Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  "Infuriating?"

  Djuna ate her nori lump by squishy avocado lump, chasing the melt around the roof of her mouth with a tongue tip as she listened. The Traveler's Garden sent out a hesitant smell of rain.

  "Infuriating. Because, after all, what were his people supposed to say to that? He was clearly unhappy but he refused to say anything. And then, eventually, he put aside his crown and went walking down the road, and blamed it all on the unhappiness he never would explain to them."

  There was a silence before the kid spoke again, voice like an uncertain snail's horns emerging. "Is this story really about Jaguar warriors?"

  "It started out that way," she said. "Then it all went pear-shaped, and I don't know when."

  Silence stretched between them. A few seats forward, a nerdy boy was interviewing the unicorn girl. She spoke in upper-class, almost accentless English.

  "My name is Cristen Night," she said, blinking at the camera. "What should I say?"

  "Talk about anything. Talk about what sort of TV you like to watch."

  "I like to watch that new show, These. You know the one? It's been around for two seasons, just starting the third."

  Nerdboy made a noncommittal sound, gestured at her to keep talking.

  "There's the main character, King T, who's married the Queen of the Centaurs and brought her and her sister Emily to live in his place. It's like a huge cloud castle, all misty white corridors and you know, atmosphere."

  The plastic creaked as she shifted against it, getting more animated.

  "The actor they have playing him is all-vid, latest gen algorithm. Kurt Destiny is the brand. So swank! Dublicious. Anyhow, he was getting married at the end of last season, and all these glims in black show up, laced and gothy. They're wailing and beating on these hand-held drums they wear around their necks. He asks who they are, and they turn out to be genetic constructs whose male counterparts, like their twins, have all died out due to a bad DNA twist. All bereft, widowed twins. They tell him they need him to wrestle this minotaur thing."

  "Why?" Nerdboy adjusted his camera, brought the focus even closer in on her face, her perfect eyes, polished horn gleaming like mother of pearl in the bus's overhead lighting.

  She shrugged. "Television." She continued on.

  "There's these two PoWs, Palamon and Arcite. They are in this tower and look out, and see Em—that's the Queen's skanky sister—in the garden, her arms full of red and white roses, and more growing from her jacket. They're big bang crush right off on her, and they start fighting over who loves her the most. Then Arcite gets freed and they argue over who's better off, Palamon, who has the chance of glimpsing her every day, or Arcite, who can go home and raise an army to come and get her with."

  The bus jerked to a stop. This close to the sea, salt water rode the wind.

  After dinner, the smokers excused themselves as soon as possible from the meal to go outside and power through cigarettes or long thin cigars as fast as possible. The man in the suit didn't even pretend to eat, just ordered a large coffee, black. He took it outside. By the time Djuna came out of the burger taco squid joint, cigarette butts mounded by the heel of his black snakeskin shoe.

  Later some riders watched the evening news on the bus TV screen, which hung down to the driver's right. The light was blue and soothing. With headphones in, all she saw was the flicker of faces. Later, she took the headphones out and leaned back. Someone behind her was telling this story:

  "I knew this kid, he was a game developer, got snagged by a company fast out of college, bright kid, worked hard, played hard, did a lot of mountain climbing, kayaking, that sort of thing. Truth be told, he was stronger, had a bit more swagger, than the average geek at his company and he became a bully, lorded it over the other devs, and the company let him get away with it because he had the programming chops to back it up.

  "He married the CEO's daughter, a bright young Wellesley grad, a geek's daughter, who loved online games as much as any solitary nerdy kid that had been raised on World of Warcraft.

  "He was one of those weird, obsessive kids and he noticed his wife spending a lot of time playing online games. He'd go and make characters on whatever server his wife was playing on and go grief kill anyone she was flirting with. Over and over again.

  "He kept on doing this, rather than working on the games he'd been hired for. He'd try to get his wife into the betas of the games, but she was on to him by that point, I think, wouldn't log into any virtual world he was in, said he was too intense, and of course that just made him more intense.

  "When his manager talked to him about his job, he went nutso and accused the manager of having virtually seduced the wife. He'd noticed her playing this one online game, Paradise Garden, an adult encounter game, and when he'd tried to join it, he learned his IP was banned, and all of his credit cards. He said the manager ran the game and that was how the game knew to ban him.

  "He went to some sort of halfway house for people that the Internet had damaged. And while he was there, he took up in an online relationship with some kid on Mars."

  "And you know him, or you know this kid?"

  "I'm him. I'm going to meet the kid."

  Silence. Djuna wondered what he looked like. The other voice said, "I thought you said he was young."

  "Sure. Twenty years ago, before he went into jail and then the house. He was young back then. I was young back then."

  "How old is the kid you're going to meet?"

  "She's 18. Cute and smart and funny, and wants someone to help her run the restaurant she inherited. Life's good." He drummed restlessly on the back of the seat, and she wondered again who he was, which of the crowd he was, as he repeated himself. "Life's good."

  Day Two

  In the rumble of early morning, the Traveler's Marvelous Window Garden was filled with silvery green shoots, soft as toothbrush bristles. Djuna ran her palm over the surface and stared outside. A construction site surrounded the highway, orange plastic, then yellow, then olive green, then concentration blue, and tangles of machines and signs that pointed forward and backward, up and down. The bus lurched, swaying from lane to lane.

  Like everyone else, she conducted her morning wash in the bathroom, and was glad the bus wasn't more crowded. She stared at her too-pale face in the jerk-surfaced mirror as she brushed the flavor of last night from her mouth and washed her hands with vanilla ginseng bubble pearl soap. She didn't bruise herself changing into a fresh shirt from her bag, but it was close. She'd always bruised easily, banged into door frames and tripped on missing top stairs. She'd lost the ability to be bruised, though, somewhere along the way.

  Was that how it went, were the dead unaffected by any events? Was that why they resorted to story after story, half-glimpsed or fragmentary or laboriously whole? They were all the same effort.

  When she returned to her seat, she found that the bus had entered the Underwater Tunnel. Outside, she could see the rivets and glass holding back seawater, and the silvery slide of fish every once in a while. The children were glued to the window, and the three blondes stood near the forward luggage rack, taking turns to gaze out. One of them flicked their hair back, away from their flat smooth forehead, and within a few seconds, the others followed suit, made the same gesture.

  Behind her—which was the Internet junkie, on his trip to meet a kid, a child? Was it the flat-faced, pleasant-haired man, or the one beside him, who looked surlier, bruised like a peach bounced down the road by life. Maybe that tubby middle-aged man wearing the Darth Vaderix Giz-Pop t-shirt or the very polite looking elderly man. Two looked back at her then let their eyes slide away.

  Later that day, around 2 bus time, or so the buzz went, they'd be stopping in Elfland as they passed through. Just as one of the blonde girls, who said her name was Magda, confided this to Djuna, the robot driver announced it over the intercom.

  Its voice buzzed like a wasp: At 2:35 PM, we will be stopping at the Elfland Border Park and Shop. You will have one hour, fifteen minut
es for meal and recreational purposes. Please return to the bus promptly at the appointed time. The announcement stopped with an admonitory pop and crackle of static and the robot continued staring forward, its metal claws buried in the steering column, maneuvering the bus along the twenty-lane highway.

  Signs swooshed past, underwater settlements, sometimes just single homes clinging to the side of the tunnel like a barnacled bubble: Who-ville, Perelandra, Surf N' Turf, Dagon's Deeps, Bucket and Tub, Tile Place, Atlantis. Atlantis looked like a fancy resort. Buses and small, gimcrack cars with their tops down filled its parking lot to its attendant booth gills. Djuna counted cars and tried to convince herself that she wasn't really on the way to Mars. She was at home, snug in bed or on the couch with a cat curled on her stomach.

  Who would be feeding her cats?

  The red-haired boy told his mother that his civilization just completed the pyramids.

  "Did you build the Sphinx too?" she asked, but he didn't know what that was. The mother returned to her phone conversation. They were arguing about interiors and paint and why she didn't just fly there. She said, voice pinched tight with anger, "You're always complaining about the cost of things. I thought you'd appreciate the gesture." The phone clicked as she turned it off.

  Nerdboy was interviewing Bristle Woman, standing with his camera transfixed by her face.

  "My name is Tulip Song," she said. Her face was lined as though by weather, but a chemical edge to the redness made Djuna think she was younger than originally estimated.

  "Are you going to Paradise?" Nerdboy asked. He smirked, and Djuna sensed a tagline for the documentary in his head. Are you going to Paradise? Indeed.

  She said, "I am."

  "In order to ... "

  "I'm going to visit my childhood servant."

  Did she say servant or sweetheart? Djuna wasn't sure, and her following words didn't point her in either direction.

  "A little girl name of Laura—I haven't seen her in over half a century! Oh, how I look forward to seeing her!"

  In Djuna's book, the woman wondered if the dolphin really liked her while the dolphin wondered if she really liked him.

  Tulip Song simpered but said nothing more about Laura. Djuna wondered what Laura thought, waiting for the child mistress. What would it be like to grow up with servants at hand? Who did that anymore?

  Elfland was disappointing, too neon and clove scented, too ready to hawk jeweled bridles and flasks of love potions. The passengers ate a late lunch there, including fresh fruit from the little goblins hawking grapes and strawberries and apricots in the rest stop parking lot. Djuna sat among the ancient oaks, filled with gloom and doom and signs warning her not to go too far into the trees.

  The cheap fruit was sweet, so delicious that she ate it all within an hour or two of having re-boarded the bus, which swayed its way up the Elfland Entrance Ramp, 77BAA. She licked her fingers clean long past the time when the savor had left them. This would have embarrassed her more if she hadn't noticed others doing the same. The children were uniformly asleep, drooling like opium smokers. The elderly man had bought a birdcage with three blue butterflies in it. They sang the same tiny shrill song, over and over again.

  Mr. Suit had bought more than fruit—he drank from a little golden flask. Restless, he paced around the inside of the bus. Finally he leaned over the back of the seat in front of her and said, "Hey, you?"

  She squinted at him.

  He squinted back. "You look like a palm reader. You read palms?"

  She shook her head.

  His eyes squinted harder. Dirt lined his collar and stubble sprang out on his jawline like an untamed assertion.

  "I knew a palm reader lived in a guy's house one time, upstairs in the spare bedroom, 500 socks a week including breakfast and Sunday dinners. Real pig too, had piles and piles of books and noodle cartons.

  "His landlord was a regular guy, a carpenter. Had just re-married after his wife died from being hit by a garbage truck. Sweet little thing, just barely legal, his dead wife's sister." He exhaled and she could smell the fairy brandy on his breath. "Puppet pretty."

  "The carpenter's out one weekend, helping the guy next door build a miniature golf course. They've been working on it for a while, it's going to help fund their early retirements. She's doing laundry and cooking lunch and the palm reader catches her in the stairway, halfway between the first and second floor. He can see her husband next door, building something that looks like a wooden snowman."

  He paused dreamily, closing his eyes and breathing out a second invasion of alcoholic air. Behind her, the caged butterflies began their song again.

  "He takes her hands and leans in close, telling her he'll read her fate in her palms, turns them over like soft little doves to examine their bellies, releases one in order to trace the other with a fingertip, running his nail up from the wrist towards the fingers, along the life line, then strokes it from left to right, wavering between the fame and love lines."

  Every word made her more uncomfortable. There was something about his face, as though he'd forgotten she was there, as though he was telling himself the story and had forgotten the punch line.

  "He brings her wrists to his lips, still looking out at her husband and the pine skeleton of the snowman and browses along the skin there. But she manages to yank away, looking out the window herself. She pulls up the window, sticks her head out, shouts and waves to her husband while the palm reader shrinks back against the wall. She doesn't say anything like Hey, the boarder is hitting on me, though. Just says hi to her husband, and then pulls her head back in, shuts the window, and says to him, My husband's the jealous type. Anything you're proposing to me, you better be factoring that in."

  Man in a Suit breathed out, breathed in, and out again. Djuna wondered whether he was falling asleep, but he opened his bloodshot eyes and said, "And he did. He factored that in quite adequately."

  His voice was bleak as air-conditioning. He said the last part again, as though worried she might miss its meaning, "Quite adequately."

  Djuna didn't answer and he went on. "The carpenter was going out of town to a meeting of his church. Had I mentioned he was a religious man, a deacon of the Fist of the Luminescent Salvation, a first-class deacon, no less?

  "All that she wanted was to sleep in her lover's arms, and that was all he wanted too, he said, envisioning a night of this and that and the other thing. And the next day, the carpenter came home and his wife told him that the palm-reader, Nicholas by name, had been ill and had been staying in his room all this time. A day went by and another, and the carpenter grew uneasy that the palm-reader might have died. He went upstairs and used his master key to open the door and look inside.

  "The room was crowded with books and tapestries showing hands and skulls and seas of the moon. Nicholas sat on his bed in lotus position gazing at a tapestry showing a mandala with lotuses blossoming outward.

  "The carpenter went to him and shook his shoulder until Nicholas shuddered and came to himself. Gracious, he said, and then thanked the carpenter for waking him from his vision. What was the vision of, the carpenter asked in turn.

  Next Monday at a quarter past midnight, it will begin to rain, and rain so hard that it floods all this world, the palm reader said."

  The man's suit was the latest cut, but the cheap, shiny material showed threads clumped along one hem. Crumpled Kleenex protruded from his jacket pocket and it looked as though he had been crying. As though he might burst into tears again now unless he was humored.

  "And he believed the palm reader?" she said. A dubious twinge tugged at her.

  He looked earnest. "Sometimes we aren't raised to question things," he said. "Sometimes we just ... sometimes we're as shocked as anyone that things turn out to be different than what they say."

  She licked the memory of goblin fruit from her fingers and felt his eyes on her. He was bending forward towards her, almost head to head.

  "I need to sleep," she said, uncomfortable at
his proximity. She leaned back in her seat and pulled the blanket over her like a shield. She could feel him standing there, staring at her for a few more moments and then he lurched off to the restroom. She heard him retching in there, again and again. She held her fingers up to her nostrils, underneath the blanket, and smelled the apricot perfume on her skin as she licked them again, each finger in careful turn.

  Day Three

  Today, the plants of the Traveler's Marvelous Window Garden had split into two kinds of plant: a set of heart-shaped, fuzzy leaves and fern fronds salad-suitable, tasting of thyme and lemon when she picked one and ate it.

  The bus climbed, up and up, a slant that continued for an hour, maybe more, before they broke into sullen sunlight and saw the Space Needle glimmering, the gulls overhead. The bus stopped for a little while at the station there and everyone got out to stretch their legs. Three new passengers got on: a pair of tattooed kids, and an elderly woman with short gray hair and no nonsense running shoes. Within a few minutes of her arrival, the man in the slouched hat was next to her, talking. Waiting near the bathroom, Djuna overheard:

  "You look at me and you don't see much, but once I was a sales guy, such a sales guy I could sell kittens to cats and the dry litter left over to a cactus. The home office loved me, they sent me to Boston, Bangkok, Berlin, one time to Baltimore, you name it."

  "I used to sell things too," she said. "And trade. One time I started with an empty glass jar to trade and ended up with an entire house, and two ponies, and a basket full of mushrooms."

  "One time I promised to sell the moon."

  "I told a woman I'd give her fifty percent off on true love."

  "I got a guy to approach me about buying his mother's name."