Back in Ithaca, when he was in the midst of trying to figure out what to do with all the stuff in the house, he got a call from Frank, a cousin of his mother’s, who in the last few years had been phoning the family house every six months or so to see how she was doing. Mark had met him once decades ago, when he was in the Boston area for a relative’s wedding, but barely remembered him. Frank had lived all his life in Alabama, where Mark’s mother’s family came from, and he spoke with a wonderfully slow and thick Southern accent.
“Mark, I’m so sorry. Your mother was a real live wire.”
“Yes she was.”
“When I was six or seven and she was nine or so she dared me to peek into the girls’ changing rooms at the beach. She taught me all sorts of things my momma would have whipped me for, if she’d known.”
Mark turns over in his sleeping bag. He should have brought a thicker pad. He doesn’t want to be tired tomorrow for the closing and the long drive home.
On the drive here, he stopped at a McDonald’s along I-90. He ordered a special, an Angus burger with swiss cheese and mushrooms, and he asked that they add a slice of raw onion. The gawky, acned teenager who brought him his order said something as he handed over the bag that Mark didn’t catch. “What was that?” he asked.
“I said, I always eat it with a slice of onion, too. My friends say I’m crazy.”
Mark thought about this for a couple of seconds. He knew he should say something friendly in return, maybe something witty, but he couldn’t think of anything. Finally, he just said, “They’re wrong.”
The kid beamed, and as he turned away he said happily, “They are!”
Back in the car, Mark wondered why the exchange pleased him so much. The warmth of it lasted all the way to Boston.
This reminds him of a larger bubble of happiness, equally mysterious, that formed around him a couple of weeks ago. He was driving to the county recycling center to renew his trash disposal license. He stopped at a light. A blue car turned right off the intersecting road, and as it passed Mark’s car in the opposite lane, euphoria blossomed in his chest. It kept expanding, filling the passenger compartment. After a moment of puzzlement, Mark realized that the color of the vehicle that had passed him was the exact blue of his Iso Grifo Matchbox car.
Suddenly, he noticed everything. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that he was capable of noticing things suddenly seemed miraculous. A teenage girl was standing on the corner. Her dog had lifted its foreleg, looking up at her with ears canted forward in expressive dog-worry, to show her the leash was tangled, but she wasn’t paying attention, she was texting a friend. A semi-trailer was making a left-hand turn into Mark’s street, and the minivan in front of him wasn’t backing up, even though there was space for it, to give the truck more room, and Mark wondered if it was sexist of him to have the impression that women were more likely than men not to notice that backing up in such situations was helpful. The truck driver inched along, eyes on his side mirror, stone-faced, barely making it, and the bubble of happiness kept expanding, taking in the small truck with the slat-walled flatbed that now zipped through on the late yellow light, carrying discarded Christmas trees that had been picked up along the city sidewalks and were shipped to barrier islands for burial, where they helped stabilize sand dunes.
It kept expanding, and there was no open cattle truck with cow and careless calf, no panel van with fifties script reading tv repair, but everywhere there were people turning right and left, crossing railroad tracks, accomplishing errands, living their lives on a speck of space grit, and he thought of the list written by every first-grade nerd who ever lived since the invention of writing and cosmology, only now with adult completeness: Mark Fuller, Room 3, Munroe Elementary School, 1403 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, Massachusetts, United States of America, Earth, Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, The Local Group, Laniakea Supercluster, Universe, Brane-verse—and behind it all, Leibniz’s question: Why is there something, rather than nothing?
The light turned green. The minivan in front turned left. It was a woman. Mark followed her, and the words that flowed around and through him, lifting him higher and higher, were, We’re all in this together.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
The bus was scheduled to arrive in Cleveland at 2:55 a.m., but it was 50 minutes late. It was supposed to depart at 3:55, but now it’s 4:02, with no sign of the driver. She’s been trying to sleep. The bus is overheated. Except for the terminal, there’s nothing but parking lots in every direction. Correction, behind the bus, across a derelict street, there’s a featureless brick warehouse. Correction, there’s a louvered steel vent in the otherwise featureless brick warehouse, obscenely gummed up with gray glistening foamy material that appears to have boiled out and frozen. She imagines the warehouse filling with toxic waffle batter, some military-industrial process spiraling out of control, fleeing workers pressed into the corners, suffocating, creating negative molds of themselves like Pompeiians.
In Pittsburgh, 33 passengers got off, 18 got on, leaving 19 empty seats, five of them in pairs and nine single—one of them next to her—meaning presumably the other 13 pairs were all occupied by couples. Such
