Threads in the Wind

Even between the two of us, we still had an embarassingly little sum of ready money, and neither of us were in possession of a car; so it was decided the most practical thing to do was to alternate between riding buses, hitchhiking, walking, and train hopping. The first two options I had suggested, the latter two, Hannah. We scraped together our money, crumpled bills and gummy coins, and took the bus to the Greyhound station downtown. It felt odd, riding the bus with Hannah right there on the seat next to mine, when I was so used to anxiously anticipating her boarding. I examined her profile from the corner of my eye, unfamiliar with which ones were considered good and which bad. I liked it, though.

Hannah was wearing a pair of sunglasses in her hair like a headband, and her lace-up sandals again, the thin laces crisscrossing up her tanned, subtly muscled calves. I remembered her dancing at the fountain, the sureness of her movements and the wonderfully channeled emotion, and wondered if she took lessons.

"I hoped you packed a pair of sneakers," I told her.

"Nope," she said.

"What if those fall apart? I mean, what if we have to walk for days on end or something?"

"Then they'll fall apart," she said, with a hint of sadness in her voice. "I'll just do without."

"But what if you step on a rusty nail or something?"

She looked at me, then said, "Well, I hope you're strong, because then you'll need to carry me all the way to the nearest hospital." A mischievous smile suddenly broke out on her face.

"But I'm weak," I protested. "What if we're stuck in the wilderness and it's miles to the nearest hospital?"

Hannah darted a glance out the window, then rapidly pulled the cord for a stop. "Silly boy," she pretended to admonish me. "Look what you did with all your silly worrying, you almost made us miss our stop."

The Greyhound station was crowded and noisy, lit by relentless flourescent lights. "I love bus stations," Hannah told me, "but especially Greyhound stations, because they remind me of that Death Cab song. I love airports too. I love anywhere where there are things coming and going. Don't you?" and then laughed at her rhyming.

"I don't know," I mumbled, wincing as a ragged-looking mother dragging a long line of bickering kids bumped past me. She laughed even louder at this, as if I'd said something unbearably clever, and I felt terribly embarrassed.

The two of us came to huddle around a faded route map on the gray cement wall, squinting at the squiggling mass of lines that wormed forth and back all over the contiguous United States. We must have stood there at least half an hour, marking unexpected bends and major stops with our fingers, and debating over the most efficient route. When our shoulders or hands would accidentally brush, I suddenly became a weightless, wavering mass, no more substantial than a hologram in a virtual reality. The thrill of being so close to her made my stomach drift upward into somewhere near the region of my throat, and my stomach already had the raw feeling it got every time I was in a crowded place; which resulted in Hannah noting that I looked on the verge of throwing up. I confessed my aversion to crowded spaces (though hinting nothing of my opposite-of-aversion to her), then promptly directed her attention back to the confusing route map.

Eventually we caved to a compromise, and bought a dollar map from a vendor to trace our road onto the crinkling paper with a dehydrated Sharpie. The line snaked and bled its way from a tiny dot on the Virginia coast threatening to fall straight into the Atlantic to an identical dot in the barren south of Utah. We knew it would be impossible for us to make it all the way by Greyhound alone - it was just too hopelessly expensive - so we had to decide on our premature final stop. We chose Des Moines, Iowa. A fair amount of the way would already be covered once we reached Des Moines, and two round-trip tickets ate $268 out of our $404.13, which would still leave us over with $136.13 for meals, etc. Very likely the money would run out at one point or another, but there of course had to be ways of obtaining more.

"You know, we're doing an awful lot of planning for two crazy teenagers on a cross-country trip," Hannah remarked.

"Would you rather we didn't?" I asked.

"Maybe a little," she whispered, leaning her face close to mine, a mischievous light in her eyes.

"Well, I - um - I'd better go get our tickets," I said quickly, my words falling over themselves in the hurry to put a distance between us again. I scuttled away to wait in line at a ticket window, my face flaming and my entire body rippling like water a stone had been skipped over. A moment later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around. "You might need this," Hannah said, handing me her half of the money. "Oh, right," I mumbled, my face hotter than ever. "Thanks."

As I waited in line, I recounted our money, then had a brief moment of panic. I calmed myself down, and re-recounted the money. It still came out to the previous sum. "Hannah," I said, not sure how to break it to her. "We're missing five dollars." "Oh, I know," she said. "I gave it to that guy," and pointed to a Japanese man sitting on a nearby bench, playing a cello. "Hannah! Why?" "Well, firstly because he needs it more than we do - but more than that, do you hear what he's playing?" I tried to listen, but only a few disjointed notes, jagged and passionate, filtered out through the hustle and din of the bus station. I said I couldn't really. "It's - well, I forgot what it was called, but it's something really hard. My mom, she used to play for the city philharmonic orchestra, except she wanted to get into something else higher, and her audition piece was that. I remember how much time she'd spend just practicing that one piece, and she was still never able to get it perfect. I miss my mom. I wish I never had to lose her."

There was no way I could argue against something like that. I stood there, as the dust and harried forms swirled past me, and mumbled an apology. "Don't say that," she said, and there was nothing else I could say.

"You know, I offered money to a prostitute once," Hannah suddenly said. "Not in that way, but she was pretty and she looked kind of like Regina Spektor, but more than that, she looked so sad, sitting at the bus stop at eleven at night, and you could tell she wasn't what she'd wanted herself to be. And I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn't take it, which is how I knew she was a good person, and then I asked her if she wanted to come to my house, but she said her bus was coming, and her bus was coming, and it was in the opposite direction I was going. And it was getting late, and my parents had expected me back half an hour ago, so I had to go. And it made me sad. And when she started to board, I said after her, 'Has anyone ever told you you look like Regina Spektor?' and she turned around and said, 'Who?' and I smiled because I knew she'd wonder that for the rest of the night and maybe even look it up on Google."

The whole time Hannah was telling me this, the line moved forward and forward, until it was my turn at the window and I became nervous as I always became nervous when I had to speak to someone in a public place. I concentrated on every word that left my mouth to make sure I wasn't accidentally saying the opposite of what I wanted, or mangling my words beyond comprehension, and told the ticket vendor, "Two round-trip tickets for Des Moines, please." The exchange went relatively smoothly, save for the embarrassing amount of change that had to be rung through. I handed Hannah her ticket and told her to hurry, because our bus would leave in less than five minutes. By some miracle of chance, we had come on the exact day the route for Des Moines would be leaving, and by another miracle, it still had room to accomodate us.

We dashed down the line of platforms, holding hands to avoid losing each other in the crowd, even though, I thought, as I looked back on it later, the crowd hadn't been that terribly thick. "Wait!" Hannah yelled, as the ticket-checker stepped down from the bus to close the gate. He looked up, and smiled widely upon seeing us. "Close shave, eh?" he said, looking over our tickets. "I know what you're all about. Boy, if I haven't seen this - haven't lived this - a hundred times myself," and shook his grizzled white head. He smiled again, a conspiratorial light in his eye, and I suddenly realized Hannah and I were still holding hands. "Oh!" I said. "Uh - we - we're not - at all..." I couldn't finish the sentence. Meanwhile, the ticket-checker had handed back our tickets, and Hannah thanked him, the only words she'd spoken the entire time.

Soon after the bus had started rolling off toward the highway, Hannah said, "Hey, Peter?"

"Yes?"

"Two things. You know when I was telling the prostitute story and the part where I told her I thought she looked like Regina Spektor? That never happened. I thought about telling her, but she was already paying her fare, and I didn't want to, I don't know, cause a scene, or something. It made me sad later, because I felt like I should have, even though it's a tiny, stupid thing.

"And second, you know when I told you - or at least, I implied - that my mom died? Well, she didn't. She's still alive. She lives in a brownstone on 5th Street, and when she gets lonely she cooks eggplant roast and then she doesn't know what to do with it. And she's lonely a lot of the time, so it's a lot of eggplant roast and a lot of not knowing what to do. And I visit her every week and take it off her hands, and I eat half of it and give the other half to homeless people.

"And I know you must feel so betrayed and you're thinking what a lousy person I am for lying to you, and that I have to be after attention or pity, but God no, I'm not after either. I'm really, really not. I just can't help it sometimes - I like pretending I have other people's lives and I like pretending my life is so much fuller and weirder and more exotic than it is. I mean, I've always wanted to be other people, just, to see what not being me is like and to have the experience of all these things I've never experienced and never might. And I think - I think if just one person out there believes something about me that isn't true, then in their minds, I'll be that, or I'll have done that, especially if it's something I should have done, but never did.

"Oh, Peter, please say you understand! Or, you don't have to understand, just please don't hate me. I know it's bad, and I'm sorry. I never mean it. Please?"

Her impassioned soliquy had gotten the attention of nearly half the bus, including the driver. He caught my eye in the rearview mirror and called, "Keep her - she's sincere. You don't know how rare that is nowadays." People had turned around or poked their heads over their seats to look at us, and every pair of eyes said, Yes, yes, he's right, he's right. Hannah had become flushed during her speech and I imagined her like a star, radiating light and heat, and I looked down at my long sleeves and pants and thought about my perpetual coldness and how painfully different and inadequate I was. And yet, in that moment, I wasn't. Watching her had given me a warmth I couldn't quite remember feeling before. And the threads within me hummed like they were making music.

"Hannah," I said. "I do understand."