For twenty minutes she pretends she might go back to sleep and she does try before suffering defeat.
The shower is powerful and hot but the water itself is too soft and leaves her hair limp. Raw and steaming, she dresses in civilian clothing; no badge, no tie, no identity, no authority. It is the same as being naked.
Breakfast is not served until seven and she doesn’t want to wait. The man at the checkout desk—a man with the right character to nightshifts—does not ask her about her stay. He processes her without looking up.
It is shy of five in the morning as she walks the gray, perpendicular streets. This is not small-town America or even a city. She is in the outskirts. On every corner is a franchise. Each rises from the concrete in its own corporate colors and logos, architecturally oblivious to those around it, not unlike the train sets that Marcus would build when he was ten. She remembers how each one of them was a microcosm of happy people working at some establishment: a gas station, a police station, a fire station, a freight mover, a hospital.
Here, at full scale, are the same institutions only grittier. As she pulls her suitcase behind her, lights are coming on at the places that serve coffee. Arby’s, Roy Rogers, Dunkin Donuts. None of these exist in Norway.
Dunkin Donuts sounds familiar, as she’d passed one once in London. She also knows what a donut is because they sell them at the co-op supermarket near her apartment in Gamle Oslo. Whoever Roy Rogers might have been, his fame hasn’t crossed the ocean. And Arby, absent a family name, sounds too casual in his approach to food.
She crosses the empty street to a parking lot where a pickup truck squats long and empty beside an eighteen-wheeler with too much chrome.
Inside the white, orange, and pink dream of the donut hall, a fat man in a nylon jacket silently eats at a table affixed to the floor while a black girl pours cooking oil into a vat from a plastic jug almost too heavy for her to lift.
“With you in a minute,” she says, not looking over.
“Take your time,” Sigrid says.
The girl places the jug below the deep fry and flicks some switches over the donut display, illuminating a palette of Disney-colored frostings.
The girl does not look any sleepier than Sigrid feels. She must be accustomed to these hours.
“Latte with sugar,” Sigrid asks. “And whatever he’s eating.” It is something with eggs and a bread product. It looks hot.
“That’ll take five minutes.”
“Got a newspaper?”
The girl takes Sigrid’s money. “Down the block on the right. Otherwise, I think someone left one here last night on that back table there. I’ll call ya when the food’s done.”
Sigrid sits herself at the table with the Sunday edition of the paper dated 10 August, which means no one cleared the table Monday, Tuesday, or this morning, either. She reads old news about Russia and Georgia going to war and one hundred and forty people being crushed to death in a human stampede at a Hindu Temple in Northern India; at least forty of them were children. Leading the headlines, though, is the U.S. presidential elections. Many are saying that Barack Obama will win. This strikes commentators as extremely important.
Outside, fed and caffeinated, Sigrid pulls her luggage behind her and over the pitted streets as the first light of dawn rises behind the neon lights of the pawn shops and check-cashing offices. Trucks in the westbound lane pass her bearing Canadian plates. That country is even more of a mystery to her. Her only association is with Katarina Witt winning the figure skating Olympics in Calgary in ’88. As a young woman Sigrid thought that she’d never have a body like that; grace like that; be beloved like that. They were the thoughts of an adolescent. They turned out to be right.
The bus station smells of urine. The ticket counter is closed, so Sigrid sits alone on a bench beside Gate 4. There is a taste in her mouth from the food or the milk that isn’t going away. Something she’s eaten since arriving has made her feel bloated.
Two men approach and sit on the bench and Sigrid watches them. One wears beige trousers and a shirt that could never have been white. The other is late middle-aged and wears shorts and sneakers and a gym T-shirt over skinny shoulders and a round stomach. They don’t engage with her or each other. They didn’t look at the gate number or check their tickets. Their motion is routine, learned, and performed in the muscles. When they stop moving they look painted into place.
The bus arrives. It halts with a hiss and shuts down so thoroughly, it becomes immediately derelict; the engine doesn’t even crackle from the heat.
The driver looks like rotting fruit. Sigrid can tell she is in the last job she’ll ever have. She leaves for her break.
More people arrive. Ten minutes later the driver is back looking twenty minutes older. She fires up the bus, which rumbles to life with the enthusiasm of an old man passing gas. The hydraulic doors seem to suck the passengers inside; a giant vacuum it clears the platform and removes all traces of humanity except the lingering smell.
Sigrid, together with the accompanying passengers, sits like a convict looking out the window at places she hadn’t known existed before and even on seeing them, somehow, still doesn’t believe that they actually do.
The bus ride lasts thirty-five minutes. She arrives with the sun flooding through her window, glinting off the step as she descends to the sidewalk. The morning is up now. The day is on. There is a glare from the map she will follow to Marcus’s home to find whatever might be waiting there.
As far as she knows, Marcus has never had any real money. He didn’t come from
