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.