Mosquitoland (5 page)

Recall

TELL ME WHAT
you see here, Mary
. I stare at my reflection in the shaking mirror, clutching the sink for balance. I'm blind and wet, and my name is Mary, not Mim, and I've never been in a fight, never been on a boat, never quit a job, never been to Venice, never, never, never . . .

The bottom drops out, and I'm down, on my side, floating in a strange sudden weightlessness, as if in water or outer space. From far away—one, two, a thousand pleas for mercy, animallike screams, rabid and seething for survival. A minute, an hour, a lifetime—there is no time, there are no Things. I have no more Things. I have only scraping metal, screaming voices, and death.

And suddenly, my symphony of travel crescendos, achieving its rumbling, mighty End.

The bus is still.

On. Off. On—off—on. The jaundiced lightbulb flashes at random intervals. I lie on my side, staring straight into the now-cracked mirror. Like a joke with some sick punch line, my right eyelid is closed. For a moment, I am content to lie immobile, a cyclops among a thousand shatterings. Breath races through my lungs, veins, limbs, spreading like a virus to every corner of my body. It gathers strength, then, at once, rushes to my head.

There is life in my life
.

To my left, the door hangs loosely by a hinge.
UNOCCUPIED
. The opening is narrow, but I squeeze under it, into the main compartment of the bus. Despite the pain, I pull myself off the floor and look around.

The Greyhound is tipped.

It's a simmering stew of glass and blood and sewage and luggage, a cinematic devastation. Like the lights in the bathroom, the cabin lights flicker on and off in irregular intervals. Some people are moving, some are moaning, and some aren't doing either. Carl is bleeding in about six places, administering CPR to one of the Japanese guys. I see Poncho Man help Amazon Blonde to her feet, right where I'd been sitting. I stand and stare for I-don't-know-how-long, until an ax crashes through the left wall—formerly the roof of the bus. Firefighters crawl through the wreckage like ants, pulling limp bodies around their shoulders, administering first aid. Two EMTs—one with acne and scraggly red hair—approach the limp body of a woman. The redhead leans over, puts his ear to the woman's chest. Straightening, he looks at his partner, shakes his head. Together, they hoist her from her seat and that's when I see who it is: Arlene.

My
Arlene.

I am Mary Iris Malone, and I am empty, cleaned the fuck out. All that's left is a fierce hunger for flight.

I have to get out of here.

I stumble forward, stepping on a yellow dash. Then another and another.
I'm walking on the highway. From inside the bus.
The windows, once lining the sides of the Greyhound, are gone, replaced by wet blacktop. Seats are jutting out of the wall, row after row of them. I step over and around people, and it's impossible not to wonder which ones are dead and which ones are unconscious—the difference between stepping over a person and stepping over a body.

The dam of my epiglottis cracks, then crumbles; I vomit on the ground in front of me.

And I see it. Thing of Things, impossible, yet inevitable. Poking out from under a threadbare Philip K. Dick novel, the corner of Arlene's wooden box. Like a time capsule, it remains blissfully unaffected by the annihilation of the world around it. I pick it up, stagger the rest of the way through the bizarro bus. Through the jagged perforation of hacked metal, I step outside, transported from one dreamlike scene to another. The rain soaks through my hoodie in seconds, and at first, all I can think is
I never even heard the sirens.
I pull Arlene's box tight against my stomach and turn in a slow circle.

A surreal panorama: fire engines, ambulances, state troopers, and curious bystanders are gathered, rain or no rain, right in the middle of the highway. Behind us, the headlights of a thousand cars go on for miles in complete deadlock. Amazon Blonde is being loaded into an ambulance. Jabba the Gut is going with her, probably for about three hundred pounds' worth of reasons.

“Here,” says an EMT, draping her arm around my shoulder. “Lemme help.”

“I'm fine,” I say, pushing her off.

She points to my knee, where a crimson stain has soaked through my jeans. “So that was there before then, was it?” She leads me into the back of an ambulance, out of the pouring rain, and treats my wound. Once done, she drapes a blanket across my shoulders, then jumps back into the wet wreckage without a word. People are rushing on and off the bus, some crying, some bleeding, some hugging, and I can't help but think that before all this happened, I probably would have gotten off in Cleveland in a day or so, and, other than Arlene, not given one thought to these people. But now they're really part of things, part of my life, written in the History of Me.

Arlene.

Choking back a flood of tears, I pull her box out from under my blanket.
What in the world am I going to do with you?

“You okay, missy?” Carl is towering over me like I-don't-know-what . . . a Tower of Carl, I suppose.

“Yeah. Just a cut.” I shiver and pull the blanket a little tighter, concealing Arlene's box. “What happened?”

“Tire blew,” he mumbles. “I reported a recall back in Jackson, recommended we either change tires or take a different bus, but no one listened. No one ever listens.”

A-freakin'-men.

“You were traveling alone, right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Already called my dad, let him know what was going on. He said as long as I'm not hurt, I may as well go on to Cleveland. How's that work, by the way?”

Carl lights a cigarette, takes a long draw. God, he looks like a badass smoking in the rain. “I'll make arrangements. Whoever wants to can stay in a motel tonight, then we'll take a new bus in the mornin'. Everything'll be paid for, of course . . .” He trails off and seems to be considering something. “Listen—”

“You the driver?” interrupts the redheaded EMT. He's shivering in the rain, holding a cell toward Carl. Before taking the call, Carl—like some muscly action hero—rips off a bottom section of his sopping wet T-shirt and hands it to me.

“You got something on your face, missy.”

Oh my God.

My war paint.

Somehow, it seems beyond appropriate that I stumbled through the ravaged bus with my face painted red. Mim the Warrior Princess. Battle survivor with a bloody wound to prove it.

As Carl limps off to take his call, I wipe my face with his rainy T-shirt and study Arlene's box. Surprisingly heavy, it has one of those old-fashioned skeleton keyholes. The contents don't shake or rattle or anything, but they do shift as I move the box side to side. On the bottom, I find four letters carved deep in the wood:
AHAB
.

A Metamorphosis Completed

September 1—late, yo

Dear Isabel,

MY GREYHOUND BUS

(After Tipping on the Side of the Highway and Causing an All-Around Shitstorm from Which I May Never Fully Recover)

Okay.

So I suck at drawing. But
that
? Just happened. To me.

Ahem.

SON OF A BITCH, IT WAS TOTALLY CATASTROPHIC
.

Sorry.

Had to get that off my chest.

Now. It would be easy for me to wallow in self-defeat or self-pity or self-doubt or a hundred other selves, but I won't. I'm just going to write.

I'm going to write, and that way I'll be okay.

Let's start with a name. I'll write down this name, and it won't mean anything to you, but when you read it, know that it means something to me. The owner of the name died on that bus, and while I didn't know her all that well, she was a friend, and those don't come easy. Not for me, anyway. She smelled like cookies and wore funny shoes and used words like
pizzazz
. Here's the name.

Arlene.

. . .

. . .

. . .

Okay.

I'm okay.

I'm headed to a motel right now, in a van with about twelve other people. Our bus was full, but most of the passengers seemed uninterested in continuing their relationship with Greyhound.

Relationship.
That's exactly what it is.
Hey, gurl, I know I almost crushed you to death, but it was a one-time thing, and I swear it'll never happen again
.

Greyhounds are pigs.

Unfortunately, I don't have many options. Anyway, it takes more than a life-before-your-eyes-kill-your-elderly-best-friend type of bus accident to keep me from Cleveland.

My Objective is a bulwark never failing.

Moving on.

My war paint is Reason #5.

Mom's favorite lipstick: the only article of makeup I've ever been interested in. Call it a cosmetic deficiency.

The idea that this was abnormal hit early, around third or fourth grade. (A girl knows when she's being talked about, am I right?) But I didn't care. I rolled with it. Abnormalities abound! That was my motto. Until it wasn't.

In eighth grade, I joined the Ashland Blackhawks street hockey team. The league was a fledgling operation run by a throng of kids, meatheads mostly, looking for an excuse to punch someone. I was the only girl ('twas always thus), so they only rarely punched me.

The team captain, who doubled as league referee, was this punk kid of about fifteen named Bubba Shapiro. While other teams were called for high-sticking, clipping, cross-checking, and all manner of unsportsmanlike conduct, our team got off scot-free. Bubba looked exactly as you'd expect. Big, beefy—he even had a full-fledged beard, which at his age commanded enormous respect. (Not from me so much, but, you know, the meatheads ate it up.)

One day, a kid named Chris York didn't show up for practice, and Bubba made an announcement. “Okay, guys, Chris came out at school today, so we're gonna have to push on without him.”

I raised my hand and asked where Chris had come out of.

The meatheads laughed.

Bubba asked if I was an idiot, then said, “He's a fudge-packer, Mim. Queer bait. Brokeback Mountaineer. He's gay.”

Again, everyone laughed.

Again, I raised my hand.

“Sorry, but . . . what does that have to do with hockey?”

Bubba rolled his eyes and explained that gays didn't like sports.

Well, here's the thing: I never really liked sports, either. The only reason I joined the team was that Dad said I would need some extracurriculars on my college applications. (Malone males are notorious overachievers.)

This association between sports and sexual identity continued to nag at me, until one night, while Mom was doing her makeup, I asked how I would know if I were gay.

“Tell me,” she said, putting the finishing touches on her mascara. “How do you feel about Jack Dawson?”

I blushed and smiled. My eyes, I'm sure, took on a twinkling, otherworldly property.
My parents had always been sticklers for film ratings (though I suspected Dad was the driving force behind this), and since
Titanic
was PG-13, I'd had to wait until—you guessed it—my thirteenth birthday, at which point, Mom and I watched it exclusively and repetitively. We'd seen it twenty-nine times (exactly, not approximately). While the story and special effects were achievements in their own right, it was no secret why we loved the movie. Leo DiCaprio as the noble Jack Dawson was just too yum for his own good. (I swear I'm not one of those girls who
oohs
and
aahs
over weekly celebrity crushes, Iz, but in the case of Leo, I simply cannot help myself. I'd be lying if I told you I don't think about that scene down by the furnaces, in that old car . . . Blimey, it's hot in this van.)

Smiling, Mom reached for the makeup tray on her vanity. She grabbed the black tube with the shiny silver ring in the middle—this was her favorite lipstick, the kind she wore only on special occasions. “Scoot in here, Mary. Let me show you a thing or two.”

For the next twenty minutes, I received my first and last makeover. I have no moral objections to makeup, you understand, it's just . . . I know me. And makeup isn't me. This, in addition to my edgy, hard-nosed, take-no-prisoner attitude, and I think I could have made a pretty decent lesbian. Not to pigeonhole the demographic. I'm sure there are plenty of lesbian softies out there, gobbling up tubs of ice cream and sobbing at the end of early-nineties romcoms. But when it's all said and done, I am Madam Winslet in that old car with Leo, not the other way around. And as simple as it sounds, I think understanding who you are—and who you are
not
—is the most important thing of all Important Things.

So that's the setup.

The teardown is a topic of substance and despair if ever there was one. Or as Bubba Shapiro might say—unsportsmanlike conduct. But you really only need to know two things: first, I've been carrying around my mother's lipstick for a while now, occasionally using it to paint my face like some war-crazed chieftess preparing for battle; and second, it is vital that the lipstick be returned to its rightful owner.

I have to go now, because we just pulled into the motel's parking lot.

More Reasons to follow.

Signing off,

Mary Iris DiCaprio

MOM HITCHHIKED THROUGH
Europe when she was younger. I remember her talking about the hostels she stayed in, and how they were complete dumps but she didn't care. They had stories to tell, little pieces of the people who had stayed in them before—what they wore, what they ate, what they believed. Mom said she loved staying in a place where “anything might have happened even if nothing ever did.” And she always ended her stories by saying, “Granted, they all smelled like a moth's shoe, yeah?”

God, I wish I could have known her back then, in her hitchhiking glory days. The Young Fun Now, twenty-four/seven.

I stuff the stick figure journal in my bag and hop out of the van.

“Alrighty,” says Carl, limping from the front office of the Motel 6. Dude is a superhero. Bandaged and bruised, and not one word of complaint. I suppose the streak continues. If this guy's not a true-blue Carl, then I don't know a thing. He passes out keys with dangling bottle caps. Mine has the number 7 scrawled on top.

“These are your room keys,” he says. “Greyhound's gonna drop off a new bus overnight. I set up a six thirty wake-up call for everyone tomorrow mornin', so let's meet back here at seven thirty on the dot. You don't show up, I'll assume you got another ride. I ain't your mama. Got it?”

One of the Japanese guys raises his hand; I think it's the one Carl just CPR'd on the bus. “Excuse me, bus driver?” he asks, without a trace of an accent. “Where are we?”

Carl lights a cigarette, exhales out the side of his mouth. “Memphis. Just outside Graceland.”

Everyone disperses, heading toward his or her respective rooms. I grab my bag with renewed spirit.
Graceland
. Home of my mother's all-time favorite artist. Undeniably, this is a good sign. Poncho Man (who apparently lost a shoe in the wreck, as he's currently wearing one penny loafer and one too-big sneaker) winks at me as he turns toward his room. “Sleep tight, Mim.”

Go to hell, creep.

On the way to my room, I spot a pharmacy across the street. It's one of those real classy joints where the lightbulb in every other letter has gone dark; instead of
PHARMACY
, it reads, “
P A M C .
” Maybe it's the wreck, or the rush of blood from my leg wound, or the death of my friend, but I'm suddenly feeling impulsive and alive. I need change, and I need it now.

I cross the empty street and enter PAMC, surprised it's open this late. Between the elevator music and the sharp artificial lights, it feels like I just stepped onto a flying saucer. (Apparently, my aliens love the dude who sings “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Because, you know, obviously.) An employee behind the checkout counter is filing her nails and humming along with the song.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey. Haircutting shears?”

“Aisle nine.” She points a fiercely manicured fingernail.

I hustle down aisle nine and, as an afterthought, grab four packs of makeup remover. At the checkout counter, the girl blows her fingernails, rings me up.

“Makeover?” she says.

“Something like that.”

Back across the street, I locate the room between 6 and 8. Hanging there with aplomb is a brass
L.
I twist the letter into the number 7, but it falls again. Too tired to care, I unlock the door with my bottle cap key and breathe in the sweet scent of a moth's shoe. I wonder—what might have happened in this room?

. . . Elvis wrote my mother's all-time favorite song, “Can't Help Falling in Love
”
 . . .

. . . a rogue beekeeper, who insisted on the very freshest honey to go with his morning biscuits, snuck in a hive . . .

. . . a rabbi questioned his faith . . .

. . . a whore turned her trick . . .

. . . a somebody did their something . . .

In this room . . .

I toss my JanSport under a rickety AC unit and pull the shears out of their plastic box. In the bathroom, I stare at my reflection in the mirror and visualize a new me: Mod Mim. Like Michelangelo with a block of stone, I see my lengthy mop of dark hair and know the end result before I begin. I snip with courage, purpose, urgency, styling my hair the way I've always wanted, but never had the stones to ask for—edgy, chic, short-short in the back, then angled down into longer sides, the bob cut of all bob cuts. And the bangs, my God, the bangs! I leave them long, just barely out of my eyes, sharp and straight enough to give Anna Wintour a run for her money. With only one good eye, I have to double- and triple-check all the lines to make sure they're even. Once done, I stare at myself in the fluorescent light and finally feel like the girl I am. The girl who gets called to the principal's office but hops a bus to Cleveland instead. The girl who survived a catastrophic accident
.
The girl who took matters into her own hands, figuratively, literally, fucking
finally
.

I feel more Mim than ever before.