Sweating and shivering on the bus, most people would think he’s a junkie. Most people would be right, but it’s not H he needs.
It’s something far more delicious.
I get on the bus and he’s so far down he doesn’t even sense me. If he was even halfway full he see me, black Saba jacket, blue jeans, black cheap sunglasses, all surrounded by red light flickering a dying fluorescent. When I look at him I see the same light, except his is flickering faster and jolting out from his body like it is alive and knows it must escape its sick host.
Sliding into the seat behind him and I can smell his desperation. It’s leaking from his pores, thudding out in dull cell echoes. The rotten fruit scent is starting to fill up the back of the bus but the travellers here probably can’t tell it from the competing aroma of thin worried people on long journeys. Fruit fruit fruit – paw paw left in plastic wrap and dumped down the back of a metal bin in the sun.
He groans softly and I lean over the chair to talk to him and get a mouthful of disgusting flavour instead. We’re pulling out the bus stop and I’ve just got on but I’ve need to take him off right now or it’s going to be bloody and rotten on this bus in about ten minutes.
Hey. Hey, stop the bus. My friend is sick, we need to get off.
I pull him up the aisle as heads turn toward us. Clearly I just got on and clearly I didn’t speak to the guy or sit next to him but no one says any of this to me. Why would they? Out here in the dark of middle America no one wants to challenge someone on a bus over some other dude they never saw before. The bus driver doesn’t even speak; he mutely pulls over, a hiss of pressure hydraulics as the door opens and I pull the guy off. A moment later and the bus is gone and we’re on the side of the road about twenty metres away from the bus stop.
I need to travel. Got to move.
Yes yes, I’ll help you. I’ll get you into a car and we’ll find your heart. Where is he?
New York. Feels New York. Far away. Hurts. Jules.
You’ll be fine Jules. We’ll get there in no time. Come to my car.
I haul Jules off the road and into the dark. Hot gusts of rotting fruit push up into my face as he shakes and sweats. The fruit smell is punching out from under his clothes like he has doused himself in some revolting perfume. I didn’t lie entirely. I will take him to a car. But there is no way he can reach New York.
He was in Los Angeles. He flew to New York. Businessman. I followed. He flew back. He flew back. Back.
I make a non-committal noise. It carries hints of don’t it just beat all get out and damn traveller and a little of it’s a hard life travelling the roads huh? I’m thinking he’s an idiot for travelling if he had found the house.
Sit here. I’ll get my car.
I dump him far from the road in the deep darkness. No one but me or another of us will see him as he crawls toward New York. As I walk away, other scents float up and other sensations. I’m heading away from my heart, only a little, and I feel a slight elastic twinge; a low tide pulling at my body. I’m well full – if it were a fraction it would be about seven-eighths – and so this low tide is slight and manageable.
Bar noises slide up before the local drinking hole comes into view. It’s a small place, like the town, so when I steal the red Honda someone will notice and then the police will come … eventually. I scan the area and don’t see anyone watching. Ten seconds later and gravel is crunching under stolen tyres.
A minute more and I lift Jules into the backseat (he had crawled about fifteen metres by then). He starts mumbling but I’m not really listening because I’m trying to breathe shallowly. Jules is hitting the stench of an entire poisoned fruit market that has been abandoned, left to rot away along with the dead bodies of pigeons and local dogs. Slam the door and then we’re away, out of the town and into the darkness.
New York. Going to New York. Good.
Yeah.
I know what he’s feeling. Heading toward a heart or a heart coming to you is running with a tail wind on the hard wet sand of a beach, swimming with the current, every metre better than the last, more joyful, more serene, more right.
We hit ninety miles an hour and Jules is still mumbling but I’m remembering a basement in some forgettable town where I waited for three weeks once. I had arrived two weeks earlier and everything was fine because my heart was there just trundling to work and back. I found his house, his work, his supermarket. I timed him and followed him and was happy to rest up there for a while. I was sitting in a bar drinking and not thinking when I felt a sudden lurch crash me off the chair. I hit the floor, dragging my beer on top of me and keening with the ache of tiny fishhooks embedded in every muscle. Flight. Travel. Fast flight of my heart away from me. The bouncers helped me to the door and I sobbed my way through town until I got to his house. Soon I was in his basement, head throbbing, brain screaming at me to steal a car and drive drive drive. I nearly did it too, twelve hours later when I felt him still moving, moving away from me.
Time passed and I passed along with it, drifting in pain with the pull, mostly unaware of anything but my little private universe of longing.
Then, after some weeks of a century each, a flash of lightning surged through me and I leapt up from the floor, bright life bringing me back. My dear heart was flying back to me. The fifteen hours following were ones of joy and delight as he came closer at great velocity. Then he was in the house and I stood downstairs shaking as a starving man who can smell roasting chicken and knows all he has to do is reach out for his fill. And then I ascended the stairs and had my fill.
Jules kicks his foot against the passenger side window behind me and cracks it. His mumbling has a wet gurgling overtone and not even the aircon on full and the window down can suck his revolting stench away fast enough. He’s draining out and soon. Minutes maybe.
I pull off the road and drive into the dark of unfenced dusty nothingness. No fences because there’s no cattle or sheep or camel or anything out here apart from maybe some sleep-deprived truck drivers who occasionally slide off and wipe themselves out. Jules grunts when he feels our angle change and then starts hyperventilating when I turn the car another ten degrees or so to see what he’ll do. I keep up on that angle for a few moments and then straighten up a little to give him some relief. Once we’re well out of sight of the road I pull up in a screech and leap out of the car with the keys in my hand.
Jules screams and scrambles into the front seat a second later, thrashing with idiotic hands at the wheel. He punches his foot up and down on accelerator and brake and then falls out of the car onto the ground.
Drive me. Help me.
His eyes are bleeding.
My heart. Heart. Flyer.
His ears are bleeding.
My Heart. Hearrt. Hisart.
He is seeping.
I hold my breath and grab his shirt, pulling him away from the car. We head toward New York so he doesn’t struggle although some part of his brain must still be working because he says can’t drag me thousand miles.
I make soothing noises until there are rocks and a dip between us and the car, and then let him go. Immediately he starts moaning and gurgling again; a dying man with a strobe of light crashing around him. He says heart again and tries to reach for me but I step back toward another pile of rocks. For a moment I think about whether it is humane to rock his head in and then think maybe it’s vampane for me to kill him or maybe it’s vampane for me to want to watch his last moments.
The next few minutes turn out to be about forty minutes which I think about as useful to know but then dismiss as useless because once you’re as far down as he is you’re essentially fucked. During the wait I try to work out how close I got to this and I’m deciding on two to four days when his low gurgling and bleeding blister up to full.
Jules chokes through a mouthful of blood and black liquid and his jeans dramatically darken like he has pissed himself with deep red tomato sauce. There are actual spurts of blood from his face as tiny veins rupture and project out into the dust in a gory sprinkle. He doesn’t kick or thrash at this expansion through him; rather it is a strong tightening of muscles without limit. The red light around him dips and flickers as cells shrink and then supernova. I watch from the rock, breathing into my jacket so I don’t have to smell him.
Mere minutes of infinity muscle tightness and every single part of Jules has burst itself. Only when he stops breathing do I hear the sursursur of the faintest bubble wrap popping;the echo of a grandstand clap;wave departing from the shore; the final grains of a sand timer trickling. The last cells of Jules crackle away like chubby atom-sized Sumo stomping into their rice ring.
The smell departs almost immediately; heavy fruit now replaced with wet denim. I walk closer to him and see the spray of blood is all along the same arc. All towards New York.
I look for maybe half a minute more, mostly thinking about air travel and how fucked up it makes things. The next half minute as I walk back to the car is spent considering how to prevent airlines from flying. I’m somewhere around climate change and blood for oil as I get back on the road. Down the road I’m pondering prank calls and terrorists and rolling two words, humanity and vampanity, over and over and then a little while later I don’t care much at all because I’m heading towards my heart and every metre, every mile is supreme joy, solace, comfort and right.