“A wider society.”
* * *
I wake up and feel so calm and quiet that I don’t think that I exist, so I take a few short, shallow breaths, and when I realize I haven’t disappeared, I slow them down and let them deepen. There’s a bump, and I remember where I am. The bus has cooled, and the sounds are comforting: the rumbling diesel and the big tires on the asphalt, the big broad shape through the wind. I sit up and look out the window. I can see across to the southbound side and the landscape beyond. The trees have pulled back from the highway. It’s a big road here — four lanes each way.
I wonder where Lila and Thomas Strawberry are, and I shiver because I realize I left her urn by the river. Maybe it got taken out with the tide, too, taken home, or just became part of the broken beach. “It’s all right,” I kind of sing to myself and stretch out in my seat, remember my bag, and reach out for it: It’s still there. The woman across the aisle’s still there, too. There’s the empty candy wrapper on the seat beside her. She’s looking out her own window. There isn’t much for her to see: the cars below, the dark wall of trees, the occasional building, and the lights, of course — street lights along the highway. We’re almost there. She moves her mouth slowly — maybe singing — mouthing something. I watch, try to read her lips, even place her drawl and impose it on the silent song—“I feel like going on. .” It’s what she seems to be saying — perhaps unconsciously. I know that song, at least in part.
I take a sip of water and the lone interior light surges. And it seems to remind the user to turn it off. I taste my breath when I swallow — rank with ash and coffee. I quietly open my gum. She grunts and turns. Her eyes are closed. She wasn’t singing, just moving her jaws slowly as though she was still working on the peanuts from the candy. I see things about her that I hadn’t noticed before. Such a strange-looking woman — gray and violet hair, puffy eyes with growths on her lids and cheeks, blotchy skin, a great, round, solid body. She looks like she’s been on a lot of buses, up and down this highway and others. And I want to look at her a little more, but she grimaces, as though whatever it was that she’d been dreaming about suddenly turned on her.
I look out my side at the rush of the opposite traffic. We must be speeding, either that or holding up traffic in the far left lane for a mile back. There are poles with doubled lights running between the roads, and they flash against my window like a slow, soft strobe. And after each flash, between the black landscape and the hazy, charcoal blue sky, I catch the last of the day — a softly bending narrowing pink band. It gets dark early so fast in late August. I lean against the window and sing, “I feel like going on. .” I barely know the song, so I just repeat that line a few times, changing the phrasing a little with each pass. Then I feel her watching me. I turn. She is. Even from across the dark aisle I can see that her eyes are jaundiced and rheumy. We just watch each other and the passing scenery behind. She exhales, long, and I can tell that she’s had a taste of whiskey from a hidden nip. I expect the scent to jolt me toward either craving or revulsion, but there’s only a brief hit of sweet, then it’s gone.
“What’s that you were singing?”
“I Feel Like Going On.”
“I don’t know that one. What is it, gospel?”
“I think.”
“I don’t know much about gospel, but I think I’ve always liked it when it’s sang. It sneaks up on you, you know — sadness, joy, and what else?” She closes her eyes and shifts heavily to face the other way, turns to the front, but can’t seem to get comfortable. She settles on a position not entirely to her liking and grimaces again.
We turn hard, almost banking, to the east, following the highway’s twist north. I close my eyes: There are Lila and Thomas, the bridge and the harbor. They’re still floating. I feel myself smile and feel the bus follow shallow arcs left and right. No sail, but I exhale anyway to give them a push. But then I shudder: The burnt pyre is actually returning — this way — into the mouth of the river. It passes under the bridge, and I lose them. I crane my neck to peer under, but it’s too dark in there.
I gag, pant, snap forward, and open my eyes. I take some shallow breaths to make sure that I’m not drowning, then look across the aisle. Her eyes are still closed. We turn again, west this time. The lights flash, the highway winds, and we follow. And though nothing seems to change — the evenly spaced turns and flashes — I know we’re moving forward. North. We track Polaris, roughly, adjusting east and west. And there aren’t any visible stars, just more electric spill, which keeps the road navigable, uniform — a safe, glowing haze — but it obscures the first order. I press my face against the cool glass and try to see forward. I can’t. Even on a clear night, turning east and west, it would be there out the window and then not. I sit back. It doesn’t matter; I know where it is: here. I see its traiclass="underline" outside; that woman still moving somewhere and in: the makeshift, upriver skiff. And then, both — like a small wave that has caught light while folding over into darkness. I am that star, its beginning, an expanding, deepening ball of fire in the dark, and its end — the dark itself. And in that end is a beginning, its last breath, bright dust — interstellar drift, waiting to be informed by a larger hope and love, waiting to be reborn. My maker remembers me, remembers me well, and I move to that place I’m called. Listen: the prayer to me—Quick, I am here. And I swear I hear Lila’s voice folded into mine: I am coming—whole or broken — I am coming.
We keep moving, tracking residue — trace elements floating in the void. So real, assumed, or imagined, it is still there — the latter, perhaps, most important because it burns more brightly there — and that, I know, is real, consuming, sacred — wholly different from the burn of shame. And it leads me to other things I can really touch: my few friends, here and gone, my children, and my wife. It’s what led her to me — she is that star, its end and its beginning. Its final breath, recollected, reformed. I can touch her face, trace its soft line, hold it in my hand and feel her pulse in her temples. And I don’t care what it represents. My Claire. And unsung or not, I made a promise that “I will be true. .” I love my wife. What else can I do? There’s a break — no lights — then a bright flash from an overpass. Then it’s dark again. And the bus stays dark, rolling through the dark, but it remains, a small feeling, not desperate, not bold, but present in a place I pray I never lose. And it hasn’t anything to do with anyone other than me — here and now. I’m coming back, or closer, I’m coming. I’m coming because I’m in love. Now I see her: the dark horizon, like a long, crooked mouth and the last rosy glow from off in the west. There’s a flash of the highway lights across the bus, then another. The road ascends as we enter Providence.
We pull off 95 and stop on the west side of the station. The old woman stays in her seat, gives me another hurting look, and closes her eyes. “Not yet for me,” she mumbles. I take my bag and limp and creak down the aisle and steps.
The air outside seems warmer and muggy — strange for these parts to have more heat than New York City. I turn south — no Claire. I stand there a moment while the other passengers take their bags from the storage compartments underneath. I realize that this area’s only for buses, so I follow behind the others to the adjacent side, which faces the parking lot. Two get in waiting cabs, another in a car, and the last starts diagonally across the big lot. I think about him disappearing beyond the guardrail and cattails and the unlit road.