Since the Seattle autumn had turned especially cold and wet and nobody walked outside anymore, the drivers steering Vicky’s evening bus route began asking that passengers sit on laps. At first everybody complained, with loudly whispered grumbles and exaggerated sighs, but at thirty to thirty-five more people per bus, all had to admit it was quite efficient. Cozy, some thought—they appreciated the intimacy, however superficial. “Where else you gonna get it?” one man often proclaimed, some woman or another perched primly on his knee as though they were newly paired lovers.  The man had cataracts and tufts of snowy hair. A hand like tangled tree roots hovered over the small of the woman’s back, one pothole away from inappropriate groping.

Vicky stood in her kitchen one evening and told her mother about the bus rides over the phone. Outside, a raisin sky bloomed low overhead, and rain had again started falling from it in shivering torrents. Her mother was down in Palomino, Arizona. She didn’t understand the things rain could do to a person, to a city.
She was far from impressed.

“What if the bus crashes,” she said. Conclusively, as though the bus surely would crash. “And you’re all trapped inside. You’re packed up like sardines and you’re totally immobile. Totally bloody.”

Vicky tried explaining. She liked to argue with her mother, to articulate their differences. She described the steam from all their bodies, the way it clouded the bus windows opaque and obscured the drowned streets beyond.

“It’s about transcending anonymity,” she concluded, and silently applauded her poetic instincts.

She was eating a late dinner of tuna fish straight from the can. She scraped the fibrous pulp from the metal rim with a white plastic spoon. Stacked all around her, crowding the tiny kitchen, were cardboard boxes filled with kitchenware she had yet to unpack. Boxes were everywhere in the apartment—cardboard skyscrapers, teetering in the hallways, the bedroom, the kitchen.  A cardboard city.  Boxville. Cardopolis. Brown Town.

She needed to move, she thought. What about Florida? Or Maine? What about Texas?

“So how is Hudson?” her mother was asking.

Dead, Vicky wanted to reply. Drowned in the Pacific, poor thing. Sunk like a stone.

 

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