The Bus Ride

by rosa

Posted to Stories on 2003-06-07 14:48:00

It was her gypsy skirt he noticed first, peasant colours falling in folds from an elastic waist. Then her slim ankles, pale, before her heavy shoes.
The bus is tripping along the road, stumbling over stones and pitted dirt. The sun flits between the wrinkled rocks that line the road. Each time the light appears, eyebrows tense against the brightness, eyes translucent and burning, skin glowing. He can recall the moment, minutes ago, when the sun disappeared for quite a long time and the light became densely gray, and everything seemed lonely. Each space of his body had become hollow, like a swallowed sob filling his throat, his chest, his lungs.
It has been four days since he left the farm. He walked until his joints began to ache and stiffen, the inside of his mouth coated with dust, and in town on the end of the second day he bought a bus ticket. In the morning he raised his stiff back and body from the spot where he had slept and boarded the bus, walking to the back where he slumped against his bag. The girl arrived on the fourth day with a thin strapped purse and a hardened jaw. Her face is arresting, her skin shadowed with sun and dirt, and her eyes burn green against the brown.
The girl has a strange effect on Simon, for as he watches her so intently and stares at the curves of her face until he can feel them on the tips of his fingers, he is flooded with images lacking in any connection with the face before him. He remembers, without fully acknowledging as memory, a day months ago when he was sitting on the aging wooden fence watching cows and the flies that spotted their faces, their eyes, and in the heat he could smell their thick scent and the scent of the farmland. It was, too, although Simon does not realize, the day his father tried to leave the farm only to return the next day at dawn, when things were half asleep and Simon sat eating cereal with a heavy head. He did not notice his mother’s face behind him that flickered with colour as his father entered the room until it settled into one expression. The emotions that passed over her face that day and through her body would be forever impossible to name, and she, reflecting, did not try, realizing that at that moment words and names for things had nothing to do with anything she felt. And to have identified those passing sensations would have been to draw them into a collective and restricted community, a pool of labels from which people came and went, leaving with the closest thing they could find to what was already past.
Simon hears the girl speak when an elderly man asks for the time. Her answer is, though how could it not be, innocuous (she does not have a watch) and her voice is disappointing. There is a lilt to her words, the slight accent of affectation, and Simon becomes suddenly aware of a certain consciousness in her wild construction.
Leaving the farm was nothing more than an escape from banality. Simon finished school seven months ago in January with nothing to do and nothing to desire. Quickly he settled into the routine of the farm, and as the snowfalls came in waves he realized that the days could pass very quickly indeed and that the aches of his body after hours of work would carry him through the dark evenings without allowing him the energy to want anything more. His father and mother moved in circles around him as if the three were caught in a slow and silent dance and almost trance. But spring appeared and the bitter smell of earth became piercing and dank with melted snow and there came moments when sunlight would wash across the sky and Simon could not help but feel exhilarated.
He became irritable at times with the extent to which his motions were intertwined with the motions of the farm. The swing of his axe against a log seemed to weight the mechanism of the farm like a seesaw, infusing the other end with energy as his father across the field would lower his arm to draw milk from a cow, and over by the side of the barn would come the dance of his mother’s hand as chicken feed fell from her fingers. Their words, too, seldom left the realm of the farm, a plodding routine ruled by some rhythm of nature whose ease was intoxicating.
Simon’s parting with his parents seemed to him far more bland and less vivid than he had envisioned. Their reactions were quiet and uninflamed, and the look on his mother’s face was almost uninterested. But in fact, both Simon’s parents were encountering an entirely new feeling, one that united them although they themselves did not know it. Simon’s mother thought this feeling had something to do with loneliness and loss and maybe freedom, while Simon’s father did not precisely realize that any emotion had overcome him but noticed instead his immediate and consuming thirst for the orange juice in the refrigerator. And so Simon left.

In the next small town Simon leaves the bus, walking away with his eyes seeking the eyes of the girl through the dusty windows of the slowly rolling bus in some hope of a cinematic connection. He believes he catches her eye for a second, but is disappointed by the blankness of her stare and the lack of any current running through his body.
Left alone, Simon turns and walks towards the centre of the town. The few streets are picturesque but authentic, untouristed. Mailboxes scatter the streets in bursts of colour and the lawns are trim but not manufactured. It pleases Simon to see an ice cream shop with a red and white striped awning. On the main street, a painter has set up an easel. Simon believes the painter to be a foreigner to the town, and a true artist, because his canvas is not directed at the shops and colours of the main street, nor at the children playing in the tiny playground, but rather is tilted upwards towards the sky and the brooding colours that shift in the slanting light. The sky is not, however, irrelevant to the motions of the town. The streets and the people soak in the moods and manners of the world above them, and it is therefore not merely the sky that the painter is capturing, but the sky of this particular town at this particular moment.
Simon is half right. The painter, Michael Grange, is indeed an artist, or was once considered to be. He is not, however, a foreigner to the town, but rather grew up at its very centre, leaving for only four years to attend a university. Recently, people have begun to criticize Michael, saying that his paintings, while brilliant, remain copies of one another. His different images are somehow evocative of the same essence and the expressions on the faces have become redundant. Michael has the artist’s recognition of intensely familiar essences that have existed previously unmentioned, and it is this that gained him his reputation. But now that same recognition has grown stale in the eyes of his critics. Michael’s paintings return over and over again to the same few points of sensation. In his early painting, the viewer experienced something so precise arising from the un-nameable expression in the small girl’s oil face. And in the face of the small girl’s mother was an element that each person knew as his own yet, too, as something foreign. But, paintings later, when a young painted man at a painted bar elicits that same recognizable sensation, people have begun to lose their carefully built respect for Michael Grange, the painter.
Michael cannot help but repeat himself. He is unable to tear himself away from the beauty he has seen. There is something there, some un-definable feeling that has overcome him rarely but so vividly. It is a wash of utter sensation, a sudden unity that materializes for seconds between him and his surroundings, the trees that momentarily bow in a whirlwind dance with the air and the moving clouds, and he an energy at the core of it all. And while he seems so inessential to the sudden and swift creation of fleeting magic, he is also crucial, for its existence appears only in the realm of his singular mind, and in the people around him he can sense the continuation of mundane thoughts and a lack of any connection to the currents of life that rush for seconds to meet one another. He cannot help but paint that moment, that instant which he is sure each person in the world has experienced, although in a multitude of different ways. He will paint it over and over again, pure beauty as he has known it, and in the swirling paints it transforms into something new and not his own, and yet again in the eyes of its viewers.

It is something common, this preoccupation with beauty. For Simon, it is far less a beauty of sensation than a beauty of sight. He is intoxicated by it, fascinated, so completely aware of it and so aware of his awareness that it torments him. He is constantly re-evaluating his definition of beauty, seeking out strange forms in which it can appear and surprise him. He becomes at times occupied with the notion of its subjectivity, of taste and the possibility of rare existences beyond taste.
“I like your painting,” Simon says, and then cringes because he hates the futility of his words, because he has always dreamed of being suddenly capable of saying exactly the right thing, recreating his precise emotion and idea. Michael turns and sees black hair in waves and pale eyes in pale skin and a slightness that has become compact and dense from hours of labour.
“Thank you,” he says as if thinking about something else.
“No,” says Simon, “no, I really do like it. You don’t just paint what other people paint. Stores and restaurants with people and all that.”
“I hate it. Look at it. What is it? Blue and white, and then a slightly different shade of blue and some off-white. You know what I wanted to paint? This morning, I was sitting over there on that park bench and the birds were singing. Then, as a man walked by I heard him whistle the tune of a folk song, and its melody was strange, eerie against the natural scales of the birds. And there in the sandbox was a young boy whose concentration was so intense that he was scowling at the sand structure that rose beneath his hands. He had a shovel in his hand and as he sat there thinking, planning his building, he tapped his shovel softly against the wood at the side of the sandbox, a gentle ticking against the whistles of the man and the birds. And suddenly I was presented with a miraculous feeling. That’s not exactly it, you know. ‘Miraculous’ doesn’t in any sense give glory to that moment in which you become one with your surroundings. But it will have to do, I suppose, for now.”
“It was God, wasn’t it?” says Simon. “You felt God.”
Michael looks up. “I don’t believe in God.”
Simon is about to walk away when he stops and says, rushed, “You don’t know of any place I could stay for a few days, do you? A cheap room?” And before he has thought, Michael hears himself offering the boy a room in his house.
Later in the day, Simon is sitting in the room that Michael has prepared for him. It is a small room that smells of turpentine and linseed oil. The smells evoke a definite period of time in Simon’s mind, one he cannot quite place but realizes to have occurred at some point earlier than today. Perhaps it was the year that his father painted their house, he thinks, and the air was saturated with smells of white paint that were sometimes sweet and sometimes acrid.
In the room is a small window, old with milky streaks where the glass has run. Outside his room, pigeons are circling in ovals, flashing the white undersides of their wings and then their dark backs as they swoop and swoon in the air. Simon is unsure of what to do next. Does he go downstairs to make idle conversation that might fall upon something interesting or may simply meander? Or can he stay in this room where the light within the pale walls shrinks his pupils to tiny points and the smells surround and bathe him in memories and slow thoughts.
Michael, downstairs, is painting. Simon has not left his room but lies instead on the narrow thin mattress that billowed with dust when he first sat down. Michael hadn’t planned to paint. He usually enters his studio only in the early morning or the early evening, the familiar light like a drug which calms his nerves and transports him. But this afternoon, sitting in his living room with his thoughts straying from his magazine, Michael stood and walked into his studio. It is the largest room in the house, an expanse of wide walls and windows and high ceilings. It is surprisingly uncluttered. Before he had established himself as a painter, back when he painted in his parents’ garage, he had imagined his studio would be small, littered with paint drippings and discarded drawings and vibrant with thrown colour. In fact, the room’s cream walls and the hardwood floors remain bare; as clutter encroaches, it seems to invade Michael’s mind, spidering through his thoughts. Then, his head muddied, he can no longer paint and works feverishly to regain spacious order.

After hours, the painting has begun to take shape. It began as a study, an exercise in deliberation, choice of colour, placement and texture, without ever referring to a greater purpose, an image of inspiration or a meaning beyond technique. But as he worked, Michael’s thoughts began to loosen and wander until he became less and less aware that he was thinking at all, and less aware of time passing and of the motions of his hand on the wood of the brush on the coarse canvas. Finally, exhausted, his movements slowed and he noticed the strain in his eyes from squinting and from lack of light. Now, staring at the canvas, he is presented with images that seem so foreign, so lacking in connection with his intellect. Colours overlap and undulate in intensity, reds are rimmed with blacks, browns textured so that they become tangible simply through sight. The background is a strange and deep yellow, a colour so unusual that Michael cannot fathom how it came to be, this yellow, this dense energy that reflects and deflects and absorbs and diffuses every other colour and shade on the canvas. It is wonderful, to Michael. It fills him with exuberance and exhilaration. To have created something so different! To have moved so far from mere sensation, which seems now even dull, towards energy, towards colours as characters, as lively beings that converse amongst themselves and chatter and chant. The colours emote and, once remote, now unify in complex and intricate relationships. This is true painting, thinks Michael, for finally he has reached beyond the limit that he did not know existed, to a space beyond that he could not have predicted where colour and shade and light have no obligation to human form and human sensation and the human world, but rather exist in their own world, on another plane.
He must show Simon, the strange pale boy who is sitting above him, reading, perhaps, or thinking or sleeping. Simon will love the painting. He will see not one but multiple gods in the colours and he will see the beauty and the essence and the essentiality of it all. Michael saw it in his pale eyes, today in the park. In his mind, he sees a boy who was born wise, who did not forget instinct as he grew older but retained it, a knowledge of pure nothingness that everyone begins with but seems to grow away from. Simon will love the painting. But first, Michael will make dinner, for he has not eaten since early morning and neither, he supposes, has Simon. The painting will wait, it could wait forever and its vibrancy would not fade, its energy glowing on the canvas.
As Michael cooks, the clattering pans wake Simon from a half-dreaming state. The noises of the kitchen cause Simon to realize that he is hungry. Rousing himself, he wanders out of the room into the dark hallway and down the wooden stairs. At the end of the downstairs hall Simon can see the kitchen glowing with warm light. Michael is humming as he cooks. Not typical, thinks Simon, though he has barely spoken with the man. Walking towards the kitchen, Simon’s eye is caught by colours at his periphery, canvases mounted along the walls of what must be Michael’s studio. Entranced, he steps forward to stand in the doorway. The walls are lined with images of men and women, their children, their faces and feelings caught and stilled. But there, in the centre of the room, stands an easel. Simon, transfixed, stands in muted horror. The painting is ugly; there is no other way to see it. Colours mash together and mangle, muddied with too much mixture and strange combinations. The texture of the paint is vivid and frightening, rising in snaking patterns much like those that appear beneath Simon’s eyelids whenever he is sick and strangely skewed by fever. He hates this creation, it repulses him, and he pulls himself out of the room and towards the kitchen, where Michael has begun to lay the table with plates of steaming vegetables and meat.
Michael is in high spirits, his face feverish and his eyes dark. Every few minutes, the area around his mouth distorts, puckering with a kind of glee.
“I have something to show you,” he says, his eyes and mouth twitching like a child trying to conceal a manic smile.
“But no,” he stands, “first, dessert. What should we have? Ice cream? Fruit? I’ll have to go to the store. I don’t eat dessert much.”
Simon is unresponsive, almost frightened.
“I’ll go to the store,” says Michael. “You just wash the dishes, then I’ll come back, we’ll have ice cream and I’ll show you the thing.”
“Okay.”
Simon knows what Michael wants to show him, those ugly jumbles of coloured paint on cloth that had such power to repel him. As he hears the door slam and he starts to clear plates from the table, Simon begins to dread the moment of the painting’s unveiling. He cannot feign respect, he cannot gape in wonder and awe, he does not even know if he can look again at that horrifying force at the centre of the studio. And so, washing the last dish and drying it and placing it in the cupboard, Simon goes back upstairs to get his backpack.

Three old men sit against the wall of the hardware store as old men do in films and plays and then, too, surprisingly, in real life. Their faces reflect the moving sun as they sit, their backs curving against an old wooden bench. One man is widowed and now divides the timeline of his life with the period before his wife and during their marriage and after her death. Another is old, the skin of his face and body loosening in folds around his shrinking bones. The third was young enough to be in the war and came back changed, quiet. Simon approaches the bench, seeking directions to the bus stop whose location he has somehow forgotten despite the size of the town. The widower answers, though all are watching the pale boy, and the oldest man thinks Simon looks only slightly like an angel; that translucent skin is taut and glowing like his skin never was, even in youth, that hair so deeply black that in the burning sepia sunlight it shimmers with colours. The third, who returned from the war able to stop thinking entirely for minutes, turns away from the widower’s gesturing fingers to look across the street where a man has just stepped out from the convenience store, a carton of ice-cream in his hand and plump red strawberries in a clear bag. He sees the man’s eyes sweep the street idly and then pause, caught by the back of the boy at the bench who seems little more than skin and hair and light. The man leans forward as if to walk towards the boy, his mouth and eyes begin to shape themselves for speech, and then he stops, his features slacken, he turns and walks away.
Simon thanks the men and turns towards the bus stop, walking slowly as he feels the sun against his skin. He
feels little remorse at leaving. He left a note, there on the kitchen table, with just ‘thank you’ written in small letters. It is enough, Simon thinks, to have written those words, and Michael will appreciate their weight, their dense meaning that would have been obscured by written niceties. It is enough, too, for Michael to love his painting alone. Simon, sitting now at the bus stop, thinks of Michael putting down his groceries in the kitchen and finding the note there on the table. He will look sad at first, almost anguished, and his throat will strain against his tongue against the roof of his mouth as if to cry. But then, walking slowly towards the studio and later, standing there in the centre of the room before his creation and even later, when the light has turned black and the painting remains vivid before his eyes, he will begin to forget. As his head fills with colours, swimming colours, colours screaming silently, he will forget, and it will be enough to have this energy that, there in the dark, suspends him and sustains him, until morning.