Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should know our place again.
Language is clear provided one passes over the words quickly enough.
“They want your ligaments,” the bus driver deadpan delivered to me as I boarded. Must have misheard her. I’d been riding public transit in this city for years. Never had a single problem. Still, it was such an off-putting remark.
I was too nonplussed to ask for clarification, but even had I my wits about me, I would have known the futility of asking the driver to repeat herself. Bus drivers never repeat themselves. And being honest, I knew I made no mistake. Whoever ‘they’ were, they wanted my ligaments. Such is life.
Other than that it was a typical South Side bus ride. A woman overdressed for the season sat by the middle exit, extracting layer after layer, yet somehow the armoire of redolent clothing that shrouded her body never got any smaller.
A sallow gentleman with matching teeth and a dingy Panama hat pricked his window with the tip of his index finger—clack, clack, clack—pleading with no one in particular that he “used to live there.” A long time ago. A schoolgirl trio in uniform—sisters, it seemed—sat in the back row, cracking jokes and taking turns teasing each other about their crushes. When they weren’t joking and teasing they were singing various top-40 hits and improvising cute parodies thereof. The jokes and teases eventually made their way into the extemporary lyrics. Kelly (or Kelli) was gifted with the most reverberant tessitura of the three, but each of them carried a sweet tune.
I sat in the middle of the bus, in the left seat of a triad that ran perpendicular to most other rows. It’s a practicable choice: plentiful leg room, easy access to the exit, doesn’t foment guilt over poaching a premium seat from an elder. I took from my messenger bag a library copy of A Pale View of Hills—short and readable, quietly haunting, perfect for commutes. I looked up and smiled at the overdressed woman. Part of me wanted to wave or nod or something else, as a show of I don’t know what. Solidarity? Better that I didn’t. The smile was invasive enough. It was probably the kind of polite, paternalistic smile that told her everything she would ever want to know about me.
The bus plodded along a stretch of South Shore Drive that accentuated Chicago’s flatness. Quaint but monotonous bungalows, motionless Lake Michigan with plain old Indiana in the offing, not an undulation in sight. A pitiable golf course that Tiger’s design firm once wanted to purchase and renovate, but the plans fizzled out. This area wasn’t at the ripe stage of gentrification, his advisers likely told him. It would be at least twenty years before the tour considered the renovated course, and its surroundings, tour-viable.
—“You one of them church going motherfuckers, ain’t ya?”
I wasn’t, but something told me I should tell him I was.
“Thought so. Aye, you know I’m Hex Luther’s cousin, right?”
I had no reason to know this detail about this man I had never seen, who sat beside me in the middle of the bus. He appeared to be a few years younger than me, a few inches taller. Wore a weathered pair of Jordans—the sort that aren’t denoted by a number. Nothing about him immediately draws attention, except for the shabby sand-colored towel he had wrapped around his left hand and forearm. I couldn’t avoid anchoring my focus on the towel, even as my right eyelid twitched in anticipation of being reproached for not recognizing the weight of his familial claim.
“That’s cool,” I said in a neutral tone meant to evince basic comprehension and tempered admiration. “I like his work.” Considered curtness was the best approach.
“Fuck outta here! A church boy knowing about Hex Luther? That’s so hilarious.”
“It’s true,” I said, this time with a whisper of defensiveness speckled into my tone. “Diligent Grind was excellent.”
Ishiguro’s beautiful prose would have to wait its turn.
“You real funny. But Hex Luther my cousin for real.” Hex’s cousin had an unsettling manner about him, like a terse, shoddily translated instruction manual. Reading his intonations and body language offered no hint about what to say next. I remembered Nam Le’s point that translation is a violence. So, too, is interpretation. Yes, probably true.
When he looked you in the eyes you didn’t get the sense he saw you. In English we use the expression “looking through”, but even that doesn’t fully satisfy the picture. To look through someone is to ignore them, to focus on something that lies beyond. He did not look through me, for there was nothing to notice in the background. Just three singing schoolgirls, innocent as can be, a woman hidden under a cumbersome load—which I suppose would be a novelty if she didn’t essentially live on that bus—and a lonely looking old man.
No, he was not one who looked through someone; instead, he seemed to have mastered looking- without-looking, as if his eyes were functionless vestiges that played no part in his perceiving the world—the kind of thing for which there ought to be a German word that describes it exactly. Yet he wasn’t physically blind, of that I was certain.
More anxious thoughts crept in. Maybe they really were after my ligaments. But Hex’s cousin couldn’t have been the ‘they’ about whom the bus driver warned me. She would have alerted me when he got on—something direct, like ‘protect your ligaments and get off the bus now!' Or perhaps she wouldn’t have. She had to drive.
That garish, discolored bundle wrapped around his arm. Why was it there?
Clack, clack, clack. “Nineteen Seventy-Two,” said the old man with the Panama hat, holding onto the long ‘E’ as though savoring a sound could deepen one’s immersion into the past. Maybe it can. “That right there,” he pointed at a shabby burger joint, the sort that advertises Vienna Beef hotdogs across its weather-beaten awning but sells a cheaper knockoff. “That used to be the most happenin’ jazz club in the city. I’m tellin’ ya, this neighborhood here was the place to be! It’s a damn shame what happened to this place.” He couldn’t mask the lament in his voice as he trailed off.
—“Stupid ass old head talking to himself. He a goofy.”
There’s nothing inherently threatening about a towel, I told myself. Yet every thing in the world has its proper place—a set of proper places—and what we take to be out of place disturbs us, even when it’s something as innocuous as a washroom accessory. Is this true?
What did Hex Luther’s cousin want? My ligaments? Was ‘ligaments’ just a strange synecdoche for the whole body? If not, which ligaments was he after? The vast majority of us have many ligaments—nine-hundred or so. Did he want all nine-hundred of mine? Did it matter? It’s not as though I’d consent to a small procedure removing even one ligament, no matter how small or insignificant.
I could hardly tolerate the stench coming from the life-sized matryoshka doll sitting by the exit; she continued shedding layers of herself, compiling a mound so repugnant it forced two women to relocate to the front of the bus. Even the old man with the Panama hat changed seats. The three girls in the back row didn’t budge, although they all kept their noses pinched. Kelly complained, in a voice even more nasally than the regional norm, that the bus smelled “like rotten onions in a foot factory.” Maybe it was “food factory.” Hard to tell, but her description did align with the facts.
Hex’s cousin was still sitting next to me. “Do you know why I asked if you go to church?”
“Nah, why?”
“Cuz you look, and you talk like somebody that go to church.” It wasn’t a baseless accusation, but I failed to discern his point. He looked-without-looking at me once more, with a degree of scrutiny that shouldn’t have been possible given the airiness of his non-gaze, before raising his left arm—the one circumscribed by the towel—to tug on the stop cable.
“Aye, I’m finna get on another bus. You got two-fifty for me to get on?”
I handed him an extra Chicago Transit Authority pass I forgot I had. “This got about ten on it.”
“Appreciate you, my boy.” A pause. He stuck out his right hand, expecting a dap up. I obliged. “Yeah… they finna get you.” The bus lurched to a stop. Hex Luther’s cousin exited, trampling over a litter of greasy discards and other clutter on his way out, muttering profanities meant to describe how nasty it all was. A ratty Chicago Blackhawks scarf stopped the middle exit doors from gliding shut, so the driver pressed the green OPEN button once again, freeing the scarf to drift delicately onto the patchy road verge outside.
“Yep, they say age don’t make concrete any kinder”, murmured the old man with the Panama hat as he swiveled his head toward the window. Without question or comment, the bus driver retrieved the decrepit thing and returned it to its owner. The grossly overdressed woman, stolid and expressionless, thanked her in a flat, breathy baritone that suited her face.
Suddenly I started to feel groggy. My breathing became labored, my forehead flushed, palms clammy and useless. All I could hear was Kelly and her two sisters harmonizing—oh, that saccharine Shenandoah! Such mesmerizing talent. The girls’ voices rang like sirens in a long, vacuous tunnel. I could no longer tell if they were singing or calling out to me. My consciousness faded slowly.
Those final echoes dissolved into nothingness, like a forgotten dream, or the slow decomposition of organic matter.
“Hey, young man.” I came to. Blurry. Metallic gray ceiling, like a futuristic gurney. The old man with the Panama hat. He tapped my shoulder with his time-hardened knuckles. I was weak and delirious.
“Young man, this as far as this bus goes. Get off that table. Driver got an hour break before she’ll be back.”
“Off what? What are you”—I was still on the bus, but splayed across a table that somehow fit within the bounds of its narrow aisle. “What the hell is this?”
“The lady told you they was gonna take out your ligaments. Heard her myself. You think she was telling you that for her amusement?”
“Why didn’t anyone help me?”
“Man, please. What’s an old fart like me gonna do to stop them sharp little girls? Shoot, I don’t even have my real teeth no more.” The mercurial man removed his dentures and set them at the head of the table. It was a standard, foldable rectangle, lined with glossy white linen, wobbling between the grooves in the floor.
“And I ain’t gonna speak for no one but myself. There. There’s the only good teeth I have left.”
“Little girls? You mean the”—
—“Forget that. It’s over with. Go out and get you some fresh air. But you listen to me real good, brother: don’t go down to 79th and Yeats. They chewin’ on brains like sunflower seeds over there.”
He chuckled with unnerving glee and got off the bus. “Be safe, brother man.”
“Yeah, you too.”
Chuckled again. His ears were sensitive to insincerity.
Alone on the bus, I was left to cope with arms that could no longer support my bodyweight. Legs were ruined too. They could bend but not unbend, once bent; they could unbend but not bend, once unbent. These were tentacles, not limbs. They took my ligaments.
Although there was minimal cause for optimism, I convinced myself I could walk, as long as I could find my feet, by fortune or fiat. If I needed to, I would drag my failing legs like a dog drags a burdensome bone, with gritted teeth and a forbearance on shame.
Unable to dismount from the table, I rolled counterclockwise and collided with the acrylic panel separating the exit door landing from… why am I telling you all this? The upshot is that getting up was fucking hard, but I eventually did. I shuffled on, pregnant with pride, more like perverse rectitude, until I collapsed onto a quiet bench in the gardens of Rainbow Beach Park. A spider creeped from the bench’s underside and weaved across my sightline, ending atop the leaf of a mature American elm, which cast a modest canopy over us both. What would happen if I ate it—no, I shouldn’t. In this pathetic state I couldn’t help but interpret the spider’s effortless high wire performance as anything but one of nature’s cruel taunts. But no, there was no need to be bitter. Just let the spider be. There is no reason we cannot coexist.
All that was left to do was sit and wait. For what? I wasn’t sure. I took my Nordic blue Leuchtturm1917 notebook in hand—the very one you hold in your hands now—and I wrote, as legibly as my writhing wrist would allow:
If these are my final words, may they be my most eloquent, for I have grown frail and feverish—an inessential teratoid, a gormless god, a carbonic mass lacking substance, a thinking THING. Oh, my hollow heap of skin and marrow-less bones, always make me someone who questions! Sever the whole thing, scatter it thin across the city—this illusion of abundance will do!
Pick up and read.
“They want your ligaments,” the bus driver deadpan delivered to me as I boarded…
Samir de Leon is a writer based in Chicago.