I wonder how it’s possible for the soul to live outside the body. Will I find it on my mother’s island? Will I see it drifting over the water like smoke?
The nun gets off in Jefferson City. At a rest stop, I buy chips and a Coke from the vending machines. I nearly miss the bus from spending too long touching the warm buttons, trying to remember how to choose.
We pass a small airport. The tarmac is a jumble of machinery, rusting engines and squat white trucks and carts with black wheels. A little green plane sits at the end of a runway, the wings heavy with snow.
After the airport, the landscape turns rural. In the fields, sprigs of brush stick up through the snow. These fields are surrounded by disintegrating wood fences, panels that have fallen to the ground like dislocated body parts. A steel grain silo. More brown cows, scruffy and sick-looking and weaving through the winter muck.
I see distant lines of trees, the silhouettes slight and charcoal black, like they’ve been burned. I see power lines, the cords sparking and swaying in the wind.
A mist rolls in and covers the trees. The windows fog. It feels like we’re driving through a cloud.
I unfold the map of American highways and follow the lines that will lead me south. From Birmingham, I’ll ride down to the Gulf Coast, pass into Florida through the Panhandle, and keep going.
When I look up from the map, I notice a man three rows ahead. I don’t remember seeing him get on in Jefferson City. He’s sitting in the window seat. He’s staring out and I wonder if he is seeing anything through the fog or if his view is as dense and white as mine and he too is pretending that we are no longer on earth.
No one is sitting next to him. He is alone, like me.
I remember the masked man standing on the street corner in Chinatown and the masked man I followed all around the Stop & Shop in the middle of the night. I remember wearing the vampire mask in my basement apartment and thinking that if I never took it off I would just slowly suffocate under the heavy sweet smell of the rubber.
I fold up the map and tuck it into my pocket. I leave my seat and sit down next to this man. He is wearing a rabbit mask. The round eyeholes are surrounded by swirls of white plastic fur. The ears are a pair of white points, the cheeks mounds of pink. The lips are plump and rosy. A nice healthy rabbit. He looks like a cartoon character or a make-believe bandit—except I am touching the pointed ears and he is not yelling or telling me to get away. Behind the mask he is breathing deep and slow.
He’s wearing black pants and a puffy maroon coat with a hole in the stomach, so the cotton stuffing spills out. I watch him reach into his lap and push the yellowed guts of his coat back inside.
I remember him showing me how the life line on my palm ran long and deep. I remember the white tuft of hair, which I know is hidden somewhere under that rabbit mask. I want to reach inside and find it. I remember the Real-Life Ghost Stories and the hair dye on our fingernails and Latin homework and the sweaty smell of his boy body in the bathtub.
I remember.
He pulls off the green gardening gloves, one at a time, and looks at my hands.
The bus slows. The air is thick with fog. Something inside me collapses, goes warm and soft, and there is a wet heat on my face. Never have I wanted someone to remember me as much as I want to be remembered now.
“Marcus,” I say.
*
In Charlestown, Ms. Neuman liked to play the Powerball lottery. Marcus and I would sit on the floor, just beyond the light of the TV, and braid the shag carpeting. We would watch little white balls jump around in a plastic bowl and a man in a tuxedo call out the winning combinations. Ms. Neuman always played the same numbers. We didn’t know what those numbers meant to her; we only knew that she never won a dime. Once Marcus whispered a set of numbers to me, the bloodied lips of a zombie mask brushing my ear, and then I saw that same sequence appear on the TV. He did it again, a month later. Here Ms. Neuman had spent years trying to guess right and Marcus had done it twice in a row. That was the first time I realized his mind didn’t work the same as everyone else’s. The second time was when he woke me in the middle of the night already knowing Ms. Neuman was unconscious on the floor.
*
We don’t say anything for the longest time. We stare straight ahead and watch the fog begin to lift and the road unfurl like a scroll before us.
I’m the first to speak, to ask how he found me. Marcus has no way to explain. After the sickness ended, he started traveling the country by bus, moving from one city to another to another until he ended up here.
“I wanted to get out there,” he tells me. “I wanted to see.”
He has passed through Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, through places called Cuba and Brazil and Lebanon. Cities named for countries. He felt a westward pull, though he never made it as far west as Kansas.
A list of what he has seen: a helicopter crashed on the white edge of a field; an abandoned watchtower, the clock hands stuck at noon; a replica of the Statue of Liberty, only instead of standing on an island and holding a torch, this lady was outside a church and holding a giant wood cross. He has seen hitchhikers and shooting stars and a bleating goat tied to a fence and a nightfall that closed around him like a fist. A woman sitting on the side of the road, a sleeping bag draped over her shoulders. A gas mask discarded in a parking lot.
For both of us, these long hours on buses have shown us more of America than we have ever seen.
We pass a field with humps in the snow, like there is a creature living underneath all that white.
When Marcus wants to know where I’m going, what I’m doing here, I look at him and say, “I have a mother.”
I catch a road sign for Indianapolis, which doesn’t seem right at all. According to my map of American highways, we should be seeing signs for Fayetteville and Little Rock and Jackson, but then again what do I know about cross-country bus routes.
A damp snow starts falling. It covers the yellow highway lines.
“You have a mother? Since when?”