Edward Lee: The Minotauress

God knew when they'd be in Lexington.

On the plastic seatback in front of him, someone had magic markered: THE PERFECT MATCH: YOUR WIFE, MY KNIFE, and in worse script just below it: GANG BANG ALL WIMMIN TO DETH AND KILL ALL WHITE PEEPLE, NIGGERS, JEWS, MUZLUMS, INDIUNS AND SPIKS!

Curious, the Writer thought. At least the Asian-Americans can rest easy...

The massive woman next to him had stopped eating and fallen asleep, her maw agape below the sagging face. The Writer couldn't resist; he extracted his Sharpie and applied a graffito of his own: NATURE, THOUGH AN APPEARANCE, IS NOT MERELY THE IMMANENT MIND'S ISSUE OF CONSCIOUSNESS BUT A MANIFESTATION IN ITS OWN RIGHT OF A SUB-TOPICAL SPIRITUAL REALITY.

There, the Writer thought.

Just then the threat of a potential symbology pressed to his face like a clammy hand. My watch! the thought, unbidden, occurred to him.

But why would he think that?

He looked again at his Timex Indiglo. On the back it read "8-Year Battery," and he knew he'd bought it eight years ago. Hmm, he thought.

What could that mean?

Time's up, he guessed.

Like when the narrator of that Bergman flick says "At midnight... the wolf howls." Did it mean something pontifical? A deep-seated literary allusion that was clear only to the most astute?

Or was it just pretentious poop?

The intercom crackled, then the driver's voice boomed, "Next stop, Luntville."

The Writer had never heard of the place, and was glad of that when he looked out the window. It reminded him of that show he'd seen on cable about an Appalachian family: rusted trailers, dilapidated houses that were visibly leaning, cars up on blocks. Many houses had CONDEMNED signs on their front doors while obviously still occupied. The road wound through wild woods with vast breaks of scrubby farmland pocked by tractors scarlet with rust. When they passed another ramshackle house, the Writer noticed an entire family sitting vacant-faced on the bowing front porch: an older man in overalls sipping clear liquid from a jar, an obese woman with a masculine face pulling leaves from a bag of Red Man, a teen daughter in cutoffs and stained white bra smoking something from a glass pipe, and a dirty tot sitting naked on the bare wood, shuddering as if from Parkinson's.

White Trash Gothic, the Writer mused.

Eventually the road drained into what was apparently the main drag of a township, this Luntville. Closed storefronts lined either side. The driver swore in some kind of an accent when the street's only stoplight turned red; the bus squealed to a halt like a train slamming its brakes.

No vehicles were seen in the perpendicular lane.

Then the thought sparked, a delicious aesthetic fire in the Writer's head. WHITE TRASH GOTHIC! Suddenly he wanted to cry out in joy.

That's my next book!

Hence, on the Greyhound bus, no less, his next creative calling had struck, a veritable lightning bolt of the truth that was his aesthetic blood. He'd left Ipswich on this self-same bus three days ago and prayed he'd leave his writer's-block as well. But a new book idea had never occurred to him.

Until now.

Oh my God... It will be my most genuine novel... I'll win the National Book Award!

In a split-second, then, like a death-flash, the entire novel appeared before his mind's eye...

Moments later the bus roared into the front of a convenience store. A tiny sign on a streetlamp read GREYHOUND DEPOT: LUNTVILLE.

One old man with a beard and white hair hobbled down the aisle. The Writer grabbed his two carry-ons and followed him, after, of course, the arduous task of asking the behemoth next to him to get up so he could squeeze by. The woman's walrus face fixed on him; she had a Big Dipper of moles on her forehead.

"I saw you writin' that dirty shit on the seat," mouthed the walrus-faced woman. Green pistachio-mush was caked between her inordinately large teeth.

"It's Wilhelm Leibniz," the Writer replied. "Pluralistic objective monadism."

When he tightrope-walked by, the driver said, "I thought you were going to Lexington," but the man pronounced the word as "Rexington." He was Asian-American.

"I've experienced a creative advent, a new variance of my Muse has arrived ," the Writer replied. "And, I'm sorry to point out, your bus is too fetid."

The driver's slanted eyes looked cruxed. "Fetid?"

Someone from the seats cut in, "He means your bus stinks! "

"Oh... "

Next, a passenger with a more distinct voice appended, "Yes, it smells like B.O. mixed with the smell of dried apricots. You know, that uncanny way you taste the smell right as you're eating one? The sapor? "

The Writer stared back as if into a glittering chasm. The person who'd made the simile was a gaunt-faced man with spectacles and a slight malocclusion of the jaw. He looked about as happy to be on the bus as the Writer had been.

Thank you, sir! the Writer thought and hopped off the bus.

The Greyhound tore off in a deafening roar mere seconds after the door had flapped closed behind him. The Writer felt siphoned within a dervish of dust and noise; a final glance at the bus showed him a smear of faces, like apparitions, inducing him to recall Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." Like petals on a wet, black bough... The old man who'd gotten off with him fell down from the roaring vacuum drag.

The Writer helped him up. "Are you all right, sir?"

"Blammed dink driver!" the old man railed. "Bet'cha he was VC, I shorely do! Wants to get back at us fer blowin' his shit country up'n that Ho Chi Minh fucker!"

"Actually I think he was Japanese, but then... we blew their country up too."

The old man waved an irate fist in the air. "And I just had me some Hin-doo doctor at the hospital in Pulaski tell me I gots some blammed disease called dye-ur-beetees."

"Oh, sorry to hear that. Type 1 or 2?"

A cockeyed glare. "How the fuck do I know? I tolt ya, the fucker was Hin-doo, could barely understand his swami jabberin'... . A'course, maybe he wasn't Hin-doo on account he didn't have one'a them dots on his head. What's that make him, then? A fuckin' A -rab?"

"I'm sure I don't know, sir."

"And looky there!" the old man continued pitching his fit. "I'se in a swivet, I am!" He pulled up a pant leg to show a swollen ankle purple as an eggplant skin.

Ew, the Writer thought.

"Swami fucker says I ain't got no cirkalayshun no more on account'a this dye-ur-beetees ‘so's if I wanna live, I gots to have my fuckin' feet cut off! And ya knows what else? Says I gots ta pay him to do it! Eight hunnert bucks, and the fucker had the balls ta tell me that's the poverty discount!"

The Writer's heart went out to the old man...

Rheumy eyes peered back below bushy white brows. "You ain't from ‘round these parts, are ya, boy?"

"No, sir. I'm from—" but then the Writer faltered. I'm the man who came from nowhere, he answered in thought . He picked a random city in his head. "I'm from Milwaukee."

The old man tensed. "Same place that fella in the news is from?"

"Pardon me?"

"It's been on the blasted news the last three days straight!"

I've been on a Greyhound bus for the last three days straight... "I hadn't heard. Something happened in Milwaukee?"

"Dang straight. Cops caught some fella with dead bodies in his apartment, had cut-off heads in the fuckin' refrigerator. Said there was even a head in a lobster pot! One'a them homo fellas, probably chugged more cock than I'se chugged moonshine. And he hadda pair'a cut-off hands hangin' in his closet."