The Lunatic Express (22 page)

Time never really came back to me. There was Moscow time and Vladivostok time and the time where we were at any given point and one day looked like the next, and in the darkness of an early morning we slid into Vladivostok. It was time to go, time to walk out of the jungle. I crunched across the snow and hailed a taxi to the airport.

BRANDON [Manitoba]—Screaming passengers fled in terror from a Greyhound bus as an unidentified fellow passenger suddenly stabbed a man sleeping next to him, decapitated him and waved the severed head at horrified witnesses standing outside. The apparently unprovoked assault left 36 men, women and children stranded Wednesday night on the shoulder … watching while the bus driver and a driver of a nearby truck shut the crazed attacker inside the bus with the mangled victim. Reports Friday said the suspect tried to eat parts of the victim
.

—National Post
(Canada), July 31, 2008

TWELVE
Same, Same, but Different

“D
EATH!”
T
HE HEAVY-METAL
refrain crashed through the terminal, pumping out of the “Rock-On Greyhound Multimedia Center,” as a man in a black T-shirt with pasty skin and long, greasy hair pushed buttons and dollar bills into the machine. A guy in a hoodie and goatee slumped on the metal wire bench. A fat woman in a T-shirt and sweatpants dragged a kid across the linoleum like he was a piece of luggage. Of which there seemed to be little; mostly plastic garbage bags stuffed full at the last minute, as if by people on the run. Six a.m. in the Los Angeles Greyhound terminal and I held a ticket for four buses and seventy-two hours across the U.S.A. It all seemed incredibly familiar, of a piece. Bogotá. Quito. Lima. Dar es Salaam. Nairobi. Patna. Hohhot. Another bus station, another three thousand miles. But different, too. I could hear conversations, ask for things, decipher it all, and it didn’t look romantic. No sweet milky chai kiosks. No wooden bakso stands. No smell of shit. No smell of smoke. No monkeys or feral dogs or women with gold nose rings and bangles or wearing felt hats. No fresh tortillas. No food at all, except for vending machines full of Snickers and Fritos and twenty-ounce blue energy drinks.

It all seemed a little crazy, hard to grasp, process. A day before I’d stepped off a train in Vladivostok in snow and ice, still hung over from the vodka hug-fest with the silver-toothed gangsters, India and Afghanistan just over my shoulder, on my mind, and then, wham, a taxi through warm L.A.—“Fuck, man, look at that traffic!” said the driver, who’d emigrated to the U.S. from Jordan when he was sixteen—and I was plunging into a place I hadn’t seen in months. As a T-shirt in India read, “Same, same, but different.”

Since the beheading on Greyhound in Manitoba, Canada, in July, knives on board were no longer cool, and we were cursorily frisked with a metal-detecting wand as we boarded. By now I knew what to do: I placed a bag on the seat next to me and feigned sleep, my mouth open and droopy, to discourage a possible seatmate. On buses the difference between comfort and torture lay right there; in fact personal space was the key to everything, no matter what country you were in or what conveyance you were on. The most dangerous, most rickety bus in the world could be a pleasure—as long as it stayed on the road and no one cut your head off—if there were extra seats, if it didn’t fill.

“My name is Tom. I’ll be your driver to Las Vegas. We’ll have a thirty-five-minute break in Barstow at the Greyhound steak house. You know what that is, right? McDonald’s!” And then he rattled off “the rules: No smoking. No alcoholic beverages. No profanity. Any aggressive behavior, physical or verbal, will get you thrown off the bus!”

Welcome to America.

Tom fired the engine up and we rolled out, past the warehouses and chain link of downtown L.A., onto the 405 and then east up into the desert, America huge and spread out and vacant-seeming. The streets felt empty. Where was everyone? Except for Siberia and the Gobi with Tsedee, even the great empty swaths of Afghanistan and Africa and the Andes always seemed dotted with a donkey cart or a peasant tending an alpaca. A voice cut in. “I’m on top of the world and making money like there’s no tomorrow!” It was a man three rows in front of me, talking on his mobile phone. Loud. As if he were alone in a room. “I was blessed with superior intelligence and I start law school in four days and I have an MD, so soon I’ll be a JDMD; isn’t that awesome?” He hung up after ten minutes, dialed his doctor. “Yes, this is Drew Fenton and my social security number is …” I couldn’t believe it; he yammered the digits and went on and on, made call after call, an ego that seemed insatiable. “What’s your financial situation?” he asked someone else in another call. “Watch out; that guy treats me like a bank!” I wondered whether it offended me only because I could understand the language, the words.

We hit Vegas that afternoon, and America seemed like the saddest place I’d seen in months. The worst, most dangerous conveyances in the world always had a mix of people on them, people bursting with life and color and friendliness. In Peru or Mali or India or Bangladesh everyone was poor. The few rich people flew; everybody else took a ferry or a bus or a train and they prepared for the journey with their carefully wrapped boxes and containers of rice, and the stream of fresh food offered for pennies was ubiquitous. Except for Drew Fenton, the loudmouth on the cell phone, Greyhound was the dregs of America, the poorest of the poor. My ticket from L.A. to D.C. was more than two hundred dollars; surely I could have found a flight for more or less the same. In America if you had an Internet connection and you wanted to get somewhere you found the lowest fare and flew, but the people on the bus were people off the grid. “We’re busiest around the first of the month,” said the driver. Which meant that its passengers traveled on government checks or whatever they could scrounge. A man boarded in Vegas with nothing but a plastic sack of Coke cans and he hadn’t showered in days, along with a skinny, sickly woman with a neck covered in tattoos. No one carried food; they ate french fries and Big Macs at McDonald’s. They were pale, had crooked, broken teeth. “Ready to Go Home?” read a poster in the Vegas station. “Don’t Runaway Love, you’re not on your own! Open your eyes and come back with me,” read the poster, imploring teenaged runaways to seek help and call an 800 telephone number. I thought of Moolchand, poor as dirt, buying me tea; of Fardus, feeding me fresh coconuts from his yard and dreaming of Las Vegas. But this
was
Vegas. This
was
America, the dream itself! And it looked like a place cracking, peeling, coming apart at the seams. Who would invite me to their house for lunch? Who even had a home? When we’d passed temples on the Blueline, Moolchand had prayed; Khalid prayed constantly, for me, for our safety; the men and women to whom he gave money gave us prayers back. Moussa had made tea in the vestibule of the train in Mali, and handed it all around to whoever wanted a cup. Rokibal in Bangladesh had wanted to know everything about me, and Ranjit, the bus driver in the poorest state of India, had given me his red velvet pillow. Wakiba and David had begged me to come home with them after twenty hours of fighting Nairobi traffic, and fed me in a house that had no kitchen and no bathroom. The conditions were deplorable sometimes. Dirty. Hot. Crowded. Groaningly uncomfortable. Dangerous. But all those people had been so filled with generosity and spirit, curiosity about a stranger, and they all in some way had felt connected in a way they didn’t even realize to a larger society, culture, family. But the people around me seemed alone, disconnected; what bound them to each other? To America? What
was
America? We were a bus of lost souls in a country that itself seemed without a soul. Wherever I’d been in the last few months, people had asked me about Obama; he’d been inaugurated a few days before and here I was, finally in America, and no one on the bus mentioned him.

We made a quick stop in Vail, Colorado, where I’d lived for eight months when I was eighteen as a ski bum, and I clambered out of the bus to stand in the snow for a moment to remember. Suddenly the doors swung shut with a sigh of air and the bus started forward. I rushed and banged on the door. The bus halted and the doors swung open and the driver barked, “I didn’t tell you you could get out!”

We stopped an hour later so he could put chains on the rear wheels for the trip over Vail Pass. I got out again, and a second later he jumped in and started forward again. I ran up to the doors and he barked again. “Ain’t leaving, dammit, just moving forward a bit. What’s your problem?”

In 50,000 miles no one had spoken to me like that. I lost it. “Why are you being such an asshole?” I said.

“Stay away from me!” he yelled. “I don’t like you!”

.    .    .

W
E PAUSED IN
K
ANSAS
C
ITY
at 9:00 p.m., a light snow falling, and perky Suze Orman lectured us about cutting expenses to amass six months’ savings in a down economy, from the wall-mounted flat-screen TV. “I know how to cut expenses!” said a man next to me, with a few days’ growth on his cheeks, wearing work boots and a denim jacket. “I have a great idea. I’ll say to my four kids, we’re going to alternate eating. Your mom and two of you will eat on Mondays, and then me and the other two will eat on Tuesdays.” He was a truckdriver who’d just gotten laid off when he’d rolled into the depot in Kansas City that day, and he was headed home to Florida on the bus. “Retirement? A 401k? I’ve got two plans: the good one and the bad one. The good one is to win the lottery. The bad one is to work until the day I die.”

The miles and hours passed in a blur. By now I was used to the physical discomfort; it seemed like nothing, though the constant diet of Big Macs and fries was getting old, and my country felt so sad—there wasn’t any other word for it. “I just have to get down to Tennessee and to court, and then I’ll come back,” said a fat man in white socks and shorts, though it was seventeen degrees outside and 3:00 a.m., in the St. Louis station. “Hoping I might get a job around Indianapolis or something.”

“What’s the court case about?” I asked.

“Wrong place and the wrong time, that’s all,” he said, picking his teeth, as the television overhead blared, “What if I told you there was a way to make money on your own terms? It’s been right under your nose your whole life; the question is, are you ready for it? To take advantage of the enormous profits of the stock market, no matter where it’s going!” I couldn’t believe it; the stock market had fallen by 60 percent, had collapsed, and here was the same old song, and I wondered if anyone was buying. Not the guy next to me, at least. “Might as well just go to Vegas,” he said. “All one big fucking gamble.”

I loved the idea of being surrounded by otherness, but this was an otherness that I wanted to push away, not delve into, not subsume myself in. I imagined Moolchand or Moussa as bottomless pools leading me to India or Mali themselves. But my fellow Greyhound travelers felt like dead ends. I didn’t want to feel that way about America; I’d been imagining coming home and seeing it in a new light, shiny and clean and easy and modern, and familiar and welcoming, and I hadn’t noticed any of this on the China bus to New York or the Greyhound to Toronto so many months before.

We were waiting in line to get back on the bus, and I had to run to the bathroom. I asked a man who’d been on since L.A. if he could watch my bags. His wire-framed glasses were crooked; he hadn’t shaved in a while, and he carried a garbage bag. But he just looked at me. Stared. “No,” he said softly. “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

We boarded and headed toward Pittsburgh. A woman sat next to me and started texting with people in a sex chat room over her cell phone. “I got 8 inches!” “Please can someone help me, I want to so bad,” wrote “lookin4luvlesbo,” as we hurtled down the great American road.

Another voice from across the aisle. “The baby died! No he totally dead, you know, and that’s what I’m sayin. Sounds like bullshit to me. She don’t got no job and can’t do nothing but sit and cop an attitude. She told me the baby died but there’s no way that baby was six pounds and there’s gonna be no body, no funeral, nothing. We gotta go down there and figure out what happened to the baby. It’s the ugliest thing I ever seen.”

W
E PULLED OUT OF
P
ITTSBURGH
at midnight and I was headed home. I couldn’t quite fathom it; I was so close, yet I also felt still very much out there, riding that unbroken chain, and I felt closer to New Delhi and Kabul in a way than I did to Washington. Get off the bus, find a hotel, plan my next leg. No. Not anymore. This was it, my last night on the road. I had a feeling that my life had changed. That I had, slowly but surely, inexorably, reached not an end but a starting point. A beginning.

Escaping into the farthest corners of the world had always felt good to me. Part of it was just adventure, the excitement of plunging along a muddy road in the Peruvian Amazon or jumping aboard a ferry with no idea of where I was going. I took it for granted that no assignment was too long or too dangerous—that the most intense ones were the best ones—and that my family would be there for me when I got back. That my wife would love me. That my children would miss me and hug me when I walked in the door again weeks or months later, and no one would ever feel abandoned and that I’d feel as much a part of their lives as if I’d never been away. That’s what I’d always told myself.

But as the bus rolled down the highway toward home in the middle of the night, I started thinking about the price I’d paid. Going away, living the life I’d lived, had cost me. It was one thing to go away on a four-day business trip, another to be on a ship at sea in the Pacific for two months—and to leave three weeks later for another fourteen days in New Zealand, as I’d done, gone for more than 120 days that year. On this trip alone I’d been traveling for 159 days. My marriage had crumbled and I’d let it, even though I had told myself I was trying to save it. I’d let the duality of my life grow, without stopping it; while I constantly kept moving, Lindsey and I had barely taken a vacation together, just the two of us, in fifteen years.

All those people I’d met on the road had made me think deeply about travel and human connection and escape. I had always prided myself on the connections I made while traveling, from the nutty Swiss guy in Mombasa to Fardus in Bangladesh to Moolchand in New Delhi. But all those interactions were fleeting, shallow—I couldn’t kid myself that they had been otherwise.

In places like India and Indonesia, where people almost always travel together and I was a freak alone, I had finally started to understand the value of deeper connections, especially as I cruised through the night toward home in this bus of lost souls. Only connect, wrote E. M. Forster—one of those famous literary lines that’s now a cliché—and as humans that’s what we all craved perhaps more than anything else. To be known, to let your guard down, was scary; how ironic that so many of us fled instead, that we didn’t allow ourselves the very thing we wanted in our deepest souls. The lure of foreign countries and cultures has always been escape, but also transformation, redemption, discovery. People who felt like they didn’t fit in had long sought escape in the exotic, but maybe that was because in those foreign lands they didn’t have an excuse—they could never be really known in the first place, never have to take that risk of opening up and trusting. We passed another McDonald’s and I thought of my father, who’d never remarried after divorcing thirty-five years ago. Today he was living in Thailand with a woman whose command of the English language was shaky at best, and it was his longest relationship in years. Did they get along because they connected so deeply, or because they barely connected at all and she couldn’t ask him any of those pesky emotional questions? There’d been a time when I’d had all of those connections at home, but I’d let them lapse, had cruised through a great chunk of my life without thinking about it, working as if on autopilot, until it was too late.