“You’re about to consider yourself out of a ride.”
There are no other passengers. A long skinny aisle runs between the rows of seats. The rubber matting on the floor looks sticky. The driver says the bus is headed for Kansas City, which is a start. After I pay, I am down to twenty-five dollars in cash. I take a seat in the back and the bus lurches forward. The skin on my fingertips is waxy and gray, a color I have never seen on skin before.
I think about my infant self in the cardboard supermarket box, waiting to be found. I think about the burn of the cold on my tiny fingertips, all the pain I must have felt, the pain I was too young to remember.
Outside La Harpe we move through a white sea. The bus skids on the ice. I see another deer, but this one is dead, spread out on the roadside, its middle split open. The guts are a dark purple mush, the borders of the flesh bright red with blood. It looks like something in the wet middle of the deer is still moving, and I watch a snake slither out from the intestines and down the side of the road.
A list of what I know about dead bodies: after you die, your cells explode. After you die, your organs eat themselves. As a result, the bacteria in your body does not die at all; it keeps right on living. There are five stages of decay. They begin with bloat, end with bone.
I see green Christmas garlands twisted around a barbed-wire fence. I see an orange car rusting in a field. The tires are missing; the metal body is sinking into the land. Brown cattle rooting around in the snow. A windmill, the blades turning in a great slow circle.
On the bus, there is the feeling of passing from one self into another, like a ship moving from a bay into the vastness of open water.
I only know where my mother lives and that she is alive. Alive! I feel like shouting that word out the bus window. In Florida, when I find her, it is possible she will not be happy to see me. I know this. It is possible that whenever a strange young woman approaches, she feels a current of dread.
I have thousands of miles to travel. I don’t know how many days those miles will take.
In time, she’ll see that I’m worth keeping around.
“Do you know about existence affirmations?” the bus driver calls back to me.
I move up a few rows. The fog twists over the road in a way that makes me think it’s not just air and water but something alive.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“If you affirm your existence daily, it will continue to be true.” He drums his fingers on the wide black wheel. “Every day when I wake up I look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘I am alive I am alive I am alive.’”
It sounds like this man is doing one of the Pathologist’s meditations. I wonder what he would think of Dr. Bek and his theories about the unconscious mind.
In Paola, Kansas, two horses gallop into our path. One is white, the other sorrel. They seem to come out of nowhere. The driver hits the brakes and yanks the wheel. The bus shoots to the side. I’m thrown forward in my seat. I bite my bottom lip and taste blood. The horses slip on the road, heads raised high, manes billowing. Their running is frantic, without sense or direction. The bus stills. I press my hands against the window and think about how I used to dream of me and Louis leaving the Hospital together and boarding a bus just like this one and watching the landscape pass.
My hands leave twin palm prints behind on the window, the fingers bleeding into each other.
I lean my head against the glass and close my eyes, wanting to drift off, wanting to dream about anything other than the Hospital. I remember Rick’s Laws of the Road, him telling me to never sleep in the company of strangers, but on the bus his voice gets smaller and smaller until it’s gone.
When I wake, there are woods on either side of the road. I look out and see two black tires hanging from the branches of a tree, secured by thick hay-colored rope. The rubber circles sway on the branches. They look like nooses.
We break through the woods, surrounded once more by flat white fields. I see a young man in a flannel jacket, standing by an old hatchback on the side of the road. Louis, I think for a moment, touching the cold glass. He calls out and waves. The bus gains speed as we pass, spraying his pants with snow.
24.
The first sign of the city is the Missouri River, the water black and snaking in the night. A rail yard with tracks like thick veins in the ground and smokestacks netted in tiny orange lights. White loops of rising smoke. A tall silver skyline in the distance.
In Shawnee, we pick up a man wearing glasses so large and dark I think he must be blind. He sits next to me, even though the bus is still empty, and I consider the questions I could ask him, as a test. Do I look like I’ve always had this haircut? Do I look like I have a mother? Do I look like I have all my memories? Do I look scared? Does the skin on my fingers look dead?
In Kansas City, we pass an empty square and a bronze statue of a winged horse. In the Hospital, I imagined the cities were once again filled with brightness, the clatter of alive bodies, but this one looks dark and hollow, an underground system that’s just been pulled into the light.
I decide to get off on Seventh Street. As I move down the aisle, I think of what I could say to the driver. I want to tell him those affirmations, those meditations, never worked out for me or for anyone else in the Hospital I left behind. I am still living not because of what I thought but because I moved.
“I am alive,” I say instead.
On the street, I am dazed by the height of the buildings. It feels like being dropped in the center of a tall and intricate maze. On the corner, a man in a trench coat is selling hardback books titled Does Death End It All? I don’t see a single person in a suit or a mask.