Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

“I love you!” the boy calls out to them in a deep, unformed voice, and they do not realize at first that he is speaking English. “I love you!” He begins to dance then, frantically, while the men behind him cheer and clap their hands in some vague semblance of rhythm. Even as the bus pulls out of the market, the boy is still dancing; he pulls off his shirt, either in response to the heat or the coaxing of the men, and dances, and their last glimpse of him is of a large white mound twisting and writhing, the final, energetic gasps of a fish set down in the desert.

* * *

They do not speak until the bus is well outside of town, allowing the dexterity of the henchman, who hangs from the bus with one hand, to command their attention. “I was just so… so… taken back,” Sheila says at last, weakly, testing this position aloud, sensing that their claim to indignation on the retarded boy’s behalf is compromised by the fact that everyone had witnessed their repulsion.

“An odd place,” Bernadette agrees, feeling safest with small, inconsequential commentary, and then they are quiet again, aware of the continuing stares of their fellow passengers and the increasingly tortuous nature of the road.

Perhaps an hour later, although they are seemingly in the middle of nowhere, the bus stops, and a family climbs on board, the parents, plodding and silent, accompanied by three children of varying heights but with a uniformly androgynous appearance — dull, sunken eyes and shaven heads covered with scabs and even a number of open sores to which red slashes of Mercurochrome have been applied, giving them the appearance of strange, colorful warriors from some remote tribe that is not in the habit of taking the bus. The parents settle heavily into the seat in front of the women, the only empty seat, while the children pause mutely in the aisle until the father makes a gesture, a downward slice with his hand, and the children drop obediently to their knees and crawl beneath the seats, the two youngest curling together under the parents’ seat like twins waiting side by side to be born, while the other, the tallest of the three, huddles beneath the women’s seat.

Before the family’s arrival, the women were quite aware of being the oddest thing that the other riders had expected to encounter on this trip, but now they are fairly sure that they have acquired competition, a fact that relieves them greatly, for it is a tiring thing already, this trip through winding mountain roads in 115-degree heat with the smell of diesel fuel and vomit everywhere. An occasional, vomit-ripe plastic bag rolls past their feet on inclines, like a water balloon in search of a target, but most of the riders have given up on bags and are simply emptying their stomachs directly onto the floor. At several particularly curvy points, Sheila thinks that she might be forced to join them, but she concentrates on restraint, mindful of the attention that her particular nausea is sure to attract. Each time the bus begins a steep climb, Sheila and Bernadette pull their feet up, holding them off the floor while vomit flows beneath them like an incoming tide, and then again on the downward grade as the tide goes out. They have only backpacks with them, cradled in their laps. Early on, they had removed the packs from beneath their seats, and it is this vacated space that the boy occupies, for, though still unsure of his gender, that is how they have decided to think of him — as a boy, or more specifically, and purely for ease of reference, as a pronoun: he .

“What do you think he’s doing down there?” Sheila asks.

“Nothing, I imagine. He’s probably just staring at our ankles.” For some reason, this thought — of the small, strange boy fixated for hours on their ankles — unsettles both of them, and they begin to fidget, keeping their legs in restless motion.

“What if he bites us?” asks Sheila, who has unusually fleshy calves.

“Why would he bite us?” Bernadette responds, but sharply, in a way that suggests that she too has entertained such thoughts.

“It must be so hot down there,” Sheila says eventually. “And they’ll be covered with vomit.”

“Well,” says Bernadette, whose practical nature often gets misread as apathetic. “What can we do really?” She looks out the window, finding the barrenness consoling. Many of the other passengers are still watching them, some turned fully around in their seats, apparently unconcerned about the havoc that this may wreak on their already compromised stomachs. It is too soon to tell whether their interest has shifted to this strange family, three-fifths of which has taken up quarters under the seats, or whether people simply wish to see how the two women will respond to them.

“Why does everybody feel the need to stare at us?” complains Sheila. “Why don’t they say something if they think it’s so awful?”

“Maybe they don’t think it’s so awful,” says Bernadette reflexively.

“Then why are they staring like that?”

“Like what?” Bernadette asks, more loudly than necessary despite the breeze from the open windows, which she knows she will later blame for her elevated tone. Her voice contains a surprising level of irritation, and their immediate neighbors look quickly at Sheila, expecting a response, the way that spectators follow a tennis ball that has been sent, with some force, back into an opponent’s court.

“Like they’re just waiting for us to do something,” Sheila says.

“You know what I think?” Bernadette says tiredly. “I think they’re just testing us. I don’t think that anyone really cares whether something gets done or not. I think they’re just wondering what we think about it all, whether we find it wrong or important or”—and here she pauses, searching for one last adjective— “ or worthy,” she says at last, unconvinced and disappointed by the vagueness of these options.

“Well,” replies Sheila after a moment, “maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just close our eyes right now and go to sleep, and when we wake up everybody else will be sleeping also.” Sheila is calling her bluff. Bernadette understands this, just as she understands that she has put herself in a position to have it called.

“And we just leave them under there like little caged animals?” she asks, underscoring her words with an outrage that she does not really feel. Logic, for which she possesses a great and natural capacity, has deserted her; she notes its absence distantly, by attempting to catalog the things that have replaced it — the heat, of course, and the stench of diesel, which has created a ringing in her ears. “Well,” she says dully, “there are probably worse things than riding under the seat of a bus.”

“Of course there are worse things,” Sheila explodes. “What are you suggesting? That we determine the absolute worst thing in the world and fix only that?”

As this discussion is taking place, the parents of the children have begun to devour a packet of fried fish, dropping the heads and bones onto the floor between their legs. They eat without speaking, though both are unusually loud chewers, and without offering anything to their children, who must surely be watching the steady rain of scraps. At last one of the children pops up between them — fish bones and greasy smudges of breading across the left side of his forehead — and extends his hand, urchin style, but the father pushes him back beneath the seat with a greasy hand of his own. A man leans over and says something to the parents in Arabic, something loud and unmistakably angry, and then another man adds to it, gesturing to the children beneath the seat for emphasis. The parents continue to eat without acknowledging any of them, and finally a third man rises and calls out to the driver, who pulls obediently to the side of the road. He and the henchman come back and stand in the aisle while various passengers offer statements, and in the end, it is the couple’s passivity — they continue to eat without showing any interest in the proceedings against them — even more than their actions that seems to turn everyone against them. The henchman kneels and extricates the children, and because there are still no seats available, the three of them crouch together in the aisle, lined up like tiny members of a chain gang.