He walked neither quickly nor slowly, aware of being observed, his pace determined by the tension of appearing unconcerned. It was still possible that the two men were following him, that someone was, and that when he reached a properly remote spot, he would get the beating that was coming to him. And worse perhaps, trying to conceive what might be worse. He was walking toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
The lights burned. The ticket windows like a gargantuan network of nerve cells with the skin (as in a biology diagram) stripped away. The rawness of the place, the needle glow of the lights as if the outer skin of the bulb had been removed, suited Curt. The needs of his mood. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to, conceive of a place more congenial to the way he was feeling. He basked in the raw lights like a convalescent on a Florida beach.
When he went into the waiting room to sit down, suddenly exhausted from the weight of the day, he had a ticket in his pocket for Tucson, Arizona. Since the bus for Tucson wasn’t leaving for another four and a half hours, he had time to think over what he hadn’t yet decided to do. The waiting room was mostly empty. Six people, seven including Curt, were scattered about — no two together — as if they had been blown into the rows of hard wooden seats by an arbitrary wind. Curt looked around, comforted by the isolated presence of others, yawned. He let his eyes shut for a moment, recognizing the darkness as a landscape he had spent a good part of his life in. He didn’t mean to go to sleep, resisting the urge, the need, but to no avail.
Saw himself at the White House, knighted by the President, an enormous silver medal placed around his neck, then he was standing up before the cameras to denounce the war, all wars, war itself. A gallery of his students, Christopher among them, cheering, clapping, throwing things — paper airplanes, firecrackers, tomatoes, small animals, the corpses of children.
He awoke with a sense of urgency fifteen minutes before the departure time of his bus. Disoriented, he rushed — made frantic by exhaustion — to the center of the terminal, trying to recall as he ran where he was supposed to go. A series of numbers flashed through his mind, some relevant to his life, some not. A phone number haunted him, stayed with him indelibly — his father’s number (his own), the house they moved from after his mother died twenty-one years ago.
He went from platform to platform, too rushed to ask directions. (Where was he supposed to be?) The signs intrigued him, the places that people were going. Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, California, North and South Dakota — exotic places to a man who was born in Connecticut and had spent most of his adult life in New York City. A bus, not his, scheduled for Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Des Moines, and Denver was boarding as he went past. For the hell of it, he got at the end of the line, five people ahead of him. Denver. He had visions of mountain lakes, of lying on his back in a canoe, of bathing nude under a waterfall. There would be no talk of war, no television films of corpses in Denver. Unfortunately, the ticket he had in his pocket was for Tucson, another place altogether. Watching the woman ahead of him — the tension sharpening him like a pencil — he planned his move.
“Say, when do we get to Denver, Mac?” he asked the driver, who punched a hole in his ticket — the hand faster than the eye — and returned it, mumbling the information without looking up. Curt thanked the driver and went, overflowing with secret pleasure, his face determinedly blank, to the back of the bus, where he found a window seat, the last one available.
He let the seat tilt back as far as it would go and, painfully tired, closed his eyes. The fear of discovery, the needles of sweat on his neck, kept him alert. It was only when the bus began to move that he relaxed and let his tiredness overtake him. He slept, the bus rocking him, and in his dreams he was a child again.
It was light — a DRINK MILK ad on a billboard the first thing he saw — when he awoke. Telephone poles limped by, impassive exiles. He had the sense, watching the landscape recede as if it were in motion, that he was getting away with something, had already perhaps gotten away with it. Whatever it was.
He demanded of his mouth a smile, a benign charismatic figure, turning to the woman next to him, who had a sleeping child of two or three on her lap. He was a man free of the importunities of the past. The woman nodded to Curt, then looked away. He held onto his smile, saw it reflected back at him, mockingly, it seemed, in the glaze of the window. Who do you think you are to get away? the eyes said. He wondered dimly what Christopher and Rosemary were saying about him, what they would think of his disappearance. The baby next to him began to cry. Wherever it was he was going, it would take a while. Through the dust of his reflection, Curt saw something amazing with antlers — ah! a lovely thing — then a field of cows, telephone poles, some geese or ducks, a red farmhouse, receding into the distance, feeling the loss of things he had never known as they passed from sight.
FIFTEEN
ON THE SUBWAY, hanging from a strap like a piece of meat on a hook, floating. Being pressed against, owned, used against himself. His other hand on someone’s leg, flesh for flesh. The train starting, stopping. The lights out, on. The fan over his head whirring, cutting hands from wrists. A sour-lipped woman shaking her head at him. Made in God’s image. We are all, each one (God help us!), made in God’s image.
He opened the collar of the blue knit shirt that had belonged to Parks, his neck heavy with sweat. Would she recognize the shirt as his, as Parks’? He worried that she would confuse the two of them, but saw that in the long run it didn’t matter.
Rosemary wearing a blue bathrobe, her hair like a jungle, when she opened the door. She let him in without asking who it was, without looking to see.
She held her finger to her lips, latched the door silently behind him.
“Get dressed,” he whispered, his throat thick.
She was back in a few minutes — he had no sense of her being gone — in a blouse and shorts. “I have a razor, Chris, if you want to shave.”
“Pack it in a bag and take some clothes to change into.” He felt his stubble with his fingers, surprised at its thickness. Everything, even the hair under his skin, was out of control.
Her eyes impassive, heavy, she went into her room to pack. He sat by the window, looking out. Felt lonely.
Watched a little girl squatting in the grass, holding a headless rubber doll in her arms, rocking it. A police car went by. He forced himself to look, framed in the window — a matter of will — until the police were gone.
Come on, come on. Let’s go.
“Rosemary,” Aunt Imogen called from her room, “is someone there?”
Rosemary, carrying a tote bag, emerged from her room, wearing a denim skirt over her shorts. Led him, no questions asked, to her car, a skin-colored Volkswagen, holding the key out to him on her finger.
He took the wheel though he had no license, but after a few blocks he pulled over to the side and changed places with her. “Do you know how to get to the Washington Bridge?” he said. “I can’t keep my eyes open.”
“You’ll have to give me directions, Chris.”
He closed his eyes — a car swerving toward them, a madwoman sitting on the hood, winking at him.
“Be careful,” he warned her, his eyes splitting open as if they were being born, clamping shut.