He had left her burning in her tears at the Greyhound station, I land now he was about to take the city bus home. It was twi-w light. Knowing that she was standing in line at this moment, facing him, yearning for him, made him weary and afraid. A black cawing creature crooked itself through the slatey air between palms. A bus came, well lit inside. People dreamed or stared as it rolled them away. Perhaps she was boarding her bus now, passing through the long smelly darkness of the loading garage. The blue-uniformed baggage man would be kicking the last suitcase deeper into the sidecave; then he'd slam down the cover. Could she hear that, sitting inside? She'd be looking out her window at the numbered metal doors. The driver would close and lock the one she had just come through, so that she couldn't see the Coke machine anymore, but through the window she'd still be able to find legs opening and closing with comic earnestness, reflecting themselves on the bile-green floor. Now she'd be staring at the streaks of brown grease above those metal doors. He could feel her thinking of him. He'd never get away from her. She thought of him until the driver came in and started the engine. The driver took his coat off, slammed the door, slid glasses over his nose, honked, and began to pull out into the street. A man in a baseball cap was whistling and pacing, a garbage bag over his shoulder. Cold shadows and tired lights began to encase the buildings in their night incarnation. Another bus went by, almost empty, a rolling box of lateness. She would be on the freeway now because the traffic was light. It was too late for her to be accompanied by the noises of little boys in baseball caps eating chips. The other heads growing from the seats like halitosis melons would be weary heads, not even mumbling as she passed the Hofbrau and the Hotel Marshall on that bus which sometimes smelled of leather, sometimes of tunafish, always of that disinfectant whose nauseating fumes always commanded him to consider the toilets of mental wards. He could see himself sitting behind her, glimpsing the top of her head over the seat, her shoulder between the seats; maybe she'd reach for the reading light and he'd see her arm bloom sweetly up. He allowed himself to remember kissing her. Remembering was just the same as reading the commentary on a favorite poem, not to learn any secret, but only because he'd read the poem to satiation without yet exhausting his love, and scanning the commentary was a way to kiss the poem again without reading it. Nobody was in sight. Blank or vicious little headlights scuttered around the bases of the chilly skyscrapers. It got darker. The trees were now almost the color of the sky. Cool darkness pressed on his head. On a squat skyscraper, a glowing red bead tipped a horn of darkness.
You want some love? a whore said.
Too much love is my problem, he said.
All right, honey. Well, we don't have to call it love.
He looked up at her and she was not very pretty but she was very determined and he remembered how one Japanese term for a courtesan meant
I don't know who she is, but if you want I'll be her, the whore said. Just tell me how to be her and I'll be her for you. I need my fix real bad.
Can you be a train? he said. I left her on the Greyhound but if you were a train you could carry me home to her.
The whore got down on her hands and knees on the sidewalk and whistled like a train. She began to crawl toward him. He stood up, and the sound of his heels upon the hard night sidewalk echoed like light. Laughing, she snatched at his ankles. Gently he took her hands away and sat down on her back. — All aboard! she cried. Her eyes became headlights. The train thudded very slowly between the gravel shoulders and fences and across the trestle bridge to morning, only slightly rusty, that put the brown river behind.
Soon now he'd knock at the door of the cool house where she'd be waiting to leap into his arms. He sat on one of the long wooden benches, which was warm and moist with so many people's sweat, and listened to the echoes that clashed beneath the high vaulted ceiling like belltower vultures, harsh and flat and desperate in the heat. Soon he'd be drinking her spit. Soon he'd be holding her in his arms listening to the moon. He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. It was breathlessly hot. Little girls in matching dark plaid dresses whose squares were as wide and solid as flagstones — evidently some school uniform — wandered, eating onion chips and drinking sodas. A slender-legged Japanese girl with a severe black braid knelt on the marble, watching black boys play cards on the next bench. The boys had their uniform, too — white shirts and bluejeans. They were eating ice cream cones. — Cheat! one shouted. — No I didn't, wept the Japanese girl. You play!
