Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

There’s an orange Hallowe’en glow on one wall and all of a sudden Kelly is sitting up in bed, pulling down her T-shirt.

  “What happened?” she says. It was getting to be one of the favourite questions on the bus.

  “Nothing much,” I say, blowing out three perfect smoke rings. The old man had a favourite expression. Something just went to hell in a hand basket. I heard him say it to my mom once, about their marriage. But I knew the occasion demanded something more original than that. “This little holiday trip of ours,”I say, “just went to hell on a Molotov cocktail, that’s all.”

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 17

  It was only a matter of time. I was dreaming of making love to Prometheus while vultures tore at my kneecaps when something woke me up. M. was sitting on the side of his bed in his beige shorts, smoking a cigarette & looking very Mephistophelean against a backdrop of crimson dancing shadows. He calmly informed me that the bus was on fire. He wasn’t lying. A midget terrorist did it, he said. Pete put the fire out but there is some damage, he said, & so we’re stranded in Mashhad. Strangely, no hysteria, everyone’s taking this fairly calmly, except for S., who says she’d like to sleep on a cot in our room, if it’s alright. M. & P. voted no, but we overruled them. Tanks roll by in the streets below & we can hear rifle fire in the distance. P. wants to go out & shop for carpets. C. took 3 pills & she’s down for the count.

  S. is calmly pigging out on pastry she bought at the chai shop downstairs. D. is calmly reading The Honourable Schoolboy. Mick is calmly sitting at the window, smoking, watching Pete work on the bus.

  Mick

  I picked up the phone and asked the hotel operator for Pete’s room. It took him nine rings to answer.

  “Hi, Pete, how ya doin’?” I said.

  “What do you want, mate?” he said.

  I think I interrupted something.

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Just thought you’d like to know that a horde of Iranian terrorists just dynamited the bus.”

  Pete and Charole’s room was two doors down. All he had

  to do was look out his window to see I wasn’t pulling his

  wanker. He didn’t bother saying thanks, mate, see ya later. He didn’t even hang up the phone.

  About two minutes later me and Kelly see Pete running out of the hotel, barefoot, just his jeans on, with a fire extinguisher in his hands.

  It didn’t take him very long to put the fire out. When he was finished, he bent down on one knee and punched the pavement.

  “Pete’s having a bad trip,” I said to Kelly.

  “We’re all having a bad trip,” said Kelly.

  Patrick and Dana slept through all this and we decided not to wake them up. They’d find out soon enough in the morning.

  Kelly whispered, “Well, we’re not going to get much sleep tonight. You might as well join me in bed. If you’d like to, that is.”

  The last time I’d pissed, my ugly was still a little gummed up. As I’d fully expected it to be. And so I was having a quick little debate with myself about just how unscrupulous I was when Charole came knocking on the door and the debate became moot.

  Of course everyone was freaked out.

  It was Charole’s idea to go down and give Pete some moral support. Though I think the idea behind this was for him to give us moral support.

  And he did, to a certain extent. While Patrick took three dozen pictures of the bus, Pete told us it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

  “You mean it’s worse?” I said.

  He didn’t ignore me. Because, of course, it would’ve been worse if it hadn’t been for me and my toothache, and Pete realized that.

  He said, “Looks like the carburettor got the worst of it. Might need to replace a few gaskets, and the oil pan, just to be on the safe side. Maybe the fan belt. That’s about it.” He looked at me. “Thanks for the phone call, Mick.”

  Mick. First time he ever called me by name.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Then he said we all might as well get some sleep and he told Charole he was going to spend the rest of the night on the bus, just to be on the safe side, which brought a pout to her face, and she asked Kelly if she’d mind coming over to her room.

  Kelly glanced at me, as if to say, well, aren’t we one ill-starred romance, and told her sure.

  In the lobby the guy behind the cashier’s desk was acting like nothing had happened. Like he saw this kind of thing every night.

  I don’t think anyone got a lot of sleep that night. The next morning around eight, Pete came knocking. Told us we could all do as we liked but if we were smart we’d stay in the hotel. He said we were probably going to be stuck here for a few days while he found repairs. And that was it, he was gone.

  Then Suzie came knocking. She looked like a rabbit who’d just seen a big hungry wolf

  “When’s the bus leave?” she said.

  “No one knows,” said Charole. “Your guess is as good as anyone’s.”

  “What do you mean?” said Suzie.

  There was a big ugly hickey on her neck and she hadn’t combed her hair, which was a first, I think, for Suzie.

  So Charole told her the news.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Suzie, even while she was looking down at the bus, with Pete’s feet sticking out from underneath it. She looked at Kelly. “This is a malaria nightmare, right?”

  “That’s what we’ve all decided,” Kelly said. “It’s some sort of hideous group malaria nightmare. We’re going to write about it and submit an article to Psychology Today.

  Kelly looked at me. I gave her the chuckle she was looking for.

  “Har, har,” said Dana. She was sitting on her bed, painting her toenails mauve.

  Charole got out a little pink pillbox, knocked back eight or nine pills, crawled beneath her sheets. “Wake me up,” she said, “when the nightmare’s over.”

  Patrick looked at me. “I think what might be in order, Mr. McPherson, is breakfast. Don’t you agree?”

  Well, I was feeling a tad famished. Charole had given me a donut the day before and that was about all I’d had to eat in about forty-eight hours.

  “I think that’s a pregnant idea, Dr. Livingstone,” I said.

  He asked the girls if they’d care to join us, but Suzie said to Kelly, “I need to talk to you.”

  Dana was up for breakfast, though, and so the three of us went down to the dining room, which was one of these dining rooms with white tablecloths, place settings, candle in the middle of the table.

  It took fifteen minutes before we got any water. There were flies buzzing around so we killed time by killing them with two of Patrick’s International Herald Tribunes.

  When a busboy in red finally came with the water, he spilled most of it on the table and in Patrick’s lap. We decided to let it pass. Ordered omelets. Took an hour for those to come. Dana found a dead fly in hers.

  “Our stay here,” said Patrick, “will not, I predict, be a pleasant experience.” “No kidding,” said Dana.

  “Still,” he said. “One must always try to turn a negative experience into a positive. Mashhad is famous for its fine carpets, as I recall.”

  “You’re going to go shopping for carpets?” said Dana.

  Patrick wiped his mouth daintily with a white cloth napkin. “I may,” he said.

  “Then you’re crazy,” said Dana.

  Patrick smiled at her. “Aren’t we all?”

  Patrick did go shopping for his carpet. He came back with a real pretty one. A deep brown and green with your usual Persian design. Mosdy geometric triangles, kind of a pyramid at one end. Patrick said it cost him two hundred pounds. He said it almost cost him his life, he was almost run over by five different taxis he was trying to flag down.

  Halfway through the afternoon some soldiers showed up to guard the bus while Pete took off to look for repairs.

  We didn’t see him for the rest of the day or that night either. We didn’t see Rockstar either. I was going to
go knock on his door and tell him what happened, but then I figured what the hell, Suzie probably told him already.

  Me and Patrick played sixteen games of backgammon that day. The bar downstairs sold him a bottle of Johnny Walker and we polished that off by suppertime.

  For supper we decided to try room service. Called them up and ordered a bunch of chelo kebabs.

  It took an hour and a half for them to come, and when they did come, they were cold.

  I think this depressed Patrick more than the bus getting blown up.

  “There’s nothing less appetizing,” he said, “than tepid spiced beef.”

  I think it was about this time, or it could’ve been earlier, that some bellboy brought in a cot.

  “What’s that for?” said Patrick.

  Kelly said, “It’s for Suzie.”

  Patrick looked at Suzie. “A lovers’ quarrel?”

  By this time her eye was pink and purple and a welt the size of a tennis ball was bulging out of her left eyebrow.

  “None of your bloody business,” she said.

  That night no one had a whole lot to say to anyone. Every

  once in a while someone would go to the window to look out at the lights of the city or at the soldiers walking back and forth below.

  Every once in a while we could hear gunshots.

  At one point, Suzie said, “We’re all going to bloody die, you all know that, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Dana, “we didn’t know that, thanks for the info.”

  “Yep,” I said to Patrick. We were still playing backgammon. Me on the bed, him on his carpet. “Looks like cabin fever’s starting to set in.”

  Patrick looked at me and gave me a sour smile. “I’m very impressed with your tenacious grasp on the obvious, Mr. McPherson.”

  I felt like kicking him in the teeth. But I thought about it and decided to let it slide. Moved a checker instead.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 18

  The Iranian muezzin is like a hawk’s scream. Opened my eyes & there was my world, this lime green hotel room, strangers sleeping, Patrick snoring away. Everyone has their own belief system, everyone their own journey. But have I wandered off track? Have I ever been on track? It doesn’t quite make sense that I should die in Mashhad. But that’s probably the way a nine-year-old feels when the plane he’s in loses an engine. Saw a beautiful blue in my meditation, & F. looking sad.

  Mick

  I think the next day was the day Kelly finished painting that picture of Jenkins. She had her paint brushes and little jars of paint with her and everything, and she did the picture in no time flat. I was impressed. Not a big picture, maybe eight by twelve, and nothing too fancy, just a picture of Jenkins sitting on that bed in Sivas with that hangdog look of his on his face, his little Kodak hanging around his neck.

  It was when she was done the picture that Charole—I think the picture bothered her some, made her feel guilty—got this idea that they should paint a sign to put on the bus, something like, “Hail Allah, Allah is Great and There’s No Damn Yankees Here.” This from a Yankee. Patrick thought it was a great idea, and besides, it gave us something to do, so me and Patrick went down to the kitchen to try and get some boxes we could cut up and tape together, but the chef was this mean-looking hombre who would’ve looked right at home on “Friday Night Wrestling.” He just waved his butcher knife at us and told us to beat it. Patrick had to wave some British pounds in his face and beef up his limey accent before the guy finally caved in and gave us a Campbell’s soup carton and a Hennessy whiskey carton. Patrick got some tape and scissors from the front desk and we were in business.

  Kelly drew a mullah-type figure bending down in prayer in front of a mosque while Charole did the calligraphy, which Dana filled in with a black felt marker.

  It looked real neat, and it even got a laugh out of Pete when we showed it to him. He didn’t mind us putting it on the bus, either, he said it couldn’t hurt, and so we put it on the windows facing the street.

  The day was blue and bright and somehow the sign put everyone in a good mood and so we hit the cocktail lounge, this was around about four, and spent the next few hours drinking Chateau Rezaiyeh and talking about mysticism and Castaneda and how Jenkins and the deLucas might be making out and whether or not Rockstar was still in his room.

  Suzie said, “He’s got about fifty hits of acid. He’s probably right out of his gourd.”

  “Hey, that’s what we need,” I said, “a little acid trip or two to make the time dribble faster on court.”

  Patrick said, “I think not, Mr. McPherson, not in these dicey circumstances,” and he went on, of course, to tell us about the last time he dropped acid, how he was convinced that he was this animalistic thing, all it did was eat and shit and eat and watch the telly, and there was something big and shaggy just out of the range of his ken, as he called it, that was watching him, everything he did, and then there was something even further out, bigger and shaggier, that was watching the thing watching him, and it went on and on like that, out into infinity. And so what happened that night was like what’s happened to me lots of nights, when the drugs are on the table. We got into war stories. Because there ain’t no doubt about it, all you have to do is look around, drugs are everywhere and everyone’s tried them, and it was Kelly’s opinion that what all these drugs are doing are opening up the doors of perception, but that’s all they do, they just open up the door, if you want to go in the room of the actual psychic unconscious, which, she said, is likely a huge room that’s capable of either expanding or shrinking, depending upon the individual, then you have to use other tools. Like what tools, said Suzie, who was starting to look at Kelly with something like awe. Though it wasn’t awe. Respect, admiration, maybe love. I was starting to notice how Suzie’s mouth slowed down a gear whenever Kelly was around and she seemed to be making a conscious effort not to say anything too stupid.

  Kelly said, “Well, meditation, prayer, EST, whatever turns your crank, whatever’s right for you. Music, dance, anything creative will create a connection with your right brain, which is where this big room is that’s seldom used,” and she went on to talk about how autistic people often have a damaged left brain which steals cells from the right brain and you have to turn things upside down, sometimes, either to draw them or to see how they work, what makes them tick, and life is like that too, you have to shake it up, listen to it rattle, and that’s what’s happening to us right now, she said, it’s a great opportunity for self-examination. It’s easy to say what’s really important in life when you have death staring you in the face and it’s doubtful, she said, if the really important thing turns out to be money.

  One thing’s certain, Kelly was sure revved up that night, I’d never seen her quite like that, talking about psychotechnologies and mantras and Esalen and the transformative experience of paradigms, what else, Dave? Near-death experiences and psychological pendulum shifts and Colin Wilson and Seth Speaks and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Teilhard and Maslow and why the chicken crossed the road, until finally we all got hungry, and none of us wanted to, exactly, but we did it anyway, we wandered into that dining room, but we took a couple bottles of wine with us and Patrick laid his Chargex card out on the table and when the waiter finally came to our table, he asked him what was the biggest tip he ever got, percentage wise, and the guy said, bang, right away, fifty per cent, and Patrick said, well, if you provide even a modicum of service tonight, you’ll do much better than that, and that, at least, wiped the scowl off the guy’s face.

  And so we had a pretty decent meal, thanks to Patrick. Maybe he was trying to make a point about money, I don’t know. Patrick had lobster Newburg and I had chicken piccata and Kelly had a Caesar salad and Dana had oysters Rockefeller and Suzie had escargots and a chelo kebab deluxe, no sense of occasion at all.

  “Eat, drink and be merry,” as Patrick put it, but before he could finish, I said, “Because tomorrow we might all be tits up,” and everyon
e laughed, that’s how drunk we were, that’s the attitude we had, and even Kelly ended up getting drunk that night on the wine.

  When the bill came, it was a shocker, something like five thousand rials, which is maybe seventy bucks American, but Patrick took it in stride and added on what he said was a sixty per cent tip, which impressed everyone except me, because, like I maybe said before, Patrick’s Chargex was way over limit and he had no intention of ever paying it off.

  Charole had made a doggy bag of all the leftovers and we took that out to Pete. Pete was greasy as a greasy-spoon French fry and looked tired when he crawled out from underneath the bus, and when we asked him how things were going, did he find all the repairs he needed, he said, “Well, it seems like all the Mercedes Benz dealers have closed up shop and gone to the Caspian, thanks to the revolution, but I managed to find a few things and I have a contact or two looking for the rest of it, so we should be okay. The main problem’s likely going to be the carburettor.”

  Charole asked him how late he was going to work, he said maybe another hour or two, and Patrick asked him if he could get the daybook off the bus, so Pete got that for him and then he slid back beneath the bus and we headed up to our rooms, past Rockstar’s room, and I got a look from Dana that said well, if we’re going to go tits up in the morning we might as well screw all night, and I got a look from Kelly that pretty much said the same thing, but it could’ve been my imagination. At any rate, it would’ve been awkward and nothing was said, which happens way too often in life, if you ask me, which is why I asked Soon this morning if she’d consider cheating on her Bangkok buddy just once, as a dying man’s last request, but she just laughed, maybe because of the way I said it, kind of kidding around, though kind of not, and she gave me my dose of Metronidazole and told me I’d have to settle for that.

  But back to Mashhad. That night in bed I asked Dave what Rockstar was up to.

  Dave said that search back at the Iran-Turkey border freaked him out because they almost found his acid and Pete told him the Afghani border was even worse so he was dropping all he had, three hits at a time, every four hours or so, he didn’t want to waste it, and so, basically, he was in a highly psychotic space and was best left alone. I said no problem.