Metrosphere 2004-2005
"Can I Have One of Those?"
From my seat, my turned head, the girl behind me looked unhappy. All the ride she sat remarkably inert against the bus's aggressions with an air of distant solemnity; the bleary scenes that filled the windows mocked her face for response, but she held, quite effortlessly, to her private dreariness with the chasteness of an abbess in prayer. These images, not exclusive to her as a scan of the passengers revealed, ghosted themselves two or three times in the imitation glass that sectioned the rear of the bus from the central articulation (about where I sat), a mechanism that, by its giant, heaving flex, was resonant of a monstrous respirator.
It was a ride on an afternoon bus in the late summer. The air conditioning system wasn't working. An oppressive heat, holding the passengers to their seats like magnets, swelled in the bus and allowed forth in its protest only the weakest, heat-strained sighs. This appeared, among other things, to be the stigma of the girl's sadness, or merely her exhaustion. I suffered from the malaise too, as did the man across from her, watching her fumble a package of cigarettes indifferently in her hands, and all of us. We were alive and felt the weight of living, held on this bus, in this heat, that carried us everyone to and from whatever businesses had brought us together.
"Excuse me. Can I have one of those? I mean for when we get off?" I knew it was the voice of the man across from her.
"I only have one left," the girl said.
"Oh," he said.
He was wearily defeated by this; he'd been leaning forward with a small, hopeful look and then sat back slowly. The sign over the driver's head reading "stop requested" blinked in time with the sound of a bell. "Twenty-second and Larimer, next stop." I looked back to see if the girl had sounded it, hoping, if only for a subtle notion of her purpose here, to see her fingertips releasing the bell cord, or her arm suspended beneath it in repose, but the leap of the cigarette package, now acclimated to the bus's turbulence, showed it hadn't been her. She was throughout a stone, and likely to remain so. But then, as if carried out to spite this, the bus took a bump that shook everyone, forcing me and a few others to readjust our positions. With a strange urgency the girl got to her hands and knees. Her fingers fanned over the filthy black rubber with her red hair hanging over her shoulders and face. She was clearly trying to recover something, but her attempts were inept, as if the object had achieved consciousness and delighted in evading her; it reminded me of a blind woman learning the floor to recover her dropped something-or-other, but what happened was less pitiful.
"Shit," she scowled.
I looked behind. I saw, like little white bones rolling over the rubbery floor, ten or eleven cigarettes eluding her grasp. They had come out of a pack, not a case with a flimsy latch. How so many cigarettes were able to come out of a pack, soft or hard, was in that moment more aberrant than her exposure; I could imagine two, three at most, only inching over the package lip, not nearly as many as I saw right then, not nearly as many as she frantically tried to recover.
"I thought you didn't have any left, only the one," the man said in an accusing tone that seemed more perfunctory than condemning.
"Um..."
"It's okay," he said.
"No," she said, "I'm sorry."
"It's fine. I just needed one, you know? I'm having a shitty day. I probably wouldn't have given one up either if someone asked me for one. I"-a little lightly-"would have probably said what you said."
She shrugged, started to speak, but her words were crippled. Her face lifted from impassivity finally to a look of pained astonishment, as if she'd been reprieved of murder. I looked back at them, at him mostly. He seemed older, or not older so much as he seemed to employ the sensitivity and diplomacy an older man might possess, or simply a nicer man, a man attempting to sound understanding, who has secretly and humbly made his peace with the insufferable afternoon.
"I've been having a shitty week all around," she said.
"I hear you. It's been a rough couple weeks for me, too. What do you do?"
"I'm a nurse's assistant."
"A nurse's assistant-and you smoke?"
"I guess so...Yes, I do."
"I'm joking. That's fine that you do. I imagine a lot of nursing assistants smoke. Hell, nurses smoke. My mom was a nurse and she smoked. She said they all did."
"I know. I'll bet, but that's no excuse for anything. It is...bad."
"Don't lose any sleep over it, not yet. You're in good company."
The girl had collected most of the cigarettes and stuffed them back into the package. I went on stealing backward glances, through the coughing of babies and old women down front, through the washing sound of cars passing the windows. Her face was still dull, but had settled out of embarrassment, and he sighed with exaggerated profundity at how shitty his week had been. Somehow, I felt, as her words began to lighten, as her entire rigidity started to fall away, that her melancholy was ephemeral. This stirred furtively under her words, as the bad came out with playful reluctance, as if a hint of her usual congeniality had been stirred by this exchange.
"Listen," she said, "I have to get off at the next stop and I can buy another pack of these. If you want I'll just give you some of these, or the rest of the pack."
"You don't have to do that."
"No...I mean, I know I don't, but I want to. I don't usually turn anyone down when they ask for one. I've never seen anyone refuse a cigarette to someone. People just give one up, you know?"
"You really don't have to, though. That's a lot of cigarettes to give up like that. What's you're name?"
"Eve."
"Eve...I'm Nathan."
"Hello, Nathan."
"I'll take a couple, but I don't want the whole pack."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah. I'll take...three."
"Okay."
"No, two, so I can smoke the one I asked you for originally and then when someone asks me for one I can honestly say I have one left. That third one wouldn't be able to fall out from my ear, if you know what I mean."
"Yes."
She smiled. The bus slowed and made its steaming, wrenching sounds. She started to stand up and he did too in a way that seemed as if helping her. The reality of the afternoon, obscured by the peculiarity of their introduction, reasserted itself, and I felt surprise at its suddenness. They returned to being the strangers I'd only observed before the cigarettes had joined them-us. Suddenly the moment was ending almost as bluntly and quickly as it had begun. Neither of them had pulled the bell, but now they rose at once, as if this stop was an unquestioned point in both their routines.
Now I looked back with my whole body
Somewhere in all this they shook hands; he smiled too. The back door breathed open and they walked right past me and stepped down to the curb. From the glass, again, I saw her but now in the brilliance of the sunlight, at last removed from its distortions in the bus where she and I and everyone seemed dull and ready to expire. The doors sucked closed as the bus pulled away. The wheels pushed over something hot and tar-battered. It did not seem insane, suddenly, for me to yank the stop bell myself in a second and jump off at the next spot and run back to whatever store they went into, or to witness their unheard decision to part, to let the matter rest, let forgiveness prevail. But the departing vehicle denied my urge. The tired faces around me returned like a flood and by the space of a few parking meters the bus resumed its steady groan. I kept looking, though, and watched their figures shrink in the sunlight. Two or three cigarettes still rocked across the floor like little bones that no one would ever bury.