed a lady's purse yesterday. Over."
Zebra looked down at his cell phone. No reception. "How come you radio works?" he asked.
Officer Glenn walked around the car into the headlights of his car. The cord from the radio on his shoulder dangled to a frayed pair of wires. "Ain't no human radio ever worked on this stretch of highway." He pointed skyward. "This here radio's connected to Mission Control."
"Can Mission Control send an ambulance? Got a bus wreck up the road."
"Mission Control, suspect reports a bus wreck. If you could send a white-and-stripe, that'd be mighty kind of you." He patted the radio. "I got to say, though, Mission Control ain't so good with the, you know. With the ambulances."
A couple hours ago, Zebra wouldn't have felt any pangs of injustice, being taken in. But now, it didn't feel right. "What's it good for, then?"
"Judgment," said Officer Glenn. "That's all."
"Aren't you just better off on your own?"
"Out here, you need all the company you can get."
"Then you never been out here alone," Zebra said. "It's beautiful."
"Beautiful or not, it's time we get you back to Champion." To his radio, he said, "Mission Control, we're coming home."
r.p.e. 1: the end
Emmanuelle circled wreckage of the bus. A shallow puddle of fuel and oil had spread over the concrete, splashing underfoot as she drew closer. The bus driver was mumbling now, sometimes trailing briefly to silence.
On another day, under the lights of a familiar city, Emmanuelle would have just retreated with her sewing bag to stitch a tangle of metal surrounded by a fuel-slick, a few stylized snowflakes swirling down. She could see in her mind what it would've been, and she could feel the desire to create it with her hands. But the dark world of the parking lot held more possibilities, somehow. Perhaps it was because everyone else was gone, everything else was gone, that she felt herself drawn to the animal sounds, quietly and inexplicably confident that she had the power to bring the man out of himself.
The bus driver bit the steering wheel to keep from crying like a woman. Where were the keys?
He was dimly conscious of sounds that came from his mouth when his teeth were not clamped against something. His keys had to be somewhere. He had left them in the ignition, but they had become dislodged in the accident, and now they were somewhere in the demolished cab, among the twisted metal and the broken glass.
The bus driver did not believe in miracles. Indeed, he had always felt that he was called precisely because miracles did not happen. Was not transportation, on a schedule as immovable and eternal as the stars, a kind of almost-miracle all its own? He had always risen from sleep with the knowledge that, even if the gods would not reach down and eradicate cholera, even if the child withering of starvation would still be dead by nightfall, at least it was possible for a man standing in Champion, Colorado at three seveteen p.m. to be in Chicago by dawn. And if that was not a good in and of itself, was not promptness, timeliness, the stuff of which good was made and great deeds accomplished?
But he was wailing again, he could feel it in his throat. Once more he sifted his fingers through the shards of glass, wet with fuel, on the cold rectangle of pavement that filled the place where the side window had once been.
Even though he did not believe in miracles, he wanted to put his keys in the ignition and turn them, one last time. Because he would know, then, if he had truly been forsaken by Time. It was possible, not likely, but just barely possible, that Time needed that final proof of his devotion. That it awaited his bloody fingers turning the key in the ignition one final time, before it would raise him and his bus phoenix-like from the snow and darkness and send him hurtling once more toward his destiny.
On his forehead, the mark burned.
Emmanuelle approached the crumpled cab slowly. It was dark, and she knew the man was there only by the sounds of broken glass crunching and labored breathing.
"Hello?"
"You better get on board," he said. "We have to make up lost time."
"The bus is smashed."
"I just have to find my keys."
"The bus is smashed," she said again.
"Of course it's smashed. Do you think I'd have lost my keys if it wasn't smashed?"
"You can't drive it if it's smashed."
"Don't you understand? It's not me driving. It's Time. This is Time's bus. I just push the pedals and turn the wheel." The crunch and rattle of glass was suddenly interrupted by the musical jingle of keys. "Here."
Emmanuelle found herself moving before she even thought, and her hand caught his just as the key started to dip into the ignition. "Wait."
"We've waited too long." But his hand was momentarily still. It was a strong hand, a thick thumb, and slippery with something.
Her strength seemed to grow as he submitted to her touch. She felt her fingers wrapping around his hand, felt him yielding to her influence, but when she tried to guide his hand away, it did not move. She heard his breathing in the shadows of the wreck.
"If you turn that key," she said, "You'll make a spark." They were standing in a stew of fuel from the bus and the truck, and whatever come out when the wreck sheared off two fuel pumps.
"That's not up to me."
"Then who?"
"Time."
"Why don't you just come out of there?"
Just come out? She did not understand. She could not possibly understand. Someone who had never been called to serve could never imagine the peace of a mission so clear and so just. It was not better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Service was the sweetest good, and no one more wretched than the servant with no master. If Time would not have him, then his good was dead. Continuing would be incomprehensible.
"What's your name?" Emmanuelle asked.
"I'm the bus driver."
"I know. What's your name?"
A hand emerged from the broken frame of the front window. It held a plastic badge. Emmanuelle took it and held it close, squinting at the print. At first the print was illegible, but slowly it seemed to brighten, and Emmanuelle realized that the clouds had parted, making way for the moon, nearly full. Around her, the ruined parking lot took shape in faded monochrome. "Matthew."
"Yes," he said. "That's it."
"Come out of there. It's time to do something new."
"What?"
"Come out and we'll see."
"There's nothing out there. This is just a place I stop."
"You think Time is beauty, don't you?" she asked.
"Beauty?"
"There's more than one kind of beauty in the world." Emmanuelle opened her soft sewing bag, and slid her hand down into the silky depths of slippery fabrics and soft thread. She groped down to the bottom; she knew all pieces there by touch. She took the one she had started that morning on the bus and drew it to the surface.
Outside the bus the snow glowed in the moonlight, and the pale-skinned woman was luminescent, except for her eyes, which drew light into themselves, darker than the night sky. She held up a small square of cloth.
The cold slip of blood, black in the monochrome light of the moon, darkened the white square, and the bus driver felt himself shiver. He held out his own hands. They, too, were black with blood, cut by the shards of glass he'd sifted in his search for the keys.
The keys. The woman was taking them from his hands.
She brought out another square, this one showed the wide eyes and bared teeth of a cat, racing toward him, behind it the shape of a massive dog filled the background, open mouth and long teeth, and eyes that he knew were red without being able to see.
He leaned forward to look closer, and saw the next: "fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker," it said, in light colors and dark. He imagined pink and green and blue and yellow.
One more, and this one he reached out and took in his hands: it was a man in uniform, perhaps a policeman, perhaps a bus driver. He was sitting on the hood of a car, and his pixelated eyes were wide white squares. Astride him sat a woman, her skirt flowing over him, her head thrown back, hair streaming down, and three small black x's making a smile. Matthew stepped out of the ruined of the bus and looked down at the woman in front of him.
Emmanuelle felt a shiver when Matthew stepped out into the light. The 'X' on his forehead glowed in the moonlight, an iridescent black cross on his skin.
"Of course," she said.
"Did you make that yourself?" he asked. "Did you have a pattern, or did you just see it in your mind and know?"
"I just saw it."
"He was right," he said. "That boy was right. It's beautiful."
Emmanuelle reached two fingers to touch the mark. The skin burned hot. "This was all for you," she said. "He marked you. This was all for you."
Matthew felt his throat tighten; it was raw from crying out. He lifted one hand to his own forehead, his fingers touching hers as he felt the cold paint of the mark. His other hand reached out to touch the bent metal of his bus.
"For me?" A tear left a cold streak down his cheek.
"He looked into your soul," Emmanuelle said. "He looked into your soul and he saw that you had to be set free."
"Free to go where?"
"Down the road."
"Without my bus?"
"Without regard for Time."
"Alone?"
"No," she said, and she drew him to her like a child. "Not alone."
He was stony and unyielding, first, but as the breeze swirled around them and they felt snowflakes touch their cheeks and melt, the statue of a man came to life, and his arms squeezed her back, and she gasped at their sudden strength.
[this is a love story. we will start off with six characters. after every installment, readers will cast up to two votes: one to remove a character, and one to keep a character. one vote to keep cancels one vote to remove. the character with the most removal votes will be removed from the narrative during the next installment. all rules subject to change as the story proceeds, but I convenant to stick to these two:
1. this is a love story.
2. the votes of the readers will be obeyed. ]
chapter 1: Champion, Colorado
Coral pushed through the double glass doors of the bus stop with her heart full of love. Love for whoever she might find there--though she had never ridden the bus before. Love for whoever she might meet at her destination--though she had never been more than a hundred miles from Champion, Colorado, and certainly not as far as Chicago. It was love that clutched her suitcase to her chest, hard plastic feet cutting into her stomach. Her love was beautiful and boundless, the love that shoots a horse with a broken leg or drives evil out by force. It was a love that frightened strangers, frightened even herself sometimes. Her love was too much for Champion, Colorado, so she was leaving, alone, for a big city that might have room for it all.
Raster had silver and blue and yellow paint markers, no black, no red, but he was doing his best on the rough fiberglass canvas of the back of a seat over by the broken Coke machine. He wasn't sure what it was going to look like when he was finished, but right now it was kind of like a blue and yellow tiger, only it had long ears like a rabbit, and it was running through something like silver rain and jumping. Raster hadn't painted in the eyes yet, because he didn't know why the tiger-rabbit was jumping. Maybe from hate, maybe from love, and no matter what anyone ever told him those were two very different things.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton kept her cross-stitch handy at all times. All times. You never knew when you might be suddenly abandoned and left to sit for who-knows how long. And when you are all alone, when everything that matters to you in your life is gone and you have to suddenly, say, board a bus to take you to a strange city, you have two choices: madness, or cross-stitch. Her cross-stitch bag was a kind of journal, a layer of colored threads that she had picked out of thousands because they were the colors she felt, beneath that a layer of her current projects--slogans, mostly, or angels. Then there was the false bottom of her bag, and beneath that, the cross-stitch pieces she almost never worked on, but which were always in the bottom of her mind like the bottom of the bag, one that said "fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker" and another that showed a dirty, filthy thing. In color.
Zebra had a cousin in Chicago, a cousin who worked for a big security company that patrolled O'Hare airport. Zebra's cousin said he could get Zebra a job no problem, that he knew a guy who could make sure they didn't run a background check on him. Zebra had to rob a lady to get the bus fare, even though it made his eyes tear up while the lady trembled and handed up her purse. And if she wondered why her mugger was crying, it was because he had made a promise to never hurt anyone anymore, but he had to break that promise one last time.
Drexel held the door for some chick in a tight animal-print skirt, and as she walked past him without a thank-you he tried to figure out what race she was. Damn beautiful--full lips and light-brown skin, dark eyes that narrowed at the edges. Not Chinese, not black, not Indian, not Mexican. All of the above, maybe? Drex would've followed her and talked to her, but she was carrying only a purse, and the only bus leaving for the next two hours was the special to Chicago. A woman walking like that, with her mouth set like that, taking a thousand mile bus trip with only a small black purse--she doesn't want any new friends. So Drex sat down across from the lady doing the cross-stitch, because he had to talk to somebody. He was a salesman, and even when he wasn't selling he had to be talking. Silence made him feel like the whole world was drowning.
"Is that a pig?" Drex asked.
The woman with the cross stitch looked up with a kind of panic on her face.
"How come it has wings?" Drex asked.
"It's an angel."
"An angel pig."
The woman nodded.
A loud metallic crash, the clang of a garbage can slamming into a cement pillar and bouncing off to rattle against the tile floor, made both of them jump. They looked up, and everyone else looked up except for the kid hunched over the back of one of the bus seats, and the whatever-she-was girl in the tight skirt was sitting herself down in a seat as if nothing had happened, but the way that garbage can was rolling it had to be her who threw it.
"Damn," Drex said. "Wonder what that garbage can ever did to her."
[Coral voted off.]
chapter 2: the fat damned hand of fate
Zebra saw the cop car pull up out the side doors, lights off. He grabbed his bag and headed for the other door, walking fast. Fucking A, fucking A, fucking A, he didn't want to go back, he didn't want to go back, he didn't want to go back. Maybe he deserved it, but he would run if he--
Another cop car pulled up outside the other exit. He turned to the front door--there were two more damn cops, stiff and pudgy in their bulletproof vests, running up to disappear on either side of the main front doors.
So that was how it was going to be. Big, dangerous Zebra, broke and hungry, and they were bringing out the entire Champion P.D. to take him down. Shit.
So much for running, man, they were going to be pumped up and he didn't want to get shot. So, Z., what you going to do with your last ninety seconds of freedom?
The girl sitting over by the coke machines was beautiful. Not merely hot--she was beautiful. He had seen her when she came in. She sat leaning forward, hair covering most of her face, except there where it parted to show a long neck, smooth skin, and a perfect ear.
The seats in the bus station were set in rows back to back; he crossed to the row behind her and sat, his back facing her back, and took a deep breath. He could smell stale cigarette smoke, and the faintest hint of the musky smell of hair that had been damp with sweat--the smell you would smell if you rolled over next to her in the morning. Zebra closed his eyes and breathed.
The doors of the room exploded in at Coral all at once. Clattering feet, rushing men, and she knew they had come for her, she snatched up her suitcase and leapt up on her seat, started screaming.
Two of them had their guns out, little, foul men, stupid and squishy, she turned her breath on them as she screamed and they were yelling back at her. "You can't have them! No!" Coral yelled. "You'll all be drowned. This town will be drowned. I won't let you take my babies!"
Then two of them charged at her and she wasn't so delusional that she didn't know what was going to happen, no, she knew the score, she jumped over the back of the seat and bolted for the exit, faster than she thought she could run, so fast, seats whirring by, suitcase still clutched to her chest, then--
The catch on her foot--some fat, damned hand--was sure as fate, and she felt her body toppling forward under the ruthless pull of momentum. The suitcase kept going, though, still yearning for the door--even then they sought freedom, even then they knew right from wrong and sought light over darkness--but then the floor hit her like a truck full on, a bright slam of pain, but she kicked back anyway with her free foot and felt a face yield beneath it, loosing her for just a moment to spring forward.
But another man was already on the suitcase, already scooping it up, and she felt hands grab at her from behind once more, so she did the only thing she could do, she grabbed the only thing she could reach--the thick white arm of a man staring at her from his seat, and sank her teeth into that corrupt white flesh with all the force of righteousness.
Drexel bent over his bleeding arm while the wild woman screamed as four cops held her down while the fifth brought out his cuffs. He didn't even know humans could bite like that for fuck's sake. Blood seeped between his fingers, and he clenched his teeth together for fear of making an undignified noise if he opened his mouth.
Across the room, a cop hauled the woman's suitcase up onto a seat and unfastened the zipper. When he lifted the flap he recoiled, and a moment later Drex could smell it even from twenty feet away. He couldn't see for sure what it was, but there was something furry in there, maybe a few different somethings, and Jesus God whatever they were had been dead for a while.
The woman next to him with the angel pigs opened her purse and held out a small yellow tube of ointment.
"You better put something on that. She might be infected."
chapter 3: the bus waits for no man
"Okay, people," said the bus driver, striding into the room. "The bus is here, and in three minutes the bus is leaving."
The young cop who was taking Drexel's statement looked up. "Hey. We're not finished."
The bus driver pointed to the oversized clock that loomed over the front door. "I serve one master," said the driver, "and I wait for no man." Doors swung shut behind him; outside, the bus engine rumbled to life.
Raster uncapped his pen even though the cop was still standing just a few feet away. It was time to go, but now he knew what the eyes of the tiger-rabbit were like. Like that woman when the cop grabbed her ankle: wide and feral, but not attacking, running away, and the silver slashes of rain burning like fire. His pen was quick and sure: a pupil-slash, then a small arc of panic at the back of the eye and Raster snatched up his bags and almost ran for the door. He didn't look back. He never looked back.
Drexel had a silky yellow bandage from the woman's cross-stitch bag hand-tied around his arm. He had struggled with the antibiotic, and without asking she'd stepped up and taken over. She had pinched the yellow fabric between white teeth and torn it with one sharp movement. Up close, she was younger than you'd think--she dressed like an old lady, but she was only maybe middle aged, or maybe not even that, underneath her shapeless white sweater.
"I've got to catch this bus," he said to the cop. "I can't wait until tomorrow."
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton took just as long as she thought she could take in the bathroom, composing herself in front of the mirror. There was a spot of blood on the white cuff of her sweater. She hadn't tried to get it out, she just looked at it, and felt a powerful desire to dig down to the bottom of her cross-stitch bag. In the mirror, her pale skin and drawn cheeks made her look, she thought, like the ghost of an old governess haunting a wine cellar. She didn't mind that at all. She snatched up her bag and headed for the bus. It was a long ride, and the bus would be nearly empty.
Zebra was a study in stillness, a chair, a cigarette butt, a thing no one could possibly notice or care about, nothing anyone would keep from getting on a bus because they wouldn't even notice it was there, and sure enough the cops walked right past him. The girl helped, sitting behind him, just as cold and still as he was. Every time he breathed he felt her, and he imagined that every time she breathed she felt him, and that kept him still and centered, letting everything flow around him. Then it was time, the minute hand clicked forward, and Zebra stood up and walked for the bus, not looking back at the girl. Follow me, he thought. I don't want to go to Chicago alone.
Kareena was the last one in the station. She rose, finally, and crossed the empty room, her footfalls loud against the cathedral-high ceiling. She would rather have gone anywhere but that bus, but the bus was where she had to go, and whatever else was wrong with her she wasn't the kind to shrink from her fate. The walls of the bus station were darkened with accidental water-stain frescoes of saints and devils.
Kareena always felt as if she were being watched, which was probably because she was always watching herself. But the sense was stronger than ever that day as she walked toward the door. She felt as if the whole room behind her was eyes, watching and passing judgment.
The bus door started to close, but she caught it with the flat of her hand, forced it back open, and stepped on.
"You're late," the driver said.
"Not late enough." She climbed three steps into the damp darkness of the bus.
[Raster voted off. I inadvertently introduced a new character in the person of the bus driver, so character count stays at five.]
chapter 4: fucking beautiful
When Raster glanced over at the woman in the back corner he knew instantly what she was doing. There was a forced nonchalance on her face, but the tension around her mouth made it a lie, and her eyes worked too intently on something no one else could see. The tiny turns of her head toward every little sound told him she was listening for anyone coming close. She was making art.
Raster felt a swell of fellow-feeling so sudden and powerful he rose from his seat. He'd met plenty of other artists, guys like himself, or girls even, but never a woman like that--the kind of woman who drove by without meeting your eyes, who had other people do her shopping. He had seen her shuffling by, written her off like she had written him off, but damn, now she was even beautiful, her bottom lip pinched by the white point of a sharp tooth.
Because he knew exactly how she felt, because he knew that her awareness of her surroundings came and went like a swimmer coming up for air, he could get close to her. He just waited for that pinch of displeasure around the eyes that said she was distracted by some problem with her art, and he could close the gap, moving soundlessly, until he was able to slide into the seat in front of her, unnoticed.
On any other bus trip Drexel would've been talking to people, but the bite on his arm hurt like the devil, and it made everything seem strange and dangerous, and that made him feel awkward. So he sat and hurt and watched uneasily as the bus lurched and growled on its way through some nameless little mountain town.
When the raggedy-looking kid a couple seats away got up and headed for the back of the bus, Drex sat up. The kid was going back toward the woman who had bandaged Drex's arm. Drex would've sat by her himself if it wasn't so obvious she wanted to be alone. He watched the kid in the reflection of a bus window. He wasn't going to bug the woman as long as Drex was on the bus.
She was really in the zone. Because Drex was able to rise up over the back of the seat and look right down at her, and she didn't look up. He expected to smell the tang of a paint marker but--
The woman was sewing. No, stitching. A white circle of cloth, and in the middle--
Blood. Embroidered goddamn blood.. The top of the circle was dark with it, and she was stitching down the outline of a heavy drop sliding, and the borders of three other drops were marked out in a spray across the circle.
It was the most beautiful, excellent thing Raster had seen in a long time, and he felt his cheeks getting warm. She would notice him as soon as she finished that line.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton's fingers plunged the needle through the fabric, deftly twisted it, sent it back. They were a blur to her eyes, but she felt the sure movement as they drew the edge of the blood, the blood she had to stitch because she had seen it and felt it and it had touched her and when she felt something true she had to make it with her own hands.
There. The border was finished, now to fill--
There were eyes, a man, leaning over her, looking down.
A surge of panic coursed through her and she stuffed her work into her bag, felt the bite of the needle in her palm.
The man was smiling, broad and delirious, and he started to speak when another voice interrupted him.
"Hey," Drex said. "I think the lady came to the back of the bus to be alone."
"Did you see that?" the punk asked him. The kid had this look on his face like he'd just found the Virgin Mary in his breakfast cereal.
"You better sit down."
Raster didn't know who the dude in the tie was, and didn't care. People like that talked shit all the time; he'd learned a long time ago to just let it roll off him.
"That was fucking beautiful," he said to the woman.
The guy behind him was saying something.
"I just had to see it," Raster said. "I knew from the look on your face it would be beautiful."
The guy behind him put a hand on his shoulder, so Raster turned around and punched him in the stomach to make him stop. He was going to hit him again but then he remembered that the guy had already been bitten and he didn't want to make shit worse for him so he just gave the guy's head a push with his hand and sent him stumbling back up the aisle.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton heard the air go out of the man she'd bandaged, saw him fall when the younger man pushed him. Her palm hurt and her ears burned, but her fingers felt the need to stitch more than ever.
The young man had seen her work--it was as if he'd seen her coming out of the shower. He had seen it and understood it. Loved it. And then the other man had tried to rescue her. Mrs. Emmannuelle Appleton had not been so near the swirling center of the bizarre energies of maleness since her husband had left her two years ago.
When the bus lurched to a stop it took her a moment to realize it wasn't just her insides staggering like that.
The bus driver reached over the fallen man and lifted the punk by jacket, hauling him back past the other passenger and into the door well of the rear doors.
"Where are we?" the bus driver demanded.
The punk looked at him.
"We're on the bus," the bus driver said. "And who am I?"
"You're the bus driver," the punk replied.
"You're damn right."
Raster's toes just barely touched the floor of the bus; the fucking driver was stronger than he looked, and his piggy eyes had the kind of intensity it wasn't safe to ignore. Even so, Raster was never smart when he was fueled by art, and he felt his fingers closing over the silver paint marker in his pocket.
"Who are you?" the bus driver demanded.
"Raster."
"You're nobody."
"My name is Raster."
"On my bus, you are nobody."
From the back of the bus, Raster heard a woman's voice. "Thank you." It was the woman with the cross-stitch, and she was standing up in her seat now, looking straight at him.
Raster smiled at her, but it was too late now, he knew what had to happen next; a flip of his thumb uncapped the marker in his pocket, then he brought it up and with a quick flick of his wrist put a silver 'X' on the bus driver's forehead.
"You have the mark," Raster said.
The bus driver slammed the kid back against the doors; they started to open but his body stopped them, so he yanked the kid back and the automatic opener finished the job, then he tossed the kid out onto the side of the road.
The kid landed standing, staring back at him.
He felt the two cool lines of drying paint on his forehead.
"I serve time," he said, "this bus serves me. No one makes me late."
"You have the mark," Raster repeated.
The woman was watching him, a shadow behind tinted glass.
Raster slipped the marker back in his pocket and lifted the hood on his sweatshirt. The lights of the last town back were visible back up the road. He started walking.
chapter 5: so far so good.
Mrs. Emmanuelle Appleton reached down to help the man to his feet as the bus lurched back into motion. He was only just recovering his breath; ever since the other man had hit him, he'd been gasping like an asthmatic in his last throes.
The man tried to brush her hand away. "I'm fine."
Mrs. Appleton, suddenly and without premeditation, told the first lie she'd spoken for the past sixteen months. "I'm a nurse."
"I'm fine," he repeated, but stopped resisting as she helped him up and steered him into a seat, then found herself sitting next to him, quite close. "You can breathe again," she said.
He nodded.
"Your diaphragm," she explained, dredging up the explanation from where she had no idea. "Negative pressure on your lungs."
The tense cast of his mouth relaxed a little. He seemed to appreciate the science--and if it was wrong, as it might well be, he didn't seem to notice. He loosened his tie.
She gently touched the yellow knot of the bandage she'd tied around his bite wound from before. "Do you always have this much trouble when you travel?" She knew he had to travel often. Something about the easy way he'd sat across from her in the bus station and started talking.
"No," he said. "Usually it's worse. You should've seen me after my last trip to Tucson."
>Zebra had watched the stuff going on in the back of the bus through the reflection in the window, and once again he felt amazed that the one thrown off the bus wasn't him. His whole life, if there was one person the cops pulled off the corner, one person searched at the border, one person who his girlfriend called at random times to check on him even though he never cheated, it was him. So far so good. If he could only make it to Chicago, he'd have a chance.
On the down side, he couldn't smell anything but old cigarettes, even though the girl was in the seat in front of him. The bus was supposed to be non-smoking, but the signs were newer than the bus, and those old fabric seats, they never gave anything up.
The obvious thing to do was get down on the floor and slide under the seats. Lucky for him she wasn't wearing a skirt, so no one would think he was a pervert. There was some pretty unspeakable stuff on the floor, but the seat was kind of coming apart in a few places, and he used the stuffing as a sponge to wipe it clean.
Zebra had never in his life questioned the existence of love, but he also knew the other obvious thing, that usually it was a swindle, and usually you that was doing the swindling. But just because he'd never seen a great blue whale didn't mean he doubted they existed. He slid on his back until his head was close to the girl's boots. She wasn't wearing socks, more like short tights, with dark red and black tiger stripes. He liked the way the not-socks seemed to be saying to the world that there should be red and black tigers.
Down there she smelled more like wet leather--that would be her boots. But there was the other smell, clean clothes, and somewhere underneath it the faint smell of skin that he couldn't pick out but knew was there, enriching everything.
Kareena leaned her head against the cool window and felt the rumble of the road.
She had never really believed that you could escape judgment. Even though she didn't believe in a Judge. It was not something she could ever explain, but there was always the feeling that just moving through her days, working, eating, smoking, she was borrowing against an account that would have to be paid, but how and in what currency she had never had the faintest clue, only a certainty that it was nothing so vulgar as hell, or as childish as St. Peter with his book and keys.
So, though her sister's call had come as the worst kind of surprise, she had accepted the necessity of going with a sense of its inevitability. But she had expected that decision to alleviate the sense of judgment; instead, it had gotten worse, and ever since she'd sat down on the bus she felt that every cross and uncross of her legs was being noted and marked, and when she reached down to pull up her stockings, she thought she heard the click of an abacus.
The feeling of breath on her fingers, however, was quite unmistakable, if rather surprising. She bent double and looked beneath her seat. There was a young man asleep on the floor of the bus, a long, thin scar cutting through his eyebrow and up to his dark hairline.
[Kareena and Drexel tied for last place; both voted off.]
chapter 6.1: decisions
Four of Kareena's nails were long and scarlet, but one was broken, a ragged edge only just now healed beneath the soft pad of her fingertip. It was that finger, second from the end, that she stretched out to touch the shallow pale track of the scar. His brow fluttered as she touched his skin. The line of the scar led to his hair; she followed it. His hair was light as air; the skin was warm, and the tingle of contact ran up the soft underside of her arm into her torso.
Would that scar count for or against him? Would her touch weigh for her or against her?
Perhaps the decision was already made.
chapter 6.2: why everyone goes to Chicago
"When I was a kid," Drex said, "silence would make my mother weep. You could have three, maybe four minutes of silence around the dinner table, and then these tears would just roll down her cheeks and if someone didn't say something soon she'd be catatonic by the end of the meal."
Pretty women made Drex talk too much. Lots of salesmen he knew were like that--they could talk a golf-ball through a garden-hose, but there was no off-switch, and you'd have to gag them at a wake. Especially, man, get Drex nervous... Drex figured that anybody who was a born salesman just came into the world with the intrinsic belief that you could talk your way out of anything, so, the blood pressure goes up, the mouth starts going. Hence the effect of pretty girls. And if they were pretty enough, he would even forget to lie.
"I can't decide if talking makes us better animals or worse. It's how I make my living, I ought to believe in it, but how often do we have something positive to say that we need words to express? And, on the other end of things, could we ever talk each other into genocide if we never spoke? But, I don't know, talking is what I do. I guess I don't really want to know the answer to that."
There was another surprise, though, that this woman was touching off the pretty-girl reflex; he still couldn't figure out how old she was because when he first saw her he wrote her off as way too old for him but it seemed like she was shedding years the longer he talked to her or maybe it was just the way she looked at him, up and a little bashful as if she wasn't used to talking to boys, which took him back to being goddamn fifteen and made his pulse race like that, too.
"I'm not a man who likes to fly," he was saying. "If a place is worth getting to, it's worth taking your time to get there. I can fly if I have to, but it's not human, too many people shoved too close together, no room to pick and choose who you talk to."
"Why are you going to Chicago?" the woman asked.
"Funeral," he said. "Isn't that why everyone goes to Chicago?"
chapter 6.3: snow
The bus lurched as it slowed, as if unwilling. The lights of the road-side service station glowed ahead, a tiny bubble of light in the Colorado darkness.
The bus seemed to be going too fast, seemed as if it would crash into the glass-fronted convenience store, but the brakes caught at the last minute, the bus slowed sharply, and at last it stopped, snub nose almost flush with the glass.
"Eleven minutes," said the driver. In the mirror, he could be seen to raise two hesitant fingers to the silver 'X' on his forehead. His furtive efforts to wipe it away had done nothing but smudge it slightly, and if the voice that projected back to the back of the bus was slightly sharper than usual, then perhaps it was because the mark troubled him.
"This bus leaves in eleven minutes. It waits for no one. If your bodies need to take matter in or expel matter out, do it now, but do not be late."
The bus driver looked over the mostly-empty seats of his bus, but if he was looking for defiance or submission, he found neither. The humans in his bus were occupied amongst themselves, and did not seem to heed him. He pulled the door open with more force than necessary, and strode out of the bus to find the attendant who had not appeared and thereby jeopardized his departure.
The wind that blew across the empty highway was cold, and as the bus driver looked up into the empty night sky a swirl of snowflakes twisted past him and away, moving fast, as if late.
chapter 6.4: ice
Emmanuelle clutched her cloth cross-stitch bag to her chest as she descended the three steps of the bus. The wind that cut across the interstate was cold where her thick sweater was open at the neck, but she felt the cold as a far-off thing that was happening to someone else.
The salesman on the bus had watched her go; she saw in the dark mirror of the bus windscreen how he followed her with his eyes. It had been so long since she had gone out into the wild to expose herself to the wanting of strangers; she had forgotten the answering pull within herself. She walked across the asphalt, floating, almost, on the desire she felt in her hands.
She was headed for the bathroom, but the cold air and movement felt too clean, so instead she walked out between the pumps and looked up at the sky, a few dim stars far away at the horizon, the rest of the sky a featureless dark surface, swirling, now, with a few snowflakes.
Somewhere across the parking lot she heard a man's voice call out "Is there anybody here?" It was the bus driver, looking small and alone in the center of an empty lot. They were the only ones who had gotten off the bus. The asphalt beneath her feet was a little slick with frozen dew.
The lights of the truck swung into view around a curve in the road and brightened as the heavy mechanical growl of the engine grew louder. The growing light was the only thing moving, the growling engine the only sound. There was nothing in the world but the straining engine and the glaring lights, hurtling forward as if on rails, as if it was not piloted by a human but instead by fate.
Emmanuelle suddenly felt the chill of the air, and clutched her arms tight across her chest.
When the road curved, the truck kept going straight. The lights shone bright in her eyes as the truck came toward her, and something about the slip of the lights through the darkness told her it was sliding. She watched it come toward her, no change in the noise of the engine, no squeal of brakes, just the noise of the machine and lights grew to a flash, and a burst of air struck her, blew her hat off and her eyes closed. She stumbled back, turned by the rushing steel beside her, hearing the rush of metal through air.
She found her balance and opened her eyes.
The truck hit the center of the bus and carried it, the bus folding across the front of the truck with a concussive crunch. A small building exploded in cinder blocks and dust and set the truck and bus spinning sharply, trailer swinging into the clear, lit glass of the station office. Glass shattered, and all the lights in the station went out at once. In the darkness glass pattered to the ground and the truck's engine choked itself to silence.
chapter 6.5 cheese crackers
Drexel was upside down. He wasn't sure how he got there. It was dark. It smelled like gasoline, and a girl. His head was pillowed on something soft. Something wet dripped on his face. Another drop fell on his lips; tasted like blood. He wondered if it was his. He couldn't really feel his legs much.
"Hey," he said.
No one replied. He was pretty sure it was a person he was lying on.
"Hey."
A drop of blood splashed onto his upper lip and got into his nose. He exhaled sharply, trying to blow it out, but that hurt a little. "I always liked the smell of gas," he said. "It's, I don't know, reminds me of cheese crackers. Road trips."
The woman underneath him murmured something.
"What?"
"Hate fucking cheese crackers," she said, barely audible. He could feel her chest move as she spoke--his head was pressed into her stomach. It had to be uncomfortable, but he couldn't move.
"What happened?" he asked. "Why am I upside down?"
"Don't know."
"Are you hurt?"
"Don't know."
"I don't think I can move my legs."
"Me either."
"I think I should be in a lot of pain but I'm not."
The woman's hand came up and groped over his chest. Her hand was small, and when her fingers came to rest on his face they were thin and warm.
"You think maybe we're dead?" he asked.
"Don't be stupid."
He found that he could move one of his hands, and reached back for her. He found the rough fabric of her jacket. "What's your name?"
"I was trying to go somewhere," she said.
"I was going to a funeral. But there was something else I wanted, and I can't remember what."
"You're not going to get it now," she said.
"I guess not."
"Something didn't want us to get there."
"I guess this is what we get instead." Another drop of blood hit him on the chin. "Do I know you from somewhere?"
"How should I know?"
"I feel like I remember how you smell."
"That's just the gasoline."
Drex felt a little dizzy. He wondered what would happen if he stayed upside down like that for a long time. His fingers tightened on the fabric of her sleeve.
chapter 6.6: flight
The last thing Zebra remembered was flight. But as he returned to himself he was very much a creature of the earth. He was flat on his back, arms out at his sides, and on his stomach was a cinder block, balanced there as if someone had been concerned he would blow away.
He reached up and lifted the cinder block, setting it down with a hollow cement clunk on the asphalt next to him. Cold air swirled around his bare arms, small snowflakes spinning.
He was alive.
He stood up.
He was alive and unhurt.
Well, sure, he was bleeding. His arms were skinned. Oh, and there were a few bits of glass sticking through his pants. He pulled them out; that hurt a little, and his pants were kind of bloody. But he'd had worse. He'd had ten times worse. He could walk fine, even still had his goddamn wallet.
In the cold Colorado night, Zebra laughed, and as he shook with the force of it, glass tinkled to the pavement as it fell free from his clothes.
chapter 7: last things
Here is what happened:
1. Zebra, overwhelmed with the sudden irrefutable proof that his years as fate's whipping boy were at an end, leapt up onto the wreckage of the bus. He found a man's brown leather shoe sticking up through a broken window, the man still attached, mumbling to himself in the bus below. Conscious of the spreading smell of gasoline, Zebra kicked out the window,
("Hey," Drexel said to the woman. "Hey, I think there's someone up there. Come on. Stay awake. Hey." He felt cold air on his bare calf, and hands grab hold of his feet.)
grabbed the man's legs, and lifted him out. He knew the rules about not moving injured people, but he also knew the other rule, the one about how gasoline burns really fast and really hot, but not so fast and hot that it's not a really unpleasant way to die. When he was laying the man down in the frosty grass by the station--and who knew he could carry a man like that, little hundred-and-thirty-five-pound Zebra?--the man said something about how she was still in there, but of course she was, that was how Zebra found the guy to begin with, he was looking for her. he ran back.
2. Emmanuelle walked carefully across the frost-slicked asphalt to the beautiful wounded salesman and wiped the blood off his face, wondering why he had to suffer so much that day, and hoping that it would be over for him soon, but not all the way over, not still and silent forever over, but warm and comfortable over, hot cocoa and fresh pressed sheets.
3. Zebra lifted the woman out of the bus, and she swore at him, quietly, languorously, like a lover. He carried her tenderly, cradling her head--she was hurt in a lot of places--and laid her on the grass next to where a woman in a white sweater knelt beside the man.
4. The bus driver kicked the shattered windscreen of the bus inward; glass scattered. He climbed into the cab and grabbed the wheel, turned sideways like the world. "Time," he whispered. "Ever have I served you. Let me serve you still." the mark on his forehead burned.
and then:
"Is this even a place?" Kareena whispered into the darkness.
Even as a child she had fought first for control. She would defy with teeth even the kindest teacher. Better to reign in Hell.
But ever since she had stepped onto the bus there had been something at work, perhaps just in her own head--no, certainly, certainly just in her own head. But very much there: a feeling that the control over herself that she'd fought for to the destruction of nearly everything was, in the end, just another stupid abstraction.
So where did that leave her? In the cold, in the dark, in a spot between two faraway places she didn't want to go to? She felt a little dizzy, like the floor was sliding beneath her.
A man's voice in the darkness next to her said, "Yes."
"Yes," Drexel said. "It is a place. It's a small stone outbuilding. There is no light because the power was knocked out by the crash. We're lying on the floor." He felt the need to explain things to her very clearly and scientifically, because she was only just conscious again, and he wanted to encourage rational thought, and the faculties of the mind in general, as the prime bulwark against the woozy darkness whose appeal had, only just a moment ago, been growing in his mind as well.
"They have left us here," he continued, "pending the arrival of help, which we are to understand may not be swift, as there is no evidence of a phone ever working at this site in the history of human civilization."
"Why don't you talk like a normal person?"
"I always talk like this when I'm drunk," Drexel said. "Apparently also when I have lost a considerable amount of blood." But talking to her was bringing him out of it a bit, so he felt the possibility of speaking normally returning to him.
"Do you think all this happened on purpose?" she asked.
"On purpose how?"
"It just seems like, you know, that there was no escaping this. Not from the very start."
"I don't know. It's just one of those things."
"It's a funny place for dying," she said. "And pretty stupid, you know. A pretty stupid reason to die."
"Death is always stupid," he said. "Life, too, pretty much."
She tried to shift in place and felt pain down her back and her leg. "I suppose there's no getting away from it."
"The best stories I've ever heard about dying are all about not trying to get away," he said. "That's, you know, as far as endings go, that's about as good as you get."
Kareena moved her hand and found that there was a rough blanket over her. "I never believed in gods, not really, but I always felt them. I always felt like they didn't like me. Maybe they liked some other people less, but they definitely didn't like me. I don't know. I guess that's okay. I don't really feel cold anymore." She reached her hand over and found the man next to her. She grabbed onto his shirt. It was damp.
"When I first saw you," he said, "when I first saw you walk through those doors, I wanted to ask your name. I wanted to sit next to you."
"I wouldn't have let you."
His hand covered hers, soft palm on her knuckles, fingers wrapping. "I know."
She tried to move closer, but it hurt, so she just held onto his hand.
r.p.e. 1.8: mission control
[there will be one more post after this one, in which love will conquer all. here, Zebra submits to your judgment.]
Zebra stood in the swirling snow and felt a kind of kinship with the woman. From across the parking lot, he could hear the curses of the bus driver.
"What do we do now?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, still wearing her thick sweater, still with her wool cap pulled over her ears as if she'd just stepped off the bus to buy a hot chocolate. "I never thought about it before."
"Seems like everybody who might've known has been arrested, or thrown off the bus, or smashed up in that accident." A long, mournful wail came from the wreckage of the bus. "Or lost his mind."
"I feel like I should help someone, but I don't know how," she said.
"I'm going to go," Zebra said. "I'm going to walk back up that road. I've got a cell phone I stole from a lady's purse." He just went ahead and said it; it made him ashamed, but he felt that it was not a time to be hiding the things about himself that he did not like. "When I finally get something on it, I'll call. I want to get some help. Those two in the shed, I don't know what's going to happen to them."
"I guess that leaves me with him," the woman said.
He was howling like an animal, his voice cracking from the strain.
"I guess it does," Zebra said.
Zebra held out a cold hand, and she looked at it for a moment as if it were some foreign gesture. But then she seemed to remember, and she shook it suddenly, with both hands. "Good luck," she said. "It's been nice riding with you."
* * *
Zebra had lost track of how far he'd come, how many bends in the road, how many hills that rose like animals in the darkness. His feet were way beyond cold; his legs felt strange, like they didn't end in anything, they just rolled mysteriously over the asphalt. The snow still filtered down, and the ground gleamed a dull silver.
He'd never been so far from everything in his life. Always run from one dust-up to another, some time in juvie, some time in county, a little job here, a couple girlfriends there, always owing somebody money or somebody after him for something. But now only person who even knew he existed was his cousin out in Chicago, and his cousin wouldn't even be surprised if he didn't show up. No friends, no enemies, nothing, and finally, for the first time, a feeling as if fate had let him go.
A pair of headlights appeared on the horizon. Zebra stopped walking and shielded his eyes.
The car slowed, and pulled up next to him. There was a set of cop lights on the top, and a shield on the door. The cop got out.
"Mission Control this is Officer Glenn," he said to this shoulder. "Have identified a suspect matching the description. Over." There was no answering sound from his radio.
"What description is that?" Zebra asked.
"One of the boys back in Champion woke up in the middle of the night and remembered where he seen your face when he picked up that lady at the bus station. Seems he knew you. Seems you robbed a lady's purse yesterday. Been following that bus of yours since you came south at Grim Ridge" He leaned to his shoulder. "Mission Control, Officer Glenn reporting this fella robbed a lady's purse yesterday. Over."
Zebra looked down at his cell phone. No reception. "How come you radio works?" he asked.
Officer Glenn walked around the car into the headlights of his car. The cord from the radio on his shoulder dangled to a frayed pair of wires. "Ain't no human radio ever worked on this stretch of highway." He pointed skyward. "This here radio's connected to Mission Control."
"Can Mission Control send an ambulance? Got a bus wreck up the road."
"Mission Control, suspect reports a bus wreck. If you could send a white-and-stripe, that'd be mighty kind of you." He patted the radio. "I got to say, though, Mission Control ain't so good with the, you know. With the ambulances."
A couple hours ago, Zebra wouldn't have felt any pangs of injustice, being taken in. But now, it didn't feel right. "What's it good for, then?"
"Judgment," said Officer Glenn. "That's all."
"Aren't you just better off on your own?"
"Out here, you need all the company you can get."
"Then you never been out here alone," Zebra said. "It's beautiful."
"Beautiful or not, it's time we get you back to Champion." To his radio, he said, "Mission Control, we're coming home."
r.p.e. 1: the end
Emmanuelle circled wreckage of the bus. A shallow puddle of fuel and oil had spread over the concrete, splashing underfoot as she drew closer. The bus driver was mumbling now, sometimes trailing briefly to silence.
On another day, under the lights of a familiar city, Emmanuelle would have just retreated with her sewing bag to stitch a tangle of metal surrounded by a fuel-slick, a few stylized snowflakes swirling down. She could see in her mind what it would've been, and she could feel the desire to create it with her hands. But the dark world of the parking lot held more possibilities, somehow. Perhaps it was because everyone else was gone, everything else was gone, that she felt herself drawn to the animal sounds, quietly and inexplicably confident that she had the power to bring the man out of himself.
The bus driver bit the steering wheel to keep from crying like a woman. Where were the keys?
He was dimly conscious of sounds that came from his mouth when his teeth were not clamped against something. His keys had to be somewhere. He had left them in the ignition, but they had become dislodged in the accident, and now they were somewhere in the demolished cab, among the twisted metal and the broken glass.
The bus driver did not believe in miracles. Indeed, he had always felt that he was called precisely because miracles did not happen. Was not transportation, on a schedule as immovable and eternal as the stars, a kind of almost-miracle all its own? He had always risen from sleep with the knowledge that, even if the gods would not reach down and eradicate cholera, even if the child withering of starvation would still be dead by nightfall, at least it was possible for a man standing in Champion, Colorado at three seveteen p.m. to be in Chicago by dawn. And if that was not a good in and of itself, was not promptness, timeliness, the stuff of which good was made and great deeds accomplished?
But he was wailing again, he could feel it in his throat. Once more he sifted his fingers through the shards of glass, wet with fuel, on the cold rectangle of pavement that filled the place where the side window had once been.
Even though he did not believe in miracles, he wanted to put his keys in the ignition and turn them, one last time. Because he would know, then, if he had truly been forsaken by Time. It was possible, not likely, but just barely possible, that Time needed that final proof of his devotion. That it awaited his bloody fingers turning the key in the ignition one final time, before it would raise him and his bus phoenix-like from the snow and darkness and send him hurtling once more toward his destiny.
On his forehead, the mark burned.
Emmanuelle approached the crumpled cab slowly. It was dark, and she knew the man was there only by the sounds of broken glass crunching and labored breathing.
"Hello?"
"You better get on board," he said. "We have to make up lost time."
"The bus is smashed."
"I just have to find my keys."
"The bus is smashed," she said again.
"Of course it's smashed. Do you think I'd have lost my keys if it wasn't smashed?"
"You can't drive it if it's smashed."
"Don't you understand? It's not me driving. It's Time. This is Time's bus. I just push the pedals and turn the wheel." The crunch and rattle of glass was suddenly interrupted by the musical jingle of keys. "Here."
Emmanuelle found herself moving before she even thought, and her hand caught his just as the key started to dip into the ignition. "Wait."
"We've waited too long." But his hand was momentarily still. It was a strong hand, a thick thumb, and slippery with something.
Her strength seemed to grow as he submitted to her touch. She felt her fingers wrapping around his hand, felt him yielding to her influence, but when she tried to guide his hand away, it did not move. She heard his breathing in the shadows of the wreck.
"If you turn that key," she said, "You'll make a spark." They were standing in a stew of fuel from the bus and the truck, and whatever come out when the wreck sheared off two fuel pumps.
"That's not up to me."
"Then who?"
"Time."
"Why don't you just come out of there?"
Just come out? She did not understand. She could not possibly understand. Someone who had never been called to serve could never imagine the peace of a mission so clear and so just. It was not better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Service was the sweetest good, and no one more wretched than the servant with no master. If Time would not have him, then his good was dead. Continuing would be incomprehensible.
"What's your name?" Emmanuelle asked.
"I'm the bus driver."
"I know. What's your name?"
A hand emerged from the broken frame of the front window. It held a plastic badge. Emmanuelle took it and held it close, squinting at the print. At first the print was illegible, but slowly it seemed to brighten, and Emmanuelle realized that the clouds had parted, making way for the moon, nearly full. Around her, the ruined parking lot took shape in faded monochrome. "Matthew."
"Yes," he said. "That's it."
"Come out of there. It's time to do something new."
"What?"
"Come out and we'll see."
"There's nothing out there. This is just a place I stop."
"You think Time is beauty, don't you?" she asked.
"Beauty?"
"There's more than one kind of beauty in the world." Emmanuelle opened her soft sewing bag, and slid her hand down into the silky depths of slippery fabrics and soft thread. She groped down to the bottom; she knew all pieces there by touch. She took the one she had started that morning on the bus and drew it to the surface.
Outside the bus the snow glowed in the moonlight, and the pale-skinned woman was luminescent, except for her eyes, which drew light into themselves, darker than the night sky. She held up a small square of cloth.
The cold slip of blood, black in the monochrome light of the moon, darkened the white square, and the bus driver felt himself shiver. He held out his own hands. They, too, were black with blood, cut by the shards of glass he'd sifted in his search for the keys.
The keys. The woman was taking them from his hands.
She brought out another square, this one showed the wide eyes and bared teeth of a cat, racing toward him, behind it the shape of a massive dog filled the background, open mouth and long teeth, and eyes that he knew were red without being able to see.
He leaned forward to look closer, and saw the next: "fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker fucker," it said, in light colors and dark. He imagined pink and green and blue and yellow.
One more, and this one he reached out and took in his hands: it was a man in uniform, perhaps a policeman, perhaps a bus driver. He was sitting on the hood of a car, and his pixelated eyes were wide white squares. Astride him sat a woman, her skirt flowing over him, her head thrown back, hair streaming down, and three small black x's making a smile. Matthew stepped out of the ruined of the bus and looked down at the woman in front of him.
Emmanuelle felt a shiver when Matthew stepped out into the light. The 'X' on his forehead glowed in the moonlight, an iridescent black cross on his skin.
"Of course," she said.
"Did you make that yourself?" he asked. "Did you have a pattern, or did you just see it in your mind and know?"
"I just saw it."
"He was right," he said. "That boy was right. It's beautiful."
Emmanuelle reached two fingers to touch the mark. The skin burned hot. "This was all for you," she said. "He marked you. This was all for you."
Matthew felt his throat tighten; it was raw from crying out. He lifted one hand to his own forehead, his fingers touching hers as he felt the cold paint of the mark. His other hand reached out to touch the bent metal of his bus.
"For me?" A tear left a cold streak down his cheek.
"He looked into your soul," Emmanuelle said. "He looked into your soul and he saw that you had to be set free."
"Free to go where?"
"Down the road."
"Without my bus?"
"Without regard for Time."
"Alone?"
"No," she said, and she drew him to her like a child. "Not alone."
He was stony and unyielding, first, but as the breeze swirled around them and they felt snowflakes touch their cheeks and melt, the statue of a man came to life, and his arms squeezed her back, and she gasped at their sudden strength.
posted by Daniel Heath at 23:09
3 Comments:
Good job, Heath.
PS - How'd the ebook go? (If at all it went?)
Bravo, MO!
I enjoyed reading it in it's entirety.
You're a great story teller/writer.
Keep the scratch fiction coming!
I love the bits of awareness your characters have of a guiding hand. The author as God.
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