On the Bus
Lethe Bashar had nowhere to go.
So he chose Las Vegas.
The driver was hauling a load of dead bodies in his antique coach. At least that’s what it smelled like. The bodies were slouched on top of each other like intimate cousins. They leaned into the windows, exuding the sour smells of familial sweat and unwashed clothing. The persistent hum of tires on the road became a dizzying rhapsody. Lethe’s notebook was perched on top of his lap. Every couple minutes the urge would overtake him and he’d scrawl something down. The desert went past in the windows.
The bus driver had a contorted grin on his face. Like he was driving the bus off course merely for his own pleasure. He showed his beady eyes in the rearview and looked drunk. Perhaps he was hiding a bottle of whiskey somewhere. Lethe forgot about where he was going. It was dark inside the bus and easy to forget.
Lethe’s tattered notebook was filled with denunciations against his father, smatterings of verse, and long-winded rants. He perused the caustic, embittered markings and a feeling of repugnance welled up inside him. On the cover, he’d drawn a map of Barclay Park, the suburb where he grew up. There were maze-like doodles, grotesques in the margins, and hieroglyphics representing the Doctor (his father), Rose (his mother), and Mazzy (his sister). The adolescent arcana seemed to add a level of depth to Lethe’s persona. The scribbles inflated him with a sense of purpose. He carried his mythology along with him, if only to refer to it from time to time with satisfying rage.
He heard the piercing note of a baby and a mother rocking it back to sleep. His thoughts returned to his father. The Doctor’s mustachioed face turned in his mind. He drew another illustration in his notebook. Underneath the picture, he jotted down a couple lines that came to him. Writing these lines triggered a fever in his chest. With a menacing look, Lethe gripped the steel latch at his side and pulled down the window. “Heeeeeelllloooooooooo out there!” He screamed into the gusts of wind coming off the highway.
His eyes watered. The surrounding sea of the desert fled past the sides of the bus in quick strips of darkness. The pearly moon seemed to jeer at him as the bus rattled on. For a split-second he recalled Morris, the drug-addled cowboy from the rehab center in Arizona. Morris used to thrum on his guitar out by the smoking tables. Lethe remembered the senseless twanging, the mad hollering in the night. Then, as now, the smirking moon was high in the sky. Lethe turned to a fresh page in his notebook and jotted these lines.
The carnival lights are beckoning you,
Poets and Artists come to Vegas.
The carnival lights are shinning for you,
Poets and Writers come to Vegas.
You’re riding on a slow boat ride,
You’re easing into a lost heart destiny,
Poets, Artists, Writers come to Vegas.
He delighted in his little streak of madness. “Lost heart,” he repeated, “Slow boat ride.” He could still see his profile in the window. He looked like Morris—with the face of a poet instead of a cowboy.
Despite Lethe’s mad hollering in the wind, despite his energetic outbursts and maniac pronouncements, nobody on the bus seemed to hear him. Maybe one or two people overheard his fervor and intensity. But they couldn’t make out his words, let alone understand him.
The majority of the planet didn’t care about Lethe Bashar. They didn’t even know he existed.
But that would also change.
