The Last Resort

There were two days left in April the day Jackson boarded the bus. It was evening and the warm Houston dusk was swelling like a bruise, from blue to black. Whiffs of drying tar and severed grass careened with pollen in the breeze like suns in a broken universe. He stepped on gnawing an apple and yawning, feeling blank. He was drunk on the punch of Spring, spiked with adrenaline and a cheap sense of progress after a whirlwind of yard sales and internet liquidation that had consumed everything from the material facts to the dreaming embers of his discounted little property of existence. Many things flowed into his heart and mingled at the mouth of feeling, canceling each other out and making him yawn.

He had never traveled this light. Instead of luggage he had only a thin, sand-colored jacket, a three-month-old copy of Vogue he had lifted from a salon an hour ago and an mp3 player. The cleanliness of the bus surprised him. He chose a seat by a window near the back and dipped approvingly into a soft, ink-colored cushion, which reminded him of one of his daughter's plush animals. The windows were tinted in grim indigo and the twilight poured through them onto the blue seats, dyeing them a made-up, cerulean shade. All that blue and humidity made it seem to Jackson that the blood was being drained from everything while soaking in a warm bath.

He was the first on and watched the following arrivals in limp curiosity. Together, their facial expressions formed a dour bouquet and had a shared vanilla quality - nice enough but colorless. He lost interest in people watching almost immediately. Like Jackson, none of them carried any bags and boarding for the entire bus was finished in a leisurely ten minutes. He noticed there were no luggage compartments. A vehicle for detachment, he thought. He turned and looked out at the asphalt lot, which was now lit ghoulishly by incandescent lampposts and the runny half-egg of the cracking sun. As soon as he had turned, he felt a familiar peripheral pull and looked back just in time to see the crest of a redhead settle into a seat four rows up. Beautiful women have their own magnetism, like planets, he thought. Then, I should write that down. He reached for a trusted notebook that had saved the life of so many fragile phrases but remembered he had just thrown it away; and then why. He sunk back into his seat, learning for the first time of his affection for that little notebook and its grave, funereal attire of black leather binding and white paper collar.

Night finished falling and the bus belched a diesel smell before gliding gumpily onto the expressway. After an hour or so of brain-dead window gazing, which consisted of watching black blurring, he tried and failed to read his women's magazine, yawning more than ever as he did. It was written in the language of human interest, a code he now found uncrackable, not to mention slightly indecent, and he buried it in the seat pouch in front of him. He turned to the mp3 player for help and scrolled the wheel of options coldly before settling on a recording of the later, more famously difficult, Beethoven string quartets, which he hadn't had a chance to listen to yet. He nestled his ear buds in, smudged his forehead against the window and pressed play. Within seconds, he stopped it and sat up. What the hell? He had just been listening to an assortment of whines and scrapes - audio nonsense that wasn't, the way a foreign language sounds indecipherable yet organized. There was no way he was going to spend this drive trying to get into that. Forget you, Beethoven, he thought while he rolled the wheel trying to find something more famailiar. He chose for comfort: the sound of the California Dream itself, Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street." He pressed play with confidence, slouching toward the window, but stopped mid-lean. Track one, while still smothered in an expected honey of layered harmonies, was a garble; opaque and, somehow, maddeningly impossible to concentrate on. Have I lost my mind? he wondered, fuming more from irritation at the indignity of this small loss of control - today of all days, this trip of all trips - than actual worry about his brains. He was reminded of the Bible story of the Tower of Babel where an enterprising community had tried to build a ladder to the stars and God, in the limitless pettiness of his Old Testament style, had thwarted them by scrambling their speech and leaving them stammering like idiot chickens. Lately it seemed everything reminded him of Bible stories.

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