Arrival

"Arrival"

HER EYES STAYED OPEN only when the driver’s voice came over the intercom, alerting everyone that they’d arrived at their destination. A light sleeper, she had been awake for the last fifteen minutes, ever since the bus pulled off the interstate. On the off-ramp, she’d felt the deceleration in her bones and briefly opened her eyes, quickly shutting them again as if to recapture a dream she had been having. Though sleep did not again overtake her, she had remained as she was, curled up next to the window. She had kept her feet tucked under her, her bronze legs—bare beneath the frayed hem of a jean skirt that terminated mid-thigh—folded up on the seat, her backless sneakers on top of her satchel on the next seat over. She’d stayed facing sideways, her back to the aisle, her head bowed, her chin pressed against her chest, and her hands clasped together under her cheek. If this position was uncomfortable, she had done nothing to show it, remaining still for almost the entire trip with none of the constant fidgeting of the travel-weary. And even though she’d been facing the window, she had not watched the city approach. She had kept her eyes closed while feeling the bus stop and start in the rhythm of metropolitan traffic, listening to the sounds of humanity and cars merge into a distinct rumble. The noise, which faded away a couple of minutes before the driver’s announcement, was the only evidence she had had of anything existing between the highway and bus station. When she opened her eyes for good, the people responsible for the urban roar were no longer visible and remained for her unwitnessed apparitions.

   After driving up a long sinuous ramp, the bus glided into a garage-like terminal. She could sense the air being compressed, and every sound suddenly gained a reverberated quality. She watched as they passed parallel rows of diagonally-parked buses. The passengers around her—there were maybe a dozen other people on the bus—began to get their bags out of the overheads, close their laptops, put bookmarkers in books and those books in bags, and generally make preparations to disembark. She carefully put her sneakers on the floor and slid her feet into them. As the bus eased into its designated spot, a number of the passengers stood awkwardly or half-stood with one knee on the seat while they gazed expectantly toward the front of the bus. She gathered herself unhurriedly, pulling the strap of her satchel over her head and fitting it on her shoulder while she waited for the logjam that had formed in the aisle to subside. After carefully stepping down to the pavement, she made her way around the people milling about waiting for the luggage compartment beneath the bus to be opened.

   They’d pulled up to an all-glass facade, with rows of chairs and clusters of people waiting on the other side. She walked to the entrance of the waiting area and a man held the door for her as he went through. She saw him stride over to a woman who was standing a few feet away with her hands on the shoulders of a young boy, both with impossibly wide smiles on their faces. He dropped his bags and quickly wrapped his arms around the woman as if he had caught someone who was trying to escape. The boy looked up at him, still beaming, as the man reached down to affectionately ruffle the boy’s hair while still clasping the woman.

   A few others around her issued baritone bellows and high-pitched shrieks as groups of people surged to meet the passengers. For a few seconds, she was surrounded by embraces and backslaps. The ones who had no one to greet them—mostly men, and most of them wearing a sports jacket or holding one draped over their arms—had pulled out their phones and were talking loudly and boisterously into them.

   As she extricated herself from the swarm of conviviality, she pulled out her own phone and checked the time. The bus had made surprisingly good time and her parents weren’t due for another twenty minutes, at the earliest. She walked over to one of the bright orange plastic-mold chairs and set her bag down. She stretched silently, discreetly, not drawing any attention to herself, though anyone who happened to be watching her would be struck by her effortless grace, her lack of performance. This quality was amplified in the bus terminal, surrounded as she was by newly-disembarked passengers swinging their arms in complex stretches and emitting exaggerated groans of relief: a theater of crude human behavior. She readjusted her ponytail with the same understated fluidity before picking up her bag and moving away from the crowd around her.

   The section for bus deposits opened into a high-ceilinged rotunda with various stores and food outlets rimming the circular layout. The space was full of bustling activity: people waiting in lines for tickets, information, and burgers; or walking down the wide staircase that carved a hole in the middle of the room; or sitting in the garishly colored chairs by the balcony erected around the stairwell. She tilted her head up and saw through glass panels the overcast skies that had followed her from Albany. She had promised to send Libby a text when she arrived safely, but she knew her friend hardly expected a follow-up and wouldn’t be too worried if it never came. (After all, what could happen, she was riding a bus.) The promise had been just a social expedient, part of the goodbye, something to make the departure as smooth as possible. She would call Libby soon enough, of course, just not right then.

   Spotting a convenience store across the way, she joined the flow of human traffic moving clockwise. An announcement was made through hidden speakers but she couldn’t hear it over the din of voices around her. She brushed past people heading the other way who acted as snags in the sluggish current she was drifting in. Almost everyone was encumbered with hefty blocks of luggage which they dragged behind them or had shackled to their wrists, dead weight pulling their limbs down, tempting them take root. Many of the people’s movements were drained of energy; most looked fatigued by either the journey they had just taken or the knowledge of how far they had yet to go. The daunting procession continued implacably when she stepped out of it, everyone else stolidly moving to other places of business. She entered the store and made her way to the magazine racks tucked into the far corner. After picking up a copy of The New York Times, she stood in front of the women’s magazines, scanning the covers, all of them brightly colored and plastered with exclamation points and the smiling visages of beautiful women.

   At the other end of the aisle, two teenage boys were sifting through the magazines aimed at men, also with beautiful women on the covers. They were wearing skullcaps and the extremely loose-fitting clothes she remembered being fashionable ten years ago, a style that had apparently kept its appeal for the new crop of adolescents and which showed no sign of dying out any time soon.

   One of the boys showed the other something in a magazine, holding it sideways like a calendar, and the other boy smiled and murmured, “She is, she is.” His gaze skipped over the magazine and fixed on the real-life girl a few feet away. She didn’t look up but still could feel his sly, smug gaze. She heard them whisper to each other and chuckle. Sensing one of them approaching, she quickly picked out a magazine and abruptly turned away and walked toward the register. She heard one of them mutter “I’ll see him” in a strangely inflected drawl.

   On her way to the counter, she passed a man with a patchy beard and oily hair who made no attempt to pretend he was doing anything other than openly leering at her. She walked past him—not once meeting his eye—with resolute strides that quickly put her out of earshot of any possible comment.

   The cashier was engrossed in a hockey game playing on a tablet and did not immediately look up as she approached. When she placed her purchases down, he automatically reached for them, barely glancing at her, his focus squarely on the game. Needing to look for the bar codes, he glanced up, and she saw his eyes widen slightly and his lips part in a muted gape. He then smiled broadly, even warmly, as he scanned her newspaper and magazine. He was not unattractive, handsome in a scruffy sort of way, with his baseball hat and sideburns and flannel shirt.

   She used to be mostly oblivious to all this salivating male attention, or rather it had registered as a dull, droning hum in the background following her wherever she went. But after going to school far out west—about as far as it’s conceivable to go, a place with different weather, and beaches giving way to the infinity of a whole other ocean, and men who never gave her a second look—that hum disappeared and was finally made conspicuous by its absence. She then realized how much attention had been lavished on her in the past, and knew she would have to become accustomed to no longer being the focal point of the crowds she found herself in.

   Being deprived of unsolicited attention for a length of time made her acutely aware of its reoccurrence, though she was quickly finding that being noticed again didn’t make her feel especially good.

   The cashier picked up her magazine and said, “You should be on the cover of this.”

   She smiled politely, though inwardly his comment grated on her. The compliment did not feel flattering or uplifting, and it certainly did not feel deserved.

   “Anything else for the supermodel?” She shook her head. “Well, if you need anything else, I hope you come back here,” he said as he handed back her change. “And if we don’t have it, I’ll run down to Copley to get it for you if I have to.” He beamed at her as she felt her disdain for him deepen. A bone-headed attempt at chivalry, she thought. It was indicative of the horrible provinciality of these people who didn’t know any better, who didn’t know that there was a world outside this bus terminal, outside this city, outside this state. They had no idea what true beauty was, so they settled for what they saw. They didn’t know what knockout gorgeousness was because it was three thousand miles away. The ignorance of the whole Northeast. Her home. This guy in a baseball hat smiling at her meant that she was home and it made her want to scream.

   She took her reading material and re-entered the morass of pedestrians, making her way over to the chairs abutting the stairwell guardrail. She put her satchel and periodicals on one chair and sat down in the adjacent one. Most of the people around her were assuming various postures of waiting. A resigned-looking older man sat on his luggage bag on the floor, rocking slightly back and forth, his tweed jacket propped against him, his head bowed and his hands buried in the waves of his silver hair. Two black women stood against the wall, both heavily laden with jewelry including silver-studded bangles that made distinctive clinks every time the women moved; one of them emitted an exasperated sigh every thirty seconds, the other restively slid her long fake nails against one another. Some wandered around aimlessly, traipsing all the way around the rotunda and back again, burning off impatient energy. A shrunken, wrinkled man wearing a wool hat shuffled back and forth, hunched over, with an unhurried gait as if he were taking a leisurely stroll down a boardwalk. A few chairs down sat a woman talking on a cellphone, a fidgeting little boy next to her. A man sitting in one of the chairs that wrapped around the railing was visible only from his shoulders up. His head was angled downward and unmoving—the only person she could see in total repose.

   She picked up the newspaper and skimmed the front page article, then carefully opened and folded back the pages, scanning the headlines for items of interest and not finding much. Buried in the state news was an article about a gas leak at a school in Schenectady. She remembered that that was the city Steven was teaching in, though not at the school mentioned in the report. She read the article anyway.

   Turning to the wedding notices and engagement announcements, she stopped and looked at the pictures of all the smiling couples. She read a few of the descriptions, most of which were written in breathless, overwrought prose—a procession of grandiose productions. She wondered how much money a couple would have to shell out to get their engagement in The New York Times. In almost every instance, at least one person in every couple had what sounded like a high-paying job or position of power. Or their parents did. Sons and daughters of diplomats, CEOs, dignitaries, actors, politicians—their perfect weddings getting a write-up in a globally distributed newspaper. She also wondered, not for the first time, why so many couples looked related, more like siblings than lovers. So many with the same eyes, same nose, same mouth, same features, same aspect. It’s as if they had intentionally chosen pictures to accentuate their similarities, unaware of the creepy effect it sometimes had.

   Restless, she put the newspaper down, her interest in even the entertainment and fashion sections withering away. She slowly swiveled around in the chair, twisting her torso until she felt a cracking release in her back. She saw that the formerly reposed man had gotten up and was also stretching, now facing in her direction. As she turned back around she caught the eye of the little boy, who was looking directly at her. She got the impression he had been staring at her for a while. Confronted with her gaze, he managed to hold his look for a couple of seconds before shyly turning his head down. He started fiddling with something in his hands. She craned her neck and saw him riffling through playing cards, each with an illustration above a square of text. One of those games with byzantine rules where the players imagined they were controlling dragons and such.

   She watched the boy feign interest in his cards, his face scrunched up with fake intensity. He was not a cute kid: his eyes were small and lusterless, his oblong face refused to bring his features into alignment, and there was an unflattering depression where his chin should’ve been, a feature he shared with many homely girls. He wore glasses with wide frames that could only have been chosen for utility, with no evidence of aesthetic consideration, and he had an uninspiring haircut that must have been perpetrated by a barber with one foot in the grave who charged the same five dollars per cut he charged thirty years ago. All in all, a very dull and easily overlooked presence. If he had any potential at all, it was the sort that could be recognized only by a mother, provided she ever got off her phone and observed him long enough to notice it.

   A sympathy for the boy crept into her. He peeked bashfully at her every few seconds and then quickly looked back down. Some of his cards caught the light and glittered around their borders, like jewelry on toy dolls. She imagined herself giving him a helping hand, pointing him in the right direction, warning him that it doesn’t get easier, that, in fact, it gets so much harder. Look at me, she would tell him. Look at me, if you want. Don’t talk yourself out of the simplest thing. If you can’t face people at an age when unreserved scrutinizing—even outright ogling—is acceptable and even cute, then you will never be able to when you’re older, when it matters, when there is actually something at stake. Get over the crippling shyness now or you never will and it will cause continual frustration. It’d be different if you were truly interested in those cards, if you had something to latch onto, focus your energy and thoughts on. But that isn’t the case. It’s obvious: you like people. You want connections with people, specifically girls. How will you get them when you can’t even face one? You will either never get what you want or you will have to take whatever comes, and you will grow bitter. I can’t stand seeing the seeds of unnecessary pain planted so early. Without someone to set you straight, that is what your life will bring—bitterness—and it is saddening.

   She sighed and opened her magazine, idly flipping the pages, registering hardly anything in the flurry of brightly-colored accessories, celebrities shilling for cosmetics, and social life-saving tips printed in sassy typefaces. Halfway through the magazine one of the features finally caught her eye; it was a quiz: “The Best Sex Position For YOU!” The next few pages were filled with multiple choice questions, the answers of which would determine the optimal sexual configuration she and her partner could fit themselves into. As the introduction put it: “Discover the position that maximizes your state of mind, your state of comfort and most importantly your state of PLEASURE!”

   The first few questions were both innocuous and strangely irrelevant. One asked for her preferred vacation spot from five choices. Another asked how many red lights she had run in the past month, ranging from “None” to “Too many to count!” A few of the questions toward the end addressed more risqué matters, such as: “How much tongue is involved in your idea of the perfect kiss?” (with the two extremes being “Dry as the Sahara, please” and “All of it, and it better be swirling like a pinwheel!”) She fished a pen from her bag and began casually circling her choices.

   At the end of the quiz, she followed the instructions to get her score. The methodology of the questions had been obvious; the more conservative answers were always the first choices while the last options described what was practically aberrant transgressive behavior. Sure enough, the lower scores corresponded to the more standard, conservative positions, while the more complex couplings were reserved for those who gave the more depraved answers. She thought the simple correlation was specious and almost insultingly reductive—as if it were true that people who showered every day were interested only in the missionary position, unable to derive pleasure from the more adventurous possibilities which could be fully enjoyed only by those who regularly broke traffic laws. That wasn’t the case for the people she knew, that was for sure.

   She scanned the dozen or so diagrams of sexual positions and read their descriptions (an overly cute part of the quiz renamed the positions by asking for her favorite fruit and her birthstone, combining them into the name of a new sex position, even if it was just missionary or doggy-style—”Now you can ask your man to do a position only the two of you know!”). She had done them all, even the ones requiring a harness, even the ones that pushed the boundaries of sex in an attempt to make it new again, positions like “Milking the Chocolate-eating Cow.”

   Each position reminded her of the preferences of former lovers. Paul, the first guy she slept with at college, loved to do it standing up, pressing her into the wall. Marty, three years older at the time and able to buy her booze, would sit on the edge of the bed and she would mount him facing away so that he could fondle her breasts and play with her clit. With Derrick she would always end up on her knees, being rammed from behind while he crushed her shoulders with meaty hands. She and Terrence would somehow always end up in a 69, no matter where they were or how much time they had. And then there was cool and confident Vernon whose dad was the president of a multi-billion dollar drilling company in Texas. He was breezy, all Southern charm, the life of every party and destined for all the success this world had to offer. She remembered his cockiness, and how it had wilted behind closed doors. She recalled the timidity of his touches, the tentative way he had entered her, propping himself up on his elbows so he wouldn’t smush her, his face all creases. No sounds, except for the creaking of the bed. He shuddered a couple of minutes later as she lay there caressing the back of his head, unsatisfied in the strictest sense though contentment saturated her soul, and she had felt toward him a helpless tenderness, charmed as she was by his reverent, almost religious, manner. Charmed, that is, until the very next day, when he walked around arm-in-arm with Jennifer McIngle and barely gave her a second look.

   “Excuse me.” Snapping out of her reverie, she looked up at a man standing in front of her. He cocked his head, wearing an open and artless expression. “Do you go to school there?” he asked, his head and eyes flicking down to her chest.

   After a moment of incomprehension, she looked down at the three letters stamped collegiately across the front of her sweatshirt. The morning had been chilly and, having none of her own clothes for colder weather, she had borrowed it from Libby.

   “No. This is my friend’s.” As she said this she knew it wasn’t completely true—the shirt actually belonged to one of Lib’s ex-boyfriends, one of those items that never got returned after the break-up.

   “Oh.” The man was thrown off a little.  “So your friend goes there?”

   “No . . . it’s someone else’s. . . .” She looked at him quizzically. “Can I help you with something?”

   A slightly startled look came over him. “No no,” he stammered, “I just . . . saw your shirt and I know some people who go there, so I was just gonna see if you knew them or something. . . . I don’t know.”

   She shrugged benignly. “Well, neither do I. Sorry.”

   “That’s ok,” he quickly said. “My fault.”

   The exchange over, she turned back to her magazine.

   “Actually,” the guy piped up, “I wanted to ask you that, about your shirt—but also if I could buy you a cup of coffee.”

   She raised her head and looked at him again, this time closely, basically staring. He submitted to her scrutiny, one hand in his pocket, the other scratching the side of his face, wisely keeping his mouth shut lest the word or sound that would cause her to reject him slip through his lips. It took her a moment to recognize him as the man sitting reposed earlier. He was dressed in unkempt business attire, his slacks and sport coat looked a little rumpled, his collar was unbuttoned, and he was tie-less. She took a moment to think of a way to turn him down graciously; something about him ruled out a curt “no thank you.”

   Noticing her hesitancy and sensing his chance slipping away, the man jumped in with, “Actually you look all settled right here, so why don’t I bring a cup to you, how’s that?”

   She shook her head and tried to get out a few words of discouragement, but the man was already backpedaling with one extended finger that signaled her to wait a second, he’d be right back, and she helplessly watched him stride through the criss-crossing mesh of travelers, toward the coffee shop. She rolled her eyes and briefly considered walking away before he returned. Instead she sat there, looking around . . . for what? She didn’t know, an escape out of the situation probably. She noticed the boy still casting looks her way, his mother still chatting with some unseen person.

   The man came back with a tray containing two cups. As he approached, she saw that one of the drinks was heaped with whipped cream and covered in sprinkles. “That’s not mine, is it?” she pointed, horrified but trying not to show it, as he sat down next to her.

   “No,” he said simply, then paused. “Oh did you want—I didn’t know what you drank so I just got a regular coffee . . . I can go back—”

   She momentarily thought he was putting her on, that he was slickly trying to work his way out of a miscalculation, but his awkward surprise and the subsequent concern in his eyes convinced her that he was telling the truth, that he really did get the whimsical drink for himself, not her.

   “No that’s perfect,” she said. “Thank you.” He pried the undecorated cup out of the tray and handed it to her. She took a sip. “Mmm, thanks,” she repeated. “How much do I owe you?”

   “Oh nothing. It’s on me,” he assured her, lifting his hands as if to deflect any offer of money. “I’m the one that roped you into it, after all.”

   “You did do that,” she conceded. She watched him bury his lips into the mound of foam. He was young, she already had this impression, despite indications to the contrary like his wardrobe and receding hairline. But the disheveled suit made him seem younger; he did not look like a man coming off a hard day’s work, more like someone devoid of experience playing pretend. He had a bit of girth to him, a chubbiness that stopped short of making him rotund; he looked as if he had yet to burn off his baby fat. His round, cherubic cheeks—which she thought might actually be his best feature—suctioned slightly inward as he slurped his drink.

   All these things cemented her perception of him: a grown man, and yet something of a child. To her, this was not necessarily bad, though all in all he was someone she’d probably not go out of her way to be associated with. As if to confirm this, she watched as a dollop of cream fell from his cup onto his slacks.

   He quickly bent down to dab at his pants with a napkin, and over his back she saw the little boy staring at her more intensely than before. There was disappointment and frustration in his eyes—the tell-tale signs of jealousy. She tried to wordlessly express to him that his pain was unwarranted, that he was getting worked up over nothing, his anguish a bigger waste of time and energy than his desultory interest in those silly cards.

   The man popped back into her line of sight, blocking her view of the boy and giving her a sudden insight: this guy was not only young and callow-seeming, but was, in fact, that boy. They both had the same lost, helpless quality, and both were attracted to things without knowing why, like moths to a flame. The only difference between the two was that the man was fifteen years older, which allowed him to walk over and chat her up, something the boy wished he could do himself. That the boy was jealous of his grown-up incarnation indicated to her an intrinsic problem he had that would never be conquered: an inability to get out of his own way.

   “Well,” the man was saying, “I hope I didn’t twist your arm or anything. I just saw that you didn’t have a drink, so I figured I was on pretty safe ground. And y’know . . . actually my dad would’ve been proud of me.” He chuckled.

   “Why’s that?” she asked.

   “I didn’t let you say no,” he said meekly. “That’s what he always told me, ‘Never let them say no kiddo.’”

   “That’s kind of scary.”

   “What? Oh, no, that’s not—” His face burned brightly. Although he appeared comfortable around her for the most part, his embarrassment came easily. She suspected he may have once had a beautiful girlfriend, someone who gave him the confidence to approach other girls but left him with the inability to interact with the wide variety of women in the world, each with different personalities and quirks and senses of humor.

   “No no,” he said, backtracking. “He didn’t say that about . . . girls. He’s sort of a salesman so I got to hear a lot about ‘closing deals’ and stuff like that.”

   “Ah. What does he sell?” she asked.

   “Not too much lately,” he said, more somberly than he’d probably intended. “He’s going through something of a rough patch.”

   “I’m sorry to hear that.” She pictured his father peddling antiquated things no one wanted, bearing life’s burden on permanently slumped shoulders, afflicted with the hollowness peculiar to folks who struggle to make ends meet.

   “I’m sure things will pick up soon,” he said, attempting a cheerier tone but with the strong implication that there was nothing he could do about his father’s misfortunes.

   “And what about you?” she said.  “What do you do, if I may ask?”

   “Oh you can ask,” he said, sounding sheepish, “I just don’t know if I have a good answer for you. I’m sort of in between . . . I mean not much right now. I’ve got a few things on the table but . . .” He fell silent for a moment, as if overwhelmed by his options (or lack of them). He then resurfaced and gave her an apologetic shrug.

   “Well, I hope something works out for you,” she said neutrally, though her impulse was to rebuke him—Find something you like, for god’s sake! Be interested in something, really!

   “Well, we’ll see what happens.” He didn’t sound as if he expected anything to happen.

   “Maybe you could try sales like your dad,” she said, trying for a supportive note. She lifted her cup. “You sold me on this coffee.”

   “Yeah, I guess. Didn’t make too much profit on it though.” His face went rubescent again. “Not that I want any money of course, I didn’t mean that.” He looked drenched in embarrassment, suffering the kind of mortification that spurs more of the same. In the moments of silence that followed, she sipped her coffee and crossed her legs, setting the cup on her knee. She glanced at him a couple of times. If she were inclined, as he was, to say whatever came to mind like an involuntary reflex, she would tell him Calm down. She would say that there was a charm about him that could fully emerge if he would just relax and let it. His embarrassment was fine—she knew the myriad things men had to be ashamed of. Then again there was something to be said for a man with indomitable confidence who would never be mortified. Without thinking about it too much, she knew that most of the men she had dated were of the unflappable variety.

   After quietly recomposing himself, he attempted to casually regain the thread of their conversation. “Actually,” he said, “my dad has always wanted me to help him out. But, you know, there’s just too many things I wouldn’t like about it.”

   “Like what?” she asked out of politeness.

   “Well, for starters, the people he deals with. His business is filled with just horrid people, horrible people.”

   “Hazard of any sales job I imagine,” she conjectured.

   “And also, it’s bad of me to say, but I just can’t take what my dad sells seriously.” The complaints rolled off his tongue easily. Though his criticisms lacked true venom, he stated them with a resolution missing from his previous statements. “It’s crap, what he sells,” he said definitively. “Complete and utter.” His father was recast, in her mind, as the omnipresent figure of the beach: the hippie-ish man of advanced years with long stringy hair, combing the sand with a metal detector, moving in underwater slow motion, weighted down by the barbiturate cloud that followed him as he accosted sunbathers and tried to sell them whatever trinkets he had found.

   She knew that she was supposed to follow conversational propriety and ask what it was his father sold, but instead she said, “Anything else you dislike about it?”

   “And I’d probably have to live in California.”

   “What’s wrong with that?”

   “If you’d been there for any length of time, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

   “I’ve been there the last four years. Going to school.”

   “And you love it?” The question didn’t have an accusatory edge; he sounded genuinely curious. She decided to reward his ingenuousness with honesty:

   “Well, no,” she admitted. “I don’t. It’s not for everybody. But I always thought it was for most people.”

   “Not me. Fine for vacationers, but to actually live there?” He shook his head incredulously. “Just not my type of place.” He eyed her anew. “So what brings you to the other coast?”

   “Family.”

   “That’s a long commute.”

   “I flew into New York, took the Greyhound here.”

   She saw him shudder. “I hate planes,” he said, distaste coating every word. “I can’t fly, I mean I’m literally deathly afraid. Another reason I probably can’t do what my dad does.”

   She nodded listlessly, wishing he would stop talking about his father. She was growing increasingly annoyed that his dad was only thing he had seemed to have given much thought. He was also giving little indication that he knew how to proceed with her, after that flimsiest of pretexts with which he had approached her. She did not expect his ultimate intentions to be any different than those of every man who had ever approached her for ostensibly mysterious reasons. Even this guy—who seemed more earnest than most and who had not yet, as far as she could tell, even once looked down at her legs—would eventually, given enough time, force her to give him a fake number so they could end the interaction and move on with their lives.

   But he was sure taking his sweet time getting there. “I know what the statistics say,” he was continuing, “that it’s safer than driving in cars, but I can’t get over it. My fear.”

   At various times during their conversation, she’d felt impelled to take on the obligations of a mother, distant colleague, and guidance counselor with regard to the young man, and now she felt the role of psychiatrist threatening to overtake her. If there was an impulse she felt more acutely than the others, it was one of didacticism. All of these different roles and all she wanted was to play teacher to this guy and the little boy, one and the same, both of them requiring the same lesson, though each would learn something different: one would be shown how not to be when he got older, and the other would see that he needed to start over—they would, after their recalibrations, be set on courses that would meet in an alternative world. But, for now, they remained who they were, and she suddenly felt very impatient with both of them. Her weariness reached a tipping point just as he asked her what college she went to exactly.

   “I’m sorry,” she said instead of answering his question, darting up out of her chair before he could react. “I need to use the ladies’ room.”

   “Oh, no problem,” he said, disconcerted by her sudden movements.

   She pulled the strap of her bag back over her head. She paused, looking down at him. With an entirely composed face, she said with almost complete nonchalance: “Why don’t you join me?”

   “Excuse me?” he said, confusion ruling over his face.

   “I’ll be in one of the stalls, you follow me in after a minute,” she explained, her tone steady and even. “I’ll be facing the wall, naked from the waist down. Waiting for you. You can take me from behind, I want you to. We’ll have sex, in the midst of all these people, nobody will be the wiser. I think this is what we should do.” To convince him she was serious, she didn’t break her gaze and allowed no trace of a smile to play across her lips. This is the lesson, was her unspoken admonition. Are you ready to learn? This is the lesson. Are you listening?

   She knew it wouldn’t take much for him to believe her, and he didn’t invoke any defense mechanisms, didn’t try to laugh it off or banter back. Whatever thoughts were filling his head, they were too much for him to process all at once; she saw that he was doing his best not to be stunned into paralysis as he struggled to form a coherent answer for her. She never thought about what he might have eventually come up with.

   “Well,” she said with finality, “I’ll let you sit here and mull it over. You know where I’ll be.” She walked away without pause and didn’t look back. As soon as she took the first couple of steps, she felt an ill feeling in her stomach and had to resist the urge to immediately turn around and apologize. She noticed that the boy whom she had intended to be the dual recipient of her lesson was long gone, along with his mother.

   She walked toward the bathroom and sharply changed direction when she passed a cluster of people, attempting to blend in with them. With her adopted group, she walked down the staircase, toward the main entrance of the terminal. She still did not look over at the guy. She headed toward the wide glass doors at the end of a long corridor, doors she knew her parents would have to pass in order to meet her. She would head them off outside, before they even entered the building. She did not feel well. She wanted to get home as soon as possible. The thought of her familiar old room didn’t turn her off as much as it had on the bus ride here.

   Before she got outside, she saw many more people, most of them moving with grim purpose. She passed a janitor wearing dirty overalls, a placid countenance complementing the imperturbable demeanor no one could doubt he maintained at all times. He was old, and wisdom imbued his every gesture, even the simplest ones, especially the simplest ones. Worlds were contained when he nodded, history reiterated for the benefit of all when he wiped his brow. Or at least she thought so. If she were inclined to do so, she would’ve gone over and hugged him, humbly, gratefully. But she was not, and she did nothing except walk through the exit.

"Arrival" is an excerpt from Don Hough's upcoming novel The Youthless Young