Long After Midnight (23 page)

 
          
Nothing.

 
          
The
taxi motor died.

 
          
No,
no, thought Marie, oh God, no, no, no.

 
          
The
car must start again.

 
          
The
taxi driver leaped out, glaring at God in his Heaven, and ripped open the hood
and looked as if he might strangle the iron guts of the car with his clawing
hands, his face smiling a pure sweet smile of incredible hatred, and then he
turned to Marie and forced himself to shrug, putting away his hate and
accepting the Will of God.

 
          
"I
will walk you to the bus station," he said.

 
          
No,
her eyes said. No, her mouth almost said. Joseph will wake and run and find me
still here and drag me back. No.

 
          
"I
will carry your bags,
senora"
the
taxi driver said, and walked off with them, and had to come back and find her
still there, motionless, saying no, no, to no one, and helped her out and
showed her where to walk.

 
          
The
bus was in the square and the Indians were getting into it, some silently and
with a slow, certain dignity, and some chattering like birds and shoving
bundles, children, chickens' baskets, and pigs in ahead of them. The driver
wore a uniform that had not been pressed or laundered in twenty years, and he
was leaning out the window shouting and laughing with people outside, as Marie
stepped up into the interior of hot smoke and burning grease from the engine,
the smell of gasoline and oil, the smell of wet chickens, wet children,
sweating men and damp women, old upholstery which was down to the skeleton, and
oily leather. She found a seat in the rear and felt the eyes follow her and her
suitcase, and she was thinking: I'm going away, at last I'm going away, I'm
free, I'll never see him again in my life, I'm free, I'm free.

 
          
She
almost laughed.

 
          
The
bus started and all of the people in it shook and swayed and cried out and
smiled, and the land of Mexico seemed to whirl about outside the window, like a
dream undecided whether to stay or go, and then the greenness passed away, and
the
tovvn
, and there was the Hotel de Las Flores with
its open patio, and there, incredibly, hands in pockets, standing in the open
door but looking at the sky and the volcano smoke, was Joseph, paying no
attention to the bus or her and she was going away from him, he was growing
remote already, his figure was dwindling like someone falling down a mine
shaft, silently, without a scream. Now, before she had even the decency or
inclination to wave, he was no larger than a boy, then a child, then a baby, in
distance, in size, then gone around a corner, with the engine thundering,
someone playing upon a guitar up front in the bus, and Marie, straining to look
back, as if she might penetrate walls, trees, and distances, for another view
of the man standing so quietly watching the blue sky.

 
          
At
last, her neck tired, she turned and folded her hands and examined what she had
won for herself. A whole lifetime loomed suddenly ahead, as quickly as the
turns and whirls of the highway brought her suddenly to edges of cliffs, and
each bend of the road, even as the years, could not be seen ahead. For a moment
it was simply good to lie back here, head upon jouncing seat rest, and
contemplate quietness. To know nothing, to think nothing, to feel nothing, to
be as nearly dead for a moment as one could be, with the eyes closed, the heart
unheard, no special temperature to the body, to wait for life to come get her
rather than to seek, at least for an hour. Let the bus take her to the train,
the train to the plane, the plane to the city, and the city to her friends, and
then, like a stone dropped into a cement mixer, let that life in the city do
with her as it would, she flowing along in the mix and solidifying in any new
pattern that seemed best.

 
          
The
bus rushed on with a plummeting and swerving in the sweet green air of the
afternoon, between the mountains baked like lion pelts, past rivers as sweet as
wine and as clear as vermouth, over stone bridges, under aqueducts where water
ran like clear wind in the ancient channels, past churches, through dust, and
suddenly, quite suddenly the speedometer in Marie's mind said, A million miles,
Joseph is back a million miles and I'll never see him again. The thought stood
up in her mind and covered the sky with a blurred darkness. Never, never again
until the day I die or after that will I see him again, not for an hour or a
minute or a second, not at all will I see him.

 
          
The
numbness started in her fingertips. She felt it flow up through her hands, into
her wrists and on along the arms to her shoulders and through her shoulders to
her heart and up her neck to her head. She was a numbness, a thing of nettles
and ice and prickles and a hollow thundering nothingness. Her lips were dry
petals, her eyelids were a thousand pounds heavier than iron, and each part of
her body was now iron and lead and copper and platinum. Her body weighed ten
tons, each part of it was so incredibly heavy, and, in that heaviness, crushed
and beating to survive, was her crippled heart, throbbing and tearing about like
a headless chicken. And buried in the limestone and steel of her robot body was
her terror and crying out, walled in, with someone tapping the trowel on the
exterior wall, the job finished, and, ironically, it was her own hand she saw
before her that had wielded the trowel, set the final brick in place, frothed
on the thick slush of mortar and pushed everything into a tightness and a
self-finished prison.

 
          
Her
mouth was cotton. Her eyes were flaming with' a dark flame the color of raven
wings, the sound of vulture wings, and her head was so heavy with terror, so
full of an iron weight, while her mouth was stuffed with invisible hot cotton,
that she felt her head sag down into her immensely fat, but she could not see
the fat, hands. Her hands were pillows of lead to lie upon, her hands were
cement sacks crushing down upon her senseless lap, her ears, faucets in which
ran cold winds, and all about her, not looking at her,- not noticing, was the
bus on its way through towns and fields, over hills and into com valleys at a
great racketing speed, taking her each and every instant one million miles and
ten million years away from the familiar.

 
          
I
must
not
cry out, she thought. No!
No!

 
          
The
dizziness was so complete, and the colors of the bus and her hands and skirt
were now so blued over and
sooted
with lack of blood
that in a moment she. would be collapsed upon the floor, she would hear the
surprise and shock of the riders bending over her. But she put her head far
down and sucked the chicken air, the sweating air, the leather air, the carbon
monoxide air, the incense air, the air of lonely death, and drew it back
through the copper nostrils, down the aching throat, into her lungs which
blazed as if she swallowed neon light. Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, Joseph.

 
          
It
was a simple thing. All terror is a simplicity.

 
          
I
cannot live without him, she thought. I have been lying to myself. I need him,
oh Christ, I, I...

 
          
"Stop
the bus! Stop it!"

 
          
The
bus stopped at her scream, everyone was thrown forward. Somehow she was
stumbling forward over the children, the dogs barking, her hands flailing
heavily, falling; she heard her dress rip, she screamed again, the door was
opening, the driver was appalled at the woman coming at him in a wild
stumbling, and she fell out upon the gravel, tore her stockings, and lay while
someone bent to her; then she was vomiting on the ground, a steady sickness;
they were bringing her bags out of the bus to her, she was telling them in
chokes and sobs that she wanted to go that way; she pointed back at the city a
million years ago, a million miles ago, and the bus driver was shaking his
head. She half sat, half lay there, her arms about the suitcase, sobbing, and
the bus stood in the hot sunlight over her and she waved it on; go on, go on;
they're all staring at me, I'll get a ride back, don't worry, leave me here, go
on, and at last, like an accordion, the door folded shut, the Indian
copper-mask faces were transported on away, and the bus dwindled from
consciousness. She lay on the suitcase and cried, for a number of minutes, and
she was not as heavy or sick, but her heart was fluttering wildly, and she was
cold as someone fresh from a winter lake. She arose and dragged the suitcase in
little moves across the highway and swayed there, waiting, while six cars
hummed by, and at last a seventh car pulled up with a Mexican gentleman in the
front seat, a rich car from Mexico City.

 
          
"You
are going to
Uruapan
?" he asked politely,
looking only at her eyes.

 
          
"Yes,"
she said at last, "I am going to
Uruapan
."

 
          
And
as she rode in this car, her mind began a private dialogue:

 
          
"What
is it to be insane?"

 
          
"I
don't know."

 
          
"Do
you know what insanity is?"

 
          
"I
don't know."

 
          
"Can
one tell? The coldness, was that the start?"

 
          
"No."

 
          
"The
heaviness, wasn't that a part?"

 
          
"Shut
up."

 
          
"Is
insanity screaming?"

 
          
"I
didn't mean to."

 
          
"But
that came later. First there was the heaviness, and the silence, and the
blankness. That terrible void, that space, that silence, that aloneness, that
backing away from life, that being in upon oneself and not wishing to look at
or speak to the world. Don't tell me that wasn't the start of insanity."

 
          
"Yes."

 
          
"You
were ready to fall over the edge."

 
          
"I
stopped the bus just short of the cliff."

 
          
"And
what if you hadn't stopped the bus? Would they have driven into a little town
or Mexico City and the driver turned and said to you through the empty bus,
'All right,
senora,
all out.'
Silence. 'All right,
senora,
all
out.' Silence.
'Senora?'
A stare into
space.
'Senora!’
A rigid stare into
the sky of life, empty, empty, oh, empty.
'
Senoral
'
No move.
'Senora'
Hardly a breath.

 
          
You
sit there, you sit there, you sit there, you sit there, you sit there.

 
          
"You
would not even hear.
'Senora,'
he
would cry, and tug at you, but you wouldn't feel his hand. And the police would
be summoned beyond your circle of comprehension, beyond your eyes or ears or
body. You could not even hear the heavy boots in the car.
'Senora,
you must leave the bus.' You do not hear.
'Senora,
what is your name?' Your mouth
is shut.
'Senora,
you must come with
us.' You sit like a stone idol. 'Let us see her passport.' They fumble with
your purse which lies untended in your stone lap.
'Senora
Marie Elliott, from California.
Senora
Elliott?' You stare at the empty sky. 'Where are you coming
from? Where is your husband?' You were never married. 'Where are you going?'
Nowhere. 'It says she was born in Illinois.' You were never born.
'Senora, senora'
They have to carry you,
like a stone, from the bus. You will talk to no one. No, no, no one. 'Marie,
this is me, Joseph.' No, too late. 'Marie!' Too late. 'Don't you recognize me?'
Too late. Joseph. No, Joseph, no nothing, too late, too late."

 
          
"That
is what would have happened, is it not?"

 
          
"Yes."
She trembled.

 
          
"If
you had not stopped the bus, you would have been heavier and heavier, true? And
silenter
and
silenter
and
more made up of nothing and nothing and nothing."