‘Yes,’ Kat said. ‘Actually, I do. Now.’ She left Melissa sitting by the branch and went to Rideout. She checked for a pulse and found nothing, not even the wild waver of a heart that is still trying its best. Rideout’s pain, it seemed, was over.
The generator went out.
‘Fuck,’ Newsome said, still sounding cheery. ‘I paid seventy thousand dollars for that piece of Jap shit.’
‘I need someone to flush my eyes!’ Jensen bellowed ‘Kat!’
Kat opened her mouth to reply, then didn’t. In the new darkness, something had crawled onto the back of her hand.
For Russ Dorr
Public appearances aren’t my favorite thing. When I stand before an audience, I always feel like an imposter. It isn’t that I’m a solitary person, although I am, at least to a degree; I can drive from Maine to Florida by myself and feel perfectly content. It isn’t stage fright, either, although I still feel it when I step in front of two or three thousand people. That is an unnatural situation for most writers. We’re more accustomed to appearing before dedicated library groups of three dozen. That feeling of being the wrong person in the wrong place derives chiefly from knowing that whoever – or whatever – the audience came to see won’t be there. The part of me that creates the stories exists only in solitude. The one who shows up to share anecdotes and answer questions is a poor substitute for the story-maker.
In November of 2011, I was being driven to my final appearance in Paris at Le Grand Rex, seating capacity 2,800. I felt nervous and out of place. I was in the backseat of a big black SUV. The streets were narrow and the traffic was heavy. I had my little sheaf of papers – a few remarks, a short reading – in a folder on my lap. At a stoplight we pulled up beside a bus, the two large vehicles snugged together so tightly they were almost touching. I looked in one of the bus windows and saw a woman in business dress, possibly headed home from work. I wished momentarily that I was sitting beside her, headed home myself, ready for a spot of dinner followed by a couple of hours reading a book in a comfy chair with good light, instead of being driven to a sold-out theater full of fans whose language I did not speak.
Perhaps la femme felt my gaze. More likely she was just bored with her newspaper. In any case, she raised her head and looked over at me, only feet away. Our eyes met. What I imagined I saw in hers was a wistful wish to be in the fancy SUV, going someplace where there would be lights and laughter and entertainment instead of back to her apartment, where there would be nothing but a small meal, perhaps taken from the freezer and heated up, followed by the evening news and the same old TV sitcoms. If we could have changed places, both of us might have been happier.
Then she looked back down at her newspaper and I looked back down at my folder. The bus went one way, the SUV another. But for a moment we were close enough to peer into each other’s worlds. I thought of this story, and when I got back from my overseas tour, I sat down and wrote it in a burst.
That Bus Is Another World
Wilson’s mother, not one of the world’s shiny happy people, had a saying: ‘When things go wrong, they keep going wrong until there’s tears.’
Mindful of this, as he was of all the folk wisdom he’d learned at his mother’s knee (‘An orange is gold in the morning and lead at night’ was another gem), Wilson was careful to take out travel insurance – which he thought of as bumpers – ahead of occasions that were particularly important, and no occasion in his adult life was more important than his trip to New York, where he would present his portfolio and his pitch to the top brass at Market Forward.
MF was one of the most important advertising firms of the Internet age. Wilson’s company, Southland Concepts, was just a one-man outfit based in Birmingham. Such chances as this didn’t come around twice, which made a bumper vital. That was why he arrived at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport at 4:00 a.m. for a 6:00 a.m. nonstop. The flight would put him into LaGuardia at nine twenty. His meeting – actually an audition – was scheduled for two thirty. A five-hour bumper seemed travel insurance enough.
At first, all went well. The gate attendant checked and got approval for Wilson to store his portfolio in the first-class closet, although Wilson himself was of course flying coach. In such matters the trick was to ask early, before people started getting hassled. Hassled folks didn’t want to hear about how important your portfolio was; how it might be the ticket to your future.
He did have to check one suitcase, because if he turned out to be a finalist for the Green Century account (and that could happen, he was actually very well positioned), he might be in New York for ten days. He had no idea how long the winnowing process would take, and he didn’t want to send his clothes out to the hotel laundry any more than he intended to order meals from room service. Hotel extras were expensive in all big cities, and gruesomely expensive in the Big Apple.
Things didn’t start going wrong until the plane, which took off on time, reached New York. There it took its place in an overhead traffic jam, circling and pogoing in gray air over that point of arrival the pilots so rightly called LaGarbage. There were not-so-funny jokes and outright complaints, but Wilson remained serene. His travel insurance was in place; his bumper was thick.
The plane landed at ten thirty, slightly over an hour late. Wilson proceeded to the luggage carousel, where his bag did not appear. And did not appear. And did not appear. Finally he and a bearded old man in a black beret were the only ones left, and the last unclaimed items remaining on the carousel were a pair of snowshoes and a large travel-stained plant with drooping leaves.
‘This is impossible,’ Wilson told the old man. ‘The flight was nonstop.’
The old man shrugged. ‘Must have mistagged them in Birmingham. Our shit could be on its way to Honolulu by now, for all we know. I’m toddling over to Lost Luggage. Want to accompany me?’
Wilson did, thinking of his mother’s saying. And thanking God he still had his portfolio.
He was halfway through the Lost Luggage form when a baggage handler spoke up from behind him. ‘Does this belong to either of you gentlemen?’
Wilson turned and saw his tartan suitcase, looking damp.
‘Fell off the back of the baggage-train,’ the handler said, comparing the claim check stapled to Wilson’s ticket folder to the one on the suitcase. ‘Happens once in a while. You should take a claim form in case something’s broken.’
‘Where’s mine?’ asked the old man in the beret.
‘Can’t help you there,’ the handler said. ‘But we almost always find them in the end.’
‘Yeah,’ the old man said, ‘but the end is not yet.’
By the time Wilson left the terminal with his suitcase, portfolio, and carry-on bag, it was closing in on eleven thirty. Several more flights had arrived in the meantime, and the taxi queue was long.
I have a bumper, he soothed himself. Three hours is plenty. Also, I’m under the overhang and out of the rain. Count your blessings and relax.
He rehearsed his pitch as he inched forward, visualizing each oversize showcard in his portfolio and reminding himself to be cool. To mount his very best charm offensive and put the potentially enormous change in his fortunes out of his mind the minute he walked into 245 Park Avenue.
Green Century was a multinational oil company, and its ecologically optimistic name had become a liability when one of its undersea wells had popped its top not far from Gulf Shores, Alabama. The gush had not been quite as catastrophic as the one following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but bad enough. And oh dear, that name. The late-night comedians had been having a ball with it. (Letterman: ‘What’s green and black and crap all over?’) The Green Century CEO’s first public whiny response – ‘We have to go after the oil where it is, you’d think people would understand that’ – had not helped; an Internet cartoon showing an oil well poking out of the CEO’s ass with his words captioned below had gone viral.