by Chris Lynch
We are practically to Ashtabula by the time I make my way up the dark aisle feeling weak and sickly and unsure about pretty much everything around me. My hands are trembling slightly, so I jam them into my pockets. The bus looks exactly the way it did when I walked to the bathroom all that time ago. The shadows are all still shadows lying low in their seats.
Is this what everybody out here is like? Is this the way things are?
The trip to the safety of my own seat seems about five miles long, but I get there. When I burrow in, I go through all the pockets and spaces of my cargo pants. I was more preoccupied with other things in that bathroom than a guy would normally figure to be worrying about. Stuff could have fallen out of every pocket, I could have been left with most of my valuables taken from me and I wouldn’t have known it at the time.
I check and I check, and everything I had when I went into the bathroom I still have now. I think.
They never even touched me. I didn’t have to fight anybody. Nothing was taken. It was almost like some perverse form of admiration or something. Something thrilling for them. No harm, no foul for me.
It was a compliment. Just a bit of fun. Take the compliment, loosen up, and have fun, Sarafian. Who wouldn’t like all that? You know you wanted it. You know you liked it.
• • •
I don’t close my eyes, and I don’t so much as shift in my seat until we have to transfer at the station in Cleveland. When all the passengers have disembarked, I stand far back from the luggage compartment in the bus’s belly. I wait until every other bag has been collected before slowly making my way toward my bag, lying alone on its side where the driver dumped it on the pavement. I don’t even glance up as I make my way through the people headed away. Suddenly I’m jolted by a hard shoulder banging into me and sending me two feet sideways before I continue my route, head down, to collect my bag and scuttle off, breathing heavily and squeezing my fists hard enough that I can almost make out my fingertips coming through to the back of my hand.
I didn’t do anything. What am I holding my head down for? Could guys like that make me feel like this, just like that, so easy, by looking at me and saying things? Is that even possible to do to a person? Why am I supposed to be ashamed? And why am I going along with it?
Well, I’m not going along with it anymore.
I decide. I decide from here on, what comes with me to my new life and what doesn’t. Layers of skin are coming off at every station now, left behind for good. I don’t carry skin I don’t want, skin that doesn’t fit me now. And that goes for memories, too. If they don’t fit, they don’t come, because I’m the guy doing the packing.
Maybe skins and memories are the same thing. To be shed as needed so they can’t weigh you down or get you overheated.
And anyway, that putrid shit can of a bus is gone from my life. I came out of it, and it isn’t even a memory now.
• • •
We have to change buses again in Detroit, and the journey is feeling already far longer than it seemed when I mapped it all out. I’ve been traveling almost twenty hours when we pull into a little nothing of a station that seizes my attention anyway when I realize where we are.
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home of the University of Michigan Wolverines football team. A recruiter actually came to our school to talk to a couple of linemen who had potential, and while he was at it, he talked to me. I was on a hot streak, and they were looking hard at any kicking talent they could dig up.
Michigan. They talked to me. I never even thought about going to a big monster program like that, but just a few words from their guy, and my head was swimming. There are, like, forty thousand students at the school, and over a hundred thousand seats in their stadium.
I couldn’t imagine walking out and lining up for a field goal in front of one hundred thousand people. But for the next two or three weeks, I tried to imagine exactly that.
But my hot streak cooled off along with any interest from big-time schools at the same time that my senior-year life started heating up. The Wolverines went in a different direction, and so did I.
We pull out of Ann Arbor just as quickly and uneventfully as we pulled in. But I find myself staring out the window and looking for that big stadium like a little kid, staring and staring and getting all sad and stupid like I lost something there in a place I never even set foot.
An hour and a half later we are in Kalamazoo, and though there is a twenty-minute layover, I do not want to get out of my seat. I haven’t eaten anything since Syracuse about fifteen hours ago, but that wouldn’t be enough to get me up if I wasn’t bursting to use the bathroom. There is no way I am using any bus bathroom again if I can avoid it, so I hop up and go.
After the bathroom I hit a vending machine for something resembling nourishment. It doesn’t help that I am rushing through the decision, but Lord, I am sure if my new coach saw me put any of this stuff into my body, he would personally put that body right back on the bus and give it a good shove back east. But I’m just hungry, so I select the ten-inch all-day-breakfast sandwich, a raisin bran muffin because how wrong could they go with that, and lemonade. I go all running back, tuck the loot under my arm, and run. I may have improved on my hundred-yard-dash time as I return to the bus.
Back in my seat, I am munching on the sandwich’s tough outer defenses, sipping my drink, and watching the arrangement of about ten fellow travelers gathered together in the smoking area. They look relatively happy as far as bus people go. They don’t even seem completely like strangers, though most or all of them surely are. They talk easily, they nod a lot, they laugh a couple of times at some guy’s remarks, and they laugh all together and loudly at something right after the driver passes by them to resume his duties. Then they all have to scurry to get back on, because these drivers are known to leave people who are even a minute late, just because they can.
Even this activity seems to bring out something like a team spirit as these men and women together stub cigarettes and run desperately in a line toward the bus stairs and the road to Chicago.
It’s like dinner and a show for me, until everyone has scrambled into a seat and my all-day sandwich defeats me in much less time than that. I make the mistake of looking inside to see which of the contents might be bothering me, and I quickly slam the thing shut again. The breakfast they were referring to was apparently prepared on one of those Siberian islands where they eat things that are blubbery, killed and dried but never cooked. I’m hoping the how-wrong-could-they-go muffin will help me out, but when I bite it, I don’t think it’s even real, because it crumbles to dust like it was just a clay prop from when the snack machine was a demo model in the 1950s. The lemonade, though it contains the juice of only zero lemons, is refreshing. This stuff, I realize, is how they kill off the bus people of our country.
Once we’re moving, life takes on its new familiarity. The rumble of the engine settles me into my seat. The swerve and sway as the bus negotiates the first streets of whatever city it is before flattening out on the long easy highway, stretches that just get longer and easier as we progress west and get more of the eastern United States behind us.
Get thee behind me, old home. Get thee behind me, past, and old skins and things that didn’t look the way they really were. Get thee behind me, and stay there.
We transfer again in Chicago. Then, somewhere on the route to Milwaukee, I fall into my first deep sleep for quite a while.
• • •
All of it is wrong, and all of it can be straightened out.
“We just need to talk,” I say. “Please, can’t we talk?”
“No, we cannot.”
“It’s practically not even light out yet.”
“It’s light enough. Let me go. You have to let me go.”
“Okay, Gigi. What if, even if I didn’t, I said all right, you’re right, whatever. What if I did that and then I said it so you can feel all right, and we can just leave it there, leave it right here in this room behind us when we leav
e, and nobody, not Carl and not my father and not your father or anybody, has to be involved or upset about it? What about that, and then, like I said, we can leave it behind us, close the door on it, and you can feel all right and we can get on with stuff. What if I did that for you?
“Because I am sorry, Gigi. Whether I did something or I didn’t, I am sorry because of how you feel about it. How you feel and how you feel about me.”
She tries the doorknob again, and I grab her wrist with both hands.
I have both hands tight on Gigi Boudakian’s lovely soft long wrist. She looks up at me, almost as if she is afraid of me. Things are so wrong.
“Please, Keir,” she says, and her voice is a shaky whisper. She looks down at my hands holding her wrist, and Gigi Boudakian’s tears drop, right onto the back of my hand, and this is a nightmare now. I should be the one crying.
Things are so, so, so wrong.
• • •
My dreaming has a lurid, beyond-reality vividness that wakes me up with a jolt, a headache, and a queasy stomach. I’m sweating and breathing heavily, unsure once more where I am.
“You all right?” asks a heavy, worried-looking woman seated across the aisle. She’s wearing some kind of security guard uniform, which I almost find comforting.
“Yes,” I say. “Fine, thanks.”
“Well, whoever Gigi is, she must be awful scary,” she adds.
I fold myself up and turn away toward the window.
• • •
There are twenty-minute rest stops at both Milwaukee and Tomah, Wisconsin, and at each one I go outside to stand with the smokers. The smell of the smoke is wonderful for some reason, and the jokes about the driver and about tobacco love are among the funniest things I have ever heard.
At Alexandria, Minnesota, a girl with a bruise on her forehead and a missing left ring finger offers me a cigarette. I have never smoked in my life, but at this moment I’m seized with a panicked certainty that this is some kind of test because the smoking community has caught on and they’re going to force me out of the group for weirdness if I keep hovering among them without partaking. I take the cigarette from the girl and fight the urge to stare at the finger-space as I do it. She offers me a light, I accept it, and I smoke, right along with the smokers. I’m one of them now.
Until a different seizure takes hold and I cough loudly and violently for so long that three different people from the group take turns slapping me on the back, and by the time I am just about over it, the whole gang is laughing, and I don’t care whether it’s with me or at me because it’s such a welcome thing to listen to from so close in. Even my side pain, which came back during the choking and back pounding, doesn’t hurt nearly as bad now. And I can’t find any leaks out of me anywhere.
As we board the bus again, I am thinking seriously of giving this some practice and becoming a real smoker.
• • •
It’s not long after dawn when I open my eyes to find the hugeness of North Dakota and the Wild West opening up in front of me. I have been getting only the choppiest bits of sleep, and most of that consists of riding the rapids of nightmares I have already forgotten once I awake but that terrify me just the same. The landscape out here is something I have never seen before, and the effect it’s having on me is like a combination of peaceful sleep, a good hot bath, and hearty food, all of which I am dangerously lacking right now.
I keep my face window-pressed for mile after mile of this, and as we pass into Montana, I’m like a charging battery, fresher every minute, stronger, and newer.
Then my phone starts silently vibrating, and it might as well be a direct current electrical charge right into my thigh.
I take the phone out and don’t even think about it before shutting it off. I could have done that at any time, but at the same time, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t do it. That was a different time, different place, different Keir. That phone and its connections belong in that different place right now, and not here. Not till I’m ready, if I’m ready.
• • •
We transfer for the final time at Butte, Montana. I cannot believe how the flavor of the air here is like a different thing entirely from what I have breathed my entire life. I pull it in deeply enough and rapidly enough that I’m either going to use it all up or pass out before I can board that last bus.
But I make it aboard, then on through stops in Basin and Boulder, Montana, and finally into Helena. Home.
I feel myself grinning like a loon as I gape at the mountains in the near distance. But that is about the only thing I can feel for sure. The pain in my side is long gone. So is every other pain I ever had.
PART THREE
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN. BUT YOU CAN’T NOT.
you have arrived at your destination
There to meet me when I take the last leaden steps up to the entrance of my residence hall are not one, but two people who greet me by name. It is, I believe, mid-afternoon.
Just one would have been remarkable enough. I expected it to be at least a week before anybody called me by name, at least not without checking a roster sheet first. And I didn’t think that was any bad thing. This, in fact, kind of spooks me.
“Mr. Sarafian?” says the tall gent with the white handlebar mustache framing a broad, welcoming smile.
“Yes, sir,” I say, stepping right into his handshake as he steps around the big reception desk.
“I’m Mr. Rivera, residence halls manager. Pleased to meet you.”
“And hey, Keir,” says the anxious young guy beside him. “I’m Fabian. I’m going to be your roommate. And you are right on time, which is an excellent way for a new roommate to announce himself, I have to say.”
“Is it?” I say, shaking hands with Fabian while I try to catch up with the speed of progress here. “Can I ask how you know whether I’m on time or not?”
“Your father forwarded your itinerary,” Mr. Rivera says. “Just in case you got waylaid somewhere on the road between leaving his jurisdiction and entering mine. That was quite a journey.”
“Yes,” Fabian says, nodding and shaking his head at the same time. “I was tracking you the whole way, door-to-door, and I was wiped out just keeping up by computer.”
What am I supposed to make of this? Do I feel welcomed, embraced, cared for? Do I feel spooked, stalked, monitored? Is this the kindest surprise in a long time, or the creepiest? This kind of scrutiny is not what I came all this way looking for, that’s for sure.
So what do I do now? Turn right around and go back?
“Well, I’m pretty tired myself,” I say.
“Good thing I’m here,” Fabian says, picking up the long, stuffed duffel bag I dropped at my feet. “Let me show you to your accommodations.”
“Go on, get some rest,” Mr. Rivera says when I look to him for the okay. “Come see me later. I’m easy to find.”
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”
I pivot and shuffle after Fabian, my rucksack pushing down on my shoulders in a final effort to stop me before I reach my destination. Bed.
• • •
I have no clothes, and very little fat, because I have been good about my health lately. She grabs, can’t grab, scratches instead at my chest, then slaps me hard across the face, first right side then left, smack, smack.
“Say what you did, Keir.”
“Why is Carl coming? Why do you have to call Carl, Gigi?”
“Say what you did, Keir. Admit what you did to me.”
“I didn’t do anything, Gigi.”
“Yes you did! I said no!”
I say this very quietly, but firmly. “You did not.”
“I said no,” she growls. “Say it.”
“I don’t see why you need Carl. You can beat me up just fine on your own. Listen, Gigi, it was nobody’s fault.”
“Yes it was! It was your fault. This should not have happened.”
“Fine, then it didn’t.”
“It did, it did, it did, bastard! For m
e it did, and it’s making me sick.”
“Don’t. Don’t be sick. I don’t want you to be sick or anything. I just want everything to be all right. Everything is all right, Gigi. Please, can everything be all right?”
“It is not all right! It is not all right, and you are not all right, Keir Sarafian. Nothing is all right. Nothing will ever again be all right.”
She is wrong. Gigi is wrong about everything, but especially about me. You could ask pretty much anybody and they will tell you. Rock solid, Keir. Kind of guy you want behind you. Keir Sarafian, straight shooter. Loyal, polite. Funny. Good manners. He was brought up right, that boy was, is what you would hear. All the things you would want to hear said about you are the things I have always heard said about me. I am a good guy.
Good guys don’t do bad things. Good guys understand that no means no, and so I could not have done this, because I understand, and I love Gigi Boudakian.
“I love you, Gigi.”
As I say this, Gigi Boudakian lets out the most horrific scream I have ever heard, and I am terrified by it and reach out, lunge toward her and try to cover her mouth with my hands, and I fall over her and she screams louder and bites at my hands and I keep flailing, trying to stop that sound coming out of her and getting out into the world.
I am only trying to stop the sound. It looks terrible what I am doing, as I watch my hands doing it, as I watch hysterical Gigi Boudakian reacting to me, and it looks really, really terrible but I am only trying to stop the awful sound and the way it looks is not the way it is.
The way it looks is not the way it is.
• • •
When I wake up, it’s dusky outside the window. It takes a good long stare for me to establish where I am and if it’s true conscious reality. I figure I’ve slept five or six hours, and the world seems all the stranger for it.
