What We Are (18 page)

“Yeah, I know. It's called a gratuitous pleasantry.”

“No,” she says, giving the bus some gas so I have to catch myself on the handrail. “The money.”

“You people want more already?”

“Never heard of Spare the Air Day? All rides within Santa Clara County are free.”

I could ask for my quarters back or get her name to complain later to some phantom bureaucrat on a 1-800 number, but instead I let off a dismissive stream of air that sounds like a deflating tire—
pssshhhh
—and head down the middle aisle past paisas, Punjabis, Nigerians, Laotians, Guatemalans, Tongans; preachers, derelicts, dealers; cheap, just-starting-out or environmentally conscious businesspersons; septua- and octogenarians with disapproval grooved into their dead faces; pungent transients clutching black plastic bags
packed with clothes and blankets and all kinds of recyclable material; signs that say
STAND BACK FROM THE DOOR
and
NO SE PARE JUNTO A LA PUERTA
and
DING DUNG GAN CUA
. I take it right to the rear corner, farthest from the carbon dioxide of my fellow public transportees. It's hot outside, cool in the back of the bus.

Up Alum Rock we go in red-light green-light convulsions, the bus groaning past well-lit strip malls and 24-hour porn houses, over the concrete bridges and out the graffiti-war territory aka a city tunnel. At every intersection we're being officially recorded, the cameras perched atop the swaying streetlights like solitary ravens looking down on a million burrowing earthworms. No one in this city dare pull a fast one on Big Daddy, or Big Brother, or Big Mama Earth, or whoever.

“Smile for the camera,” I hear. “You're a hell-bound superstar.”

In the other back corner of the bus, this cat is writing in his journal. It's an old-school deal, cased in brown leather with a tie string thin as the lace of a moccasin, the pages yellowed and faded like a scroll from the Middle Ages. One leg's kicked up so his journal is resting on a naked knee, polyester French-blue shorts with 10 above the hemline rolled back toward his hip, a too-tight T-shirt, black, that says,
ZYZZYVA
, in white letters. The guy can't breathe. He's got a rough edgy look and dark Balkan eyes, an unlit cigarette behind the flap of his ear, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, a goatee gathered and twisted into a point under his chin, and a tattoo on his arm in Apple chancery cursive:
Maranatha
.

He lifts his pen and looks out the window at the traffic. The smoke fumes are drifting into a popped vent above us. The lady driving the bus is looking right at him and when he returns her gaze, her eyes dart to the street in front of us. I don't like mutherfuckers with this kind of sway. Before I can think on why, he says, “You wanna know what this is, don't you.”

I'm the only person near the guy, but I don't care a lick about his deep thoughts. Highly doubt he's writing the sequel to
Notes from
Underground
, however nuts he is, whatever Slavic state he came from. I doubt he's even literate. If I wanted to listen to butchered Dr. Seuss rhymes, I'd turn on the radio.

“I'll bet you got no clue what I'm writing.”

“You lost that bet,” I say, looking out my own window.

“Well, then,” he says. “I'm waiting.”

“All right, bro. Are you and your big mouth ready?”

He ties up the journal and caps his pen, the cigarette right on the tip of his lips. I can see it, hear it: he's got some quixotic blood in his veins. Shit: looks like we're gonna either chop it up or have a duel.

“Okay,” I say. “Here's the answer: Something of absolutely no consequence.”

He smiles at once and I smile back and he looks out the window and says, “Well. You're right, of course. How strange that that's precisely what I'm writing about.”

I say nothing: we'll see.

“But you will listen, of course.”

“Why the hell not?”

He unties the journal, flips to a yellowed page, flicks the smoking cigarette stub out the window, pulls the unlit cigarette from his ear, lights it with a match that appears out of nowhere, reads:

“In the end, the nature of this age, the entrapment of time, and the idiosyncrasy of locale are only variables in the constant formula of my ill-willed temperament, which set in at first polluted breath. In the end, I will have from these hands an account of punishment tantamount to each filthy exhalation of carbon dioxide put forth from the bacterial mouths of the afflicted inhabitants of this temporal planet. In the end, no one alive shall know it. In the end, the only people getting wind of my purpose are dead.”

He's literate, all right. But I'm not happy about this at all. It's like I'm in the ninth circle with the archangel himself. I pop a window, put my mouth out for some air, focus for a second on the sturdiness of a deep-rooted oak, stay cool.

“Should I get off at the next stop,” I say, “before you blow up the bus?”

“You can depart if you want. But that would be a waste of your time.” He puts his hands up as if ordered by an invisible cop. “No bomb.”

“Okay, then. I'll play this out. You're an Eastern Euro, maybe Russian.”

“Pretty good.”

“Raskolnikov's disgruntled great-great-great-great-great-nephew?”

“Pretty funny.”

“And that's why I don't like you. You're an
übermensch
. You got too much pride. Deep down, Raskolnikov just wanted attention. To be the topic of conversation.”

“And will we be talking about you?”

“No, no,” I say. “I'd like to die with whatever grandiose ideas I have in my head still there. I don't want to add to the world's badness. My goal is just to float away.”

“How sad.”

“If I can manage it, my contribution to society will be no contribution.”

“I sense trouble.”

“Will we be talking about you?”

“You already have been, my friend. For a long, long time. Though I'm worried that you won't much longer. Legions come and legions go.”

“You're full of shit, bro.”

“No. I think not. You're familiar with Sir Shakespeare.”

“Of course. I stole from him a few times to secure some cash.”

He seems excited by the theft. “Yes. Perhaps you'll recognize the line and hence my problem. See, if
there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so
, I have to remind y'all every now and then to think. That's my job, I guess. And yours?”

“My what?”

“Your purpose.”

“Shit,” I say. “I can barely take the next breath of air without getting crossed up about it.”

“I've met a friend,” he says, putting his hand out.

I don't shake it. “No. It's gonna take a lot more than that, bro.”

“We'll see,” he says.

“As with anything.”

“Let's have a drink,” he says.

“I'm dry, man.”

“You've stopped drinking?”

“No. My pocket's dry. I've got a bike stuck to the front of this bus, and forty-six bucks to cover eternity. Just dropped sixteen quarters into that fucking slot.”

“Oh. But it's on me, of course.”

“All right. I'll get you next time.”

“If there is a next time.”

“That's right, too,” I say. “You remind me of a poem.”

He waits and then says, “Well, let's hear it.”

“
May you bite your lip that you cannot meet with God—or beat me to a pub. Amen
.”

“The title, please,” he says.

“A Curse at the Devil
.”

“The author, please.”

“Sir Kerouac.”

He reaches up at once to index-finger the slack cord, the bell in the front of the bus rings accordingly, and we shiver to a tenuous stop. Even as I'm thinking,
Who the fuck is this cat?
I follow him out
the exit nonetheless, yank my bike off the rack as he continues to talk. We walk on with our heads down over broken white concrete laced with blue and brown shards of shattered glass. Right through the waste of the earth, the busted bottles of civilization, among the flashing grid of red and green lights controlled underground by the Morse code of some nameless engineer, right under the pendulant web of telephone wire, the crows looking down on us again with those ravenous eyes of infrared, he goes on and on with his stories.

For the first time in some time I don't mind. I listen. To his frustration. A red wheelbarrow of so much overflowing possibility stuck in his raining head, surrounded by glazed chickens upon which nothing and no one depends. Too much mud in his brain, clogging the pipes. He has a reflexive appetite for destruction, his own and anyone else in the way. He calls himself the bastardized result of absolute carpe diem, of forging destiny without limit. Ad infinitum. He flirts with passion. In the land of possibility, everything seems enticing and worthy of a lifetime commitment. All tangents shine like the sun. That's what he says. This guy at one time was a software designer for Oracle, a Triple-A baseball player, a deep-sea welder, a sociology researcher/documentarist, a porn star named Jude Lawless, and is currently looking to wed. His failed search for a calling has resulted in a network of acquaintances sold on his connection to their given passion. But the truth is, he became bored by each and left them before they could leave him.

We make our way out to the oxygenated patio of Rock Bottom Brewery: Tiki burners and five dozen yuppies in business suits or Dockers. The waiters of both sexes have spiked hair and pierced brows and wear colorful tattoos and gothic eyeshadow, always black, thickly applied, coats of paint on the canvas. Looks like they crawled out of caves. I lean back in my chair and place my line of vision straight above the establishment where finally a beautiful saffron mass of sky rolls west without anyone knowing.

“What do you think is my problem?” he asks, lighting the cigarette, lipping it.

I sip on my Hefe-Weizen, ponder the question, offer, “Sounds like you maybe have too much talent.”

“I am admittedly,” he says, blowing smoke, “a mess.”

He's got sweat running down his brow, sweat down his arm. “Are you dying?”

“I may be.”

“From what?”

“Neglect?”

“What do you mean?”

“No one cares that I'm alive anymore.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I may be on my last proud legs.”

“Well,” I say. “You got a woman?”

“Been dating someone.”

“Will y'all marry?”

“Yes.”

“Do you love her?”

He just smiles.

“You seem like someone who would marry only under the condition of love.”

“Listen here.”

“I've been listening for the length of a glass of Hefe-Weizen.”

“I know,” he says. “Thank you. And you're welcome. Here's the scaled-down bio of yours truly.”

“Another one?”

“I've been saved my whole life by poles: tied to the post of family, girlfriend, job, or sport, whatever. Any time I got too wild in my meanderings I'd be yanked back to sanity like a dog on the fence, choking in his collar. But things changed. I don't know how, but I broke the chain, chewed through the rope. I don't know what to do
now with my freedom. I haven't had a sport since baseball, been jobless for half a year, and my family—father, mother, and sister—have fled five hundred miles east of San Jo to Lincoln, Nebraska. My ex, Deidre, split after catching me inside a double-jointed gymnast at her sister's wedding in Saratoga Hills. Nobody's left to keep me moderately clean, see? I am alone on the infinite plane of desire.”

“I'm missing something,” I say. “I don't get why you'd marry then, bro.”

“Well. This new one'd kill me if she caught me in the coatroom with a bridesmaid. She'd drop a pill of arsenic in my brew. I met her in Kabul. My Muslim princess of Aryana.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

“That's it.”

“Sounds promising.”

“It is. I have to believe it is. I can't talk about it any further or I'll start to break it down.”

“Yeah. Well. Good luck.”

He's looking toward the parking lot. “Let's change topics. Break something else down.”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” he says, pointing directly behind me.

A kid the height of a fire hydrant jumps out of an army-green Hummer and is led onto the patio. He has a collar around his neck, and there's a five-foot leash attached to the wrist of a man with gray wolfish eyes and finely detailed eyebrows. A woman in a diamond cross necklace flashing like a Fourth of July sparkler trails the man as if she were, despite the necklace, a dutiful Muslim. When they take their table, the man tugs lightly on the leash like he's testing the status of a fishing line, and the kid, fiddling with the gauge of the faux-bamboo heating lamp, turns his head and skips to his seat. He's no older than four, probably three, perfect age for experimentation. The man and the woman look like they've both been pollinated,
the tanned skin of beeswax. The patio is now full of Silicon Valley techies dropping in for the Thursday evening happy hour, yet no one but us has the nerve to even gaze.

My newfound friend shakes his head, splashes some Hefe-Weizen into my mug and then his own, and slams the pitcher on the table-top, his eyes on the new arrivals. His dilated nostrils look like the smoky twin entrances to infinitesimal black holes. “That's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't care how many abductors are out there. How the fuck do they get away with that?”

I sip my beer, leaving his thought afloat in the air, a kind of silent affirmation. I don't care how many abductors are out there either; just keep an eye on your child, like billions of other parents have been doing for the last four thousand years. At the table, the kid's sitting on the woman's lap and she's stroking his head like a kitten. He still wears the collar with the five-foot leash, rolled into a coil on the table like a garden hose, a rattlesnake fixing to strike. The man, already, is pinkie-crinkling a glass of merlot.