We remain seated and we do not consume food or drink on the bus. Each one of us is absorbed by the information beaming from our personal phones. The mind can easily be convinced, from here, that it is the only thing in existence. I am ethereal from them, all I can do is observe. I am drinking a gold liquid from a cold flask I keep hidden in my jacket. From the window, no one is sitting next to me — all the other seats are full — people are standing rather than sitting next to me, the city looms out and this is the wet season right here a cold grey day and the rain torrential like nothing else.
Someone wants to sit next to me, I face the window and do not look at him and cover my mouth because I don’t want him to smell my breath. He’s gotta white beard shaved so he looks like a billy-goat and he’s dressed like a swagman from older times.
“They say it’s gonna be raining like this all day hey.” Times like these I regret not having headphones so as to dissuade conversation. “Well, we need it, the farmers I mean.”
“Well yeah, yeah.” I don’t fully face him and pretend to scratch my beard so as to cover my mouth. “What’s a swagman like you doing in the city.” He takes his hat off, where his little cork bulbs?
“I’m not one to so quickly give up on these sorts of things, look at everyone else mate, the button up flannel and the fancy clothes that costed their parents too much money to care about. This whole place is built on the blood of my father and his father, now me. It’s just not right, what they’ve done to this place, it ain’t right at all. I’m from the country but this city is my country, it always has been deep under the asphalt roads, always has. My fathers blood and sweat built this city from nothing.”
There are towering concrete and glass buildings, curved glass that beam advertisements out onto the roads and the mass of people waiting by the stop lights waiting to cross the street and the angry looking jay-walkers waiting for their chance to cross from the middle of the street and the older Catholic-looking buildings that are, seemingly, the only beautiful looking things left. Oh except for those parks. Wonderful parks full of the native bush. I realise I never replied to the bushman.
“Yeah, I’m not from the city either.”
“Course you aren’t, I am.”
I look at him trying to sign with my face that this conversation is of no interest to me, I look back out to the city as we get to the first stop. The people pile out, my hands start to reach for the flask.
☺
And like — essentially — what Descartes is talking about when he’s talking about this stuff, you know what I think? Galileo had been executed — was he executed or just imprisoned? — anyway what he’s uh, the thing is that Galileo was like imprisoned or whatever because they were claiming he was like being impious he was committing blasphemy against the church — like Socrates right? Funny right? Anyway Descartes is obviously concerned about, like, being perceived like that so he makes so much effort to explain how what he’s saying isn’t blasphemous and like, jeez it’s raining hard today and I forgot my damned umbrella and and the hospital is such a god damned walk from here, but he’s saying that like god is obviously real because we can have this idea of a perfect being and so we had to have gotten that from somewhere right and this is also how he defeats solipsism and shit, like he says that this is obvious evidence of another mind — great my flannel shirt is all see-through now it’s all fucking soaked now — and like I think that uh, I’m not convinced that he err was really one-hundred% on believing everything he was saying essentially, is what I’m trying to say. My phone doesn’t have a cover and I can feel the battery heating up in my hand. And fuck that bus was packed today, full of weirdos as usual, it’s the free bus after all.
Weelll the bus went on speeding by me and my wet hair uncomfy stringy hard hadn’t been washed in too long a time sort of hair and then I was covered in its excretions its awful smelling bus smoke and you hear it go psshhh and fwshh as its wheels do that weird thing and the body rises and falls. I stumbled outta there onto Hampsbery Street, exposed brick houses and lined hedges and etc. Taking a cigarette out of the crumbled up packet, sliding it past the gold foil. This is why I only purchases Manchester Reds, they are so pretty. You gotta smoke in a town like this or you’re just kind of a weirdo. Have to find cover to smoke lest my cigarette get wet and then soggy and floppy all in the middle and then it’ll break apart and that's a dollar gone from me. You see the government really tries to tax these cigarettes it can be like eighty bucks for a pack but there are tons of little stores all along that sell illegally imported packs that they don’t pay tax on. You can get a pack there for like twenty bucks. Mmmm, illegal cigarettes, that crowded bus down the way now. Some sort of goat-looking fella came out on the stop with me and now he’s asking for a cig.
“Sure man whatever.” I give him two, its my act of kindness for the day.
☺
The flask is nearly empty now and I’ve gone on about four or five rounds of the free buses circuit. I’m gonna have to go home eventually but I’ve already run out of the Captain Morgan I stole last week and I don’t know if I have it in me to steal another. Right now my lips are all numb and warm and I just feel tired, so lethargic I don’t think I could move even if I wanted to. This feeling I imagine sweeping out over all of the city, every person in their fancy coat getting swept up in such a tired ache that their heart is heavy and they fall to the ground and everyone is there listening to the earth. The bus driver keeps looking at me but its okay because every two rounds or so they swap with someone else and this new driver probably thinks I only just got on, the drivers never seem to talk to each other. I could probably be a good bus driver but I wouldn’t be able to get the job anymore. I feel like becoming the city, like stretching my soul out over the whole mess and laying it down like a dull blanket over the fog and the rain and the grey sky. My own little map of life over this lonely anthill. Night is quickly descending.
☺
Eerie sounds echo, the train is the banshee who sits by your bed at night. At the ocean I felt a primal fear in every part of me for when I looked out into the smogblack sea I felt as if it were going to suddenly come forth and swallow me whole, or that the whole sea would rise up and crash down over me. The night-train’s windows were splattered with rainwater. The stimulant-abusers were on the prowl sitting down and chatting away with anyone who would look at them in the eye. This is why everyone was on their phone. Our personal phones tell us everything we need to know and connect our minds to one another. We can exist as pure mind and nothing else here in this realm. The train is the banshee by your bed, remember how that whistling and the screeching iron made you stare wide-eyed at the roof? When have you felt the same since?
There was a dull booming coming from the central park, rainbow light. I forgot all about the festival. The rain had finally started to die down. The night still had a fog in the air, chillness to it that made me shiver without my jacket. The city was busy but no one would look me in the eye. I needed to piss and found an alleyway suited for the purpose, the smell of previous public-urinators hang in the air, cigarette butts smushed against the concrete, disgusting odor from the dumpsters. No one was in the alleyway except for the bustling of some workers coming in and out of a crashing flyscreen door at one end, throwing heavy bags of garbage into the dumpsters, some with holes in them leaking mysterious juice. I went past this door to the very end of the alley, a deep fog was lingering here and the darkness was muffling. I undid my belt and lit a cigarette because I always had to be smoking when I pissed. That’s when I felt someone walk over my grave.
“You gotta let me bum a cig man.”
The ghost was there ethereal and dreamy, a sort of lovesick pink like how your eyes feel after crying, the burning pink colour of eyes. The colours moved in strange oily patterns across the specter, my cigarette hung loosely in the corner of my mouth but muscle memory alone continued the action of pissing here.
“Please man, just one cigarette man.”
Almost instinctively, maybe I was confused but I opened my phone up and started to pretend to look at it so as to ignore the thing. But it just kept asking and I guess at that time I heard the flywire open again and all the panic and fear I’d been holding inside me finally cascaded over me like terrible fingers and the cig dropped from my mouth as I ran screaming down the alley, pants at my ankles and some very confused kitchenhands looking rather dumbfounded indeed.
☺
Yeah, I remember how the air used to sting on those festival nights. Fresh twilight air fills your lungs with excitement. Dew on the grass and the whole town out to see the traveling show. Warm fairy lights in the park to guide your way. Yes and Leroy was there looking distant as always. Yes and so was Will and his girl. The park gilded by blue storage crates, the kind you see on the big Chinese ships, freight containers dad would call them. Yes, I remember the others from school hanging around on the park hills and watching the rainbow light spilling out all over town. Yes, I can remember Will’s girl getting up to talk to me, sitting down with me on the grass, both our pants getting equally stained with dark green.
“Are we gonna go on the Gravitron again, remember last time? You went on it like twenty-seven times and started throwing up.” Okay, exaggerating a little there. “You should do it again! Will, you should do that with him again.”
I couldn’t tell any of them but there was a heavy feeling in my heart, when I looked out at the city I felt so sad. When I looked at my friends I felt like they were already gone from me. Overwhelming anxiety had been building in my soul for years at that point, and it never really went away. Yeah, I can remember the festival nights very well. Even my first love, crying now, even my first love on that festival night. I still have the photo of us, young beardless men in the line and there she is behind me, face bordered in her chestnut hair. Apple face girl, apple face girl where have you gone? Apple faced girl, wanna drink up one more time? Call me pretty again, dear apple faced girl.