SHAPES 2

Four fat wheels under a stink-hot sun. A dust-blue bus running like a beetle from a rock upturned. And he doesn’t recognise you. He gave you a once-over when he got on, felt you were good enough to sit next to, better than the pensioner counting out coupons behind you. Bead of sweat on his upper lip. Book he’s reading looks vintage, old, and well-used. 

Now out the window. These shrubs passing like mile-markers, same as ever, feeling like you’re on a record player. Shaped like brains, green against sand, got this lyrical quality, a refrain the desert keeps whispering. He turns the page, shifting a bit, getting comfortable, and you’re back in the bus. Back in your seat again. Back with him, feeling your clothes on your body and your body in your clothes. Old-mate behind you found a good one, you can hear him whipping it in the air in silent, lonely excitement. You’re sneaking peeks at Stephen again and again, your eyes your new mouth. Look back look back look back. You’re screaming Just give me one look. At the perfect moment he sighs.

“You alright, kid?” You need a moment to translate your words from vision to vocal.

 You nod. 

“You sure?” Silent. He clicks his tongue and leaves his gaze on the chair in front of you, the cream-suede fuzzy in the periphery. He waits. Then, he goes back to his book. 

“You don’t know me but I know you.” 

“Oh, Yeah?” Eyes flash on you. Book goes down. 

“Funny. And I’m guessing you want to talk to me? I got something you want?” He reads your mind and you don’t even know him. He takes a good pause, and sighted down the aisle. “I remember when I took buses like this all the time, man, going across this country over and over again. Like cut-marks.” He smiles, you don’t. You want to grab his head and scream that you know he took those buses, you read his work, you saw his short story, Shapes, and it made you want to scream. Scream because he compressed sadness, pain, grief, shame, and loss into so few pages and, worst of all, he didn’t give you any happy ending.

Instead you say “I’m not doing so good” and hope he just knows. But you hope he doesn’t know you’ve stolen his style, that you’re so creatively bankrupt you’ve lifted the way he and David Wojnarowicz wrote and got an HD for it with no one the wiser. But then all art is just communication, so we have to learn from each other because a language with only one speaker is nothing. But now he’s getting bored and that hand is testing that bookmark. 

“Do you know when this bus stops?” 

“A few hours, maybe”, he says. It might be that he can see how you’re feeling and so he gives you a kind. 

“What are you on this bus for, kid?” An opening. 

“I don’t think I had any other choice.” 

“What’d you mean?” His bookmark gets its nose wiped. “Someone forcing you here?” His fingers twisting the denim on his leg. 

“No.” You say, quickly, “Nothing like that, nothing like-” Breathe. “I just don’t know. Really, I mean. I just – where else would I be? Whatever version of myself that isn’t on this bus doesn’t exist, I’m here because I'm not anywhere else.” 

“Shit,” he laughs, like you made a joke, “makes sense to me.” You’re glad you’ve made him laugh. “I get that feeling sometimes too.” There’s a warmth in the air now where before there was a heat. Could be smart to just let him keep going. “I feel like such a dick saying this, but I wrote a lot about this kinda place, this kinda way you’re describing. I felt like Sylvia Plath or something, just absolutely riddled with nothing. And that writing, all that, it helped let some of it out.” Thirty-four shrubs blitzed the window since you spoke. You ask if he still feels that way. He doesn’t know. He asks if you think you’ll always feel that way. You don’t know. You thought he could tell you. “Me?” You. He tells you he can’t. “Y’know how you’re sitting in that seat and I’m sitting in this seat, but we’re on the same bus? It’s kind of like that. I can’t fix what isn’t mine.” A family cradled in a red sedan overtake. You wonder if Stephen knows he’s in a story, if he’s being coy about this whole operation. Time passes. He’s not even dead, you know. You could actually talk to him. You push it down. 

A red skateboard wheel. That’s what he called the sun, right? A nice image, creative. You want to be like that, to constantly make things be other things. At least for a little while. Stephen melts into the seat next to you, does a face that says the bathroom smelt like shit. The sun, which did look like a red skateboard wheel before, now looks more like an egg yolk, spilling itself into the frying pan sky. You want to ask him about being a gay man, how you’re just like that sun, always called something other than what you are. What would he say if you suggested the word gay be scrubbed from the books? If we just did a do-over? No more Stonewall. No more Harvey Milk. No more Brokeback Mountain. No more Maurice. No more Stephen. No more Simon. No more Elio. Instead, 

“What got you on this bus?” 

Smile like an open window, shrug. 

“I guess I just got on it. You know?” 

You say you do. 

“Though I’ve had this feeling, kind of a gut thing that I can’t shake. Hard to describe, sort of just like all this is just some sleepwalk fantasy. Like I’m a kid again.” 

You ask how that feels. It’s hard to describe, he says. He talks about feeling cracked like a pavement, like a rain-water tank with a hole. When did it stop? Did it? He asks, it's rhetorical. He tells you about how he started writing shit down, how this acrid plume swept him into himself and out. You wonder if he wonders if all his talent was just one big thing to understand himself, if all this was just him stammering mad so he had some evidence he ever spoke. 

“I did it all for what? To be heard? To be a name?”

A sideways bit of guilt shifts into your stomach. You brought Stephen here, got him in this desert heat to help you out and he’s gone strange, uncontrollable. Like a frog bouncing up right after its dissection. You say something cheap about writing, connection. He waves your words away.

“Writing a story, man, that’s just talking to yourself. Like the Golden Record we sent into space. Do you think we give a shit if any aliens read that? That wasn’t what it was for, all that was just for ourselves.” Just one insecure species trying to get an A+ at intergalactic show and tell. For as long as we can remember we’ve been left home alone and God we just wish our neighbours would drop by with some food and a hug. That’s all this is. That’s all I was. That’s all this fucking bus is.

Sorry, he says. You get it, you say. The sun has fully set now. A few heads who have spotted the depot rustle amongst the headrests. A general noise of arms scoop games, and books, and makeup, and newspapers back into backpacks and briefcases and purses.

Both of you step out into the night. Old-mate stepping behind you hocking spit the colour of a nine-hour bus ride into the dusty desert floor. You ask him the time and he looks at the sky and says night-time before heading into the depot, red thongs lapping his feet like tongues. Stephen smiles and asks which way you’re going. You do your thumb one way. He nods and does his another. He clasps your shoulder, his pointer finger softening in the space between skin, singlet, and backpack-strap. He looks you square in the eyes, gives one final bit of advice, and brings your bodies together. His body warming yours before disappearing altogether. 

You watch him small into the mouth of another bus. Its yellow eyes blink and open as the driver turns the ignition, swinging it like a golf-club onto the highway. It’s a couple of hours until yours gets here, you think. It’s not so cold so you sit on the creamy carpet sand. A press of wind moves across you like a palm, coming from the direction Stephen’s going. It tangles in the cortex of a bush a few metres away. You watch it wrestle a moment, rise back up. Your mouth a circle you help it along, guiding it back the way it came.