The Planet on the Table (27 page)

In the bus it was cool. The air from the vent played on his arm. All the windows except the windshield were tinted dark green, polarizing the light and reducing the outside world to a wash of grays. Tom liked it that way.

They stopped in the run-down parts of towns where the bus depots were, to change passengers and eat meals. Joplin, Missouri; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas, Half an hour for lunch, an hour for dinner. He fell into the routine with relief.

He got on a New York-to-Los Angeles bus, and a group of passengers stayed on it for two or three days. He watched them as they lived their lives on the bus, talking and getting to know each other. Finn never introduced himself to anyone, or talked. At night people slumped in their seats, unselfconsciously sleeping. Some kept on their little overhead lights and talked all night long. Tom Finn could not sleep in a sitting position, so at night he unobtrusively crawled under his seat and slept curled on the floor, using his tennis shoes for a pillow. It was comfortable enough. In the mornings he scrambled up onto his seat and stared back at the few bleary-eyed strangers who were awake at dawn. A thin-faced young black man. A girl with stringy hair and dirty clothes. An old couple. The poor, in all their variety… Then back to the little toilet room, which grew more fetid by the hour.

As they crossed New Mexico he looked out at the parched gray land, dozed, observed the occupants of the seat ahead of him. A fat young woman struggled vainly to control her four sons, slapping them and threatening them with worse. The boys—aged eight, seven, four, and one, Finn guessed—ignored her, except for the infant, who cried or slept or sucked a bottle. The mother had scarcely slept in the three days Finn had sat behind her. He watched the oldest son, who tormented the four-year-old incessantly, and wondered if the boy was naturally evil or if his meanness was the result of his upbringing. Naturally evil?... The boy would grow up to be a runaway, he thought. Finn was a runaway.

That evening the bus pulled off Highway 8, in the south Arizona desert, for a dinner stop. The offramp circled down to a road that stretched off into the desert to the north and extended to the south no farther than a small group of buildings just off the freeway. Approaching the group of buildings, Tom read a sign: DATELAND RESTAURANT, POST OFFICE, AND CURIO SHOP.

He joined the file of people getting off the bus. “One hour, now,” the bus driver said. Although it was nearly dusk the air was still hot and dry. Finn walked across the gravel parking lot to the door of the café. There were two middle-aged men sitting at the counter. All the booths were empty. The waitresses were talking to each other. Tom saw that it was yet another restaurant that could not survive without its Greyhound concession. He sat in one of the booths, and a waitress took his order. He ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke. While he waited he flipped through the selections listed in his table jukebox console. Country-western, old rock and roll, songs in Spanish. Behind him sat the mother and her four boys. “Stop that. Stop that or I’ll hit you in front of everybody.” When his food came he ate quickly, paid his bill and left.

The main building was in the shape of an L; the long side was the café, the short side was the curio shop. Finn walked over to the curio shop, thinking to get out of the heat. Beside the door was a thermometer in an old tin Coca-Cola sign. It read 104 degrees. He went into the shop.

Quite a few people from the bus were already there, wandering about. Tom did the same. The curio shop offered for sale string ties with clasps made of clear plastic that held embalmed scorpions; cactus-growing kits; postcards with pictures of donkeys and cactus flowers and Jackalopes; turquoise rings, the turquoise white and cracked; candy in yellowed cellophane; and stone eggs. Everything in the shop had obviously been there for years and years; all those chill air-conditioned days and long hot nights had desiccated every item. No one from the bus was buying anything. The cashier stared out the window. It reminded Finn of things he could not afford to think of, and feeling that he might scream, or start to cry, he left the shop.

The heat outside relaxed him. The sun was about to set. Behind Dateland there was an old road leading off over a hill to the east. Finn began to walk on it. He was fascinated by the thin roads, asphalt or gravel or dirt, that crisscrossed the great American desert. He had seen a lot of them from the bus. Who had built them, and when? It was easy to imagine Interstate 8 being built: hundreds of men, huge yellow bull dozers and earthmovers, a whole community, moving along through the desert and excreting the highway behind it. But what about these little roads, stretching from nowhere to nowhere under the broiling sun? Finn couldn’t imagine their construction. He stared down at the faded, cracked asphalt as he walked. Sand silted over the edges of the road. It could have been built a thousand years. ago. These are the ruins of the twentieth century, he thought. Already here.

The road ended in a settlement of foundations. Rectangles of cement, half covered by sand, with fixture pipes rusting through at one corner of each foundation. The sun was below the hill now, and the settlement was in shadow. It was still very hot. Firm walked around the area, looking at the cement and the dry grass that had overgrown it and died. Wind gusted through the shadows, rustling the grass. In the east the sky was a deep blue.

Eventually he sat down on a concrete block and let the desert fill him. Occasionally the faint diesel roar of a truck wafted over from the interstate to the north. In the western sky the evening star appeared. This was his life, Tom Finn thought, this desert, this community in ruins before it had ever been occupied… Through his tears it seemed the homes that somebody had planned to put there did indeed stand, as clear glass houses that revealed everything about their owners, brittle things that could be shattered with a blink of the eye. And each blink brought the houses crashing to the ground, and the faint stars with them so that they should have been great pyres burning around him on the desert floor.

Then the evening star dropped like a stone over the western horizon, and it didn’t come back no matter how hard Finn blinked. As if it had been a meteor. Just a shooting star, Finn thought. But fear rustled through him like the wind, and he got up and walked quickly back over the old abandoned road. Something had happened…

From the hill he could see the back of Dateland. The parking lot was empty. Finn cursed out loud. He had missed the bus! Sitting out there thinking about his mess of a life he had missed his bus. He hurried down the hill, cursing still. He would have to wait in that café for the next bus, and call ahead to get the Greyhound people to recover his suitcase. Damn it! Hadn’t the bus driver counted his passengers? Had no one noticed his absence?

But when he got to the building, he forgot his anger.

Dateland was empty. Boarded up, faded, sand-drifted, empty.

The sun had been down for a while now, and Finn found himself shivering. Absently he walked over to look at the thermometer by the curio-shop door; it was broken. He turned the doorknob and pushed the door in; a gust of wind pulled it out of his hand, and it hit the counter inside with a wooden
thwack
. Finn stuck his head in the door and looked around, afraid to enter. Everything in the curio shop was the same, except dustier. A handful of Jackalope postcards tumbled to the floor, caught by the wind, and Finn jumped back with his heart racing.

It took all his courage to open the door to the café. It too was deserted. Parts of it had been removed: the jukeboxes, the kitchen fixtures, the drink machines. The vinyl booth seats were cracked like dried mud. Overcome by sudden terror, Finn rushed out of the café to the safety of the gravel parking lot. But it was getting dark; the vast network of stars revealed itself; Dateland stood behind him dark and empty, like a house in a child’s nightmare. He shivered uncontrollably. The dry wind made little noises against the building. A loose plank somewhere slapped woodenly a few times. He was afraid. “What’s going on here?” he cried out miserably. No answer but wind.

He ran up the road to the freeway onramp. The spare concrete of Interstate 8 was tremendously reassuring. Nothing there had changed. The highway was empty in both directions, but that was not unusual. He walked up the onramp until he was out on the westbound lanes, ready to stop the next car that came by. He could just see Dateland over the shoulder of the eastbound lanes, a dark mass in the starlit desert sand.

Hours passed, and no cars drove by. He was frightened again. It got colder, and he sat on the blacktop edging the white concrete of the lanes, where it was still warm with the day’s heat.

Then to the east he saw headlights approaching, and he jumped up stiffly, adrenaline pumping up his heartbeat, “Now stop,” he muttered, “please stop, please stop, please stop….”

Just before they would have reached him the lights slowed, turned on the big circular offramp leading down to Dateland. It was a Greyhound bus.

He ran down the onramp and along the road back to Dateland. Another bus! His pass was still in his pocket…

The bus was pulling back out of the parking lot when he ran up. “
Wait
,” he screamed, the word torn out of him like no other had ever been in his life. The headlights caught him for a moment, the bus stopped, the door at the front
whooshed
open.

He jumped onto the first step, grabbed the chrome handrail and pulled himself up the steps to the main aisle. There was only one passenger on the bus, an old woman sitting in the seat behind the driver. The driver looked up at him. “Sit down,” he said. “Can’t go until you sit down.”

Finn sat in the front seat, across from the old woman and the driver. He felt his bus pass in his pocket; but the driver was turning onto the onramp, oblivious to him. He sat back, happy to be leaving Dateland. Yet he was afraid to ask the two people across from him what they knew of it.

“So you found a new doctor, eh?” the driver said when they were on the freeway and up to speed. He was looking in his mirror at the old woman.

“Yes, I did,” she replied. “The best you can find, these days anyway. A Jack Mathewson, from Gila Bend. Trained by Westinghouse. He says he’ll replace the pivot in my lower back with a new part made by GE.”

“That might work,” the driver said. “Got a G.E. pivot myself.”

Tom Finn, pressed back against his window, stared at the two people across from him. The old woman… her eyes were glass. The bus passed under a tight over the freeway, and he saw that her skin was some kind of plastic. He tried to control his breathing…

“The plain fact is,” the old woman-thing said, “it’s hell to grow old. Nothing to be done about it.”

“Nope,” the driver agreed.

“Forty-seven years as a librarian, and me with a bad back. Sometimes you wonder why we were designed to feel pain at all.”

“Keeps us alive.”

“
I
think it was because people didn’t want us to have any advantages,” she said, looking for an instant at Finn, “Ah, well. All of my typemates dead and gone for years now. And Westinghouse has no more parts for my type, they say.”

“G.E. pans are just as good. But I know what you mean. All my typemates are gone too. Last century was the good one for simulacra.”

“Don’t you know it!”

Tom Finn got up unsteadily and walked down the aisle to the back of the bus, thinking that he might throw up in the toilet. But when he got to the door, he couldn’t bring himself to open it; he imagined looking into the coppery mirror and seeing his reflection grin at him with steel teeth—imagined unzipping, and finding only smooth metal. Had he always been a machine, and only dreamed, out there in the desert, of being something else? For a long time he stood there swaying with the bus. A part of his mind noticed that the bus’s engine didn’t sound like the old piston-driven ones used to. The
old
piston-driven ones? Furtively he looked up the bus at the two figures, still talking in low tones. Something had happened, back there at Dateland… he couldn’t bear to look down at himself. After a while he forced himself (for the sake of appearances! he thought) to return to the front of the bus. He watched the simulacra talking to each other, and listened to their words for a long time, wondering how to ask what year it was. Finally exhaustion overcame him and he was lulled to sleep by their voices and the hum of the bus.

He was awakened by the sound of the bus downshifting. They were on the curve of another offramp. He jerked up and looked around. They were still in the desert; it was light, just before sunrise. Just off the freeway was their destination, another little isolated café. Finn saw the sign on the building and felt faint; DATELAND RESTAURANT, POST OFFICE. AND CURIO SHOP.

“Isn’t this where I got on?” he croaked, his mouth dry with sleep and fear. They were the first words he had spoken since getting on the bus.

The driver turned his plastic head (it was obvious in the dawn) to glance at him, and laugh. “You think I drive this bus in circles? We’re west of Yuma now. There’s lots of places that look like that in this desert.”

The old woman was asleep, or turned off, still upright in her seat across from Finn. Finn felt his own pump hammering the fluids through him, and all of a sudden it was too much. He gave in to it.

Without thinking he got off the bus when it stopped. Walked over to the door of the curio shop. Without surprise he registered the fact that the bus was driving off, back to the freeway. The thermometer by the door was still broken, the paint on the tin almost gone. It still read 104. He opened the door and walked inside the curio shop. All the goods were still there, safe and untouched, covered with dust. Finn swallowed hard. There was something about the place, something he had sensed when he first entered it so many years ago…

The sun broke over the horizon, flooding the shop with dusty white light. Behind the cashier’s booth there was a closet. In it he found a broom and a feather duster, and he went to work cleaning up. All of the arrowheads, the turquoise and onyx and malachite rings, the cactus-growing kits, the postcards, the stone eggs. All as clean as new.