The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [69]
There were no difficulties. As the motor started up, Port glanced out and saw the old man standing beside a younger one. They were both close to the windows, looking wistfully in. “Like two children,” he thought, “who aren’t being allowed to go on a picnic with the family.”
When they started to move, Kit sat up straight and began to whistle. Port nudged her uneasily.
“It’s all over,” she said. “You don’t think I’m going to go on playing sick all the way, I hope? Besides, you’re mad. No one’s paying the slightest attention to us.” This was true. The bus was full of lively conversation; their presence seemed quite unnoticed.
The road was bad almost immediately. At each bump Port slid down lower in his seat. Noticing that he made no effort to avoid slipping more, Kit said at length: “Where are you going? On to the floor?” When he answered, he said only: “What?” and his voice sounded so strange that she turned sharply and tried to see his face. The light was too dim. She could not tell what expression was there.
“Are you asleep?” she asked him.
“No.”
“Is anything wrong? Are you cold? Why don’t you spread your coat over you?”
This time he did not answer.
“Freeze, then,” she said, looking out at the thin moon, low in the sky.
Some time later the bus began a slow, laborious ascent. The fumes from the exhaust grew heavy and acrid; this, combined with the intense noise of the grinding motor and the constantly increasing cold, served to jar Kit from the stupor into which she had sunk. Wide awake, she looked around the indistinct interior of the bus. The occupants all appeared to be asleep; they were resting at unlikely angles, completely rolled in their burnouses, so that not even a finger or a nose was visible. A slight movement beside her made her look down at Port, who had slid so low in his seat that he now was resting on the middle of his spine. She decided to make him sit up, and tapped him vigorously on the shoulder. His only reply was a slight moan.
“Sit up,” she said, tapping again. “You’ll ruin your back.”
This time he groaned: “Oh-h-h!”
“Port, for heaven’s sake, sit up,” she said nervously. She began to tug at his head, hoping to rouse him enough to start him into making some effort himself.
“Oh, God!” he said, and he slowly wormed his way backward up onto the seat. “Oh, God!” he repeated when he was sitting up finally. Now that his head was near her, she realized that his teeth were chattering.
“You’ve got a chill!” she said furiously, although she was furious with herself rather than with him. “I told you to cover up, and you just sat there like an idiot!”
He made no reply, merely sat quite still, his head bent forward and bouncing up and down against his chest with the pitching of the bus. She reached over and pulled at his coat, managing little by little to extricate it from under him where he had thrown it on the seat. Then she spread it over him, tucking it down at the sides with a few petulant gestures. On the surface of her mind, in words, she was thinking: “Typical of him, to be dead to the world, when I’m wide awake and bored.” But the formation of the words was a screen to hide the fear beneath-the fear that he might be really ill. She looked out at the windswept emptiness. The new moon had slipped behind the earth’s sharp edge. Here in the desert, even more than at sea, she had the impression that she was on the top of a great table, that the horizon was the brink of space. She imagined a cubeshaped planet somewhere above the earth, between it and the moon, to which somehow they had been transported. The light would be hard and unreal as it was here, the air would be of the same taut dryness, the contours of the landscape would lack the comforting terrestrial curves, just as they did all through this vast region. And the silence would be of the ultimate degree, leaving room only for the sound of the air as it moved past. She touched the windowpane; it was ice