Waiting for the Galactic Bus (27 page)

The treadmills of your mind

The Club Banal and her own place in it were faintly absurd to Charity. The description occurred to her out of the blue like so many others lately. Absurd. Pathetic. She’d always recognized the words in reading but not often enough to work them into her own vocabulary.

“Ab-surd.” She tasted the word. “Ridiculous. Re-dundant. That’s me, all right.”

The threefold business of the club churned onward through eternity. The bad brass ensemble slammed its musical assault against the harsh-lit tiles of the bar walls, the men of Accounting brooded and complained, Leon Pebbles seethed and muttered, “Boom...” The line of glum men shuffled forward to see the girls, browsed the Green Room and from there passed on to see what fantasy might beckon from the rooms.

With Charity’s outbreak of new vocabulary came an increased desire to read, although the Green Room held little nourishment, mostly Harlequin romances read and reread by the girls until they had to be held together with rubber bands. Charity once devoured them like potato chips; now they seemed insipid. The heroines were all vanilla versions of herself in better clothes, the heroes all Woody Barnes with better chances. For the waiting male customers, there was a shelf of “Bor “novels or something like that, not very interesting to Charity although she hewed her way through one or two from desperation. The men in these stories were all grim studs and all the women started out getting raped and ended up loving it. These books were kept on a shelf labeled “comedy” by the Puerto Rican girl, Esperanza, who had been raped at the age of thirteen and hadn’t cared for it at all.

“Guy who wrote this oughta do three to five in a horny cell block, see how he likes it,” Esperanza suggested darkly. “Hey, who took my Harlequin? I ain’t done yet.”

There were also some fat paperbacks called sword-and-sorcery, usually in three or more unreadable volumes each. Charity couldn’t relate to fairies beyond Walt Disney. As for destiny-haunted princes — always getting hidden with poor folks at birth and then going on dangerous quests to find out who they really were — well, she’d been there with Dane and came close to a second heart attack and didn’t need a replay. But fat Shirley (a.k.a. Lady Ellivare) read them over and over, sometimes starting with volume five and working backward.

“I can’t help it,” she confessed to Charity over her book and a box of chocolates. “I relate to all the destinies within me. How could I not, being Dion Fortune in my last life?”

There were other neo-pagans like Shirley among the Club ladies. They practiced a religion of emancipation and joy and were terribly serious about it, chanting their prayers to the Goddess in the fruity overtones of Eastern Star chapter ladies attempting
Medea.
They reminded Charity of Purdy Simco on a fired-up night in the tabernacle. The Catholic girls burned candles to the Virgin in their rooms, and gossiped back and forth through the thin walls between tricks and often during them. Protestant and Jewish girls just got bored and did their nails, talked about leaving and finding a steady man and never did either.

Essie Mendel loved to talk about her boyfriend in Accounting, upon whom her eye was fixed with iron patience but dimming hope. This swain, like his father, had died of overwork, prostate cancer and his mother.

“But he still spends every weekend with her in Ultimate Rise. Even with her around, I’m going to live there one day,” Essie vowed. “Oh, Char, those hu-
mong
ous living rooms where all your friends can come and see and owe you. The icebox with all that
food
. It’s to die.”

“You never get hungry,” Charity reasoned, already jaded with Ultimate Rise. “Bor-ing.”

Essie Mendel was a born consumer. “How can anything so rich be boring?”

Monotony was usual, but now and then diversion reared its head when a holy war broke out among the girls. The neo-pagans were always swiping novena candles from the Catholics to use in their circles. The most recent skirmish pitted wiry little Esperanza against Shirley, goddamning and screw-you-ing each other to a standoff, Elvira wedged between them laboring for peace.

“Shirley, give Esperanza back her candles right
now
. I gave you a nice new Bic lighter just last week.”

“I will
not
use a plastic lighter to purify my circle! The candles were mine to begin with. And my name, goddamnit, is EL-LIVARE!”

Esperanza strained to get at her. “It’s mud you don’t gimme my candles,
puta.
All that goddess’n’ nature shit and running around in a fancy bathrobe and stealing
my
candles ain’t got
nada
to do with God.”

“Of course not!” Shirley screeched, stung in the center of religious principle. “You sellout female eunuch!”

“Elvira, what the fuck she talking about? Some witch,” Esperanza jeered. “Couldn’t even charm the fat off her own ass.”

“Oh, give her the damn candles.” Shirley-Ellivare retired with the tatters of her dignity. “How can she understand the Goddess? Never even finished high school.”

Charity could never see any sense in the physical inspection for the customers beforehand or the forms they filled out or the pro station stop afterward. “I mean, they’re dead, aren’t they? What can they catch? Jake said this place was real.” Charity wailed her frustration and perplexity.
“None
of it is real!”

“Well, of course it’s not.” Elvira went on checking her bar invoice. “And then again it is. Look at those men in the line. What else was ever more real to any of them? They never knew much about women or sex or anything outside of their silly jobs. What else would they bring along?”

They’d tried dropping the pro station and the forms, Elvira pointed out. The customers missed the gap in normalcy. They enjoyed waiting in line, telling the same old jokes to the same friends, visiting the same women, creatures of habit even beyond death. They needed to touch something. Charity’s working room was situated between the pro stop and the bar. The men came and talked to her for a few minutes before returning to work or another drink.

She’d never understood men very much, she realized now, or her own role in relation to them beyond a gut-level knowledge that life was not all that easy before marriage and tough as hell after, and you put up with each other.

A few passed up her open door; most came in, sat down on the off-yellow futon and talked to her. Talked at her, rather, falsely hearty, ultimately shy and wary of women on a one-to-one basis beyond the sexual mechanics. The rules, the forms and pro station helped them keep at a distance an experience and a being they knew very little about and feared a great deal. In time Charity came to feel her ten minutes the most essential in the whole production line. More than sex, it was the communication they starved for, part of them knowing what the rest denied, that they needed to touch, make contact with something beyond themselves.

Virgil Bassett was with her now. Virgil died of weight and worry as a surrogate for identity, reciting his life in tones leaden with resignation. Always there had been his gray job on a diaper service delivery route, and his discontented wife, whose chief ambition had been to head the Myrtle Beach Daughters of the Confederacy but who never flowered beyond the entertainment committee, thwarted throughout her days. Joy for Virgil Bassett translated to the few hours in his basement shop for meditation and the delicate art of kite making.

“Most relaxing thing I can think of,’less it’s flying’em,” he rambled pleasurably. “Certain summer days on the beach you get them updrafts, thermals, and that old kite’ll stay up there breakfast to sundown. No strain, just a gentle pull on your line, but you know you got a friend up there. It’s beautiful...”

He never knew the score any more than I did.
Charity felt the compassion well up from deep inside for all of them and not a little for herself
. Hell, there’s no mystery between men and women, except why some poor damn fool like me ain’t figured that out yet. He’s just like me, spent a lot of time just wishing someone would really look at him and listen to him like he was a human being and mattered. We lived with bullshit rules back there and more down here. Least we can do is make up our own.

With the subversive insight came an irrepressible urge. “Hey, Virg.” She winked at him. “Knock knock.”

Interrupted in his dearest soliloquy, thermal updrafts and the nagging tyrannies of his wife, Virgil could only stare at her.

“Come on, knock knock. Say who’s there?”

“Who’s there?”

“Sonya.”

Virgil snickered. “Oh, yeah, I remember this. Sonya who?”

“Sonya shanty in o-old shanty town. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Slagle.”

“Slagle who?”

Charity crooned: “Slagles ri-i-ing, are ya listenin’?... Now I got a hard one for you. What is two hundred feet long, green, with warts all over, and sleeps at the bottom of the ocean?”

Not ready for any of this, Virgil Bassett pulled nervously at an earlobe. “Warts and what?”

“Give up?” she brimmed.

“Hell yes.”

“Moby Pickle! Got another,” Charity threatened, definitely on a roll. “What’s purple, wears a Scout hat and stamps out forest fires?”

Virgil foundered and went down. “Nothing is —”

“That’s what you think.” Charity zoomed off the futon, pirouetted and broadcast the answer to a cosmos agog. “SMOKEY THE GRAPE!”

Virgil gaped, trying to understand and failing. “That’s dumb.”

“Got a big fat headline for ya, Virg: so are we.”

Dizzy all of a sudden, sight blurred, Charity wove on her feet.
What... what’s happening to me?

“Char-i-tee?”

In the process of pulling at his ear, Virgil Bassett became a still life. All sound ceased. Charity stood like a last survivor, able to hear and move in a vacuum. “What’s
 
—?”

“Charity?”

The voice was just down the hall, coming toward her room.

She knew who it was now.

Charity Stovall appeared in the doorway, waving casually to Charity Stovall. “Girl, you have been hell to catch up with.”

Herself to every feature
 
—
clothes, hair, probably the fillings in her back teeth, yet with a subtle difference. Identical lines but each one more relaxed from head to toe and more clearly defined, the facial expression quite changed. Charity II
saw
everything she looked at but didn’t put labels on it.

“Hi.” She plopped down on the futon. “Surprised it’s me?”

“Not a whole lot,” Charity supposed after honest reflection. “Way things happen around here. Well, I look pretty good.”

“Thanks.” Charity II inspected the petrified Bassett. “Customer?”

“Mr. Bassett. Champion kite maker of Myrtle Beach, but he never got much time for it.”

“Let me guess,” Charity II divined. “When he flew the kite, he worried about keeping his job. On the job he dreamed about kites.”

“That’s about it.”

“Never met himself coming or going. But we have. Let’s work together, Char. We’re better as a team.”

“Weren’t we always?”

“Gol-lee no.” Charity II stretched her legs and crossed her arms, a disconcerting double image making herself at home. “Not in Plattsville, for sure not with Roy Stride. Not until just this moment, girl. We’re not exactly each other. You’re what I used to be. I’m what you could be. No big deal, just playing with a full deck, and didn’t you run me ragged catching up.”

“You know?” Charity said thoughtfully. “Like Leon says, you are by God right. I was just thinking
 
—”

“I know, hon. That’s why I’m finally here.”

“Just listening to Virgil go on about his job and his miseries when he can do whatever he likes anytime he wants. And then... hell, I said, so can I. Elvira told me and told me.”

“Doesn’t count until you tell you,” said her vibrant counter-part. “Lordy, but you were a case back in Plattsville. The resident Nice Girl on which the factory seal ain’t been broke. Some virgin, Char: you screwed yourself for years, right up to five minutes ago.” Charity II stood up, opening her arms for an embrace. “Gimme a hug, I’ve missed you.”

Charity hesitated, a little wary. “You’re not one of those actors, are you? There’s a lot of them around.”

“Guaranteed pure Stovall. C’mere.”

Alone again. Or joined. Whatever, something very strange was happening to her mind. Pieces of it reaching to other pieces, straining to connect, one and one somehow making three. Charity squeezed her eyes shut and open again to clear the sudden blur. She remembered something without sense or reason. Water... leaning over a pool of water, her own flat, ugly face coming up in reflection to meet her — at first frightening but then so damn silly she
had
to laugh, though the effort hurt her throat.

She must have dreamed it before to recall the image in such detail. Someone was standing on the other side of the water, telling her about... a gift? And for the gift, something paid or lost.

Charity’s sight cleared. The ancient, fragile dream faded, leaving an afterimage, a bright flash still glowing behind her eyelids when she closed them, then... gone.

Charity looked down at the sleeping Virgil Bassett. She smiled at him. “We’re in an absurd place doing ridiculous things.” She bent close to the lost kite maker of Myrtle Beach, lulling him in the manner of a movie hypnotist. “You’re deep asleep, Virg Bassett, but you can still hear me. When I say the magic word, you will leave this room and this whole dumb place, bag and baggage. Do you hear me, Virg?”

“Yes,” he sighed in sleep. “I want to, but...”

“But nothing. The magic word
is fly.
When I say fly, you will go Topside. Go directly Topside. Do not pass Go, do not collect any more bullshit. That includes your wife, who won’t care anyway. You got better things to do.”

Virgil drowsed; his lips relaxed into an unaccustomed grin. “Cer’nly do.”

“Wake up, Virg.”

He woke feeling utterly marvelous, as if a light had gone on inside him. Charity was very close and — Je-sus! — ten times more beautiful than when he dozed off. And while Virgil rubbed his eyes and tried to put it all together, Charity bestowed on him the most thoroughly feminine and satisfying kiss of his bereft existence.