It Began on the Wrong Bus Stop

Story by Bryan Wang

| AUTUMN 2019 ISSUE | FICTION

A tall bus driver looks to the taillights of the next car, staring as though they could tell more than two seconds after a coughing engine. They grumble a phrase without explanation, but inquire for another word: where am I, and why am I here, and why are we not alongside one another? How is the world not itself an hour ago, when it’s an hour passed in the same town? Nor does a brick in any building look any different.

My feet land on the lowest step, below the bus floor. I can’t see the color of traffic or where I am—driver or shotgun side, on which the blinker is flashing. I am standing, where immediately outside there’s a bus stop for another route. I am waiting for any kind of salutation, and from a stranger nonetheless. When he speaks, he says to drop in the bus fare, but I have trouble moving my fingers like they’re wrapped in thick gloves. They would rather stay in the cold than leave this place. This tired, gray bus stop. But quarters fall and they clink together. One bounces and it spins, a cradle tossed off a steep hill… it is crushed by the other three coins. 

The driver speaks again. I think he’s annoyed. He grunts take a seat before the light turns green when the bus starts to move. I’m staggering, supine, hands grasping for the rail but they grasp nothing, but I am grasped by the ground. It smells like gum stuck to the bottom of a trash can. I hear laughter. Or is it the sound of the wind from a cracked window? Do I see people or only the shadows of lamposts? They are all dark and obscured though they sit like humans: some with both arms tucked behind their head, some with crossed legs, some with their heads merged to share a secret or a secret kiss. 

Remembering is a word that galls me. When I remember things they are less perfect and less kind, more gray and more shadows, the darkest part of a bruised cloud. Have you ever tried? It’s not something I would recommend because it is trying to outrun the ocean waves sliding across shells, slipped over the sandy beach, then your toes, white froth between them like large tears.

It is an ocean outside. I hear the sounds when my ear glances a metal pole, and there’s a ring to it. I hear tires on the black road, mantles that buckle with heavy steps. I hear tapping by the window and wonder who it is. Rain? Or am I carving a cliché into something that works? No, it’s raining, pouring even, but in the bus the only rain sound is a light pattering. A soft storm. Drained, purified, dark rich petrichor in a cup. I wish I could drink from that cup, have a day’s lows blended into something smooth that I could imbibe with small sips.

There’s a woman who sits in the seat in front of me, dressed in purple pastels, ramrod straight like a tulip. She takes a drink from a tumbler that smells like coffee with cream—there’s something nostalgic in the smell, a noncommittal detail to others but evokes words from my lips. Now I’m speaking to whoever will listen, although I hope it is her. Hello? Ma’am. Remember me? Remember the way our hands fit like a jigsaw puzzle? Remember matching hearts in mood rings? Remember when the verdant hills were not green but we pretended they were? We were on a picnic flying kites, our strings got caught in each other and I in you and we were like that sprawled on the grass with no one watching but the cows.

Remembering is a word that galls me. When I remember things they are less perfect and less kind, more gray and more shadows, the darkest part of a bruised cloud.

Of course, I never say these words. They are locked in my chest. She gets off at the next stop and says thank you to the tall man who tips his hat and smiles, and then she’s not there but at a turn’s crosswalk, at another there, which, regardless, isn’t here. It’s all the same. I’m left staring at where she sat. I’m left staring, without a word: that’s how it happened before. Even cliches, even if I couldn’t bend them one way or another, I should’ve said something. Something, isn’t it? Isn’t it better than nothing?

Then there’s Nothing Street where the bus stops for a group of students, the crossguard waves her stop sign, backpacks half the size of their owners meander between white lines. I remember dreams I had at the age of seven—dreams of the girl I would marry and our house away in the mountains. I know when the dreams stopped, when they started, when they got better or worse, so “would today be another bad dream?” I ask myself, though it’s not my choice anyhow. Not even in my head is it possible to choose a different dream like a movie. There’s no remote, really no control, is there. Not outside, with too many things doing and thinking, merely existing; keeping track of them all never works out the way I want it to because at least one thing goes off the rails. Oh. It’s the tall man again. He’s staring out the windshield looking bored, thinking nothing matters but what’s inside the bus. Perhaps he’s still thinking of the lady who left at the last stop, can’t get the smell of flowers out of his nose. I can only imagine. 

The bus stops intermittently, with figures swapped out and arranged differently in the seats, but ultimately nothing’s really changed. Homeostasis put on these six wheels. I wish I could pack a bus in a bag to rest in, rocked by subtle accelerations, the engine humming like a heater. To stay in transition. That’s my only compliment for this bus before we drive past the tip of the last raincloud. The subsiding rainfall had first informed me we were no longer in the thick of things, that the ride was coming to an end; the white crosswalk, residual coffee smells, then the wrong bus stop by the traffic light, red again, like a swollen lantern dangled down through the darkness, the only difference between now and who knows how long ago, when it was green. 

The driver looks at the windshield. I see his eyes gaze into mine in the reflection. I stare back, and everything becomes secondary, splits into copies of themselves so that with the sways of the bus, the double contours also sway. 

“You should be getting off,” says the driver. And I’m still sitting there, not saying a word. And I’m still staring, beyond the glass, searching for prognostications, a piece of the future encoded across those symbols on license plates. I look outside and there’s the wrong bus stop, and so is the next one and the next perpetually because there’s no stopping.

“Some other time,” I manage, and look away. The light turns green. The driver grunts. He presses the gas pedal and the bus lurches forward, an iteration where my head touches the seat cushion and not the pole. I look outside again and see the bus stop slowly recede into a black line, like a jettisoned memory. When it’s sunrise, it’ll glow pink, because even memories are being shaped through time. I’m waiting for that sunrise. For now we continue to drive and maybe catch the rain. I will know we have when the air smells like coffee again.