Passenger(60)

In my mind, I am watching the gumballs roll across the linoleum floor, each one glinting with reflected light from the ceiling fixtures, each one a whole world unto itself. I cannot stop seeing them, cannot stop thinking about them.

I do not see the dark-skinned man approach me until he’s jabbing something hard and pointed into my side.

“Your cash!” he snarls. “Your wallet!”

“I don’t have a wal—”

He tears the rear pockets off my pants then, incensed by their emptiness, pats down the pockets of my canvas coat. There are many pockets.

“Here,” I say, digging around the inner pocket. I bring up a fistful of small bills, which he jerks from my hand. A few bills flutter to the pavement.

“What else you got in there?” He is breathing sour, fetid breath into my face, that hard object pushing farther and farther into my gut. With his free hand, he reaches around and dives into my pockets. The force tears one of the inner pockets away from the lining of the coat and, to my surprise, more bills flutter out.

The mugger curses at me and elbows me directly in the stomach. The world goes blotchy, tilts, and I spill like liquid to the pavement. Through bleary eyes, I watch him grab a few more bills off the ground before taking off in a sprint through the darkness. After a moment, only the pounding of his sneakers can be heard. Then: nothing.

I pull myself into a fetal position. The world around me blurs, and I struggle to keep it in focus. There are a few bills still scattered around the alley; I watch as the crinkled, origami shapes tumble along the ground in the strong winter wind. Nothing has a history as colorful as a dollar bill. I watch them twirl, flutter, spiral in a tornado…and find something else folded among them. A crinkly bit of yellow paper, perforated at one end. Something that has been in my old canvas coat all along. It is heavier that the money and sits where it dropped, one corner flapping in the wind.

Curious, I pick it up and unfold it. There is a post office logo in one corner, a date—August 31 of last year—stamped in purple ink at one corner. I see the carbon-copied handwriting in the center of the paper. The handwriting matches my own—matches the address I keep writing over and over on my hand.

It is a receipt from a package I mailed from the post office on Madison.

Mailed on the day I was hit by the bus.

The third and final peculiar thing—has been with me all along.

While my name and return address are nowhere on the receipt, I apparently mailed this package to:





Madeline Troy





1212 Cappestrandt Way


Ithaca, New York 14850





“Madeline Troy.” I speak it to taste it, see if I recognize it. Reality, if only briefly, swims back into focus. “Madeline Troy, Madeline Troy, Madeline Troy…”

The name means nothing to me.





PART III





TWENTY-THREE





It is a seven-hour drive from Baltimore to Ithaca, New York, give or take. Several times I think Clarence’s rusted red pickup truck will not make it—that it will sputter and die on me and I will have to leave it to fossilize on the side of the interstate while I hitchhike the rest of the way. But that does not happen. It shudders and rattles like a maraca and coughs up plumes of black exhaust, but it holds itself together. There are cassette tapes tossed pell-mell around the cab, rap music, and I play them to drown out the disconcerting noises of the old truck.

I pass the skylines of unidentifiable industrial cities to my right, faint and mirage-like in the haze of midday. Underpasses, gangrenous with graffiti, crowd in to suffocate me. Great clots of traffic tie up the highways. There is little room for negotiation. Then, as the afternoon grows old and cools toward sunset, the highway opens up and traffic disperses like the scatter of light. Urban sprawl gives way to snow-crested pines and rolling country hills. The sun is brighter here, the sky more open. I burn along at a decent speed, the steering wheel vibrating in my hands, a fever coursing through my system. There is no need for me to stop and eat—my stomach feels like a clenched fist—and I stop only for gasoline.

Two hours south of Ithaca and there is a needling toward the back of my head. Metal plate. The headache is still there, but the needling is new. It is akin to the sensation of waking after a long sleep and having your arm, which has been propped at an awkward angle, go numb. I rub my head, press some fingers against my wound, and wince. I consider spinning the wheel and launching myself through the concrete barrier that separates the highway from the fir-studded hills.

“Damn…”

The rap music is making things worse. I eject the tape and spin the radio dial to locate a station. Something soft. Classical. A twinge courses through me as I rest the dial on a recording of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

I catch a glimpse of my haunted eyes in the rearview mirror. Soy fantasma. Too clearly I can see the void inside me looking out. The sight sickens me. A person cannot live on the here-and-now alone. People need history; people need a past. There is no going forward without first going backward.

Go, I hear the teenage fortune-teller speak. The voice is so real it makes the hairs on my neck stand up. Go. Backward.

I am trying, but I am not in control. I haven’t been in control since waking up on the damn bus roughly one month ago. I am a passenger along for the ride. There is no controlling any of it.