The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  So it was: “What is your problem?” said a man who swept in through the thick blanket covering the doorway. “Meat,” he said. “In Mongolia we eat meat.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “I want meat.”

  He barked an order, sat down with me, and we shared a beer. His name was Tsedee. He was in his late twenties and spoke Mongolian, English, German, and Russian.

  I saw my opening. Tsedee was driving to Ulan Bator in a twenty-ton truck hauling propane. It wasn’t exactly playing by the ludicrous rules of my crazy idea—there was no history of propane trucks blowing up in Mongolia—and I’d been taking buses, boats, trains, and planes that you could buy a ticket on, but I wanted more. More adventure. More risk. More conversation. The train from Zamyn Uud to Ulan Bator didn’t promise anything new. I filled his mug. Looked at him. Said, “I have a strange and serious question for you.”

  “What?” he said.

  “I want to ride to Ulan Bator in your truck.”

  He looked at me. “The road is very bad,” he said. “Not a little bad, but very bad. It is very rough. It is freezing. The truck’s heater is broken. It will take thirty-six hours to drive 350 miles. It is like torture.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Can I come?”

  He looked me up and down. Said, “You will see camels and yurts and the Gobi Desert.” Took a swig of his beer. “Yes.”

  I waited for three days, the last in a one-room house with two beds and no running water, heated with a coal stove, while Tsedee waited for his Chinese propane man to call him on his cell phone; and I worried that it would all fall through and that I would freeze to death.

  The truck stood outside, wooden beams under its front axle, with no left front wheel. There would be Tsedee, a driver named Batbillq and me. Batbillq didn’t want me to come. “Too cold,” he said. “And there is no room.” I climbed in the truck. A single bench seat and in the middle, where my legs would be, an auxiliary heater balanced on the floor, connected to the electrical system with bare wires. The cab was a mess. Oil-soaked rags, trash, furs, a toolbox, were haphazardly strewn everywhere. It would be tight. But Tsedee texted me that night, finally: “You are welcome to ride with us and I am in Erlian and will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Bayarlalaa,” I said to Tsedee. “Thank you.” And the next morning I went to breakfast. “Bi husej buuz baina,” I said. “I would like some meat dumplings.”

  WE DIDN’T LEAVE until almost 10:00 p.m. that night. In the cold of forty below zero, everything was sharp. Tsedee climbed into a long-haired fur jumpsuit that made him look like a Yeti, and pulled a jacket over that. Batbillq had felt boots an inch thick. I had basic hiking shoes. The moon, one day from being full, was big and luminous and so clearly defined it looked like you could slice your finger on its edges. It hung over the darkness of the desert, glowing just enough to see a horizon that didn’t end. The wind cut like a razor; it sliced and burned, and ran through four layers of polar fleece and down like I was wearing a cotton T-shirt. The snow, blown across short brown grass, was so dry it was like talcum powder. Tsedee had been right; it was torture. We lurched and jolted at five and ten miles an hour over a frozen, rutted dirt road that turned into no road at all, just tire tracks across the desert, and that punched my kidneys like George Foreman. The sclerotic auxiliary heater pumped its best, though my feet got cold after an hour. The cracked windshield fogged.

  We had three flat tires. The first came around midnight, and quickly felt like a nightmare. The tires were big, heavy; they had tubes, and we had to patch the first one, which we did in the glare of the headlights. It took almost two hours. We drove on. Passed nothing; no other cars or trucks or yurts or camels. Not a bush. The second flat hit at first light. We fixed that one. In late morning we ran out of gas, and that really might have killed us, because the heater, such as it was, wouldn’t work if the engine wasn’t on, and a wind had kicked up. But, strangely, the engine died literally across the dirt from a gas station in one of the few villages we passed—a jumble of small wooden houses in the middle of nowhere. Still, it was an ordeal. Batbillq had to hike in the wind to the pump and we had to lift the cab up three times while he fiddled with the engine to get it going again as the cold sliced and cut. We drove for thirty-six hours straight. I watched Batbillq fall asleep at the wheel and drift off the road and I didn’t have to say a word, because there wasn’t really a road and there was nothing to hit, so we’d just drive until he woke up and headed back to the path. We did take one break, pausing for three hours in the middle of nowhere—an unbroken horizon stretching in every direction—for lunch and a brief nap. Tsedee rummaged behind the seats and produced a propane tank, a single burner, and a pot. Batbillq wedged himself in a corner and started snoring, while Tsedee boiled buuz, meat dumplings, in milk and salt and water. The broth was full of fat and oil, salty and rich, and we gobbled it down.

  WE DIDN’T TALK A LOT. Or maybe we did, and thirty-six hours was just a lot of time. I learned a bit about the gas business and growing up in Mongolia. Gas was cheaper in China than in Russia—which had a road from Ulan Bator—so Tsedee made the trip a couple of times a month. He’d been raised by his grandmother, had been sent off to school in Moscow at fifteen, had spent a couple of years in Berlin. He was smart, worldly, ambitious; with his language skills and willingness to make these epic journeys, I imagined he’d be rich in no time at all.

  I learned how cold cold could really be. We came across only one camel, sleeping on its knees by a yurt, and we saw a lot of tiny mice and several antelope bounding across the headlights. On the second night we had our third flat, and this time had no more patches, no more spares. We stood around the tire in the dark, scratched our heads. Took the wheel off and tied it to the truck and just climbed back in. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed Tsedee, slamming the door shut. “We will just pray we make it with only nine tires!”

  Had it been months ago, I would have asked a lot more questions, but I’d now traveled three-quarters of the way around the world. I’d already been across South America and Africa, Bangladesh, India, and Afghanistan. Instead I just settled in, cranking the bad tire back into its place with a wrench in the darkness and dirt and cold, munching on my buuz, watching the nights and day pass by in a country that had one-half a person per square kilometer. It was a measure of how far I’d come, how deeply I’d gone, how long I’d been away. I was stripped bare, totally open to the world and at home with two descendants of Genghis Khan and the truth was, I was a little bit bored. It was time to go home. Time to complete the circle. Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood. In everyone, I suspect, lay a tension between the need for otherness and home. We all want security, we all want adventure, the familiar and the new always jockeying for control. But when otherness began to be normal, home itself begin to seem like the other, perhaps even the exotic. Even Schneebaum had finally stumbled out of the world of the Akaramas and back to New York, “going out to look for the same self that I always was.” Thesiger and T. E. Lawrence left behind their beloved Arabia for London. Plus, I had been avoiding things for far too long. I needed to start making amends.

  After a night and a day and a night of nothing, the lights of Ulan Bator appeared as if we were coming in from the sea. It was 7:30 a.m. and dawn was breaking in a world of steam and ice, not unlike a morning in March when I’d arrived in Toronto after my first all-night bus ride. I could barely keep my eyes open. We stopped at a corner, and in a flash Tsedee shook my hand and was gone. We drove a few more blocks, to the gas depot, and as Batbillq shimmied over a wooden fence to unlock the gate, I shed the big felt boots he’d loaned me, grabbed my stuff, and hailed a taxi.

  FROM ULAN BATOR to Vladivostok by train took four days. Long days of rolling, rolling through sn
ow and naked brown trees and under white skies, and over frozen rivers, a landscape without end that never changed. “Nature,” Albert Golod said, gazing out the window at it. “Russian nature!” He was seventy, strong and straight, both paternal and childlike in his quest to show me the delights of Russia. He was on his way to a sanatorium in Vladivostok for three weeks, and had long white hair and a white beard. He spoke Russian, German, Hebrew, and English, and he’d had two careers, first as a radar engineer and later as an archaeologist working and living in Tajikistan. He insisted I visit with him over tea and cakes, briefly every evening. “This is Russian tea,” he’d say. “This is a Russian cake.” Then he’d send me on my way again.

  After the green warmth of the Amazon, after the passion and colors of India, after the blue seas of Indonesia and the hot crowds of Bangladesh, after the danger and exoticism of Afghanistan, the Russian landscape seemed oppressive, Russians proud and incurious. There was nothing glorious or grand about it save its length and breadth and its snow and unending cold bleakness. Yet Golod wasn’t the only one who looked at it with awe, with yearning. A young soldier talked to me one afternoon and the first thing he said was, “Look! Russia is so beautiful!” I looked. Snow. White sky. Bleakness.

  There was also nothing dangerous or crowded or dirty about it, which was disappointing to me. The Russian visa I’d waited for in Delhi expired by the time I got to Ulan Bator, and there, if I didn’t want to wait another three weeks, my only option was a transit visa, and a prepaid train ticket. I asked for a third-class seat, but there were no seats at all on this train—it was only compartments.

  Still, this was a piece of the Trans-Siberian Railway and, as Peter Fleming wrote in 1934, en route from London to China in One’s Company: “Everyone is a romantic, though in some the romanticism is of a perverted and paradoxical kind. And for the romantic it is, after all, something to stand in the sunlight beside the Trans-Siberian Express with the casually proprietarial air of the passenger, and to reflect that that long raking chain of steel and wood and glass is to go swinging and clattering out of the West into the East, carrying you with it.” I loved that description, even more because I was standing Fleming’s image on its head, heading east from the East itself, all the way across the Pacific toward home and the West. But the whole journey had felt that way, a raking chain of steel and wood and glass and rubber and aluminum snaking from Washington and wrapping around the world.

  The train rolled on. One afternoon I was dragged into a compartment steaming and sweaty and packed with seven men. They were hooligans, tough guys. “Vodka!” they shouted. “Russian vodka!” Empty bottles slid across the floor. A greasy chicken carcass dripped on the little table. They had full sets of gold and silver teeth and were covered with tattoos—spiders on their hands, crosses inside the spiders’ abdomens. It was like being in a rugby scrum. We were packed in that compartment and they pawed and hugged and clutched each other and me with drunken abandon, and a physicality that American men are too insecure ever to display. They held my hand. Draped arms around me. Hit me and hit each other. It was full contact and the vodka shots rained and chicken parts flew and Patap, his eyes on fire, his metal teeth glinting inches from my face, gripped my hand and kissed it and put it to his forehead and punched me in the thighs, hard, and talked, talked, talked in my face. I punched back. And I talked back; we spoke without understanding but every word hit home. We were sure of it. Yes, yes, yes! The steward tried to drag me out; he was worried. “Bad men,” he said. But nothing could be done. We were a tangle of bodies and sour breath and simmering brutality inches from getting out of hand and I don’t know how long it lasted. I lost track of time. We pushed and shoved and Patap flipped and waved his sharp knife and poured another shot and thrust a piece of chicken skin at me and finally, somehow, I ended up in my own compartment utterly spent, dizzily gazing at a landscape that looked bleak enough to kill a smile. As I lost consciousness I heard thumps and barks; the gangsters were still at it, hugging each other and beating each other up.

  Time never really came back to me. There was Moscow time and Vladivostok time and the time where we were at any given point and one day looked like the next, and in the darkness of an early morning we slid into Vladivostok. It was time to go, time to walk out of the jungle. I crunched across the snow and hailed a taxi to the airport.

  BRANDON [Manitoba]—Screaming passengers fled in terror from a Greyhound bus as an unidentified fellow passenger suddenly stabbed a man sleeping next to him, decapitated him and waved the severed head at horrified witnesses standing outside. The apparently unprovoked assault left 36 men, women and children stranded Wednesday night on the shoulder … watching while the bus driver and a driver of a nearby truck shut the crazed attacker inside the bus with the mangled victim. Reports Friday said the suspect tried to eat parts of the victim.

  —National Post (Canada), July 31, 2008

  TWELVE

  Same, Same, but Different

  “DEATH!” THE HEAVY-METAL refrain crashed through the terminal, pumping out of the “Rock-On Greyhound Multimedia Center,” as a man in a black T-shirt with pasty skin and long, greasy hair pushed buttons and dollar bills into the machine. A guy in a hoodie and goatee slumped on the metal wire bench. A fat woman in a T-shirt and sweatpants dragged a kid across the linoleum like he was a piece of luggage. Of which there seemed to be little; mostly plastic garbage bags stuffed full at the last minute, as if by people on the run. Six a.m. in the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal and I held a ticket for four buses and seventy-two hours across the U.S.A. It all seemed incredibly familiar, of a piece. Bogotá. Quito. Lima. Dar es Salaam. Nairobi. Patna. Hohhot. Another bus station, another three thousand miles. But different, too. I could hear conversations, ask for things, decipher it all, and it didn’t look romantic. No sweet milky chai kiosks. No wooden bakso stands. No smell of shit. No smell of smoke. No monkeys or feral dogs or women with gold nose rings and bangles or wearing felt hats. No fresh tortillas. No food at all, except for vending machines full of Snickers and Fritos and twenty-ounce blue energy drinks.

  It all seemed a little crazy, hard to grasp, process. A day before I’d stepped off a train in Vladivostok in snow and ice, still hung over from the vodka hug-fest with the silver-toothed gangsters, India and Afghanistan just over my shoulder, on my mind, and then, wham, a taxi through warm L.A.—“Fuck, man, look at that traffic!” said the driver, who’d emigrated to the U.S. from Jordan when he was sixteen—and I was plunging into a place I hadn’t seen in months. As a T-shirt in India read, “Same, same, but different.”

  Since the beheading on Greyhound in Manitoba, Canada, in July, knives on board were no longer cool, and we were cursorily frisked with a metal-detecting wand as we boarded. By now I knew what to do: I placed a bag on the seat next to me and feigned sleep, my mouth open and droopy, to discourage a possible seatmate. On buses the difference between comfort and torture lay right there; in fact personal space was the key to everything, no matter what country you were in or what conveyance you were on. The most dangerous, most rickety bus in the world could be a pleasure—as long as it stayed on the road and no one cut your head off—if there were extra seats, if it didn’t fill.

  “My name is Tom. I’ll be your driver to Las Vegas. We’ll have a thirty-five-minute break in Barstow at the Greyhound steak house. You know what that is, right? McDonald’s!” And then he rattled off “the rules: No smoking. No alcoholic beverages. No profanity. Any aggressive behavior, physical or verbal, will get you thrown off the bus!”

  Welcome to America.

  Tom fired the engine up and we rolled out, past the warehouses and chain link of downtown L.A., onto the 405 and then east up into the desert, America huge and spread out and vacant-seeming. The streets felt empty. Where was everyone? Except for Siberia and the Gobi with Tsedee, even the great empty swaths of Afghanistan and Africa and the Andes always seemed dotted with a donkey cart or a peasant tending an alpaca. A voice cut in. “I’m on top of the world
and making money like there’s no tomorrow!” It was a man three rows in front of me, talking on his mobile phone. Loud. As if he were alone in a room. “I was blessed with superior intelligence and I start law school in four days and I have an MD, so soon I’ll be a JDMD; isn’t that awesome?” He hung up after ten minutes, dialed his doctor. “Yes, this is Drew Fenton and my social security number is …” I couldn’t believe it; he yammered the digits and went on and on, made call after call, an ego that seemed insatiable. “What’s your financial situation?” he asked someone else in another call. “Watch out; that guy treats me like a bank!” I wondered whether it offended me only because I could understand the language, the words.

  We hit Vegas that afternoon, and America seemed like the saddest place I’d seen in months. The worst, most dangerous conveyances in the world always had a mix of people on them, people bursting with life and color and friendliness. In Peru or Mali or India or Bangladesh everyone was poor. The few rich people flew; everybody else took a ferry or a bus or a train and they prepared for the journey with their carefully wrapped boxes and containers of rice, and the stream of fresh food offered for pennies was ubiquitous. Except for Drew Fenton, the loudmouth on the cell phone, Greyhound was the dregs of America, the poorest of the poor. My ticket from L.A. to D.C. was more than two hundred dollars; surely I could have found a flight for more or less the same. In America if you had an Internet connection and you wanted to get somewhere you found the lowest fare and flew, but the people on the bus were people off the grid. “We’re busiest around the first of the month,” said the driver. Which meant that its passengers traveled on government checks or whatever they could scrounge. A man boarded in Vegas with nothing but a plastic sack of Coke cans and he hadn’t showered in days, along with a skinny, sickly woman with a neck covered in tattoos. No one carried food; they ate french fries and Big Macs at McDonald’s. They were pale, had crooked, broken teeth. “Ready to Go Home?” read a poster in the Vegas station. “Don’t Runaway Love, you’re not on your own! Open your eyes and come back with me,” read the poster, imploring teenaged runaways to seek help and call an 800 telephone number. I thought of Moolchand, poor as dirt, buying me tea; of Fardus, feeding me fresh coconuts from his yard and dreaming of Las Vegas. But this was Vegas. This was America, the dream itself! And it looked like a place cracking, peeling, coming apart at the seams. Who would invite me to their house for lunch? Who even had a home? When we’d passed temples on the Blueline, Moolchand had prayed; Khalid prayed constantly, for me, for our safety; the men and women to whom he gave money gave us prayers back. Moussa had made tea in the vestibule of the train in Mali, and handed it all around to whoever wanted a cup. Rokibal in Bangladesh had wanted to know everything about me, and Ranjit, the bus driver in the poorest state of India, had given me his red velvet pillow. Wakiba and David had begged me to come home with them after twenty hours of fighting Nairobi traffic, and fed me in a house that had no kitchen and no bathroom. The conditions were deplorable sometimes. Dirty. Hot. Crowded. Groaningly uncomfortable. Dangerous. But all those people had been so filled with generosity and spirit, curiosity about a stranger, and they all in some way had felt connected in a way they didn’t even realize to a larger society, culture, family. But the people around me seemed alone, disconnected; what bound them to each other? To America? What was America? We were a bus of lost souls in a country that itself seemed without a soul. Wherever I’d been in the last few months, people had asked me about Obama; he’d been inaugurated a few days before and here I was, finally in America, and no one on the bus mentioned him.