I don't remember getting on the bus or where I was trying to go, but I woke from a pleasurable dream in which I was courting a librarian from Napa with orange hair, inviting her to dance with me in a nostalgic, 1950's style gymnasium complete with Lettermen Jackets. Our vehicle slammed into a pothole and my coffee erupted from its container and burned my leg.
I brushed and sighed. The city didn't end. It was smoggy and gritty, oriental characters slashing in fluorescent the monotonous world. It wove the rural within the urban, as if the city simply folded outward and accepted the people as they were, constructing austere buildings around or over them. There were 20 story buildings with dirt roads underneath. There were water buffalo in the alleys, chickens clumsily dropping from balconies, naked children bathing in effluent next to ornate water fountains and businessmen milling about sipping espressos briefcases exploding with blueprints for textile mills.
My watch said it was 0100 in Los Angeles, which meant... I had no idea. My meteorological aptitude told me it was early afternoon. The bus stopped and I moved toward the window as ghost from the pages of National Geographic sat, hugging a sack of ripe onions.
The window was dirty and I wiped it with the sleeve of my jacket. There was no map on the bus. A plane rose in the sky. I was east of the airport, which sprawled across an island in the center of the harbor. A river fed the harbor. The river ran north-south, east-west, and returned north-south before dissolving into the mountains. There were mountains all around, even where the ocean should be, maybe island-mountains, some snow-capped, some with dry evergreens. And the same bleak bundle of high-rises cropped up after the same vestigial patch of rice between the naked ideas of construction. I was utterly lost.
I spread my briefcase across my lap and checked the schedule, which was useless since I had no idea about either time or date. Fourteen hundred on the 12th was a meeting with a manufacturer of mid-quality lenses. My phone had refused to work, initially sending out random text messages to the most unused memories in my contacts, then updating my social media subscriptions with past desperations to old girlfriends, creating a meaningless haiku of my life. As I sat next to the ghost with the wet onions, the phone crooned a tune from my music library and the battery melted.
The bus settled to a stop and sagged and a disheveled peasant shuffled off and a man carrying a bicycle tried to enter but the driver stood and pushed him off, then closed the door and we were off again. I pulled out a portfolio containing the notes made during a meeting in Pasadena, California. The notes, however, were doodles of busty women with dildos and sketches of flying fishes I'd seen on a tour off Catalina Island that summer with a woman with a history of failed anal sex.
At the next stop three young Saudi terrorists with ratty beards debarked and an old man with a cane hobbled on, he sat across from us and seemed to simply die. The driver shut the door and put his feet up and began to read the newspaper. No one noticed.
I began to stand, the woman's hands groping at me as she tried to communicate through a disgusting pit of blackened teeth and gums. I moved past and asked the driver where we were but he didn't understand. I sighed and looked outside. We didn't seem to be in any hurry so I took a step down and waited for the door to open. It didn't. Over my shoulder the driver had folded his paper and was shaking his head slowly in the negative. He spoke. I pushed against the door.
The air was cool, overcast. So much particulate pollution marred this alien nation that you could literally taste it on your skin like an amphibian.
I walked across the road to take a piss in a stand of waist high grass reminiscent of an idyllic Kansas prairie, except there were New York style buildings offering shadows. I unzipped and sighed, waiting. The pills were so nice. They just sort of softened everything. In the post-apocalypse there would be survivors who would canabalize each other and people who would either be food or instantly die corresponding to their supply of first world food, drugs, and air conditioning. I was unquestioningly one of the latter.
I zipped and walked away, stopping to stretch and watch the tall weeds. I thought of the hotel and those soft sheets, watching CNN International, and letting the world fly by.
The bus was gone. I scanned the street. There was no trace. My briefcase, holding its useless agendas and memos, was gone with it. I looked back wondering if I had somehow gotten turned around underneath the concrete towers and weeds. That wasn't possible. I sat on the curb where the bus had been and waited, perhaps it'd return?
I closed my eyes and a meaningless void passed. I tried to think of what this could mean. Why was I here? Why did they send me here? How did I get stranded? Stranded from every sense of understanding—place, time, date, language, purpose, etc? Was I religious? Was there any more purpose than a innate process of things? A formula of structure?
The bus had come from the left so I rose and began to walk that way. Children, their bellies fat from malnutrition would stare from the weeds under the tall buildings and I'd walk on. I watched for busses, trains, taxi's, rickshaws, horses, or any form of transportation that would take me home, the hotel, where ever that was, but there was nothing. The streets were vacant, only those fat children staring from the waist high weeds.
The road narrowed and ended at a ditch. I didn't understand. We had come from this direction and there had been no other roads. A concrete barrier stood on the opposite side of the ditch and I could not see directly over it, only viewing the cranes of construction towers someone in London, New York or Beijing was orchestrating.
A boy sat over an irrigation ditch and fished into a cesspool. A tire sat at the edge and current had collected algae and swirls of tiny white Styrofoam. We stared at each other and I asked the child if he had any ecstasy.
I walked to the opposite side of the street back toward the bus stop, double-checking there were no side streets or alleys the bus might have snuck through. Instead of weeds there were fresh slabs of concrete with circular grates holding fresh saplings. The storefront windows were empty. Rolls of carpet awaited workers to unfurl and staple them to the floor.
There were alleys but none wide enough for the bus to squeeze through. If there was one bus, there had to be more. I crossed the street and sat on the curb and waited, loosening my tie and folding my jacket across my lap, counting the little currency that remained.
Time passed and nothing happened, nothing. I put my head on my knees and waited and there were no birds in the sky, no cars, no pedestrians, not even the wind brushed past to keep me company. I rose and crossed the street and walked through an alley to a street beyond.
It reminded me of a country road of my youth and as I inspected the material below—broken with soft dirt between, I expected my cousin's cornfield to lie beyond; I could smell it, feeling the sunshine and summer wind on my skin, my first girlfriend in a flowing dress... Instead, there was a long, modern building with reflective glass. I looked back at myself.
"Hello?" I said and laughed, then shouted, "HELLO!" and listened to the echo bounce off my reflection and around the urban canyon.
I heard a response and turned, there was a man standing in the center of the empty street, a backpacker, dirty, disheveled, Caucasian, I hurried toward him as he lazily strolled down the street.
He had a beard and his hair stuck with grease. The belt from his pack was buckled over his hips.
"Go'day mate," he said, Australian.
I asked about the bus.
"The bus?" he asked.
I agreed, "the bus," I said.
He pulled back and looked up at the dull grey sky, as if that would offer anything. I waited as he bit his lip, thinking. "Reckon I dunno mate," he offered like the result of complex calculus.
"No, I took a bus here, I'm from Los Angeles and I'm here on business, I took a bus here and got off to piss and now the bus is gone. It left with my briefcase and my phone is broken and I'm staying at a hotel and..." I became emotional, as strange as that was.
The backpacker said, "The bus, mate, it's hardly a bus," he was smiling, "It's a metaphor for your mom and there ain't no way to get back on. That ship has sailed... the bus has left. You can't get back on your mom. You just gotta... keep going. She can only take you so far."
I hit him in the face and he toppled back, tripped, and fell on his pack, awkwardly flailing like a crab. I stepped over him and walked away.
