“The sense of the world must lie outside of the world. In it, there is no value, — and if there were, it would be of no value.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
The presence of relatives, living or dead, were often evoked in his dreams about travel; and travel captured perfectly his habitual anxious state, even in sleep. With each passing year, separated by time, these relations grew inaccessible to all but the memory of the child who first encountered them. Indeed, Liam was only ever a child when family appeared in his dreams. It was as if the individual in him was no longer dreaming, but instead the gene or, more necessarily, the bloodline.
The anxiety of going somewhere, of traveling to or away from a place with decisions pending about what to pack, or whether impedimenta was possible where logistics dissolved as reason—these were concerns. The child carried little, required little, and bore little regret consequently.
Sometimes Liam flew with his parents in airplanes during these nocturnal journeys, even though he never had occasion to fly with them in real life. Still, these scenarios never quite became full-blown disasters, despite a lifelong fear of heights. Plots never entailed final destinations. Many layovers at sprawling airports were endured, as well as windows looking out onto improbable craft that could no more be viewed as airborne as airworthy. Given how common this type of dream had become with aging, the dreamer wondered if they were rehearsals for a day when the dream should not end, and instead transition into another order. Regardless, the stopping place in each episode could only be imagined as lying in another state, or on the other side of a vast ocean or midnight continent.
The middle child thought of critical hours in the long journey ahead.
Liam rarely made time to reflect on his friendless life, or on his lack of achievement in foregoing friendships and stronger family ties where he claimed industry (distraction) as justification for his solitude. Still, when he traveled into stark, unprotected places, and the concept of the world (his world) frayed a little, he confronted pronounced sadness. It perhaps owed to his meditations on personal deficiencies and failures, as his idle time in transit could not be better employed. This rite of passage, in winter days of little daylight, was never more drawn out and unendurable than times when economics demanded he ride a Greyhound bus home to visit his parents over the holidays:
The midnight scene out a bus window was as dire as the bus interior. Liam eyed the featureless landscape suspiciously. There were few road signs to speak of, or memorable town names to recall. The rental Santa seated next to him carried a Ziplock bag in each gloved hand. One contained a set of dentures and a tube of Polygrip, while the other contained trail mix. He smiled (perhaps in anticipation of his meal), and his ruddy cheeks burned with the low glow of a Duraflame log.
The portly man’s most striking accessory was his boots. Their blue-black shade was of such saturated intensity that they suggested a depth of color that no human eye could faithfully record in any light. They straddled a red Salvation Army kettle in the floorboard filled with bright golden coins like toll road tokens. Perhaps these were foil-wrapped chocolate medallions to be eaten with his trail mix. The jolly old leprechaun guarded his treasure, but sensed his fellow passenger’s nervous preoccupation.
Though neither man would turn and confirm it, a gentleman sat at the rear of the bus against a window and flourished a cigarette. No smoking was allowed on the bus, obviously, but the driver made no attempt to reproach this man; and the man made no essay to conceal his activity.
Particularly, there was something in this passenger’s silhouette that frightened Liam. The glowing tip of his cigarette surged and dimmed repeatedly; and with each brightening, the contrast increased between light and shadow and made the fellow’s outline both vacant and flat. Broad-stroke details were comprehended only in the artist’s peripheral vision since he could not bring himself to scowl at the smoker. It was an inexplicable decision, as if the person in question wielded influence over the bus and all who rode it.
These occupants behind Liam acquired his anxiousness, as by contagion. He could not say if these individuals were costumed, like the Santa, but his sense was that each wore unusual attire. Were these handmade costumes? This unpleasant impression stayed in the tail of his eye, where the indefinite shadows waxed and waned conspiratorially.
These concealments were crude and hastily assembled, and were compared (as leisure invited comparison) to the Celtic practice of fashioning costumes for children, both monstrous guises and guises intended to conceal gender. A trick was played on elementals, changelings, and the vengeful dead that roamed All Hallow’s Eve looking for children to steal or devour. The idea was to disguise the offspring and have them parody (mum) the demons in pranks and thus be mistaken for one and spared. The conduct was brassy, even comical, and extended as far as spitting on newborns in mock curses to convince fairies they were ugly and not worth the bother of snatching from their cradles.
No one seated in front of the leery puzzler wore a costume; but no one in this company looked over their shoulders, either. The smoking man cast a spell over these passengers, too.
The Santa seemed neither threatened nor threatening, and the side-by-side travelers possibly sat on a critical boundary in the middle of the bus. Regardless, the corpulent man was aware of more than he was telling in his side glances. The substance of which he communicated with an offhand remark. “The Lord moves in mysterious ways, but the Devil always rides coach.”
Liam searched for distraction. “Is this a new road?” he asked.
“A brand new stretch of interstate,” the riding companion cheered, “but no place to stop and pee.”
Ionized cloud cover indicated the approach of a small town.
Saint Nick leaned in with a reaching, serious glare. “Under no circumstances look through the back window of the bus, at least not until we reach Kentucky. After we cross The Ohio River, then you must look in no other direction than backwards.“
CHAPTER
The traveler roused from a wretched half-sleep near the midpoint of an insalubrious transformation, and with a backache from the unforgiving seat. The last of the passengers were disembarking from the bus over the hiss of air brakes. Santa was gone, having crawled over the sleeper with more delicacy that would have been thought for a large man carrying a bucket of plunder.
Similarly, nothing was seen of the smoker, or of any of the costumed passengers he had imagined. The mummers had scattered in the halogen light: to first a Cincinnati bound-bus and then to the empty street. None of the transfers were seen to stretch their legs or use the bathroom facilities. Liam was not of this mind, and disembarked.
It was always the witching hour when he arrived in Paducah, Kentucky. Entering the dingy lobby, several quarters were tapped together like castanets before they were dropped into a vending machine; an iced pastry fell through the chute. It was a tasteless decoy planted along the trailside to transition skittish pilgrims out of a familiar world and into another that bore little resemblance to experience. The treat was perhaps a soul cake, one left months after Allhallowtide.
A similar gesture was made at the drink machine, but Liam was late acknowledging a glacial drip, which made retrieval of his canned beverage complicated. It took several kicks at daggers of ice to free the refreshment. The carbonated drink was predictably flat, since it must have been ages since a vendor was on the premises. The diet soda was poured down the basin bowl in the men’s bathroom as an offering.
Seeing the backseat unoccupied, the passenger seized it and its legroom. The lingering smell of tobacco smoke in the plastic upholstery was tolerated. Moreover, he faced backwards to piece together his steps thus far, including the mystery outlined by the itinerant Santa.
Once the Greyhound bus pulled away from the terminal, the roof of a two-story department store of some regional significance came into view; Nativity figures occupied its portico. Two elderly African-American women sat several rows in front of Liam and marveled at a paraselene effect in their grimy window: streetlights became the halos of attending angels by their reckoning.
The city’s solitary skyscraper appeared after several surgical turns of the lunging vehicle. It revealed a display of holiday lights. Amid them, custodial staff was seen cleaning office cubicles on mid-level floors. In one window, an unmanned floor polisher whipped around, banging into the plate glass and entangling itself in its own chord.
The inky rural landscape gradually encroached from all sides, and rushed these suspended vignettes under its garlands of colored bulbs. This arrangement of lights coalesced with distance to form a lit candle in a candlestick holder decorated with holly sprigs. The bright display stretched from the second floor of the building to the twelfth, yet its scale created mere minutes of relief in the closing void that was rural, moonless Kentucky.
Soon the holiday lights were forgotten, and only an occasional sodium vapor light attached to a phone pole punched holes in the black, unrelenting forgetfulness. There the glow provided relief to the odd barn door or relic tractor plow, and one was readily convinced that nothing else existed in this galaxy’s spent spiral arm. The Holy round Virgin was somewhere out there, beyond Mayfield and Murray, bearing, within her, an end to thirteen billion years of isolation.
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