Waiting rooms. White and Colored.
When you are powerless, something can happen to you and afterwards it has not happened. For you, it happened, but somehow they remember it differently, or don’t remember it at all. You can tell them, but it slips their minds. When you are powerless, everything you do seems to be in vain. You stow your bag, show your ticket, climb the steps. All the sinners climb aboard. You shuffle down the aisle to your seat and pluck at the little concertinaed curtain that does not block out the sun. Days spent with your forehead pressed against window glass. Nights turning your shoulder, trying to get comfortable, feeling the cold air freezing your neck. Your road seems dark. Your path is not clear. You only feel alive when you pass a source of light, driving through a town, pulling in for a rest stop. Your trace on the window, on all the windows the same horizontal smear. The grease of unhappy foreheads.
I got off in small towns, my pack landing in the dust. The driver pulling out the cases, throwing the cases in the dust. The bus terminals of small towns. Hunched sleepers and vending machines. The driver’s peaked cap, pushed up high on his head.
Sweating in the heat, throwing out the cases. I fish in my pocket for a quarter. The TV eats the coin, shows strobing shadows, ghost heads…heiress Leonie Wallace’s death at a motel in rural Mississippi, where she was found after what appears to have been an overdose of sleeping pills. Wallace was one of the heirs to a $10 billion global logistics empire. Her shares in Wallace Corp. stock were worth a reported $80 million. In a statement to media, a company spokesman said that they were not able to rule out suicide at this time. Now, friends and family are asking themselves why the beautiful and wealthy artist would feel so bereft of hope for the future.
I pass through the world, but I leave no trace. Leonie’s death is a suicide. I was never her brother’s friend. Money says our friendship never happened. Money says that I was never really alive at all. The Wallace family, struck by a double tragedy. The suicide of their daughter, a senseless attack on their son. Dignified in their grief, they appear in long lens pictures taken at the crematorium. I do not see how I can win, not against them. They are too old in the game.
They believe in me, the Wallaces. They believe in me enough to pay me money. Charlie Shaw believes in me too. I know that I am only provisionally, tenuously alive, caught like a bird, a bubble, in whatever reality has been imagined for me. I wonder where it will come from, what direction. How my death will come and fill me up. I look for people following me. I make ATM transactions for variable amounts, at irregular intervals.
Sleeping on plastic seats in bus terminals. Standing in the doorways of dead theaters, consumed by shame. The police kicking the sole of your boot to wake you up.
—Where you headed, sir?
—I hold a valid ticket.
Standing by the dumpster, watching them taser a man outside a 7-Eleven. All the men on the ground outside 7-Elevens. All the spilled Big Gulp cups, all the ice sprayed across the concrete.
I make ATM transactions just before I leave town. Only then.
My inquiries are, of necessity, discreet. By asking questions, I put myself in breach of the family’s terms and without their money I will starve. But I don’t really have a choice. Move on, they said. Move along. As if everything had been settled. Nothing has been settled. Nothing is over. I take what precautions I can. I call from public pay phones. I scout locations before I use them. Exits, lines of flight. If I sense any anomalies, any wavering in the fabric of the present, I pull out.
—Yes, the inmate’s name is Shaw. Charles Shaw. What agency? I’m sorry I don’t have that. Well, yes that’s why I’m calling you. That would be who? The Metro police? And you’re. Oh, I see. Well, can you put me through. Yes. Hello is this. I am seeking information on. What do you mean you can’t see him in your system? If I could what? Surely you have that information. I’m an ordinary private citizen. Why would I need to tell you something you already know. Surely you hold that hello hello hello
Secrets are shared at the back of long-distance buses. Whispers and confessions. A young couple furtively masturbate each other under a blanket. A fat woman clutches a prayer card. The back of the bus is a place of lottery tickets and ritual candles, fast luck and money drawing, because all the riders know it would take a miracle for good fortune to settle on these shiny fabric seats. Twenty weeks of lottery numbers for twenty dollars. If that’s the best you can do, maybe you even borrow the twenty dollars. You buy the rabbit’s foot, the reputed swallow’s heart. You sprinkle a little powder, add a root to your bag. You ride and you try to be careful, but however still or silent you make yourself, there is always the risk that someone will turn their eye on you. People are bored on buses. They will break down any wall. I lost my apartment lost my car lost my dogs I’m in the navy visiting my kids my moms down in Florida see that on my arm I got that in my tag name is but my government name