Bus Stop | Alexander T. Damle

            On September 31st, 1893, William Cormac walked out the front door of his farm house, inside which, down a hall, up stairs that a decade and a half earlier he had constructed carefully with his own hands, nails and boards bought with coin made from working in other mens fields, lay his two sleeping children, he their sole watchmen after the death of their mother, and he walked five miles down the road, and sat down by its edge to wait for the gold line bus. He sat crosslegged and stared out down the long road towards Denver, expectantly, anticipating the invention of the internal combustion engine, the birth of the bus, the creation of the Denver bus system, the laying of routes this far out into the countryside. He knew it would take a great time, but he would wait. What else was he going to do?

            After one week’s time in which he did not move from his spot, Thomas Crittenden walked up to him and spoke to his old friend.

            “William, why then doth thou set here when there are crops to tend?”

            “I must wait here for the bus. If I leave to tend my crops, I may miss it.”

            “In this then I see sense.”

            “As in all things born out of the internal combustion engine.”

            “The future.”

            “Yes.”

            So then Thomas walked on for he had his own crops to tend, and, after all, not all men may be blessed at being the great diviners of future-tech and hangers on to the end times. As he tended his crops, William remained sat waiting for the bus.

            One year later as William Cormac still sat waited, his eyes not once shuttered, his legs not once stretched, he received a second visitor, and he rode a pale horse, for it had a condition which limited the amount of pigmentation in its skin, and William greeted the rider, Pastor Jonathan Radley.

            “William, man, how’s it hanging dude?”

            “I wait for the gold line bus.”

            “Far out, man. Listen, I’ve gotta tell you something, and it’s some seriously bad news man.”

            “Yes, father?”

            “Your kids man... dude, they’re, like, totally dead, man.”
            “May I ask how?”

            “They, like, starved, because there were no crops. They didn’t, like, want to go look for food because they were, like, waiting for you to come back, man.”

            “This is sad, but understood. After all, what are we if we do not wait? I must not leave my post for fear that I may miss the bus, and they could not leave the home for fear that they may miss me.”

            “Radical, dude.”

            The years wore on, like a carousel revolving about its axis, its forward progress an inevitability, lit up under fairground lights, ground sticky with dropped cotton candy, crunch with spilled popcorn, screams of ecstasy fill the air, young couples losing themselves into each others eyes, parents looking with passivity after their children in a place of safety, while behind the men’s room a strange man approaches a boy who has become cut off from his parents, but the lights of the fair ground are lit up all the brighter, people sing and laugh and dance, because no one goes behind the men’s room, and still William waits.

            In 1914, the first car rattles past the bus stop, and William waves his hand slightly at man’s forward progress, though he knows still that his bus is a long way off, and still he has not even begun to stir from his spot, not let his eyes drift closed.

            One day a few years on  from that first car, a man sees William’s spot on the ground, passes him, turns, then walks back to him.

            “Are you the prophet William Cormac.”

            “We are all then prophets in waiting.”

            “But you have waited the longest of all.”

            “No. Those in the grave and those unborn, they are the ones that truly.”

            “How then, how may I find grace?”
            “You may sit as I do, but most men eventually will stir. Only in death will you find true peace.”

            So the man took a gun out from in amongst the folds of his clothes and blew his brains out, a fine red mist carried on the breeze into William’s face, a mist that William politely wipes away.

            Time moves more slowly now, as change comes faster, and the road is widened, then paved, and in 1934, the first pilgrims begin to move slowly past William, in cars hacked together from pieces of burned out souls, the bits of salvage of lives now owned by the banks in this time of near-oblivion and grand desperation, when the only hope is in the west because we have now conquered all else, save that beneath the seas and up in deep space. These pilgrims pass William without remark, only occasionally asking him for a bit of food or maybe a place to stay on the long road of their endless journey, but William declines each as the last. These people are waiting as he is, though they wait for death or salvation that will not come, and Tom Joad will be forgotten on the beaches of Normandy, across the fields of Europe, deep into the heart of Germany, blood and fire and steel, and then the young men who lived through hell shall come back and they shall again wait for salvation in the form of the office and the nine-five, but still though William shall not stir for he knows in waiting he will find what all they search for, and in waiting he need not age, and he need not fight, and he need not eat, and he must simply sit and keep eyes open, turned towards the road.

            In 1963, men come and work around William, and they build over the farms, over the crops awaiting harvest, create that which are called skyscrapers, tall buildings, glass and steel and concrete, and one of them, on his lunch break, takes his little brown bag, contents: one bottle Coca Cola, one ham and cheese sandwich, one Gala apple, sits down next to William, and engages William in his first conversation since the dead man.

            “What’s your name?”

            “William Cormac. And what is yours?”

            “I don’t remember.”

            “That’s a shame.”

            “Truly it is. I lost my name along with my bible up a prostitute’s cunt.”

            “How did they end up there?”

            “The same way I ended up here.”

            “Ah yes, this would make sense. May I ask what you’re building here?”

            “Sodom and Jerusalem.”

            “Is it not Sodom and Gomorrah?”

            “We all lost our bibles, so we had to improvise.”

            “I see. Well, I think your friends are going back to work.”

            “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            “Until then.”

            The man never returned to William, for the next day he awoke and remembered that his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and he was supposed to be president. The construction crew was sorry to lose the unnamed man, being as it was that he had the strength of ten normal men, but that, they supposed, was one of the benefits that came with the presidency.

            More years flittered by like old newspaper caught up in between buildings in a big city as the spot in which William waited now was, great buildings built up high, man trying to escape his chaining to the devil. More now asked William what he waited for, in his old fashioned clothes and slicked back hair, like no vagrant they’d ever known, and still he told them he just waited for the gold line bus. They told him the bus did not stop there, until 1976, when men came in to install a bus stop. This was the first time William had moved since 1893, and he found his legs were cramped upon standing, but once they had the stop in place he was able to go on waiting in greater comfort.

            Eventually a young cop came along.

            “Sir, you cannot sleep here.”

            “I’m waiting for the bus.” The cop looked at the bus schedule posted on a sign next to the bench.

            “What line, sir?”

            “The gold line.”

            “There is no gold line bus in Denver.”

            “That’s why I’m waiting for it.”

            “I suppose that makes sense. I’m sorry I disturbed you.” The cop paused and looked at William. “Do you want me to bring you a book or something?”

            “How could I wait if I had something to do.”

            “Of course, my mistake, I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t be sorry. After all, I’m only waiting. Some day I will stop waiting, and so will you.”

            The cop walked on to continue his beat, the usual non-actions of a patrol in a nice area of a big city, until he turned down an alley at the end of his shift to take a short cut to his favorite diner, in which there was a pretty young waitress by the name of Jo, who would serve him pie and flirt with him, and today he would ask to go to the pictures with him, but on his way down the alley he saw a gang of young men beating up an old dog, and when he approached them to try to help the dog, one of them took out a pistol and shot him in the head, and his brains exited through a hole in the back of his skull, and later the young men would go into the diner, point their guns around, ask for the money, and Jo would try to go for the door, but the same young man would shoot her, then watch her bleed out through the hole in her stomach.

            William of course didn’t know any of this and it affected him not at all, after all, he was only waiting for a bus.

            Time went on, other buses stopped, drivers asked him where he was headed, and when he told them he was waiting for the gold line, they simply shut their doors and drove on.

            The years, so many years, drifting past, forgotten by dead men, held onto like a gift from a long lost love by live men.

            Once a thief tried to take William’s wallet. William gave it to him, but when the thief looked at in his hand, it turned to ash.

            “What’s all this then.”

            “I’ve been waiting here a long time. Wait long enough, and we lose hold of object permanence.”

            “Yes, that’s obvious, of course. I have a degree in theoretical psychology from Harvard, after all. My question was why ash?”

            “I don’t make the rules.”

            “Yes, you are right in that.” Then the thief went on.

            On the twelfth of April, 2015, a young man with a stylish haircut and dark clothes came up to William and sat next to him on the bench, looked him up and down. After they sat there together for a while, the young man began to speak to William.

            “Look man, are you going to give up on this soon? I’m really getting tired of this.”

            “Who are you?”

            “Well, I’m the writer, I suppose.”

            “Ah, yes. Well, you created me. That doesn’t mean you can kill me.”

            “If I could kill you, I already would have done. I’m just asking you as your father if you could just give this up.”

            “You’re too young to be my father.”

            “How old do you think you are?” Then William was two days old, the genesis of an idea to it’s expression on paper.

            “That’s a neat trick, but it doesn’t solve your problem. Why do you want to end this?”

            “I’m running out of things to write.”

            “You’re a writer. When you run out of things to write, then you are nothing. But I have a solution to both of our problems.”

            “Yes?”
            “Give me my bus.”

            “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”

            “Because you’re scared and you’re lonely and you’re only doing this to stop you from thinking.” Then the writer got up and left.

            A few hours later, WIlliam found himself very tired, and, reckoning that he’d been waiting one hundred and twenty two years, the bus wouldn’t just happen to come if he closed his eyes for a few moments.

            He woke up ten minutes later to see the gold line pulling away without him