Near + Far (47 page)

D
ay One

After Djuna had been ushered outside by the men in dark sunglasses, she realized it was cold, even though yesterday had been balmy. Spring's uncertain chill chased her up the steps into the bus's welcome heat. Even cold, though, it was spring, and she wavered on the very last step, suitcase in front of her like a wall. Then someone pushed at her from
behind and she went in.

Wider than most, the bus took up one of the highway's double lanes. Inside two aisles ran between three banks of seats upholstered in royal blue, squares of clear plastic clamped onto each headrest. Shadows pocked the aluminum floor.

The bus shuddered away from the curb. Azaleas bloomed in each yard, mop-heads of purple and pink and crimson and the occasional yellow.

They left the neighborhood behind and passed through a wooded area on the town's edge. Fenced-off trees bore carvings featuring pluses and hearts and arrows and one mysterious biohazard marking. Was it warning her, confirming every misgiving about this journey? She could have stayed, somehow. Would have stayed, somehow, refused to remove herself from her house despite the polite gentle insistence of the spirits in black. Could she touch the cord, bring the bus to a stop, get off, walk back home? She flexed her hand, looking up, but made no move to rise.

When in doubt, eat. She'd packed a hamper. Two sandwiches, bacon and crunchy peanut butter, four more peanut butter on whole wheat, a cooler with four strawberry yogurts and a gamepiece's worth of cheesecake among the ice packs, baby carrots, and a stalk of celery in a baggie. A dozen juice boxes. Tofu cubes marinated in sesame oil and soy sauce, and squishy avocado wrapped up in nori. That was lunch for today, in a few hours.

She had two carrots now, biting them off with angry snaps. She'd set off and now here she went, despite the fact that she'd rather stay home, to Mars, which was also the Afterlife, somehow.

The air smelled like old French fries and stale donuts. An unceasing fan blew down on Djuna, making her extract a sweater from her carry-on. She had never expected the Afterlife to have a temperature.

At the front the robot driver, tireless, drove without ceasing on its own behalf, although it would park every six to twelve hours for the benefit of its passengers. It wore an absurd blue plastic hat and no other illusion of clothes.

The windows with which the outermost seats were privileged featured mask-sized ovals with plastic shutters. Two-thirds of the way back in the bus, Djuna slid the shutter closed, leaving a slit of brilliance.

From her vantage point, she could see most of the bus and her fellow travelers. She'd treated it like any other journey. She'd hoisted her rollaway in the overhead shelf, dumped her shoulder bag and coat on the middle seat to discourage seat seekers, and shoved her paperback in the middle seat pocket. The book's cover showed a dolphin curved around a woman, titled
Forbidden Waters: A Real Life Odyssey into Inter-racial Passion
, blue and silver foil waves shimmering around the couple.

She hooked the Traveler's Marvelous Window Garden's suction cups below the window's lip. A silly souvenir bought at the station. She did not read the 8 point font descriptions on the seed packets, simply shook vermiculite particles like mica grit from their puffs of plastic into the windowbox. She planted and watered, and read the first two pages of her book and ate another carrot. She was in it for the long haul, the five day trip to Paradise, Mars.

Most of the other travelers were nondescript. A few stood out, particularly a young woman all in pink and gold, dark hair, a spiral unicorn horn—Djuna couldn't guess whether it was cosmeticked there or some mark of Faerie. Her eyes were saltwater deep, blue as storms. She sat near the front, just behind the driver.

An elderly man in a slouchy cap stared at her briefly, like an arborist examining a tree, assessing her height and blossom schedule and composition, before going to the back of the bus and sitting down with a sulfur-scented huff.

A trio of identical blonde ... girls? Young women? Hovering on the edge of adulthood, maybe a little past. They were late getting on. They wavered near her row, clearly thinking three of us, one of you, but she buried her nose in her book and refused to look up. One cleared her throat, but the others tugged her over to a middle row, towards the back.

Triumphant, Djuna ate another carrot, more slowly this time. She looked out the window. Thunder Lanes Bowling. Lightning Shoes. Kang Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine. Fungi Fun-Go. Mi-go Me-go. Shoggoths-R-Us. Strip malls and lanes of traffic. Spirit houses beside the road, edged with gold and crimson paint. She thought of her little house, of the intricate banisters, the upstairs and downstairs she had furnished with her thoughts, her dreams, her china cupboards.

The red-haired kid a few seats up tried to explain his hand-held game to his mother again. "You can be animal, vegetable or mineral," he said.

"Yeah, yeah."

"I control my race's starting philosophy."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I'm warlike and spiritual."

She took her attention from the phone. "How can you be warlike and spiritual? Isn't that a contradiction?"

"Aztecs were warlike and spiritual. I was reading a book about them the other day. They had these sacred warriors, Jaguar warriors."

She snorted but said into the phone, "Will the house be ready? By ready, I mean completely ready. I want linens on the beds and groceries in the cupboards." Then with a shift of tone. "Yes, we'll be fine, the seats are big and he can sleep in them. Yes, I have all of his medication. Bye." She flipped the phone closed and stared at the concavities on the floor, pressing her hands together as though praying.

"Mom? Mom!"

"Jaguar warriors," she said wearily. "Listen, do you want to hear a story about Jaguar warriors?"

"Yeah," he said warily, as though unsure what he was agreeing to.

"Once upon a time, there was a king named Gil."

"Was he a Jaguar warrior?"

"He was a warrior king, fierce as a Jaguar. He ruled his kingdom with a fair and gentle hand, but every time he went out to speak to his people, the people he'd agreed to govern, to oversee, to be the head to, he'd get this sad look on his face. They'd ask him what was wrong, and he'd look away at the horizon with a sad and noble face and shake his head. This was infuriating."

"Infuriating?"

Djuna ate her nori lump by squishy avocado lump, chasing the melt around the roof of her mouth with a tongue tip as she listened. The Traveler's Garden sent out a hesitant smell of rain.

"Infuriating. Because, after all, what were his people supposed to say to that? He was clearly unhappy but he refused to say anything. And then, eventually, he put aside his crown and went walking down the road, and blamed it all on the unhappiness he never would explain to them."

There was a silence before the kid spoke again, voice like an uncertain snail's horns emerging. "Is this story really about Jaguar warriors?"

"It started out that way," she said. "Then it all went pear-shaped, and I don't know when."

Silence stretched between them. A few seats forward, a nerdy boy was interviewing the unicorn girl. She spoke in upper-class, almost accentless English.

"My name is Cristen Night," she said, blinking at the camera. "What should I say?"

"Talk about anything. Talk about what sort of TV you like to watch."

"I like to watch that new show, These. You know the one? It's been around for two seasons, just starting the third."

Nerdboy made a noncommittal sound, gestured at her to keep talking.

"There's the main character, King T, who's married the Queen of the Centaurs and brought her and her sister Emily to live in his place. It's like a huge cloud castle, all misty white corridors and you know, atmosphere."

The plastic creaked as she shifted against it, getting more animated.

"The actor they have playing him is all-vid, latest gen algorithm. Kurt Destiny is the brand. So swank! Dublicious. Anyhow, he was getting married at the end of last season, and all these glims in black show up, laced and gothy. They're wailing and beating on these hand-held drums they wear around their necks. He asks who they are, and they turn out to be genetic constructs whose male counterparts, like their twins, have all died out due to a bad DNA twist. All bereft, widowed twins. They tell him they need him to wrestle this minotaur thing."

"Why?" Nerdboy adjusted his camera, brought the focus even closer in on her face, her perfect eyes, polished horn gleaming like mother of pearl in the bus's overhead lighting.

She shrugged. "Television." She continued on.

"There's these two PoWs, Palamon and Arcite. They are in this tower and look out, and see Em—that's the Queen's skanky sister—in the garden, her arms full of red and white roses, and more growing from her jacket. They're big bang crush right off on her, and they start fighting over who loves her the most. Then Arcite gets freed and they argue over who's better off, Palamon, who has the chance of glimpsing her every day, or Arcite, who can go home and raise an army to come and get her with."

The bus jerked to a stop. This close to the sea, salt water rode the wind.

After dinner, the smokers excused themselves as soon as possible from the meal to go outside and power through cigarettes or long thin cigars as fast as possible. The man in the suit didn't even pretend to eat, just ordered a large coffee, black. He took it outside. By the time Djuna came out of the burger taco squid joint, cigarette butts mounded by the heel of his black snakeskin shoe.

Later some riders watched the evening news on the bus TV screen, which hung down to the driver's right. The light was blue and soothing. With headphones in, all she saw was the flicker of faces. Later, she took the headphones out and leaned back. Someone behind her was telling this story:

"I knew this kid, he was a game developer, got snagged by a company fast out of college, bright kid, worked hard, played hard, did a lot of mountain climbing, kayaking, that sort of thing. Truth be told, he was stronger, had a bit more swagger, than the average geek at his company and he became a bully, lorded it over the other devs, and the company let him get away with it because he had the programming chops to back it up.

"He married the CEO's daughter, a bright young Wellesley grad, a geek's daughter, who loved online games as much as any solitary nerdy kid that had been raised on World of Warcraft.

"He was one of those weird, obsessive kids and he noticed his wife spending a lot of time playing online games. He'd go and make characters on whatever server his wife was playing on and go grief kill anyone she was flirting with. Over and over again.

"He kept on doing this, rather than working on the games he'd been hired for. He'd try to get his wife into the betas of the games, but she was on to him by that point, I think, wouldn't log into any virtual world he was in, said he was too intense, and of course that just made him more intense.

"When his manager talked to him about his job, he went nutso and accused the manager of having virtually seduced the wife. He'd noticed her playing this one online game, Paradise Garden, an adult encounter game, and when he'd tried to join it, he learned his IP was banned, and all of his credit cards. He said the manager ran the game and that was how the game knew to ban him.

"He went to some sort of halfway house for people that the Internet had damaged. And while he was there, he took up in an online relationship with some kid on Mars."

"And you know him, or you know this kid?"

"I'm him. I'm going to meet the kid."

Silence. Djuna wondered what he looked like. The other voice said, "I thought you said he was young."

"Sure. Twenty years ago, before he went into jail and then the house. He was young back then. I was young back then."

"How old is the kid you're going to meet?"

"She's 18. Cute and smart and funny, and wants someone to help her run the restaurant she inherited. Life's good." He drummed restlessly on the back of the seat, and she wondered again who he was, which of the crowd he was, as he repeated himself. "Life's good."