“Try again,” Marcus says.
The phone rings three times before someone answers. They don’t say anything, but I can hear them breathing on the line. Is this my mother? Does she know who I am?
“Hello,” I say.
There is just breath and breath and breath.
*
On the road there are certain things we learn to count on. There are the water fountains with the rotten egg smell and the low-pressure ones that force your lips too close to the spout. The rough brown paper towels we use to clean our faces and necks and armpits and between our legs in the bathrooms, except for when the dispenser is empty and what you want is a wet crumple on the floor. In that case, we use toilet paper or little white napkins or go without. There are the bathrooms that are clean and the ones that look like a tiny apocalypse. In Horse Cave, Kentucky, I see a cardboard core of a toilet paper roll soaked in blood. There’s the thin gas station coffee we doctor with sugar and cream. The vending machines that eat your change and the ones that give you double Cheetos, which feels like cosmic balance. The shifting configuration of the riders, like a party where the pool of guests keeps getting made over, except no one is talking or laughing or having any fun. There is the smell of exhaust, the smell of unclean bodies, the smell of hot dogs roasting on gas station counters, the skin crisped and gleaming, the smell of the tall boys passengers crack open late at night. The road is alive. There are people in rest area parking lots, filling up tanks, spreading maps across hoods. There are Jehovah’s Witnesses handing out pamphlets and telling us that God cares about the individual burden of our suffering. There are cars and pickup trucks and semis rolling alongside us on the highway. Everyone is trying to get somewhere.
27.
In Memphis, the bus drops us on the outskirts of the city. We have been riding for nine hours, passing through towns with names like Cattlesberg and Hurricane and Coalton. We are down to seven dollars and fifteen cents.
We passed the Olympia State Forest and signs for Dinosaur World and I thought about the books in the Hospital library, about asteroids and epidemics and continental drift. In Black Rock, Arkansas, we passed a lake with a tiny forest in the center. I looked into the dense dark trees and wondered what kinds of things might be living in there. In a gas station bathroom, I saw a sign that said USE THE RECOVERY POSITION, with a drawing of one person standing over another and rolling them onto their side.
Somewhere in Tennessee, on I-40, the driver pulled onto the shoulder and got out. What is wrong with these drivers? He stood in the cold, staring at the barbed-wire fence and the snowy field beyond it. The wire points on the fence looked like tiny stars. I watched his breath rise above him in white clouds. The passengers cupped their hands and peered out the frosted windows, waiting for something to happen.
Marcus and I rapped the panes. A few people went out and tried to see what was going on. A woman wanted to get the keys and drive the bus herself, to leave this man behind, if that’s what he wanted, but the driver wouldn’t hand over the keys and no one seemed willing to take them by force.
After two hours, the driver got back on the bus and continued down the highway. No one knew what changed within him, why he stopped in the first place or why he decided to keep driving.
Is there any greater mystery than the separateness of each person?
Now the sun is sinking, another night-soaked arrival in a strange place. That is the pattern of our days, not clock time, but the cycles of light and dark. For a while we walk along a river and Marcus tells me about how, before the sickness, he bounced around shelters in Cambridge, played chess for cash in Harvard Square. He beat the mental patients and the teenage geniuses and the punks and the professors. He had an uncanny ability to predict his opponent’s next move. For a while, he belonged to a group at a community center that was supposed to teach its members life skills, but when they got together all they did was stand around and hug each other.
“You mean like sex?” I say, not wanting to imagine all those lost people groping each other on some musty basement carpet.
“No, I mean like this,” he says, and wraps his arms around my shoulders.
In darkness, we climb a steep hill. We find train tracks to follow and hope they will lead us somewhere, to lights, to people, but everything we pass looks deserted. A string of little houses with screened porches and soft, sunken roofs. Impenetrable thickets of bramble and tree. An abandoned barn.
I remember waiting for the T one night, at a stop where the trains went above ground, and seeing a man with a backpack trudging up the tracks, into the distant dark. I shouted “Watch out for the trains!” and felt ridiculous for warning him of such an obvious danger. Didn’t I know the worst dangers weren’t the obvious ones?
We leave the tracks and head in the direction of the barn. We get snagged on roots, brush against the rough trunks of trees. There is no light anywhere around us.
“Fucking shit,” we say.
We are lost. There is no getting away from that. We decide to sleep in the barn. At least it is a structure, with four walls and a roof. We walk through a doorway that is missing its door, into an enormous space as dark as an underground cave or a black hole in outer space or the Hospital at night.