Hangsaman (30 page)

Because she could not turn her head she could not see Tony, who was somewhere in the back of the bus. She thought she could feel Tony watching her. “Is this the Cornford stop?” the woman standing next to her leaned down and asked. “I'm sorry, I don't know,” Natalie said, but the man sitting next to her said (with a warning glance?), “No, next stop.” “Thank you,” said the woman, and moved somehow so that her packages brushed the top of Natalie's head. “Excuse me,” Natalie said to the man, “but what is the last stop?” “End of the line,” he said, and smiled knowingly at her.

Suddenly a shift took place. The bus, bringing up in a great sweep at a corner, paused for a longer time, and many of the passengers got out. “Change for Linden,” the bus driver shouted, half-turning in his seat, and the man next to Natalie said, “Pardon,” and slipped out past her and followed the woman in the dark coat down the aisle. Tony sat down unexpectedly in the seat next to Natalie.

“I thought they'd
never
leave,” Tony said.

“They were watching me,” Natalie said. She turned and tried to look backward out of the window as the bus started to move, but could see nothing in the rain, which was steadily growing heavier, and darkening the day until it seemed now almost like evening, although it could not be later then mid-afternoon.

“Do you suppose,” Natalie said, “That they are each assigned a certain area to guard, and that they have to get back to it to watch for the next ones?”

“A bad job, that,” Tony said. “Imagine, always pretending to run a world. Always imitating the sort of people they think they might be if the world were the sort of world it isn't. Pretending to be words like ‘normal' and ‘wholesome' and ‘honest' and ‘decent' and ‘self-respecting' and all the rest, when even the words aren't real. Imagine, being people.”

“The man next to me,” Natalie said. “He was an honest self-respecting man. He was supposed to be the sort of small businessman who has not done really well, and who has had to be satisfied with less than he wants because he is not really very capable and knows it. He did it very well, as a matter of fact. I was almost convinced until he made a joke at me.”

“They have to give themselves away,” Tony said. “They've got to make sure you know them or else there's no point to them at all.”

“I don't think they've estimated us correctly,” Natalie said. “They seem to think we're weaker than we really are. I personally feel that I have talents for resistance they don't even suspect.”

“Perhaps,” said Tony dryly, “they have antagonists you have not yet encountered.”

Natalie laughed. “If
I
were inventing this world,” she said, “—and I may have, at that—I would gauge my opponents more accurately. That is, suppose I wanted to destroy the people who saw it clearly, and refused to join up with all my dull ordinary folk, the ones who plod blindly along. What I would do is not set them against numbers of dull people, but I would invent for each one a single antagonist, who was calculated to be strong in exactly the right points. You see what I mean?”

“The trouble is,” Tony said, grinning, “that you've got this world, see? And you've got enemies in it, and they're enemies because they're smarter. So you invent someone smart enough to destroy your enemies, you invent them so smart you've got a new enemy.”

“Oh, hell,” said Natalie. “Maybe I'd better give up inventing worlds and do without any for a while.”

“At least until you've got it figured out better,” Tony said.

The bus moved on, stopping meaninglessly now and then to let people get off or on; there was no object to their riding the bus now, these people, beyond the pure formality of spying. The route of the bus was perhaps desperately familiar to the driver, who must have had to travel it many times to be able to do it right when it mattered, and the route was familiar, too, to the people who got on and off, familiar in greater or lesser distance to all of them.

“Imagine,” Tony said softly once, “imagine that we live here, just halfway down that block. That house with the wide porch is very well known to us; we live there. You sweep the porch and I dust the living room just inside. We know so well what the house looks like that we go in there by instinct without even looking at it, and we are oddly comfortable in any other house which resembles it. And now we are going past our stop. As far as this point, the bus route is familiar to us, and we know without seeing them every corner and almost every person who gets on and off daily, and every street sign and every store—back there, as a matter of fact, was our grocery, where one or the other of us shops every day. Beyond this corner, everything is wilderness.”

“That's why it's so bad to be carried past your stop,” Natalie said. “You might never find your way back—you're in someone else's territory, places familiar to the person who gets off at the
next
stop.
Their
grocery stores.”

“We're going much farther today, though,” Tony said.

More and more people were leaving the bus, glancing occasionally at Tony and Natalie with curiosity and some amusement. The bus had moved through the business section of town, through the better residential section, through the lesser residential section, and was now in a district of dirty small stores and low, dark-windowed buildings, grim and unwelcoming in the dark afternoon.

“This must be the very edge of town,” Natalie said. “I've never been here before.”

“I've been here before,” Tony said. “Long ago, before I knew who you were.”

“Do we get out soon?”

“Soon,” Tony said.

The bad neighborhood gave way to railroad tracks, and eventually, to spaces of open country. Vacant lots on either side of the road separated small houses and a rare street sign stood by a squared-off curb, as though at one time optimistic people had planned houses out here, and streets, and broad sunlit gardens, and had stood perhaps on the eight feet of cement curbing already finished and looked around and thought, We can catch the bus on this corner and be into town in an hour; the children will have plenty of space to play. One or two of the few houses had fences around them, and one of them had wash hung out in the driving rain.

“We're going to be the last people in the bus,” Natalie said. “If we got out the bus driver could turn around and go on back home.”

“Who else would go this far?” Tony said. “Soon.”

“I believe there's a lake somewhere ahead,” Natalie said, peering out through the wet window. “Of course it
could
be just excessive rain, but it does
look
like a lake.”

“It is a lake,” Tony said. “Very popular in the summer when the weather is somewhat more clement than this.”

“I can see houses,” Natalie said. “What do the people live on after the hot dogs are gone?”

“Fish, I suppose,” Tony said absently.

“We're terribly out of season,” Natalie said. Being so near the lake troubled her; it was a spot where, she could see, warmth and movement had once abided, where a skeletal roller coaster presided ghoulishly over the remains of a merry-go-round, a skating rink, a bath house. She shivered.

“Is
this
where we're going?”

“Do you want to go back?”

Beside the window of the bus, so close that it startled Natalie, a sign moved by, pointing with one imperative arm at the lake; “Paradise Park,” it announced.

“Do you want to go back?” Tony asked again.

Natalie thought of the woman in the dark coat climbing tiredly onto the bus again at her destined stop, and laughed. “Suppose—” she began.

“Do you want to go back?” Tony asked again.

“No,” Natalie said.

Ahead, the remnants of last summer's pleasure sprawled darkly, the damp air from the lake carrying along with it the faint, almost undetectable odors of wet bathing suits, and stale mustard, and rancid popcorn; it was impossible to remember with any clarity the heat of the summer or the taste of sweat or the feeling of clothes confining in the heat, although the sight of the merry-go-round recalled very distantly the sweet jangle of its music. Natalie pressed closer to the glass of the bus window, uncomfortably aware of the dubious warmth of the bus and the clinging wetness of her raincoat against her legs; even Tony, next to her, seemed disagreeably close and pressing and the sudden sight of the thin lines of Tony's face against, through the other window, the leaning timbers of the roller coaster in the gathering darkness made Natalie shiver and say overloudly, “ Aren't we ever going to get
out
?”

As though at a signal, the driver swung the bus around in a circle, pulled on the brake, and turned to look at them. “Going back?” he called incongruously down the length of the bus, “or you getting out here?”

Tony rose and started down the aisle, Natalie following her stiffly. “We're getting out here,” Tony said.

“Carnival spirit?” said the driver, and he hunched up his shoulders and laughed at them. “Big night on the beach? See the sights, take a swim, look at the girls, win a kewpie doll, take a chance?” He laughed again, snickering, as they stepped gingerly down the slippery steps of the bus. “Take a turn on the merry-go-round for me,” he called after them, and the bus door closed behind them.

Natalie stepped quickly to the side of the road as the bus turned awkwardly, because it occurred to her vividly that he might very well try to run them down—who would ever know, on a night like this? He could say it was an accident—and for a moment in the bewildering darkness after the lights of the bus she lost Tony. “Change your mind?” the bus driver shouted, leaning toward her from the window of the bus. “Last chance?” When Natalie did not answer the bus moved, picking up speed as it went down the road, and Natalie watched its lights, thinking, He is going back right now to the lights of the town, to the sounds and the lights and the people.

There was darkness ahead of her, with an odd rich brilliance of water beyond, but no human lights along the lake. “Coming?” said Tony, and she sounded amused. “He was right, you know,” she added. “It was probably the last bus.”

*   *   *

On the road back to town the signpost pointed evilly down at them with its one arm, still probably saying “Paradise Park,” and ahead the roller coaster leaned slightly forward to hear what they said. The only light, apart from the faintly luminous sky, was its reflection on the water; the only sound (beyond perhaps the anxious breathing of the merry-go-round?) was the noise of the waves on the shore. Irresistibly Natalie found herself moving toward the lake, with a human impulse to get to the edge of the world and stop, but Tony took her arm and said, “This way.”

“Where in hell are we?” said Natalie; she was cross, and it was colder than she liked, and she was unpleasantly aware that that had probably been the last bus back to town.

“Look,” said Tony, and she stood still but did not turn, “if you don't want to come you don't have to.
I
'm going anyway.”

“Where else can I go?” Natalie said. “Is it far?”

“No, not very far.”

“I'm not going to stay long,” Natalie said inadequately. “Unless it's warm.”

Tony laughed. “How would you feel about heaven?” she asked. “You wouldn't stay unless it was warm?”

“Look,” Natalie said reasonably, “I'm cold. It's wet. I don't know where I am or where I'm going. If I say—”

“You want to go home?”

“Stop it,
will
you?”

“We
could
be on our way to Paris,” said Tony. “Or Siam.” She laughed again. “And no one can find us,” she said. “Someday, suppose we were strangers and we met in London. Would you bow to me on the street, thinking, I used to know someone looked like that, and then I might wave to you, thinking, Doesn't that look like a girl named Natalie I once took down a lonely road? Suppose we were strangers after all this, and we met in London?”

“I would think, ‘Tony, Tony,'” Natalie said.

“I know you would,” said Tony.

They had gone away from the deserted playground now, and the road they followed had been set out, it seemed, for lovers for whom the Roller Skating Rink was not private enough. Over their heads the trees leaned toward one another, nodding and perhaps whispering ahead that they had come, after so long a delay; underfoot, it was wet and somehow encouraging—each step seemed to urge them forward; one could walk forever in such a vacuum.

Tony stopped suddenly, her feet in the mud, and looked up at the rain which found them still between the trees. “And if I stamped on the ground and called,” she said softly, “would anything come rushing to us from the sky, shaking in the world and speaking in a voice . . .”

“Not in
this
mud,” Natalie said. “Not in this mud you couldn't stamp.”

“All I need,” said Tony, “is a desire so strong that the world, all of the world, has got to bend itself and forget itself and break out of its circles and rock itself crazy, all to do what I want, and there's got to be a great crash when the ground under me crashes itself wide open and the fire inside is forced to crawl away from my feet and the sky too turns back so that there is nothing above me and nothing below me and nothing in all time except me and what I want.”

“Tony,
stop
it.”

“He would take us wherever we wanted to go,” Tony said very softly. “We would only need to whisper ‘Far away from here,' and he would carry us on his head to someplace where it is hot, and the sun comes down on us, and there is moving blue water and hot hot sand under our feet. Or we might be lying on a curved green hill with our heads in the grass and nothing overhead but clouds or riding on an elephant with strange clashing bells calling us or dancing in the streets of a city where no one is alive but us and the houses are round and red and blue and yellow in the moonlight and the streets are crooked and hung with lanterns and strange, or we can have a world completely flat in all directions and us with our chins resting on the edge and no bodies and with our eyes half-shut can look out peacefully on a world flat in all directions or we can—”