FOURTEEN
Terminal
Miriam stands in the thick of it.
It's night. She's no longer sure what time. She smells the stink of exhaust as another bus comes and goes, purging its people like a bulimic, then gorging on more. Across the way, sitting on a blue bench is Ashley, who makes an impatient roll of his index finger to say, move, move, move.
Once more, she thinks of running. Maybe just get on a bus and go; not like she hasn't done it before. Her feet stay glued. She's not sure why.
(You like him. You like this. You deserve this.)
The Charlotte downtown bus terminal looks not unlike a giant airplane hangar – open air, big arched canopy, skylights allowing a faint glow from the moon above. It makes her feel very small.
She wades into the crowd, hands out.
Same plan as the last hour, and the hour before that, and the hour before that – her hands graze the hands of others, or she touches an exposed shoulder as someone passes. She takes a step, and –
Three years from now, the woman grips the edges of the hospital bed, soaked with sweat, pushing, pushing, trying to push a bowling ball out a gap the size of a small fist, and the child crowns, a meager mop of wet black hair already on the baby's empurpled head, and the face is out now, and it's covered in something that looks like red ambrosia salad, but then the vitals start going crazy, and a doctor who looks more than a little like Sulu from Star Trek says something about an "obstetrical hemorrhage." A gush of blood, the woman screams, the baby slides out, a raft on red, and flat-line.
Miriam blinks away the image. She steadies herself. Not like she hasn't done this before. She's amazed at how many hospitals she's inadvertently seen the inside of. She lets her bare shoulder brush the shoulder of a man in a tank-top as he reaches in to hug his wife –
The man is alone, thirty-three years from now, in a hospital. He's bald. The cancer's all through him, like rats in the walls. He sits in a chair in the corner and he reaches over to the bedside table and finds a bottle of pills there, and he counts out one, then two, then pauses. He regards these two pills and finally just upends the bottle into his hand and gets maybe two dozen of them, all of which he swallows. He sits there for a while, not feeling anything, just staring at the floor tile, the ceiling, his face looking woefully alone, and he starts to cry; a numbness creeps in around the edges. His head droops. Jaw slackens. Drool oozes. And then
Fine, whatever, Miriam thinks. Guy gets old, gets sick, kills himself. She won't be sad. He makes it to old age, good for him. Most do. That's what she realizes. Most people make it into their sixties and die of some "old person" disease – cancer, stroke, heart attack, cancer, stroke, heart attack, on and on, forever and ever. Throw in a little diabetes. A dash of pneumonia.
Most people don't die young, at least not here in America. Tragedy is unavoidable, but in this country, it doesn't usually come in the way one dies but rather in the way one lives. Failed marriages, fucked-up children, abuse of self, abuse of wife, abuse of dog, loneliness, depression, loathing, yawn, whatever. Congratulations, she thinks, most of you douchebags and assholes are going to live your shitty lives well into your golden years.
Of course, this makes her job more difficult.
Ashley wants her to find a mark. A mark who will die soon, someone they can take for all he's worth. More important, he wants a place to squat. As it turns out, the house up in the middle of nowhere wasn't his; he just ganked the keys from some guy taking an airplane trip overseas. Took the house, settled in residence, hid all the framed photos. Instant bachelor pad.
He figures, if they can find someone who's going to die, who has money, and who has some crash-space for them while they're in town, perfect. He looked at her date book. It didn't have anything in it coming up soon enough for his impatient tastes. Ashley is hungry for more than just food.
So, he said, go somewhere with a lot of people.
Miriam offered: "A dance club." You get lots of people, most of them younger, a lot of them with risky behaviors. Cokesnorters, baseheads, unprotected sex monkeys, drunk drivers, the whole gamut. Ashley said no. Bus station. Let's hit a bus station.
Except, Miriam explained, that's not the best place, because at least half the people aren't coming, they're going. Which means, were she to find someone who was going to bite it soon, she and Ashley wouldn't be on-scene for the event, not unless they wanted to hop a bus to Des Moines. And nobody wants to go to Des Moines.
No, Ashley said. Ashley thought he knew the score. Thought he was so damn smart. She'd been doing this for eight years now, but he's going to tell her a thing or two? Straighten her out, help her to "up her game?"
Fine. Bus station, she conceded. Whatever.
And here they are.
Across the way, he looks impatient. Foot tapping. Head lolling back. Mouth open, catching flies, like this is torture for him. What an asshole, she thinks. Torture. For him.
Hilarious.
By now, she's tired and pissed. She steps off the curb to cross in front of a bus and –
He's on his cycle, a road bike with tires so thin they look like they were squirted out of a pipette, and he's got all his tight Lycra cyclist gear on like he's being sponsored by Goodyear or Kellogg's or some shit, and the tire hits a stone and he skids, flips, and then there's a screeching of brakes and a bumper crashing into him, shattering his hip, and his body (like a marionette whose strings were cut) slides up onto the hood and his helmeted head cracks the windshield and then everything's blurry and black and brain bleeding and
– she turns, finding a man waving to another man, saying goodbye, be they friends or lovers. She doesn't expect it. She was just walking along, lost in her own thoughts, and his hand must have grazed her own. It doesn't help. Yes, he dies. No, it's not tomorrow. One year from now – well, really, one year, two months, and thirteen days. Still. He looks like he has money. It's close enough that she'll consider marking it in her date book later. (If you're around, later…)
Shaking it off, she darts in front of an incoming bus (wondering for a moment, will it hit me? Is this my time?) and steps up to Ashley, who gives her the stink-eye.
"Anything?" he asks.
"This is like fishing without bait."
"So that's a no."
"Yes. No."
He shrugs. "Well, get back out there. Do your… psychic thing."
"This is really your idea of a partnership? You sit on your ass while I go and do the work?"
"My gifts don't come into play until you've hooked a fish, sweetheart."
"Your gifts? Seriously? Spare me. So far, your only gift to this world is that winning smile of yours. Everything else is taking up precious air and space."
"The smile's just the window dressing. But it is a key weapon in my arsenal of charm."
"Arsenal of charm," she repeats. "I'm hungry."
"I don't care."
"You damn well should care."
He yawns. "Listen. We don't have a place to stay. We need a place to stay. When we have shelter, then we'll think about food. Besides, you wouldn't want me to, oh, I don't know, cast you adrift, call the police, call your mother, that sort of thing?"
"I get it. You're holding the cards. Good for you. But quick biology lesson – this girl's gotta eat. I'm human. We humans thrive on food, not to mention liquor and cigarettes. I've got money. Let's hit a Waffle House? Then a motel? It's on me."
He seems to ponder. Then nods. "Fine. Yeah. Let's do it."