The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  We greeted each other awkwardly, a triple tap of shoulders rather than the customary kiss on the cheek. It had been six, maybe seven months since we had seen each other, and at least a decade since I had been in his cab. As we pulled away from his building, he said this trip reminded him of a game we used to play when I was a child and he would drive my mother and me to the grocery.

  “Do you remember that?” he asked me. “Do you remember how we used to play?”

  We turned right onto a wide four-lane road lined with shopping malls and car dealerships, none of which were there when I was growing up. For some reason, it seemed too much to respond to my uncle’s question with a simple answer like, Of course I remember those games; they were often my favorite part of the week. So instead I nodded and complained about the traffic building ahead of us. My uncle rubbed his hand affectionately across the back of my head and then turned the meter on. That was how the games we had played in his cab always began, with a flip of the meter and him turning toward the back seat to ask me, “Where would you like to go, sir?” Over the few months we played that game, we never repeated the same place twice. We started local—the Washington Monument, the museums along the Mall—but then quickly expanded to increasingly remote destinations: the Pacific Ocean, Disney World and Disneyland, Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park, and then once I learned more about world history and geography, Egypt and the Great Wall of China, followed by Big Ben and the Colosseum in Rome.

  “Your mother used to get mad at me for not telling you to choose Ethiopia,” he said. “She used to tell me, ‘If he is going to imagine something, let him imagine his home country.’ I tried to tell her you were a child. You were born in America. You didn’t have a country. The only thing you were loyal to was us.”

  The light ahead of us turned red and then green three times before we finally moved forward, a pace that would have normally infuriated my uncle, who by his own admission had never been good at staying still. The last time we played that game my uncle argued with my mother about the futility of our fictional adventures. “We can’t afford to take him anywhere,” he said. “So let him see the world from the back seat of a taxi.”

  The final trip we took was to Australia, and my mother let us take it on the condition that we never again played the game with her in the car. Once we agreed to her terms, my uncle turned the meter on, and for the next 15 minutes I told him everything I knew about the landscape and wildlife of Australia. I continued talking even after we arrived at the grocery store and my mother told me to get out of the car. I wasn’t prepared to see my trip end in a parking lot, and so my uncle waved my mother away and told me to keep talking. “Tell me everything you know about Australia,” he said, just as a deep tiredness came over me. I took my shoes off and stretched my legs out. I folded my legs underneath me as he placed a thick road map from the glove compartment under my head so my face wouldn’t stick to the vinyl seats.

  “Sleep,” he told me. “Australia is very far away. You must be tired from the jet lag.”

  I thought of asking my uncle what, if anything, he remembered of our final trip as we neared the grocery store. He was focused on trying to turn right into a parking lot already crowded with cars and what looked to be a half-dozen police cars angled around the entrance. We only had a few hundred feet left, but given the line of cars and the growing crowd waiting outside, carts in hand, it seemed increasingly unlikely that we would make it inside before the shelves were picked bare.

  It must have taken us close to 20 minutes to make that final turn into the parking lot, a minor victory that my uncle acknowledged by tapping the meter twice with his index finger so I could take note of the fare.

  “Finally,” he said. “After all these years in America, I’m rich.”

  We inched our way toward the rear of the lot, where it seemed more likely we would find a place to park. When that failed, my uncle drove over a strip of grass into an adjacent restaurant lot that had customer-only parking signs pinned to the wall. I waited for him to turn off the engine, but he kept both hands on the steering wheel, his body pitched slightly forward as if he were preparing to drive away again but wasn’t sure which direction to turn toward. I thought briefly that I understood what was troubling him.

  “You don’t have to go into the store,” I said. “You can wait here and pick me up when I come out.”

  He turned to face me then. It was the first time we had looked directly at each other since I entered the cab.

  “I don’t want to wait in a parking lot,” he said. “I do that every day.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  He switched the meter off, and then the engine, but left the key in the ignition.

  “I want to go back home,” he said. “I want someone to tell me how to get out of here.”

  t happened just like people said: Time really did slow down. The ambulance came screaming toward the Line 19 bus, crossing the Burnside Bridge in the wrong lane. Scan right, scan left, scan again—Valerie was mindful of her bus’s many blind spots. But the ambulance had appeared out of nowhere, birthed from the thickest fog she’d ever seen. Larger, closer, slower and slower, it advanced. Time pulled away like black taffy. Even the sirens seemed to groggily blink. It took Valerie half a century to turn the wheel, and by then it was too late: They were stuck.

  Valerie was an excellent driver. In 14 years she had only two SIPs on her record, both utter bullshit. Her mother, Tamara, 72 and recovering from a stroke, was home with Val’s 15-year-old son, Teak. Teak collected novelty bongs; Nana hoarded Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Her mother had been coughing for the past week. Keep her home until she gets a fever, the doctor had told her. Until? “Take Nana’s temperature,” she whispered to Teak before leaving. And to her mother, top volume: “His gummies aren’t ‘vitamins,’ Ma.”

  Her bus was less than a third full on the night of the accident. Weekly ridership was down 63 percent since February. Teenagers still boarded, cavalier and horny, treating the city bus as their Ass-Express—Teak’s explanation. (He’d sounded a little jealous, she thought. Teak was a loner, like her.) Valerie had been keeping her eye on two baby-faced girls in the back who had lowered their masks to make out. They didn’t have a death wish; they had a life wish so extreme it led them to the same end. You couldn’t convince these kids that they were vulnerable to any threat worse than a fatal loneliness.

  “Hey, Juliets.” Val’s voice sounded husky behind her mask. “Knock it off.”

  “I’m her contact tracer,” the blue-haired one called back, licking her honey’s neck. Valerie did not join in their laughter. “As long as you’re not licking my poles.…”

  Valerie called her lunar-hour regulars “the Last Bus Club.” On any given weeknight, she’d have eight or ten familiar faces. Covid had shifted the Last Bus Club’s demographics—now a majority of her riders were people for whom “state of emergency” was a chronic condition. Riders like Marla, who had no car and needed medicine, tampons, food. Marla had wheeled up the ramp at the Chávez stop, a soaking Rite Aid bag on her lap. “You’re it,” Valerie had said, kneeling to secure Marla’s chair. “New rules. Can’t have a packed bus.”

  Silver lining, Val worried less about vehicular manslaughter. The virus had cleared the streets. Many fewer pedestrians zombie-waddling around, stepping blindly off curbs. Sis! Pull the plugs out of your ears! Bicyclists: Is it wise to dress like mimes?

  Some of her colleagues called the riders “cattle,” but she’d never gone in for that. Did she love her riders? The way some of the older drivers claimed to love their regulars? “I love these benefits,” she said to Freddie. She worked this job because it was the highest hourly wage she could make for Teak. “You’re saving for retirement? I’m saving for my embolism,” she joked.

  “How many good people do you think there are in the world?” Freddie had asked her in the break room. She’d answered without hesitation: “Twenty percent of them. Some nights, eleven.”

 
; Piss bus. Fire in the shelter. Loud and Verbal. Loose dog on Rex and 32nd. Pass up throwing rocks. Weather. Possible Covid rider. Even before the accident that stopped Time, it had been quite a week.

  Lots of sharks swimming alongside the fish in this life. Some of her regulars, she did care about—gentle men like Ben who just wanted to get out of the freezing rain, Marla in her spray-painted wheelchair, knitting webby red yarn “dragon wings” for her grandson. No cash fare at the moment, and these nights she didn’t bother pressing people if they didn’t have a Hop card.

  At the station, she got a Ziploc bag with a single paper mask and eight Clorox wipes. She bought her own bleach, misted everything down. Freddie had hung up a Dollar Tree shower curtain to protect himself, before the bosses ordered him to remove it.

  Earlier that night, Val missed an omen. It happened rolling toward Powell: dozens of shuttered bars and vintage shops, each one like an eccentric aunt, shaggy bungalows, derelict rosebushes, backstops and hoops. She almost screamed when she swerved around a kid’s bicycle lying in the road. Her headlights shined on its twisted form. Ribbons spilling around the handlebars, training wheels with finger-bone spokes. Her heart was going nine cups of coffee. Nobody there. Nobody hurt. The bus roared on. Cupped in the side mirror, the bicycle became a dull speck, shrinking away like childhood itself. Her pulse fell, and she merged back into her ordinary concerns.

  A good driver’s biography is a thousand pages of nonevents and near misses. Valerie counted these shadows as blessings.

  But now, it seemed, her luck had run out. Dimly she was aware of her riders screaming behind her. Valerie braced for a collision that did not happen. What the hell was going on? The ambulance driver, it appeared, was mouthing the same question, with more profanities. It was as if they were stuck in some kind of invisible putty. Two frightened young faces crept into focus, sharpening like film in a developing tray. The bus rolled forward another inch before it stopped with an otherworldly shrieking, a breath away from the ambulance’s grille. Valerie waited for a wave of relief that never came. Needlessly, she applied the emergency brake. The clock had frozen at 8:48 p.m. She jumped down.

  “Valerie.”

  “Yvonne.”

  “Danny.”

  They shook hands solemnly on the bridge.

  “There was nobody on the road tonight,” said Danny, the driver. He had lacquered black fingernails, a starched EMS shirt. His white face looked greenish in her headlights. “I didn’t realize I was in the wrong lane. So much fog and my defroster is terrible.…”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of what she wasn’t seeing: firefly headlights racing down Naito, the wide river spinning its geometries toward the Pacific. Nothing around them moved. Darkness lidded the bridge.

  “I just want to get back on the road,” Valerie said. She couldn’t afford another SIP. They went on your record permanently, and if you complained about unfairness, it was another strike against you.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Yvonne, the paramedic riding shotgun. A Black woman with clear-rimmed glasses and wide, amber eyes, maybe a few years older than Teak. It surprised Valerie, how self-conscious these young people made her feel about her grays. Also that it was still possible to feel vain about your hair, when you were facing down eternity.

  “I apologize. I didn’t mean to shake hands.”

  Valerie nodded, grateful for her mask. She’d forgotten, too. She was terrified of giving the virus to her mother. Nana had a pelican smile now, her right side paralyzed. She worried that it made her look mean, but Teak reassured his grandma that she’d looked mean as hell before the stroke. Only he could make the smile reach her eyes.

  “It was the scariest thing,” Yvonne said. “You were coming at us slower and slower—”

  “I was coming at you?”

  “And then everything just… stopped—”

  They all stared at the quiet ambulance, then turned together to the bus. Valerie’s riders were making large gestures behind the arched eyebrows of the windshield wipers. They looked rattled, but unhurt.

  Something very strange had happened to the outer world. The Willamette River had stopped flowing; it looked icy and sculptural beyond the railings. Bars of light appeared and vanished on the bridge trestles, the deep water. Purple, maroon, palest green. As if the moon were dealing out cards, randomly laying down colors.

  Valerie climbed back into the bus cab. She called in to the dispatcher: “1902. I had an accident on the Burnside Bridge. I think I’m stuck between worlds. Or possibly dead.”

  The dispatcher could no longer, it seemed, hear her. “1902 here, on the bridge, do you copy?”

  “Help me,” she whispered.

  She hadn’t really expected an answer. What surprised her was the speed with which her confusion turned into horror, her horror into a stupefied resignation. The 19 was lost in Time.

  Valerie did not consider herself a graceful person. She had flat feet and asthma. She drove a 40-foot, 20-ton bus. And yet her mind did a gymnastic leap to the worst-case scenario: I might never get home to them.

  She gulped back a flavor of terror that was entirely new to her. Could things end this way, the bus simply sliding off the table and into a cul-de-sac of space-time, like a cue ball sinking into the wrong pocket?

  People were texting frantically, thumbing hysterical monologues into their phones.

  She felt a stab of nostalgia for the anxieties of 8:47 p.m. Loud and Verbal was a problem she understood.

  “Silent Night,” she murmured into the dead receiver.

  Swallowed Panic. Quiet Hiss.

  “Everybody off!”

  Valerie and Yvonne decided to walk for help. Without turning, Valerie could feel the others following them. When they reached the ambulance, Valerie felt as if she were walking into a gale. Doubled over, she pushed until she could advance no farther. Valerie turned to see half her riders struggling in the opposite direction, taking tai chi steps through a thickening mist. They looked like trees, slowly lifting their roots and then replanting them.

  “You sound high, Mom!” Teak would say, if she ever saw Teak again.

  With a cry, she ran at the secret wall, catapulting her fists at the air. She made it 10 feet beyond the ambulance. Her legs fought a crushing pressure, her arms flattening to her sides.

  “Should we really call it ‘the accident’?” Danny was asking, a little defensively. “Nothing happened—” He gestured at the ambulance, with its uncrumpled hood and its unshattered windshield, its undeployed airbags and its unbloodied seats.

  “Are you joking? Time stopped moving!” she said.

  One of her regulars, Humberto, “Bertie” on his name tag, had an old-fashioned watch, and he showed her that the minute hand had stopped, its tiny gears frozen. “It’s fake,” he said, embarrassed and agitated. “I mean, it tells time, but it’s not real gold.” He shook it angrily, and then with a cry chucked it over the railing. A nearly 80-foot fall. The night swallowed it whole, and Valerie wondered if it ever reached the water.

  “Hey, watch out! Six feet, buddy!”

  “Oh, sorry.” Even this close to midnight, you could hear people blushing.

  Ben, who suffered from paranoid delusions, seemed curiously sanguine. “Look, I have some spicy chicken here. So we won’t starve.” He unlidded a bucket, offered it around. There was nothing in it.

  “We’re dead, we’re dead,” the young mother in the goldenrod hijab said, and she began to cry.

  This was Fatima, a labor-and-delivery nurse and three-year member of the Last Bus Club. She worked nights at the hospital. Her son was in his grandmother’s arms in Montavilla, on the other side of the black river, waiting to be picked up.

  “Oh, I need to get to my baby—”

  “Everybody has somewhere to be, lady. You’re not special.”

  “Not everybody,” Ben said softly.

  Valerie revised the sentence for Fatima.

  “He’s right. You’re not alone. My boy
is waiting on me, too.”

  And now they let the ghosts out of their bodies, sighing. Beautiful phantoms, calling to them from either end of the bridge.

  “My fiancée is pregnant.…”

  “My sick brother.…”

  “I need to feed Genevieve, my caiman.…”

  Danny cleared his throat. “I know it’s not a competition. I’m not trying to one-up anybody here. But we were dispatched to help a woman having a seizure in a hot tub.…”

  This was not well received by Valerie’s passengers: “Well, you should have thought about that before you tried to run us off the road!”

  “Pick a lane, son.”

  “Preferably not our lane, next time.”

  “If you’re all such great drivers,” Danny exploded, “why are you riding the bus?”

  It was nice to hear them complaining, actually. It was a song Valerie knew by heart, the ballad of the disappointed rider. Her bus had broken down many, many times. Two flats on Flavel, in Vesuvian July. Electrical problems across the street from Pioneer Square. Nobody ever said, Oh, that’s OK, Val, I don’t mind waiting an extra hour to get where I’m going.

  This was an unprecedented crisis. But here, at last, was a familiar feeling. No reinforcements were coming to help them. The nine of them would have to muscle up some solution, Valerie announced.

  Now the mood among the Last Bus Club shifted. Everybody wanted to help, a desire that surged and splintered into a hundred tiny actions. Humberto looked under the hood. The blue-haired girl slid between the rear tires, sleuthing for clues. Yvonne and Danny tried to jump-start the ambulance clock. Was it the weight of these small efforts that began to multiply, refreighting the moment, unsticking it from the cosmic mud? Or was it Fatima’s birth plan?