J. Cunningham - Comfort Station

“If you don’t mind, lady,” Fred declaimed imperviously, “I’d appreciate it if you’d limit your reminiscences to internal monologue. You’re not supposed to talk to the driver while the vehicle is in motion, and as of now this vehicle is in motion.” Then he winked and said, “I won this bus in a crap game with Vincent Impelliteri, far-seeing then-Mayor of this mighty metropolis. Interested?”

“You can keep your reminiscences buttoned up too , young man,” Carolina replied, with the kind of haughty grandeur that goes a long way toward explaining the Russian Revolution.

Annoyed, Fred operated the mighty omnibus in a forward manner in a way so abrupt as to cause Carolina to lose her balance and totter backwards three tottering steps into a green plastic seat, which fortunately happened at the time to be unoccupied. Sitting there, shaken by her experience, Carolina paused a moment to catch her breath and reorganize her shattered thoughts.

“You haven’t paid your fare yet,” Fred reminded her, not unkindly, having now regretted the impetuosity which had produced his impetuous behavior of a moment before.

“Just a minute,” Carolina said. She was still clutching the handle of the valpack containing all of that portion of her worldly goods which she had chosen to take with her on this Grand Adventure, this break with the past, the endless round of misunderstandings, jealousy, petty bickering, which her marriage had at last come down to. If only ...

No. This was no time for reminiscence, not even in the form of internal monologue. This was a time for action.

Opening the valpack and spreading it out along the central aisle of the bus was a matter of a few seconds’ furious activity. Then, shielding her actions from the gaze of curious passengers all about her, Carolina knelt upon the opened valpack and delved into the pocket containing all the money she possessed in the world: two hundred sixty-two thousand eighty dollars, plus her childhood piggybank. Not much, but it would have to be enough, enough for the fresh start with Roland.

It was to the piggybank that Carolina instinctively turned now, in her moment of need. The piggybank was the last reminder of Imperial Russia, the Russia of her childhood: happy days on the Volga, etc. Holding the artifact in her two hands as she knelt there on the spread-eagle valpack in the bus aisle, Carolina thought back to those halcyon years, and a trace of a tear appeared in the corner of one eye. The right one. Speak, Memory! Carolina thought, and clutched the piggybank — named Rosebud, because of its curly tail — to her bosom.

The bus, meantime, had stopped at Third Avenue, where several passengers disembarked and several soon-to-be passengers stepped aboard. It was necessary for all of them to walk the length of the open valpack, and one of the new arrivals commented to his friend, an internationally famous plastic surgeon, “I see they’re finally carpeting the buses.”

“Lumpy, though,” commented the friend.

“What can you expect from a fusion administration?” riposted the first, and both fell to irrepressible giggling.

Carolina, recalled to the present by the people walking on her valpack — and on her ankles, if the truth be known — returned from her reverie and briskly shook some change out of the piggybank, then reverently replaced the latter in its valpack pocket, briskly zippered the valpack shut again, briskly got to her feet, and marched briskly to Fred Dingbat’s side, where she asked, “How much to the Bryant Park Comfort Station?”

Fred gazed upon her. “That’s for men only,” he informed her.

“Let me worry about that, Yarmulka,” she said, employing a Russian term of contemptuous endearment usually reserved for pet mice. “Just tell me how much.” She jingled coins in her hand. “I can pay,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

Through a window high in the United Nations Building overlooking the throbbing megalopolitan core of the Bos-Wash megalopolis complex, General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, right-wing dictator of the tiny South American nation of Guacamole, watched the traffic far below on East 42nd Street, and most particularly the impressive length of the gleaming top of the 42nd Street Crosstown bus. How many of the riders of that bus, he wondered, really understood the changes that were to be brought into their lives by the new megalopolitan construct in city planning and most particularly in the area of high-speed interurban and intraurban mass transit? Very few, he supposed. Although city planners and other concerned individuals in municipal and state and federal governments were undertaking at this very moment a massive effort to educate the general public, the man in the street by and large remained blissfully unaware of the incredible complexity of the changes being wrought with incredible speed in his everyday life by the steady swift advance of incredible technology.

If these seem like unusual reflections for the dictator of an obscure South American nation to be reflecting, let it be pointed out at once that General Ramon San Martinez Tortilla, a gross little man with a pencil moustache and an arrogant demeanor, was on the threshold of being the former dictator of Guacamole, that obscure South American nation, partly as a result of the yearning of Guacamolians everywhere to be free, but also as a result of a minor error on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States’ super-hush-hush espionage organization, little known outside the innermost circles of deeply disturbed Washington, which had for the last three years been supplying arms, funds, and mimeograph paper to the insurgents in Guacamole instead of to the Federales Government.

General Tortilla had learned of the upcoming palace revolt just barely in time to make quick arrangements to get out of the country, first converting all his assets within Guacamole into cash, buying diamonds with the cash, and traveling to New York with the diamonds cleverly concealed as decorations spread out on the chest of his red and gold and blue and green and yellow uniform. Most of the money he had bled from his native land over the years now resided, of course, in numbered Swiss bank accounts, but the diamonds swathing his chest accounted for upwards of half a million dollars in addition to the unnumbered millions in the numbered accounts.

He had gotten out of the country by arranging an urgent meeting here at the United Nations Building in New York City, crossroads of a million private lives. The meeting, of course, would not take place. But the revolutionaries back home didn’t know that. They were still there, in green and lovely Guacamole, waiting for him to return so they could lop off his head with their machismos .

New York was to be his new home, at least temporarily, so naturally he was concerning himself now with local problems, of which the knotty one of mass transportation was naturally at the forefront of his mind. So much depends on the quick delivery of people and goods from one spot to another within the growing complexity of the new megalopolis concept. The Boston-Washington complex — familiarly known as Bos-Wash to the city planners struggling to keep up with the dizzy pace of modern technology — was in the forefront of that urban battlefield.

A sound recalled General Tortilla to the present. Turning, he saw entering the room, pistols drawn, three men he knew to be a part of the conspiracy against him, three men he had thought to be safely in South America !

“So,” the three said, as one man. “You thought you would escape the justice of an aroused people, General Tortilla.”

“You got me wrong,” General Tortilla protested, and abruptly flung himself through the connecting door to the next office. Locking the connecting door behind him, he headed for the hallway, pausing only to grab up a black London Fog raincoat hanging on an old friend of his, a research biochemist, standing in the corner. Not only would the raincoat conceal the diamonds winking and sparkling on his chest, there was the further consideration that it was, in fact, raining out, and the raincoat — if the London Fog people could be counted on — would go far toward keeping him dry, should his travels take him outside.