“Okay, sport,” I sealed the envelope. “Let’s head into the night.”
After wishing me good luck and retaining custody of the car, Bread dropped me off at the San Diego bus terminal. The inside of the station was almost as bad as the area immediately surrounding it. Besides the sailors, relatively inoffensive, there were clusters of tough-looking teenage boys, hookers (which explained the presence of the teenage boys), pimp types in silly-looking hats, foreign families clustered together in fear, and women padded in all the layers of their clothing, raving as they clutched their pathetic bags of God-knows-what to their persons. The smell, which you don’t want to even try to break down into its loathsome components, was one of melancholy, disenchantment, and out-and-out ugliness. Classic stuff: Eau de Bus Station.
I bought my ticket, two hours predeparture, and tried to find a plastic chair relatively unstained by urine, gum, or spit. The bum two chairs away kept coming to and muttering muthafuckah and then resubmerging himself in his dream, or whatever it was.
I lit a cigarette and tried to think like Kerouac or even Henry Miller. This was all material, see, except that I wasn’t a writer. But what about my journal, the dream book? The last entry was the one about the coffin on the hillside, and did that ever seem like years ago! But it was less than twenty-four hours. The last line read: “In another coffin propped next to mine—” Gone. No relationship. The dream was what they say about dreams, smoke and nonsense.
I sat there, pen poised, and then must have drifted off a little because next thing you knew, the page was covered with densely packed script.
Owl flew but not with wings. You find yourself selecting new objects with which to surround yourself: a pitcher, an ashtray, an unknown Expressionist print. Soon you discover, perhaps in the dream-return as you tack that print above the chair in your room, that you have owned this item before. As you watch, its colors become clear to you and then obvious: what could ever have made you imagine that you come fresh to any purchase? That choice is not entirely dependent on what you have selected before? And you say: Oh, yes, this pitcher with its blue and yellow garland of roses… how much it resembles… of course! You have owned this pitcher before, or one so much like it that you doubt two such identical objects could co-exist in the world. You were in Italy at the time or perhaps living in a loft in New York City. Now you have a room in Seattle. It is all the same.
At the moment one thing becomes clear, the next becomes clouded.
Owl flew. You are sitting in a restaurant where you have never dined. To your friends, you say that you have never eaten Javanese food. How odd that its flavors swell in your mouth with familiarity. As you reach your bamboo spoon toward the milky salad, already you anticipate the sharp thrust of the anise. You look around the small, sparsely decorated interior and the faces you encounter strike the base of your throat with their inevitability. How odd that you do not embrace these others as your kin. That you have never entered their houses and crossed your legs upon their living room mats. You know without asking that the dessert will include guava, lichee, mango, and you know precisely how the flavors will burst. Still you maintain you have never dined here before. With wings, you stretch out the coiled tendrils in the tips of your fingers: they shine out, the exiting ectoplasm.
There is shame in release, whatever the nature. You zap the space between you and the danger. Is there danger? You have always imagined there was. Even in the most innocent street, you have always rushed, as though you can feel the chill breath of your pursuer. Have they caught you yet? Even now, do you sit in your chair while strange flowers bloom and wither on the pearly lattice of your garden trellis? Is the air thick beneath your feet because the ground eludes you? Over and over, you attempt to walk as if what gives way has not always done so. You remain sure, and the snowy wings behind you unfurl like the banner of a proud conqueror, that there is a place to begin and hence to end. You are strong and noble, and the profile of your face glints behind the eclipse like the bright exploding gas of the stars.
To tell the truth, it pretty much flipped me out. The content was weird enough—the bit about buying stuff had its moments, but all that jazz about foreign food tended to lose me. And then about walking, and the space between you and the danger…
But the definite worst, or best, part was that the handwriting didn’t look like mine!
It looked, from what I could remember, exactly like Deane’s.
“New Orleans, Houston, Austin, El Paso, Tucson, points in between, now boarding Gate Six!”
I hustled on board, if that’s what you call it with a bus, and situated my duffel next to me, hoping to discourage any goon who might try to get cozy. There was serious thinking to be done, no doubt about it. For instance, where had all those words come from? Actually, that part was the least worrisome: every one of those Surrealist guys got messages this way; it was just French for automatic writing. The part that bugged me, that I needed to consider, was the overwhelming feeling that this really was a message from Deane.
No doubt that was all a construct of my own brain, though.
I wanted—
The bus pulled out into the grubby streets, past the X-rated theaters and the gloomy near-dawn of the night.
I wanted to believe, obviously, that Deane not only wanted to see me but somehow knew I was on the way. Was that so dumb?
Soon we were well on our way into the desert. The minute you leave the ocean behind, you realize that all this land is supposed to be bare and dry, not irrigated into emerald lawns and precious flower beds. If the earth had its way, for instance, stark bare land would roll right up to the edge of the sea. Except, of course, the earth doesn’t have its way.
The sun was coming up all right and the sky was rosy pink, tinted by layers of dubious gunk that had collected on the window.
It was a good thing I’d never washed off my makeup because it would act as a protective shield, warding off the icky air that everybody else was breathing out.
Not a pretty crowd. The usual harassed mothers with noisy kids, the usual middle-aged men slumped down in their seats, faces concealed by lumpy fedoras. Though the only reason they seemed usual to me, who had never ridden a genuine bus before, as opposed to the school variety, was from reading too many books. And over us all was that weary pall of suspension, unlike the control you have in your own car, when a simple steer from the road will propel you from the magic of transition to normal old stasis. Here, we were like in the web of some pitiless spider. Either that or procured from central casting, since I no doubt looked every inch the part of runaway teenage girl.
The only person who didn’t quite fit the bill was the guy sitting catty-corner across the aisle from me. At first he looked okay, and then the shininess of his suit fabric, the frayed cuffs, and the worn-down heels gave him away. He had this briefcase on his lap, but on top of the briefcase he’d propped a Bible, which he was, if you can call it that, reading.
Even looking out the window, the oddness of his movements disturbed me, so I watched more carefully.
He opened up the Bible at random, or so it seemed, scanned a column or two frantically with his index finger, then slapped the book shut. Brief pause, eyes turned beatifically upward. Then he flipped open the Bible again—you couldn’t tell if it was the same place or not but looked like not—scanned another column, shut the book again. Wait. Then, he relaxed his shoulders and put the Good Book away in the inside pocket of his shabby overcoat. He settled the briefcase on his lap, centered it, and opened it up with a body-language show of anticipation, but what I could see over his shoulder gave me a chill.