It feels so late already, but it's only 7PM. Many restaurants are already closed. The traffic from 5PM is gone, and the roads are quite empty. The bus has no one standing, neither was the train before that. And it feels late too because I am tired. I don't know if it's really just the sun. It's tiring, the darkness, the early darkness. And there is little light outside, not on the closed stores, not from the depressing looking restaurants that are open. Even the glittering lights seem even more depressing as they illuminate the emptiness through which the bus is traveling.
Maybe we are in a tunnel, a tunnel through an alien time and an alien space. And the people around me are just lost members of the homo sapiens species on a spaceship back from or towards a crazy place. We are just lost. The glittering lights outside aren't for the fast food restaurants and pawn shops and the billboards. They are just stars in the galaxies we are floating in. And between our spaceship and the next intelligent community is some uncountable distance away, and if we actually get a glimpse of one, it's long extinct by now.
But then the bus stops. No one pulled the stop rope. Everyone is too tired and waiting for a stop to haul their bodies out. The man across the walk aisle from me has bloodshot eyes looking over his right arm on which the lower half of his face is resting. He is not really looking at anything. Two seats in front of me is an Asian woman who apparently was in communications with some alien life form yonder using her cell phone. She was whispering, with no emotions, just whispering while looking out into the darkness that forms a homogeneous ink soup we are traveling through. And on the other side of the walk aisle from her is a middle-aged man with long curly and white hair that doesn't hide his incipient balding. He's looking intently at the Asian woman, sometimes rolling his eyes slightly down, caressing her slender body with his stare. Sitting next to him is a white woman who's the only white person in the bus besides the man next to her. And she tried to contain her smile when she sees our new member joining us from outer space. The bus lights up when it stops and opens the door, as if it were greeting whoever is coming to join us. The last time it opened the door was to let back in a Hispanic man who apparently thought it was his planet to get off to but he made a mistake. He couldn't conceal his embarrassment. It's rough being an alien in a world that doesn't really want you to be who you are. Although lots of things are bilingual here, I haven't heard any Spanish, and definitely not from the people working in the bus system. If you couldn't speak English well, how do you get the courage to ask a bus driver where to get off?
At least the driver let him back in without making him upset. It's cold and dark out there in the void of the universe. The universe is really mostly empty space, and anything except the void is an anomaly, a singularity that still doesn't really mess up the homogeneity of the nothingness.
So now the new arrival is yet another black man. He's wearing a green coat, almost like the hip reproduction of German army-wear (that's post-war Germany, not Nazi Germany, for those still living in the old part of the universe). He seemed lost, but that's normal because no one here is smiling at him or even looking at him in his face. Although we are supposed to be in the friendly part of the universe, in side this even more singular creation called bus, we are just lost. Many, like the teenagers behind me, simply don't care; they are caged within their headphones and wandering in their own mini-universes of music until they are jettisoned to their random destination.
This man in the green jacket sits down in front of the man who doesn't notice him because he is still undressing the Asian young woman with his eyes. But the woman notices him, and as I said, she tries not to smile. The black man who quickly joins the rest of us in looking lost and tired, is wearing a skirt.
Really? A skirt?
Yes. And he doesn't look eccentric, as you might expect from a transvestite. Everything else he is wearing is "normal", but the dress, black, pleated, and hiding mostly under the jacket, makes me wonder if he just crapped in his pants earlier today and somehow ended up borrowing a coworker's extra skirt? Who knows. Or maybe he killed a girl but blood soiled his pants and he swapped them with her skirt?
My imagination substitutes for my desire to laugh or look stunned. He is of bigger than medium built, has no effeminate features at all. So what's with the pleated black skirt? And the loners picked up from this side of the galaxy are not at all eccentric, just working class people who can't be bothered with individuality. And he doesn't look like an exception.
Still, at any moment, I feel like he would get up and start twirling like a ballerina. And I look at the woman, who is trying to look somewhere else to avoid being provoked into laughing. Her uneasiness attracts the attention of the newcomer, who just becomes a little more humbled, if not embarrassed. The winds of the galaxy bring us strange tidings. Maybe we need to jettison more people here. I know I will be. In this bus, in this city of darkness and emptiness, we are all just too normal. People go about their businesses in fashions no less interesting than the boring lifestyles they try to advertise on those billboards or TVs. It's Christmas shopping season and the banality of the lives we lead become even more apparent when we are so caught up with doing what's expected: work hard, buy presents, feed the economy. There are ads everywhere, on this bus, in the train before, and everywhere else you can paste some information, there are ads about changing your career or getting your career on track. What if you did find a career that earns you $40,000 a year the first year, as the truck-driver ad promises? What then? You keep doing it until you're really good at it, so you can afford a family and have happy people around you, or if they aren't happy, you have to make more money to make them happy. Something like that.
So when do you get to wear a skirt? (If you're a woman, something even more eccentric.) When do you get to find something deeper in your heart and not be ashamed to bring it to the surface for all the world to see?
Now, my stop calls out to me and the bus slows to a halt.
