Yet as the highway off-ramp curved and his anticipation grew, something appeared in the road ahead: a slumped body with a sickly iridescence.
“Look out!” he shouted. The heads in front of him looked in every direction.
He was thrown forward. The bus skidded and swerved to the right. The wheels moaned louder than any dying animal he had heard inland. They slammed against a cement wall. A moment later something broke, a heavy sound of metal separating from metal, and the bus fell forward. Suitcases pinwheeled down the aisle, and bags from the storage shelves above dropped like falling fruit. Passengers on the left were flung to the right, screaming, salmon-pink mouths gaping.
As Michael plunged through the air toward the front of the bus, along with the suitcases and bags and newspapers from other passengers, he was surprised to find he could see everything very distinctly at once: he saw a stray lemon tumbling down the aisle; he saw a series of hats and scarves climb over seats; he saw, through the windows, the iridescent body in the road that lay motionless, and at the same time he saw the other side of the canal they had fallen into and that the bus was teetering on the cement wall that divided the street from the sewer; and he saw himself, in mid-air, somersaulting, snagging his blazer on one of the armrests, sensing a sharp tear in his body; and then he saw himself falling slowly, past the two stowaway silverfish, and it seemed to him that he could die, if not by smashing into the glass at the front of the bus then at the moment when the bus would finally fall into the canal and be swept away by the waters. At that moment, a sadness, a heavy feeling of regret, sank with him to the ground, as he understood that just when he thought his new life was beginning it was already over.
A blast of humid air entered the bus.
An overzealous young man with a barking voice had opened a side window as an emergency exit and commanded that everyone waste no time and climb out. Michael, though, lay on the ground, watching this exodus, numb, trying to make sense, inhaling the new smell of the open sea that seeped in. Then he detected another scent. Someone, out of fright, must have urinated—soaking into his scalp was a trail of liquid that started several rows back and, because of the angle of the bus, crept into his hair. He quickly dried himself on one of the seat covers. Liquids were constant enemies he had to avoid.
Where was his valise? He raised his hands to explore his head and ensure there were no soft dents caused by the urine but instead he felt something else.
His left arm was missing. It should have registered as a bigger problem that he was missing part of his paper body, but physical pain was something he no longer experienced. His paper skin had always seemed distant, so distant that he never received messages in his mind of any sensations of pain. The only hint was in his vision, when things lost their shape and blended their colors and textures. Land and sky would mix into each other, blurring borders; edges bled into their surroundings, and he would swim in a concave pool of colors until the sensation passed. This usually only lasted a moment. It was how he recognized something was happening to his body.
However, with the commotion and the increasing urgency to escape, it gave him less time to pause. The seats and windows were blurred into one puddle of colors, of lights and darks, and then the moment passed and details returned. Nearby, the remaining passengers scrambled to the emergency exit and out into the salty air. The bus lurched forward again, and those inside cried for help.
With one arm, Michael searched under the seats. He found his valise toward the front. Because he was so light, his own body weight didn’t tip the bus forward as he wandered up and down the aisle. Beneath the old woman’s wool blanket, still smelling of camphor, he located his missing arm. Some stout person must have stepped on his fingers, for they were smashed flat.
He clumsily dragged the arm and case to the emergency exit, only to discover he could not lift himself. He was the last one inside. Through the front glass of the bus, he could see the swift muddy waters in the canal.
A shadow from above fell over his face.
“It’s true, then. Inlanders like to stay on the inside.” There grinned the man with one eye.
Michael humbly smiled back. Why shouldn’t they be friends, after such a horrific accident? The man put out his large hand, the same one that had tried to touch Michael’s face.
“Give me your suitcase first.”
Michael hesitated.
“Give me the suitcase first, and then we’ll pull you out. Hurry.”
Michael raised the valise with his good hand, and the one-eyed man grabbed the handle.
“Thank you,” Michael said. He was learning a valuable lesson now that he was on his own. He told himself not to be quick to judge others and was thankful that the man was forgetting what had happened. “Can you take this as well?” He held up the broken-off limb, embarrassed to look the man in his one eye.
The metal of the bus creaked again as it started to lean further.
“Hello?”
The man was gone.
2
ON THE DRY PAVEMENT LAY THE BODY: A NUDE GIRL WITH WHAT looked like seaweed for hair, with fishing line and beaded floats tangled in it. At first, Michael thought it was a body risen from the dead, southern custom dictating that all bodies be buried at sea in the great Bay of Bones. Perhaps there had been a mistake, and she had been buried alive and tried to swim back to land? But the triple set of gills—crusted with sea foam and bursting from each side of her neck, told him this creature had not originated on land. Her skull—crushed, the bones piercing the skin of her face. One of her webbed hands held a rusty knife; the large fin that extended in place of legs had been severed down the middle and was filled with a canyon of dried blood. Her bluish lips had a taut smile, exposing two sets of small, serrated teeth. The stench of her body overpowered the lingering gasoline from the bus. Around her an elastic cloud of flies stirred as people approached, and then returned to cluster onto the soft spots of her iridescent skin.
The bus finally gave in to gravity and disappeared over the low cement wall. The passengers paused as it slid below the canal’s trembling surface. Several fragile passengers whimpered; a few ran away. Michael stood back. Two clean-cut young men had pulled him out after spotting his detached arm waving like a flag outside the window of the bus. They had nearly tossed him across the highway, misjudging his weight so badly. He thought they were heading toward him for a better look, but the corpse of the fish girl was far more intriguing.
The man with the missing eye was nowhere to be seen, Michael’s valise gone with him. It was as if another part of his body had broken off. There was too much going on around him, though, to think about this. He neared the crowd, wobbling past a few sweating passengers who lay on the ground, pressing cloths to cuts on their foreheads and forearms. Michael saw flashes of bright red. Blood always thrilled him, not because he was sensitive to it but because he no longer bled like that.
Leaning for a look, Michael wondered aloud: “It’s a dead mermaid?”
“Should’ve run her over,” someone complained.
“And we were almost home.” The woman who had smuggled lemons and laurel leaves was crying. “Typical city trash! Get me out of here.”
“She was dead before we got here,” said a woman with red hair, frizzy as if she had been electrocuted. She put her hand out to touch the body but pulled back when a pair of mating flies landed on her palm.
The
