My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (27 page)

*

Laquisha was twenty-two. She was from East Harlem, and had come to Chicago to spend a week with a guy she’d met a month before at a club in Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center. He’d even paid for her plane ticket. Only after she’d arrived had the truth of his situation become clear—the guy was obviously married. He parked her at a low-rent South Loop hotel and stopped by now and then to have sex with her, on his lunch break and briefly each day after work. Afterwards, he’d invent an excuse to rush off and tell her he’d see her the next day. A massive, diamond-encrusted wedding ring appeared occasionally on his left hand, and when challenged he’d said, “What, this? This is my class ring!” She’d spent the week feeling duped and forlorn, browsing stores for clothes she couldn’t afford, wandering through museums, and watching
Jurassic Park III
each night at the theater on Navy Pier. After the hijacked planes hit their targets, she never heard from the guy again, and now she just wanted to get back home. “But my life’s boring,” she said with a sigh. “I really don’t get why you’re taping all of this.”

I was taking my radio assignment seriously, invented or not. A bus full of people headed home to New York in the city’s darkest hour? That seemed like potent stuff to me. Any colossal event is always expressed most poignantly through the experience of a few individuals, and carrying a tape recorder and microphone gives you license to engage with strangers and ask any questions that come to mind, no matter how silly, bleak, or personal they might be. As the sun dipped out of sight and nightfall doused the golden Indiana wheat fields, I roamed up and down the aisle, kneeling here and there to collect stories from other passengers: Where had they been the morning before, when the planes struck? Where were they headed now? What did they think the future held for all of us? There’s something dizzying and intense about interviewing people with a crystal-clear mic and weighty headphones clamped on your ears. All other sound is negated, and the person’s mouth appears to be moving silently, with their voice streamed right into your ears, directly inside your head, as though they’re magically transmitting their thoughts. Your face is within a foot or two of theirs, and as you look into their eyes, you can see individual emotions swirling to life; you’re point-blank on their laughter and their hurt; you can watch a tear begin to form. I swear, I could interview strangers about watery farts and come away feeling moved.

For the most part, everyone was still in a strange kind of shock, as though they expected to wake from this shared nightmare at any moment and be thrust back into their relieving, pedestrian concerns. They all offered earnest, thoughtful responses to my questions, but for many there was a sense of detachment, like they were talking about a football game that hadn’t gone the way they’d hoped, while for others it was a struggle to lay out their feelings without simply repeating things they’d heard Peter Jennings say, or the plain truth that this was one of the most horrible tragedies they’d ever seen. More interesting to me were the individual details of how they’d each ended up on this bus—the business trip to Denver, the family reunion in Des Moines. As it turned out, few of the passengers were headed to New York City itself. Some lived in Boston, some lived in Connecticut. One hippie couple, an environmental activist in a Mexican poncho and his young, dreadlocked bride, were just hoping to get as close as possible to their home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. About half of the folks on the bus were a group of retirees from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who’d flown into Vegas on Monday, the tenth, for a six-day casino junket. Tuesday morning, an hour after the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed—while my friend Maggie had continued to pose nude in that university art class, I imagined—they’d boarded this bus, and apart from a few stops for gas and food and to drop off passengers and pick new ones up, it had been a thirty-six-hour straight shot, with at least another twelve to go.

“What’s your stop?” I asked the white-haired old woman I was kneeling next to.

“Harrisburg,” she said.

Her husband, leaning over, cut in, “We’re still trying to work that out.”

Most of the old folks just wanted to be left alone to sleep and play cards. Laquisha, on the other hand, was down to talk for as long as I wanted, and about anything that I cared to bring up. We compared favorite movies, favorite comedians, and favorite singers. Laquisha told me that for the past six months she’d been working at the Sbarro’s in Times Square, and to learn about new music, she’d made a policy of asking customers what they were listening to on their headphones—if it sounded cool she’d write it down. Often, tourists from Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Berlin had simply popped the CD out of their Discman and passed it to her to keep. Her friends thought she was weird because she listened to indie rock, techno, and opera, and not just hip-hop and R&B.

Laquisha told me she was taking one class a semester at a community college in the Bronx, and hoped to eventually transfer to a four-year school to study psychology. I learned that back home in New York she was raising a ten-month-old girl, though it wasn’t her baby; the baby actually belonged to her mom. Laquisha’s mom had been in and out of drug rehab for years, and the previous winter had given birth to Laquisha’s baby sister, before disappearing back onto the streets. “She wasn’t even around long enough to give her a name,” Laquisha said with a frown. Laquisha had named the girl Destiny. This sorry, failed trip to Chicago was the longest she’d ever been away from her. I loaned Laquisha my cell phone so she could call the cousin she’d left in charge of her baby sis, and casually eavesdropped as she gave an update on her slow progress toward home.

Outside of Jamestown, Indiana, the bus driver pulled off the turnpike into a sad-looking truck stop and said in a raspy southern brogue, “Bathroom break. Have a smoke. You’re not back on the bus in fifteen minutes, you get left behind.”

Hungry, Laquisha and I went inside to poke about, and she revealed that she’d emptied her wallet bribing the bus driver to get aboard. I bought her a microwaveable bacon-and-cheese sandwich and a Diet Mr. Pibb, nabbed a pile of granola bars and dusty fruit for myself, and we sat in the scraggly grass outside, with the Greyhound bus in view, and had ourselves a strange, postapocalyptic picnic, as other drivers pulled into the truck stop and filled their gas tanks, all looking slightly dazed. The midnight air was oddly warm, and a hot, flip-flopping breeze swept Taco Bell wrappers and empty soda cans this way and that across the lot.

“Did you see that white woman in the front of the bus?” Laquisha asked me. “The one with the black coat and the pink scarf who keeps crying?”

I knew exactly who she was talking about. She sat directly behind the driver with her face buried in her hands, at times weeping softly, and at times completely still, maybe even asleep. The bus was so full that some people had squeezed three to a row, with a handful seated in the aisle toward the bathroom all the way in back, and yet no one dared to share a seat with the crying woman. I’d thought I might approach her with my tape recorder and my microphone—not solely because the job of a journalist is to intrude on people in their moment of grief, though it is, but because I’d also learned that it sometimes brought comfort to people in pain to have someone to talk to, instead of being shunned. As a rule, if I see someone crying, anywhere, I try to enagage them, or at least see if they want to be engaged, since I know how much I’ve appreciated it when a stranger has done the same for me. But when I got near, and summoned the courage to put a hand on her shoulder, ready to explain myself and ask if I could sit with her and talk, she lifted her head from her hands and stared at me with a look of such utter heartbreak, misery, and revulsion, that I quickly said, “I’m sorry,” and hurried away in retreat, spooked and ashamed.

“I don’t know if it’s true,” Laquisha said, “but I was talking to this girl at the bus station in Chicago, and she told me she was on the bus with that woman coming in from St. Louis and heard her talking to someone. And I guess what she said was, her son was in the towers. Or that’s what she thinks. He was a waiter or a cook or something in that restaurant at the top of the thing. And I guess he’s missing. She still hasn’t heard from him.”

“Wow. Oh my God.” Naturally I’d suspected that the woman had been affected by the attack in a way that was more personal than, say, the band of retirees from Wilkes-Barre, but still, the specificity was shocking. “That is so fucked up.”

“Right?” said Laquisha. “I can’t imagine if Destiny was missing and I didn’t know if she was alive or dead or what.” She teared up a bit herself, and when I draped an arm over her shoulders, my tiny gesture of compassion seemed to trigger a greater release. “It’s just all so fucked up and crazy,” she said, her voice breaking as she started to really cry. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Me neither.” I squeezed her shoulder and watched our fellow Greyhound passengers begin to stream out of the truck stop, back onto the bus.

We sat there for another minute, rocking gently, and then Laquisha sniffled, wiped the tears from her eyes with two fists, and laughed. “This has been the most fucked-up week of my life,” she said.

“Come on,” I said, standing. “Let’s make sure no one steals our seats.” I pulled her to her feet and followed her back to the bus and up its steep interior staircase, past our buccaneer-looking driver, who closed the doors behind us, flipped the ignition, and brought the engine roaring to life. Spontaneously, as I moved past the woman in the black coat, her head sunken low, I touched her shoulder again. She lifted her head to peer up at me, eerily blank, and I wordlessly offered her a banana and a granola bar in my outstretched hand. For a moment she paused, and then she took both, and managed, in a whisper, “Thank you.”

I found my window seat, Laquisha took the aisle, and after a few minutes back on the highway, Laquisha, and just about everyone on the bus, it seemed, had fallen into a heavy sleep. I popped a can of Tecate and watched out the window as dark trees, deserted billboards, and the dull lights of sad-sack, forgotten towns trickled past. We crossed into Ohio. I closed my eyes. Over the hum of the engine, the tinny treble of Laquisha’s headphones, and the barely discernible twanging notes of country songs on the driver’s radio, I could hear the woman at the front of the bus wailing softly to herself. It was the world’s saddest sound.

*

In Cleveland, around three a.m., our bus coasted down a highway exit ramp, wound its way through desolate downtown streets, and turned a corner into a wide Greyhound station parking lot, bright with pinkish fluorescent light. It was the middle of the night, but the lot was a hive of activity, where ghostly throngs waited and roamed, smoking, eating, playing dominoes, and kicking a soccer ball back and forth, while others flopped on the sidewalks, jackets pulled over their heads, using each other as pillows. The overall effect was of a refugee camp.

As soon as we pulled in, a cry went up and people grabbed their backpacks, duffel bags, and suitcases and began to crowd toward us, lurching like zombies. Reflected in the rearview mirror up front I could see our driver swiveling his head, taking the scene in with visible fright. Before allowing the bus to come to a complete stop, he thought better of it, and instead laid on the horn, gunned the engine, and cranked the wheel hard to the right. The crowd parted as we rumbled through, into a wide alley, and with a jolt we dropped off a high curb, emerging onto a tiny side street behind the bus station. A few fleet-footed hopefuls had given chase, hammering on the flanks of the bus as they ran alongside us, dodging hydrants, newspaper boxes, and telephone poles. The driver cut left onto a wider street, and floored it for several blocks until those in pursuit had fallen away. He swung a right, rolled through a maze of side streets, and finally pulled into an empty warehouse parking lot and killed the engine. “This is Cleveland,” he said over the loudspeaker, a bit rattled. “Anyone getting off?”

A scattered few came awake and shuffled up the aisle, and the driver climbed outside and helped them wrestle their bags free from the luggage compartments beneath the bus. Then he scampered up the steps again and said, “I’ll be back in fifteen,” and I watched as he guided the disgorged passengers away in the direction of the bus station. I dozed for a few, and when my eyes fluttered open again, the driver was back, tramping through the warehouse lot, followed by a ragtag band of five or six new riders, surging after him with pained, desperate faces, lugging duffel bags and steamer trunks behind them. They loaded their stuff under the bus, came aboard, and settled down into the few remaining empty seats or any vacant real estate they could find in the aisle.

Laquisha shifted around and squinted at me with one eye. “Are we there yet?” she asked.

“Cleveland,” I said.

She gave a cute little
harrumph
, settled back, tugged her headphones back over her ears, and pressed play on her Discman. Soon we were off again, back on the turnpike. I watched the moon rise over an open field and couldn’t help but think of my favorite Simon & Garfunkel song, “America.” I’d always dreamed of finding the right girl and running away with her on a Greyhound bus to somewhere new and thrilling, like the young Michigan couple in the song. But everything had been turned upside down—as much as I had Laquisha’s back and felt that she had mine, there was no romantic energy between us, and we were headed to New York not because a new part of our life was beginning, but because the world, for all we knew, was ending, and we were determined to be there to see it fall.

*

The next morning was cool and bright, and at the Highspire Rest Area in central Pennsylvania, I found myself strolling out of the men’s room, zipping up my jeans, and blinking in disbelief as the Greyhound bus—with my backpack, recording equipment, and everything else still aboard—rolled away through the parking lot, down the entrance ramp, and back onto the turnpike, before disappearing around a distant bend. Laquisha came galloping toward me, breathless. “That crazy fucker ditched us!” she cried.