The Stranger - Max Frei [117]
I wanted very much to peer at the driver’s cabin. (People have a habit of doing on occasion what they know they shouldn’t.) When I did, I saw a broad, carnivorous-looking face sporting a sparse growth of whiskers. His tiny eyes, drowning in abundant flesh, burned with unearthly ecstasy. It was hard to determine what frightened me most about his appearance. Let’s just say that at that moment I understood what a soul wandering through Bardo must feel when it first comes across the procession of Divine Furies. Ordinary epithets (“fear,” “horror,” “shock”) cannot begin to describe what I felt.
The streetcar slowed as it approached the stop. Then I realized that this was the end: if I got in, it was the end of me, and if I turned tail and ran, all the more so!
I glanced again at the driver’s seat. Now it was empty, to my relief. A streetcar without a driver, on a street where streetcars don’t run, along route 432, from nowhere to nowhere—that was alarming, but bearable. This form of distorted reality was more to my liking.
The streetcar came to a halt. It was a completely unidentifiable old model with crude letters scrawled on the side that read “Sex Pistols” and “Michael is an ass.”
I’ll always be grateful to this Michael. He saved my life, or my reason, or both. Contemplating the animal nature of the person immortalized on the side of the streetcar reassured me, and I entered the empty semidarkness of the compartment. I sat down by a window and arranged my backpack on the next seat. The door closed. It closed very gently. There was nothing in the least bit frightening about it. We started moving. Even our speed seemed just right.
The nighttime landscape outside the window was in no way unusual—half-familiar urban streets illumined by the pale globes of streetlights, now and then cheerful yellow patches of windows, the weak neon shimmer of store signs. I felt happy and calm, as though I were on my way to my grandmother’s house in the country, where I hadn’t been since I was fourteen. My grandmother died, the house was sold, and I had never again been as free and happy as I was then. I looked at my reflection in the glass: cheerful, eager, youthful. What a nice guy I can be.
On one of the seats I discovered some sort of magazine, and I reached for it happily. The magazine was a news digest, a genre I am especially fond of. Some people like things that are a bit hotter, but at that stage in my life I liked to numb my brain with digests—an ecologically clean drug. It made time pass the way I like it to: imperceptibly.
This probably all seems very absurd—jumping without a backward glance into an old jalopy of a streetcar, reaching for an out-of-date magazine, and devouring the day before yesterday’s news over fresh sandwiches. But that’s just how I am: when I don’t understand what’s going on, I try to find some activity that will distract me. In everyday life I often behave like a lunatic, but as soon as things start getting strange, I become a psychologically balanced bore. It’s no doubt my unique version of the instinct of self-preservation.
When my attention wandered away from the magazine, I noticed that it was getting light outside. Suddenly I felt like there was a taut string inside me, quivering and ready to snap. Two cheery suns were clambering up into the heavens above the horizon—each one above its own horizon, that is. Two sunrises in one—or one sunrise twice? To the left and to the right, so that neither eye would feel left out.
Come what may, I had to gather my wits about me. So as not to panic, I turned away from both