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Transitway

Transitway

Glen Hirshberg

"Is there any need to explain why fear eats the soul of Los Angeles?"

— Mike Davis

On the first day of his retirement, Ferdinand Fernandez awoke to banging on his front door. For a few, fuzzy moments, the sound bewildered him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd actually heard it. Rolling over, he dropped his hand onto the empty pillow beside him, momentarily wondered at the ghost of heat he imagined he felt there, then forgot it as whoever was outside banged again.

"Coming," Ferdinand mumbled, digging into the pile of clean but unfolded Hawaiian shirts he never bothered to return to his single chest of drawers. The one he pulled up was mostly blue, with swordfish leaping across it. Struggling into that and a pair of shorts, he stood up barefoot on his futon, feeling his gut drop onto his hipbones like some exhausted geriatric leaning over a seawall, and caught sight of the clock.

10:30.

The panic that seized him wasn't entirely surprising. He'd felt it buzzing around in his dreams all night. And it had probably been thirty years since he'd slept this long. This time, the banging on the door rattled his living room clock off the wall.

"Goddamnit," Ferdninand barked, though half-heartedly. As he stepped across the warped hardwood floor of his bungalow in his bare feet, he decided it wouldn't be the worst thing to see another human being's face this morning. Any human being's. After all, today— and pretty much every day, from now on — there would be no one, anywhere, waiting for him.

Throwing open the door, he blinked against the blinding LA. sunlight, and Q shoved him backward and strolled in, brandishing a black satchel. His shined two-toned shoes clopped, as though they had taps attached. Knowing Q, Ferdinand thought, they just might.

"Out the way, freed slave coming through," Q said, bounding straight across the living room, through the kitchen toward the unused back hallway and the bungalow's other room.

For the second time that morning, panic flared in Ferdinand's chest. "Where the hell are you going?"

At the sound of his voice, Q stopped dead, one foot still in the kitchen, the other poised above the scraggly tan carpeting of the hall. When he turned around, he was wearing the surprised smile that had, all by itself, made him a better teacher than Ferdinand, and an exceptionally long-lived department chair. There was something endearing about someone so completely in charge being that willing, and that often, to be caught off guard.

"No idea," he said. "Seems like last time I was here, we…"

"Last time?" Ferdinand blinked, rubbed at the sleep in his eyes and wound up smearing sweat there instead. "When was that, exactly?"

By now, Q had recovered, become Q again. "Right 'round the last time you invited me, F-Squared."

Ferdinand winced, although he knew Q hadn't meant any insult. The nickname had been pasted to him by a recent class of students and was a term of affectionate mockery since, other than P.E., his courses had become probably the hardest in all of Florence Normandie High School to fail. He hadn't meant to go soft. He'd just lost the point, somewhere, of telling these particular kids, facing their particular choices, that they sucked at communicating.

For a long breath, the two men stared at each other. Outside, the air Q had disturbed filled again with its more familiar sound: the gush and snarl of traffic pouring over the 110 freeway just down the block like the morning tide. Ferdinand eyed his boss — ex-boss — and felt a surge of startling and powerful gratitude. For thirty-four years, going to work had been better than it might have been because he got to spend at least twenty or so minutes of his time with this man.

Except that looking at Q now, it seemed Ferdinand hadn't really seen him for years. When, exactly, had Q gotten old? Well into his fifties, Q had kept his 'fro flying—"Springy as a trampoline, soft as your butt" — but sometime recently he'd shaved it down, and now all he had atop his knobby black skull were outcroppings of charcoal fuzz, like dead moss on a boulder. What had been Q's barrel chest was now a barrel all the way to his hips, and it swung when he walked.

"What?" Q snapped.

Ferdinand gestured at the black satchel. "That's your idea for our first day of retirement? Bowling?"

Q unzipped the satchel with a flourish, then drew out the strobe ball that had hung over his desk for three decades. He laid that on Ferdinand's white, round, plastic kitchen table, then pulled out eight bottles of Corona and set those ceremoniously next to the ball before flinging the bag away.

"Not your real uncle, praise the Lord," Ferdinand murmured, then blinked as Q straightened up, mouth flat.

"What?"

"I don't know." Ferdinand's breath felt furry and uncomfortable in his mouth. From too much sleep, perhaps. "Didn't I used to say that to you? Or some student?"

Q shrugged, settled back into his habitual, hip-cocked, preening posture. "Well, I ain't your uncle. I'm your daddy." And he waved at the beer and the strobe. "You imagine how boring this year's end-of-term wine-and-whine faculty meeting's going to be without me and my stuff?"

"I'm still trying to get over how boring they were with your stuff."

Q grinned. "What's for breakfast, fellow free man?"

While Ferdinand got bowls down from his cabinet for cereal, Q wandered again toward the hallway that led to the back room. It made Ferdinand nervous. God, when was the last time even he'd been back there? Guest room, that's what he'd called it. Hadn't he? Stupid conceit. By the time he'd finally managed to save enough scraps from twenty-six years of teaching paychecks to put a down-payment on this place, his parents had been long dead, and his sisters had moved to Fullerton with their families, which was just far enough away for them to visit less often, but not far enough for them to sleep over. Except for Q, his school colleagues had stayed colleagues, not friends, and if Q ever did sleep over, it would be face down wherever the last Corona had left him, not in a bed. Right this second, Ferdinand couldn't even remember if there was a bed in that room. Whatever furniture there was in there, the termites and dust must have long since claimed it.

Pouring oat bran and milk into the bowls, Ferdinand let his eyes close for just a moment. People had warned him about the first hours of retirement. He'd told them they were crazy, it wouldn't be like that for him. From outside, sluicing through walls honeycombed with termite nests he couldn't afford to eradicate, came the gush of freeway noise. There should have been other sounds out there, too. Had been, once. The blatt and thud from some suped-up ride stereo, say, or the sound of neighborhood kids woofing at each other's sisters. But his neighborhood had gone silent of late. Or else the freeway had overflowed its banks and drowned out everything else.

He turned, and Q scowled.

"What is that? Bran? I bring you my strobe, you offer me fiber?" Sweeping both bowls out of Ferdinand's hands, Q flipped them upside down into the sink. "Where the eggs?"

He didn't wait for Ferdinand to point to the refrigerator before popping it open. "Good. Where the peppers? You people always have peppers." He found those, too, piled in the vegetable drawer. "Okey-dokey. Now. Dance."

And all at once, Ferdinand realized it was all true. There would be no more Back-to-School night. No more "Wait, you teach English?" No more beautiful, still-hopeful faces disappearing mid-semester into their South Central lives and never coming back. No more F-Squared. No more no-flip-flops days. Dropping into a pose he could only hope was as gleeful as he felt, he launched himself into the Macarena.

"That's my boy." Q started cracking eggs, but Ferdinand completed a circle and bumped him out of the way, snatching up a knife and beginning to chop at the jalapenos.

"These eggs might make you weep," he said.

"Your dancing's going to make me weep," said Q.

Several seconds went by before Ferdinand realized his friend had neither returned to the table nor cracked the remaining eggs. Instead, he was staring into the sink.

"I gave you that," he said slowly, reached down, and lifted the bowl. It was white, with a picture of an apple-cheeked Red Riding Hood and a particularly sleazy, slobbering gray wolf under a red-checked bedcover painted on the bottom.

Ferdinand nodded. "Revenge, I think. For that…" Skeleton pinata? Was that right? What had started them trading gifts like that?

Eventually, Q shrugged. "Still no reason to put bran in it."

"Sorry. Go sit."

Ferdinand wound up folding in so many peppers that the eggs turned sticky green-brown, the color of the palm fronds that somehow sucked nourishment from between the particulates in the L.A. air and kept growing alongside every deserted sidewalk and choked roadway. When presented with his plate, Q nodded his approval absently, flooded his entire plate with Tabasco sauce, then gulped it all down in silence.

From his own seat, Ferdinand stared past his friend, through the strings of dust drifting in the air like lines on an old TV set, into his living room. There was his old brown vinyl couch, the cushion on one side collapsed like an exhausted lung. Past the couch stood the matching free-standing bookshelves he'd bought from IKEA a few years back on a splurge, then accidentally assembled upside down so that the rough sides pointed out. Books crammed every available inch of those shelves, and piled up on the floor, too. He spent the great majority of his non-school time in there, so the dust all over everything surprised him.

Cracking open a Corona, Q fished a lime out of a baggie he kept in his shirt pocket, squeezed some into the beer, and drank half of it in a single draft. Then he sighed, returned the lime and baggie to his pocket, and crossed his ankles beneath the table. "Okay. What's it going to be, Ferd? What we gonna do with all this time? Santa Anita, bet us some ponies?"

"Too poor." Ferdinand initially waved off the new bottle Q offered him, then took it after Q popped it open with his thumbnail, the way he always did.

"How 'bout over to Swinger's, case us some ladies?"

Ferdinand smiled. "Too tired of people. And we're too fat."

"Plus, you dance funny. Okay, your turn."

"Clifton's," Ferdinand said.

Immediately, Q slapped the table with his open palm and laughed. "Hot damn. Clifton's, for some roast beef."

"And a pudding."

"Pudding, too."

"Eat in the trees."

Q laughed again. "Remember that time there, with the waterfall, when Moe — "

"Milt," Ferdinand corrected, and Q stopped.

Both men stared at each other. For the third or fourth time that morning, queasiness bubbled in Ferdinand's stomach. Finally, Q pushed a breath between his teeth.

"Milt," he said, as if the word were foreign, brand new to him.

"Pretty sure. Can't remember anything else about him, but that was his name."

"Just a kid."

"Field trip, maybe."

"Must have been."

After another few seconds of looking at each other, then down at the table, Ferdinand got up and put the dishes in the sink. The idea of Clifton's Cafeteria really did seem right. They'd tuck themselves at one of the tables by the indoor waterfall, beneath the giant fake trees, then sit for hours and watch Hollywood hustlers work the ground floor and get in arguments with Grand Market wheelchair thieves, while retro Zoot Suit thugs swung pocket watches and cribbed betting tips from old ladies stuffing themselves with French dips and dripping sauce all over their Santa Anita racing forms. Best people-watching in Los Angeles.

"Hey, Q. After Clifton's, how about the main library? Check out some books we finally have time to read."

"Just as long as none of them's Flecker," Q barked, and leapt to his feet to toss his second empty Corona into Ferdinand's recycle bag.

This time, Ferdinand's smile didn't make him nauseous. Just wistful. Teaching in an academic system that had ditched Dickens, Twain, Dickinson, Hurston, Faulkner, Hughes and Wright as either too difficult for the students or irrelevant to their lives, Ferdinand had devoted a week or more, over thirty-plus years of objections from department chairs and district "curriculum advisors," to The Golden Journey to Samarkind. Partially, this was because there were always one or two kids, each year, who responded to poems about getting somewhere else. Partially, it was because not one of the parents who'd actually turned up for Back-to-School night had heard of Flecker, a fact Ferdinand never failed to enjoy, since the parents almost invariably asked if he weren't the Spanish teacher.

Mostly, though, Ferdinand had stuck to Flecker because that's what his father had read by campfire or starlight during his frozen three-week crawl up the cactus-strewn wastes of El Camino del Diablo over the border into Great Depression Arizona in 1938.

"For lust of knowing what should not be known," he found himself mouthing, for the thousandth time in his life. "For lust of knowing what should not be known." His students would forget him, every one. But in their most haunted hours — on their wedding night, maybe, or the day they fled town, or the eve of their very first gangbang — one or two would inexplicably murmur the forlorn phrases of a twilight-of-the-Empire British twit who'd dreamed hard and died young. A pathetic legacy, maybe. But a legacy, nevertheless.

"Move your Fleckered ass, and let's roll," said Q, and Ferdinand went.

Moments later, humming the Macarena to himself as Q downed yet another beer, Ferdinand led the way onto the cracked and weedy driveway to his 1974 Vega, shoved his key through the channel he'd made in the rust on the doorlock, and popped the doors.

"Sweet Jesus, get the air on," Q moaned as he settled onto the scalding, split vinyl.

"Air?" Ferdinand grinned. "They make 'em with air, now?" He jammed the key in the ignition and turned it.

The car didn't kick or even cough. It just sat. The grin stayed stuck to Ferdinand's face. This was only right, after all. Only fair. Every year, usually by dark on the first night of Christmas break, he came down with the flu he'd held off all fall, arid stayed sick most of the vacation. Like his body, the Vega had apparently known precisely when it was okay, at long last, to go ahead and give out.

For a few seconds, Ferdinand sat and baked in the morning sunlight, stroking the cracking dash board as though it were the muzzle of a horse. A dead horse. Then he said, "Think maybe we should take your car."

Q grunted. "Walked."

Ferdinand turned his head in surprise. "All the way from…" Where did Q live again? He knew, of course he knew, he'd gone there all the time when…

"Wanted to see and hear people, you know? Felt weird getting up this morning, knowing no one's waiting."

Ferdinand nodded.

"Of course, L.A. being the great throbbing nowhere it has always been, I hardly saw anyone anyway."

"City of cars."

"Hardly even saw those. Had to trot onto a freeway overpass just to make sure everyone was still out there."

Sighing, Ferdinand waved a hand toward the window and the noise roaring up the 110. "Pretty sure they're still out there."

"Yeah, but where the hell are they going? Not my neighborhood."

The air in the car seared Ferdinand's lungs, seemed to seal his skin like paint. Nudging the door open, he climbed out, wanting to be away from Q for just a moment, and wandered to the edge of his driveway to stare at the row of stunted trees lining his street.

This was the scariest thing about bad L.A., he thought. Not a single moving car in sight. No faces at windows, no summer vacation kids on bicycles. But with the sunlight pouring honey on the palm trees and carefully kept rooftops and porches, and the purple flowers on the jacarandas swinging like little bells in the morning breeze, and that dry, delicious heat seeping up from the desert sand still stirring under all that concrete, you could so easily trick yourself into mistaking this place for some seaside Spanish town at siesta.

Just try not to notice the bars latticed over the miniature square windows of each stucco-and-cedar bungalow. Try not to acknowledge the way those bungalows hunch too close together on their tiny, ice-plant-choked lots like circled wagons. This particular low-income development had gone up in the 1940s but, despite its age, and like most southern California neighborhoods — rich or poor, grafted onto the hillsides or welded into the desert — the buildings all looked as though they could be coupled together and rolled off the landscape in a single afternoon.

Even so, Q's description of his morning walk nagged at Ferdinand. Had his neighborhood always been this quiet? Where were the earthquake tremors of hip-hop bass as the local teens threw open their car doors and sat on their driveways to smoke pot and stare at each other? Where were the women, older mostly, heads wrapped in scarves despite the heat, wheeling shopping carts to the convenience store, glaring their defiance at each passing gaggle of driveway boys?

Behind him, Ferdinand heard a single, hollow thunk. For no reason, the sound horrified him, made him afraid to turn around. His sweaty hands clenched at his sides. With a grunt, he forced himself to look back.

Q stood three steps out onto the square patch of dead, petrified grass that passed for Ferdinand's front yard. In one huge fist, he was holding the handle of a yellow whiffle bat. When he saw Ferdinand looking, he thunked the barrel again against the ground.

"This a whiffle bat in my hands, or am I just happy to see you?" Q said.

Ferdinand realized his own hands had stayed clenched. And deep in his throat, something was squeezing. "Leave that," he croaked. "What, here?" "Where you found it."

"Found it right here, what the hell's the matter with you?"

"Put it back."

Raising a single eyebrow, Q ran a hand through his scraggle of hair. Then, with exaggerated pomp, he knelt and laid the bat gently in the dead grass. As Ferdinand watched, the bat seemed to lift slightly, then settle, like a bottle with a message in it washing out to sea. Abruptly, he stepped forward and picked it up himself.

The plastic had long since mottled and cracked, and a faint, fetid odor wafted out of a pinhole in the top. Ferdinand swung the bat once, in slow motion, and whatever it was in his throat constricted again. Milt. Not your real uncle. My, Q, what big hair you have…

"Goddamn," Q said. "Retirement's gone and made you wack."

"Think it was you that did that," Ferdinand mumbled.

"Used to play a lot, you know. Whiffle."

"I know."

"You do?"

Glancing up, Ferdinand was startled by the look on his friend's face. Mouth puckered, eyes glazed, turned inward. Pretty much like his own look, he suspected. "We've known each other a long time," he said, though he somehow thought he'd meant to say something else. He tapped the barrel into the grass.

What was it about that sound? Maybe just that there wasn't enough of it. It barely stirred the air, like footsteps on an unmiked soundstage. Silently, he cursed the Vega. He didn't want to be home anymore. He felt invisible enough already.

And then, all at once, as though someone had kicked a volume switch, noise poured into his ears. That permanent freeway roar, like the world's largest summer fan except it ran all year and made everything hotter instead of cooler, less bearable instead of more, and was so omnipresent he'd stopped noticing it half the time. Turning to Q again, he felt at least a semblance of a smile creep back over his mouth.

"Got an idea."

"This your first time?"

"Transitway," Ferdinand said.

Slowly, as though awakening from a deep sleep, Q shivered and glanced toward the street. "What about it?"

"Riding it, what do you think?" Ferdinand felt cramping in his fingers, then all the way up his arms. The sensation was painful, and also weirdly reassuring. He was still part of the world. Could go where people were, be a resident of the city, even if everyone in it had already forgotten he was there. "Thought you wanted to go to Clifton's."

"Before I die," Q said. "Thought maybe I'd put off my murder until just a few days after my retirement."

But Ferdinand could see, by the way Q was shifting his weight back and forth and shaking his head, that the idea intrigued him, too. "Aw, come on. You, the caller of everyone else's bullshit. Who do you know who's even ridden the Transitway?"

"We are talking about the Transitway, as in the bus line that runs up the damn 110, right? As in right on the 110? The one where people finally just hurl themselves off the bus stop benches into traffic 'cause they're already deaf from cars screaming by and burnt to death 'cause there ain't no shade and they've stopped breathing anyway because the carbon monoxide ate their lungs. That Transitway?

"Again," said Ferdinand, closing his weary eyes and feeling further from smiling than he usually did when Q started ranting. "Who do you know who's ever ridden it?"

"Whoever it was told me there are whole gangs shooting up together in the stairwells. Using the homeless people and anyone else they find down there as dinner tables."

"Hell, they're probably using them as dinner," Ferdinand said, and now he did start to smile.

"That's somewhere south of funny."

Ferdinand had heard the stories, too. "Look, what I heard, there's no one down there. City poured all that money into it, and people won't even go on the thing. 10,000 riders a day, they were expecting. I saw an article not too long ago that said they get less than 500."

"Wonder if that's because they built the stations right on the fucking freeway. We'll be waiting — probably two hours, given traffic and the frequency of buses our neighborhoods have always been granted — on a concrete island in dead sunlight or under some overpass where only the passing cars can see us get our guts ripped out, if anyone who happens to be around is in a gut-ripping mood."

"Like you said, probably won't be anyone around. So it'll be nice and quiet."

Q snorted. "'Cause we'll be deaf ten seconds after we get down there."

"It'll be an adventure. Kind of our own little mountain climbing expedition. All that carbon monoxide'll probably even give us that brain buzz high-altitude guys are always raving about."

"Mountain climbers go up," Q snapped. But by this time, they were already walking.

Halfway down the block, Ferdinand quickened his pace, and Q matched him wordlessly. The Transitway, he thought, couldn't be much emptier than the street where he lived. Heat hummed in his skin. His footsteps sounded hollow, the way the whiffle bat had when Q bounced it off the ground. And he kept catching his own shadowed, blurry reflection beneath layers of grime in the windows of parked cars. It was like seeing a home movie of himself twenty years older, crouched forward, inching his way to market at that lurching pace only the ancient and sick could bear. Except there wouldn't be any movies, because no one would take them. And who would watch?

The roar intensified. Glancing up, Ferdinand saw the entrance to the Transitway station and stopped. Q stopped beside him.

Flung upward from the sidewalk at a 45-degree angle, a giant wing of glinting steel loomed like the wedged-open lid of a tank, shading the escalator that dropped prospective passengers out of the neighborhood into the maelstrom of the 110. Several of the stations along the route bore similar architectural flourishes, apparently meant to signal the arrival of a new prosperity to even the most scarred and embarrassing sections of Los Angeles. Even if all they really marked were the exits.

Shielding their eyes against the beams of glare shooting off the steel overhang, Ferdinand and Q crossed Adams against the light, neglecting even to check the traffic, since there wasn't any. The cramping sensation crept all the way into Ferdinand's shoulders, now, and his steps got even faster. The excitement he felt was oddly nostalgic. When had he last experienced anything like it? Years and years ago. Maybe when his mother took him on the one and only plane ride of his childhood… or that time—with Q — going on Space Mountain at Disneyland. On some Grad Night excursion as chaperones for the students, maybe. Had Florence-Normandie really taken students to Disneyland, once? They must have. Striding even faster, waving behind him at his friend, he passed into the shadows beneath the overhang, reached the top of the escalator, and his mouth fell open as the sound surged up the shaft to meet him.

He'd been standing there several seconds, gaping, when he realized Q was rugging on his arm and turned.

Q was staring down the escalator at the noise. Even Ferdinand's hips were cramping, now. Standing in that spot really was like being atop the caldera of a volcano bubbling toward eruption. Under their feet, the whole planet seemed to shudder as millions of tons of metal and rubber and cargo and drivers crawled and snarled and fought their way home or away from home along the so-called freeways. Even up here, the din bored into their ears, and not only their ears. Ferdinand could feel it drilling into the corners of his eyes and the top of his skull and the cartilage of his rib cage.

And then there was the exhaust, which he half-believed he could see rippling in the air at the bottom of the escalator. It didn't exactly float, any more than smog on the horizon did. It lapped, instead. Here at last was the man-made reservoir the people of L. A. had always dreamed of building, deep and renewable enough to sustain life in this city where nothing but desert tortoises and creosote should live. As long as the new inhabitants could drink and breathe carbon monoxide instead of water.

"Let's do it," he finally said. "Be like our own private limo once the bus comes."

"Got that right," Q half-shouted. "Don't see anyone else stupid enough to join us."

Ferdinand stepped onto the escalator, which whisked him silently down. He'd gone maybe fifty feet when the surging sound finally swept up and engulfed him. Jamming his palms against his ears, he half-turned, saw Q still poised at the top, not yet descending, and almost panicked. He didn't want to be down here alone, and somewhere in the onslaught of traffic noise the tunnel caught and magnified there were other sounds. From inside his head? A small child's laughter, and whistling—like a whiffle curving as it caught the air? — and something else, too. Ferdinand lifted his right-hand palm a tiny bit away from his ear, just-to check. Then he dropped his hands altogether.

That last sound, anyway, had come from the walls. A voice? Not exactly. An articulated breath? A consonant in the burbling, snarling torrent.

Dddd.

Hands at his sides, whole head ringing, Ferdinand glided down, watching Q recede out of sight. He could taste carbon monoxide slithering between his clenched teeth and down his windpipe. Just as he reached the bottom, he began to bounce up and down on his heels and opened his mouth, wanting to warn Q, shriek for him to go back. Then he just stood still, listening.

What he heard was roaring from the freeway, full of overtones, vibrating all the way down his bones. No laughter. No whistling. He was standing in a cylindrical concrete walkway, brightly lit. He couldn't see any tagging anywhere, just bright, cheerful colors winking off the walls and ceiling. So the city had continued pouring funds into keeping these places bright and clean and usable, even if they were deafening. Or else even the gangs wouldn't come down here.

The walls and ceiling were actually chrome, Ferdinand realized. The colors came from reflected sunlight shooting off the hoods and roofs of the thousand cars and trucks passing every minute out there, twenty feet ahead, where the tunnel opened onto broad daylight and the shelterless island of the Transitway station.

"My friend, the Sun — like all my friends

Inconstant, lovely, far away…"

Those were the words his father had used to propel himself north, through a silence all but unimaginable, now, to a promised land that had, in some ways, kept its promises. His father had never landed a job worthy of his education, but Ferdinand had. And now he stood here, using the same words just to propel himself onto a bus so he could go downtown. It was a mercy, he supposed, the way people's capacity for adventure seemed to decrease along with their opportunities for it.

"At least drowning's supposedly quiet," Q shouted as he stepped off the escalator and stood next to Ferdinand.

"What?" Ferdinand shouted back.

Instead of laughing, Q ducked, and Ferdinand did too, instinctively, as that hard Dddd he'd heard before erupted out of the ceiling like hail. When it stopped, both men straightened, glanced up the walls, and finally at each other. Ferdinand was surprised to find his hands at chest level, curled into fists, one on top of the other, as though cocking a bat. Milt. Julio. Milt. Playing Bond-and-Blofeld in the dark as the cookie flashed overhead, that's what they'd called that splotch-asteroid that appeared right as they topped Space Mountain's lone hill…

Sticking out a hand to steady himself against the wall, Ferdinand shook himself hard, felt whatever he'd been thinking fly to pieces. His fingers seemed to sink into the concrete. When he stumbled forward a step, he seemed to pass through strands of carbon monoxide hanging in mid-air like cobwebbing.

"You hear a dog?" Q yelled.

Ferdinand turned slowly, eyeing his friend.

Q shrugged. "For a second, swore I heard Benjamins."

"Listen hard enough down here, you'll hear anything you want to," Ferdinand said, but too quietly. Even he couldn't hear himself. "Benjamins?"

"My…" Q started. Then he just stood. Slowly, as though he were liquid, a shudder rippled over his still-massive shoulders.

"Q. You don't have a — "

"Got to cut down on the pre-noon Coronas don't I? Remind me, yeah?"

Ferdinand began to nod, and the shudder caught him, too. Because of the way Q said the dog's name. As though…

Then he heard barking. Stiffening, Ferdinand glanced fast toward the walls, blinking away the blinding streaks of color. When his vision cleared, he was looking up at a shiny reflection of himself upside down. A paunchy wannabe-gringo in a button-up shirt two sizes too big, floating bewildered in a sea of pavement. Why wouldn't there be dogs here? It was as good a place as any to shit and scavenge and wrestle for dominance with your friends and get run over and die.

Q, he noticed, was not looking. He was staring straight ahead. Slowly, he put his hand out, turned it over, as though awaiting a lick. And at that moment, Ferdinand thought he felt it, too. A trace of warm wetness across his palm, heavy golden paws on his chest, but there was nothing, nothing, never had been…

Yanking his hands up from his sides where they'd been dangling, Ferdinand realized that his ears were literally quivering against his head, trying to fold like evening primroses fleeing light. He jammed his palms to his temples once more. What he'd heard wasn't dogs, or Dddd, either. That was just the scrambled sense his brain was trying to make from the din.

Benjamins, Bond-and-Blofeld, Milt and Julio, pinatas and Robin Hood bowls, Petra laughing…

Spinning so fast he almost twisted right off his feet, Ferdinand took two fast steps back the way he'd come. He was saying something, too, shouting, maybe just making sound, trying to cancel out the racket the way noise-blocking headphones supposedly did. His eyes had started to stream—from exhaust, just exhaust, it was probably healthier to hike across Bikini Island after a nuclear test than to spend fifteen minutes down here — and now he was singing. The Bond theme, the guitar bit, dung-de-de-dungdung-de-duh-duh.

There had been an up escalator, hadn't there? He hadn't noticed. Sweat broke out all over him, and without lowering his hands or stopping humming or opening his eyes any wider than he had to, he scurried back to the bottom of the shaft from which he'd descended, and yes, there it was, gliding silently up. The way out. Home. He took another step, and Q grabbed his shoulder from behind, turned him, and as he saw his friend's face once more, Ferdinand smiled a single, desperate smile, and said, "Petra."

Q's fingers tightened, dug hard into Ferdinand's skin. "What the fuck did you just say?"

Ignoring the pain — relishing it, really, so sharp, so undeniably there, the first time in so unspeakably long — Ferdinand reached up and touched Q's hand his with his own. "I said my wife's name." His eyes welled and overflowed. "My wife's name was Petra."

Around them, barking erupted again, louder this time, more distinct. When Ferdinand craned his neck, he saw his overhead reflection swarmed by thousands of flashes of color, as though set upon by sharks in a frenzy. He couldn't stay here. Not in this tunnel. Not one more second. And the fastest way out wasn't up, but straight. Onto the freeway. Ripping free of Q's hand, barely registering his friend's gaping, terrified face, Ferdinand flung himself forward.

Seconds later, he was doubled over gagging in the sunlight. Eventually, he felt blindly with his hand, found the mesh metal bench the city had thoughtfully provided to mark the bus stop, and sat down. For a long time, he concentrated on trying to breathe. Behind him, the sounds continued to swirl, rioting in their cavern. Petra. Nothing else. Just the name. And the certainty. Ferdinand felt tears mass in his eyes again, let them come, held on tight to the bench as the passing traffic rattled him.

Finally, Q emerged, too, stumbled to the bench, sat down. Another long minute passed before Ferdinand realized he was sobbing.

"Milt," Q said, through the fingers curtaining his face. "My son."

Which was right. Of course it was. For Christ's sake, when Julio had been very young there was no one on earth, not even Ferdinand and Petra, that Julio had wanted to see more than—

Julio.

DDDD, wailed the voices behind him. Dddddaaaahhh.

Half-screaming, now, as the wind of two massive trucks thundered over him, he looked down, one last time, at his hands.

Fist on top of fist. Batting position. Ferdinand surged fully awake in one headlong, convulsive rush.

The cookie on the ceiling of Space Mountain. The furniture in the guest room, which had never been a guest room. Bunk bed, plastered with L.A. Raiders stickers. Poster of Farrah in that hideous brown bathing suit upside down right next to the head of the top bunk, "So she's always looking right at me, and only at me, Pops." Bukowski on the bookshelves, which Ferdinand had railed against, hoping his disapproval would disguise at least some of his pride at his boy's discovery of such writing at the age of twelve.

His son's room. His son's room. Even through his own screams, he could hear Q's, took half a moment to wonder what he'd just remembered. Then Ferdinand was saying Julio's name again. Just the name, turning it in his mouth like a key in a lock, feeling it click, watching his whole life swing open.

Milt and Julio together. Striking each other out with the whiffle, demanding constantly to be left alone, to go off alone, go down town, take the bus…

"Oh, no," he said, and somehow, through the aching that gripped his entire frame like a vise, he sat up. "Oh, no."

They'd come here. Julio. Petra. Milt. All. Sooner or later. How long ago? How fucking long?

Right then, glancing to his right down the freeway, Ferdinand saw the bus. Giant, empty, shambling straight toward them. A year or two ago — it was almost funny, not funny at all, that he could remember this but not his family — Q had showed up outside Ferdinand's classroom door outraged, waving a newspaper. He'd waltzed right into Ferdinand's first-period class and brandished the paper at the students. "You don't exist," he'd practically shouted. "It's right here in the paper. You don't exist." The article he'd been waving had come from the Sunday Times, reporting on a City Council vote to remove the name South Central from all future maps of Los Angeles. Too many negative associations. And it hadn't ever been a real place, anyway. Had it? Not one you could fix a precise location to.

"One by one," Q croaked. He was all the way standing, now, staring at the bus, which crawled closer, towering over the traffic before it. Shepherding it.

"One by one," Ferdinand murmured back.

Everyone they'd cared about. Everyone they'd loved. Everyone around them. One by one, each for their own reasons, they'd glided down those escalators and stepped aboard the Transitway, which had swallowed not only them but the memory of them, wiping them clean out of history. Was this whole thing some unthinkable top secret city project, a logical extension of that Council vote? The runoff channel the city had needed for so many decades, to help it funnel the unnecessary and unseemly into the sea of oblivion?

Or maybe the desert had arisen at last from the distressed sand, reclaiming itself from the teeming creatures it couldn't possibly sustain.

Or was the Transitway a Transitway, after all, a service that simply shuttled riders elsewhere?

"Come on," Q said, grabbing Ferdinand's elbow and trying to tug him back toward the tunnel.

Ferdinand just opened his mouth, turned, and stared. "Come on? Where?"

"Anywhere. It's coming, you idiot. Run!"

"Run where?" Both of them were shouting. It was the only way to be heard. Behind them, the sounds in the tunnel seemed to have cohered into a rumbling, feline snarl. "Q, I'm going where the bus goes."

"It goes nowhere, man. Don't you get it?"

"It goes where they went. Where else would you want to be?"

"Right fucking here, dude. Where I can remember. Where I can grieve. You go cop out, I'm taking their lives back with me. Or their memories, anyway. I persevere, and I preserve. It's what I've been doing my whole life."

In the tunnel, the snarling intensified. When Ferdinand looked toward it, the light in there seemed to have dimmed. "Q," he said. "I'm not sure we actually have a choice."

"One way to find out."

Without another word or a goodbye glance, Q launched himself off the traffic island and ran straight for the tunnel. Ferdinand almost went after him, though whether to drag him back or follow he couldn't have said, then caught sight of the bus inching closer. All but here. He stopped, stared at it a second, looked back toward Q.

It was like watching a car back over one of those rows of angled spikes set up next to signs reading DO NOT BACK UP — SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE. At the mouth of the tunnel, Q took a little leap, and so he wasn't even touching the ground when his body shredded. It simply came apart in the air, in dozens of pieces, and Ferdinand fell to his knees screaming and weeping, but he couldn't close his eyes.

The most astonishing part, in the end, was the absence of blood. Each shining sliver of Q seemed to shoot straight up, like a spark ejected from a fire, and for that one moment, all the things he was and knew seemed to hover in the air, all jumbled up, a kaleidoscope of bone and books and beer and muscle and love of kids and quiet, seething, desperation. And then it vanished. Every speck.

Falling forward onto his hands, Ferdinand crouched, rocking, blowing heaving breaths through his lips. Tasting the fouled, poisoned air. Remembering.

Then, slowly, he stood, turned. The bus had come, was sliding into the station with a weirdly human breath that seemed to echo all the way across the endless lanes of endless traffic.

Black hair. His wife had had black hair. She'd worn a clip in it, every single day, right at the base of her neck. Clenching his jaw, Ferdinand tried to remember more. But nothing came. Not now. Not yet. Soon. He'd see them soon. Petra. Julio.

Or else he wouldn't. Regardless, he was going. Either way, he wouldn't be alone anymore. He hadn't ever been, not in the way he'd imagined all these…however many years it had been. Years, though. He allowed himself one quiet prayer: That the Transitway had taken Q, too. That all ways out of this place led somewhere, or at least to the same nowhere. Drying his eyes on the drooping sleeves of his ridiculous blue shirt, Ferdinand stepped toward the bus as the doors sighed open.

Content

Хиршберг Глен Transitway

Transitway Glen Hirshberg