At the Bus-Stop
By K. Overman-Edmiston
Copyright 2011 K. Overman-Edmiston. All rights reserved.
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At the Bus-Stop is from the short story collection Night Flight from Marabar.
Paperback print edition (ISBN 9780646369693) published by Crumplestone Press,
PO Box 6546, East Perth, Western Australia 6892
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At the Bus-Stop
... Things which must shortly come to pass ... [Revelations 1:1]
Salek Bernard closed the door behind him, drew his coat closer around his body and shuffled towards the bus-stop. He held his guilt fast against his stomach. Cool in the warmth of his coat, his guilt contracted to the span of a small bottle. He threw his guilt out like a thread to the scene of betrayal, and he drew himself along. Such a gentle, conscientious man.
As he neared the bus-stop he saw his plans as snapped things. Three young women sat waiting for a bus. He looked anxiously at the shelter. It was always shrouded in semidarkness at this time of the day. The usurpers sat talking and laughing. He wanted to tell them there was no point waiting. No bus was due for well over an hour. This he knew as he had come to this spot every week, on this day, for the past two years. In guiltiness and silence he had come to this place with his small bottle, knowing no bus was due. Knowing he could sit alone in the shadows thrown by garden wall and bus-stop, and drink his wine. At the end of a seemingly colourless, blameless life Salek could sit alone and unchallenged and slowly savour a small bottle of red wine.
Salek had ulcers. He had had them since middle age and now he was a very old man. He knew his lasting was due, in part, to the care of his wife, Sarah. The bland but painstakingly prepared food, the safe tasteless drinks that had been set before him, the allocation of medication − all carefully administered by the loving but crushingly unimaginative Sarah. For over forty years Salek and Sarah had been man and wife, and she knew him now as little as she did then. A quiet gentleness was all she knew of her husband.
This all conspired to make Salek's weekly bottle of wine such a betrayal. Sarah would not have complained, at least not with words. But he would be made to die a thousand deaths for his sin.
Salek did not know what to do. He could not take the bottle home, there was not an inch of the house that would act as a hiding-place. All crevices would lose their shadows before the blazing sun of Sarah. And Salek had such need for a small shadow, a shadow to cover him up, take him in, give him comfort, dark solace, peace.
The three young women sat and talked. Every so often they laughed. Oblivious, they kept Salek from his shadow. He searched the surrounding area for sanctuary, his eyes everywhere at once. There was another bus-stop on the other side of the street. At this time of the day, however, as the sun was setting and lending his bus-stop a glory of shadows, the other was bathed in the light of that same setting sun. Salek continued to cast around for shadows. He had only one hour before darkness fell and he would be missed at home. As impossible as it was for him to take the bottle home so it was impossible for him to throw it away. In an adult life as uneventful as a salt plain Salek refused to forgo this one peak: not for Sarah, not for ulcers, not for the three women who unwittingly stole his shadows.
For every glimpse of heaven there is a little death.
He shuffled across to the other side of the road and made for the second bus-stop. It was swathed in sunlight. He walked around behind it. No bench. He walked to the side facing the road and sat down. For ten minutes he sat without moving. He could not open his coat, he could not take out the bag, he could not take out the bottle. He prayed that a bus would not come, and that he would not have to stand up and wave it on. He prayed that he would not be noticed. His hour was slipping away. And still he sat, motionless.
Salek-Would-Not-Could-Not. He sat in the palm of inertia.
His eyes were creased against the sunlight. The disc itself had dropped behind the silhouette of a house. He was losing the three women in the murk, in the shadows cast by the shelter in which they sat. And how he envied them. Fifteen minutes of his one hour lost to him.
The sky was now ablaze. Clouds picked up the light thrown off by the falling sun. Salek's heart beat fast as the minutes were torn from him. His medication was taking effect more quickly than usual. Desperate, he opened his coat, just a little, and took out the small plastic wine cup. He left the bottle in the bag.
Salek was not an alcoholic. He was an old man, an ill man, coming to the end of his life. He was a man tenacious of the pleasures left to him. One life, the only thing entirely his own.
Salek slipped his hand around the neck of the bottle; it felt cool and slender. 'Mustn't be just a series of automatic moves, rote speeches, pre-lived ideas and forms. This is mine,' he mumbled.
A wind picked up and threw noise from the trees before him. He started with fright. A small, barely audible voice, in at his ear, Behold, he cometh with clouds ..., he heard.
Salek looked up at the sky. It was blazing with light. His heart thudded in his ears. He fumbled in his pocket for the penknife. His guilt was now in his mouth, he could taste it.
The ritual began. He pulled the blade from the body of the knife and in two swift moves cut an arc around the lead casing and lifted it. He flicked it off into the bag. In his mind he pulled down a fine but impregnable veil that shut Sarah and her disapproving looks out. He swung the corkscrew on its pivot and plunged it gently but firmly into the yielding cork. He began to twist metal into wood. Quickly at first then slowing the rhythm he took the corkscrew to the point where no swirl of metal could be seen. All this he did without looking. His kingfisher eyes were open and lost in the brilliant colours of the sky above and before him. In one deft move he pulled the cork from the bottle and lifted it to his nose. The smell closed his eyes to the light. In the darkness the voice, again.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending ...
Salek moved the cork to the other nostril and gently drew its purple aroma along the membrane of his nose, back of nose, throat. Finally he swallowed the scent; an aperitif in itself.
He opened his eyes. The light swam in, taking away his ability to locate himself. He faltered. As his eyes adjusted to the brightness they took in the clouds rising from behind the house, above the river, in columns of livid pink and gold. He counted them.
I saw seven candlesticks ...
As he did when a child, Salek looked for figures in the clouds. He saw a man from whose right hand flowed seven stars, from his mouth a two edged sword. Salek put the neck of the bottle to the lip of the cup, and slowly poured. The noise, a blend of click and glug, fell like spheres. He filled the cup two-thirds, and lifted it to his nose. The wine shuddering from liquid to fume filled his nostrils, rasped sleekly past skin.
I will give thee a crown of life ...
Salek sat for a full minute, savouring the perfume. He continued to draw the sky in through his eyes. Before him the clouds hung on to the light of the sun, transforming it into the essence of colours. Aprigold to burnished orange, pinks to smoking maroons. Above him night was stealing in and, here and there, a star appeared.
And I will give him the morning star.
Without the tremor, without the trembling that had characterized the past decade, Salek lifted the glass to his lips. He sipped.
'Is heaven up there?' he whispered, 'Is heaven in me? Is heaven round and about us every second and in the spaces between seconds?'
He sent the fume along the back of his throat, up along the back
of his nose, expelled it through his nostrils. The wine was moved languidly across his tongue, swept through the palate. Full at almost every sense, Salek knew that within minutes, pleasure and the physical effects of the wine would be transporting him in a chariot.
I have set before thee an open door ...
Salek took another sip, then another.
... Behold, I come quickly ...
Salek watched the drama of the skies. Monumentally beautiful, one pillar of cloud drifted off and joined the fragments dropping to the horizon, off into darkness. By the second glass he was rising, a pillar himself.
Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple ... and I will write upon him the name of my God ...
Salek became parchment, a sheet written upon.
'I am pale,' whispered Salek, 'I am a man of non sequiturs.'
He took another sip, humbled his face about the cup. A surge within him, a quickening of heartbeat.
'And yet everything is significant to me. I have