step through city streets took her closer and closer in the fusion of time and space to the blessed sanctuary in the shadow of the womb.
When she arrived at the station at last, she turned in through the swinging doors and crossed the almost deserted floor to the cage where the ticket agent sat nodding behind bars, her staccato footsteps amplified under the high ceiling of the cathedral-like interior structure. The agent shook his head and looked at her with sleepy eyes, waiting for her to name her destination, and she returned his look without speaking, struggling against a recurrence of hysteria, for though it was very funny, though it was a town she had been born in and had lived in for a decade, she simply couldn’t remember the name. Her lips began to tremble from the first faint force of the rising wave of laughter, and she caught the lower lip between her teeth and looked down at the floor.
“Where to, lady?” the agent asked.
Then, in response to his question, the name came, and she lifted her eyes and told him.
“One way or round trip?”
“One way,” she said, and the two words sounded like an oracle in her ears. One way, reverse way, the way out of a complex and threatening now to a simple and secure then.
The agent stamped her ticket ad handed it to her through the small aperture in the bars. “Bus leaves at five-ten, lady. About an hour’s wait.”
“Thank you.”
She took the ticket and crossed to a hard bench near the doors to the loading dock. She sat on the bench in the prim posture that was part of her personality, knees and ankles together and eyes turned straight ahead. She was, as a matter of fact, challenged by her temporary failure to remember the name of the town of her birth, trying to remember the face of the mother who had borne her, and she couldn’t remember that either, not at all, though she kept trying very hard until the face of Jacqueline intervened, and she began to think instead of what Jacqueline had said in the booth at the Bronze Lounge.
Give yourself up, Jacqueline had said. Go to the police and tell them he attacked you, she’d said. The cold, measured words returned, repeating themselves in the high vault of the station, and beneath the icy syllables was the current of fury and dreadful fear. Evil words, words of death, counseling a cruelly realistic course of action which was terrifying to consider. It was so much easier, once one had discovered the way, merely to return to the simplicity of one’s beginning. Bus leaving at five-ten. Three dollars and fourteen cents to innocence.
Her level line of vision was broken by bodies going one way and by bodies going the opposite way, and once a body paused and remained motionless in the line of vision for some time, but she was not aware of any of this. Someone sat beside her on the bench and looked at a magazine and got up after a while and went away, and she was not aware of that, either. A disembodied, amplified voice announced the departure of buses to points north and points south after having previously announced that the bus going north was loading on dock number six and that the bus going south was loading at dock number nine, and she heard and understood the voice, even though she did not hear anything else or see anything at all, because it was necessary and important to know if it was her bus, the bus to innocence, that the voice was talking about.
At five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside this open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, “Going someplace, sister?”
She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, “I was going on the bus. I was going home.”
He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, “I got a better idea. I got the idea we’d better go down to Headquarters.”
Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.
It was the morning of the last day.
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