12.26.07
Rolling Out
Armen Adroushan lie spread out on the Horseshoe green on the last day of final examinations. He looked up into the fat Carolina sky and let the steaming sun soak into him. A slight breeze trickled through the lofty canopy of stately old trees, but it didn’t seem to reach the ground. A squirrel barked up in the canopy, a raven hovered out and back into the leaves, and the squirrel scolded again. Armen gazed lazily at the sky, watching it roll, and listening to it rumble.
This was it. “This is it,” he replied to the sky. He’d previously planned to go on to graduate school, but lately he just couldn’t see it. He was having a hard enough time getting motivated to attend commencement. It would be worth a recollection, with President Bush and Andrew Lloyd Weber slated to speak, but no, there wasn’t a chance that he’d even be in the state by then.
The night made a rumbling sound. The massive sphere rolled. The rumbling was low, steady, and everywhere inside the sphere. The road under the streetlamp felt the rumbling. The streetlamp felt the rumbling. The car parked along the curb felt it. The windows at the drive-in felt it, as the sphere continued rolling.
As a glow spilled across the horizon, a bus roared down the whispering street, drowning out the rumbling, and the air was filled with foul, black smoke. The street rolled away under the bus. The street lamps rolled away. The town rolled away. An iron bridge rolled away. A forest rolled. Corn fields. Night rolled away, and suddenly, so had the dawn. Other towns rolled away under the wheels of the bus, and other bridges, and days, and nights.
He was quite accustomed to the rolling. He felt at home with it; the not pretending to stand still.
In the belly of the monster, he seemed to time his breathing with the monster. The bus exhaled its smoke, and Armen exhaled his. Each had its fire. The internal combustion of one and the internal respiration of the other were essentially the same technology.
As another night rolled away from the eastern horizon, a great grey bridge rolled past the bus. It did not roll away in a moment, but kept rolling and rolling past. The grey, striped hollow of the bridge flickered, then suddenly became dark, with a narrow stream of light pulses, and then the bright stripes returned. The stripes vanished, replaced by a canyon of boxes, some dull and some flashing, bright, and reflective, rushing by, slowing, ceasing, then rushing away. Sometimes when the box canyon slowed, it would turn and flow away in another direction, but the direction was always the same somehow. The boxes hurried past.
The boxes slowed and rolled through a half turn. The rumbling diesel engine tripped in silence. The bus door opened, and peopled dropped out, one by one.
Armen Adroushan stepped down on the floor of the garage-like bus station, walked alongside the bus, and waited by the cargo doors. He cradled a paperback book and a spiral-bound notepad in his right hand, his fingers shifting their ballast slightly to keep their cargo from tipping too far in either direction. The driver opened the cargo doors, and the passengers ducked under, pulling their luggage out. Armen grabbed a worn backpack, heaved it out of the bus and onto his back. He stepped through the waiting area into San Francisco.
“What now?” he wondered. He inspected the cracks in the sidewalk and wondered how much they’d grown during last fall’s earthquake. He felt relieved to be back on trembling soil—so unsteady, like himself, but he could feel the City’s ceaseless activity overwhelming this delicate familiarity. The boxes, so abstract from the bus window, now became walls of steel, with an appearance of windows and doors, yet ominously inaccessible. The sun only cast shadows. It was forever hidden behind the walls of the deep canyon, and the chill exhalations of the City would howl up and down the steel canyons. As the shadows darkened, the day-dwellers thinned out, and the night-dwellers came out of the cracks and crevices and sterilized the pavement with their bladders. Armen allowed his feet to lead him back to the bus depot. He walked in out of the City and purchased a ticket for Fresno.
