Last Stop Before Morning

When Mick woke up, the bus had changed drivers again.

The fluorescent lights overhead stuttered their familiar seizure, casting everything in that particular shade of public-transit yellow that made healthy people look tubercular. His mouth tasted of copper pennies and yesterday's coffee. The seat beneath him groaned with that specific vinyl complaint that belonged to every city bus since 1982.

Christ, how long was I out?

He rubbed his eyes hard enough to see phosphenes bloom behind his lids. Through the smeared window, streetlights blurred past in amber streaks. Could've been Third Avenue. Could've been anywhere. The city outside wore darkness the way drunks wore suits...badly, with things poking out where they shouldn't.

"Guess I slept through the transfer to Hell," he muttered, fishing for his phone. The screen stayed black. Dead battery. Perfect.

The driver adjusted the rearview mirror, and Mick caught a glimpse of eyes that didn't quite match, one brown, one the color of old television static. The uniform looked wrong too. Bus driver's jacket, sure, but the collar belonged on a priest. Or an undertaker.

"Long shift, huh?" Mick tried, needing to hear something besides the engine's tubercular wheeze.

"Longer for some than others." The driver's voice had that customer-service smoothness that made you want to check your wallet.

The other passengers slumped in their seats, heads bobbing with the bus's rhythm. A woman in the back row mumbled something that sounded like a grocery list recited underwater. An old man near the front clutched a briefcase that leaked something dark onto the floor. Nobody else seemed to notice. Nobody else seemed to do much of anything except exist in that peculiar way mannequins existed. All presence, no life.

Then the woman in the back said his name.

Not loudly. Not clearly. But definitely "Mick," wrapped in static and sleep-talk.

He turned, but she'd already gone back to her underwater shopping. Her face looked familiar in that dream way where everyone you'd ever met got thrown in a blender and poured into one person.

"Did anyone else hear that?" He aimed for ironic detachment, hit nervous twitter instead.

Nobody responded. Of course they didn't. Late-night bus rules: no eye contact, no conversation, no acknowledging the guy who might be having a breakdown three seats over.

The bus lurched to a stop. The doors wheezed open with their pneumatic sigh, and cold air rushed in carrying the smell of rain that hadn't fallen yet. Outside, the street looked almost right. Almost his old neighborhood. Except the streetlights pulsed with a heartbeat rhythm, and the billboard across the street advertised "LANGLEY FAMILY FUNERALS. Because Accidents Happen" with a photo of his mother's smile stretched three feet wide.

What the actual...

A man stood to exit. Same height as Mick. Same slouch. Same jacket he'd lost five years ago in Sarah's apartment.

The man turned before stepping off, and Mick saw his own face, younger, cleaner, still believing in things like promotions and happily-ever-after. Young-Mick smiled with teeth that hadn't been ground down by night shifts and Xanax, then stepped into the pulsing street and dissolved into the light.

"Early departures complicate routing," the driver muttered, marking something on a clipboard that hadn't existed thirty seconds ago.

"Wait! What stop was that?" Mick's voice cracked on the last word.

"Not yours." The driver's mismatched eyes found him in the mirror. "Not yet."

The doors closed. The bus lurched forward. Outside, his old neighborhood folded in on itself and became somewhere else entirely. A diner he'd thrown up behind in college. The parking lot where he'd lost his virginity. His father's hospital room, somehow turned inside out and wrapped around a streetcorner.

This is wrong. This is all wrong.

But saying it out loud would make it real, and Mick had gotten good at not making things real. Ask Sarah. Ask his therapist. Ask the bottle of Jameson in his freezer that definitely didn't count as a problem because it was the expensive stuff.

The passengers started whispering.

Not to each other. To him. Or about him. The distinction blurred when you couldn't see their mouths move.

"You shouldn't have driven that night."

"He said he'd only had two beers."

"Typical Mick, right? Always halfway somewhere else."

That last voice belonged to Sarah. He whipped around, but the seat held a teenage girl with Sarah's eyes set in a stranger's face. She smiled the way Sarah used to, before the arguments, before the lawyers, before everything became paperwork and silence.

"You were funny once," the girl said, her voice a perfect blend of accusation and pity.

"I'm still funny," Mick shot back, defensive reflex kicking in. "I'm hilarious. Ask anyone."

"Can't." She turned to watch the window. "They're not on this route."

The windows fogged suddenly, condensation blooming from nowhere. Words appeared in the moisture, written in his own handwriting: WAKE UP.

Then: WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP until the glass ran out of space.

Okay. Okay, this is a dream. Obviously. Stress dream. Anxiety dream. Too-much-Thai-food dream.

He stood, legs shaky, and made his way to the front. Each step felt wrong, the aisle stretching longer than physics should allow. The floor tilted without tilting. The fluorescent lights hummed a tune he almost recognized. Something his mother used to sing while doing dishes.

"I need to get off." The words came out steadier than he felt.

The driver never looked away from the road. Except there wasn't a road anymore. Outside the windshield, the city had become blank paper, buildings folding into origami suggestions of themselves.

"Everyone gets off eventually," the driver said. "Timing's important."

"You're not even on a road!"

"Roads are constructs. Routes are eternal."

"That doesn't mean anything!"

"Meaning's a construct too." The driver's mouth might have smiled. Hard to tell when his face kept shifting between angles. "You always liked constructs, didn't you, Mick? Built your whole life out of them."

Fuck this dream. Fuck this metaphysical bullshit.

"Look, I don't know what kind of avant-garde Uber nightmare this is, but I want out. Now."

The driver chuckled, a sound that belonged in medical waste containers. "Uber. That's good. You were funny once."

"Stop saying that!"

But the driver had already stopped listening, stopped existing as anything more than a uniform filled with purpose. The bus continued through the paper city, through streets made of suggestion and memory.

Mick stumbled back to a seat. Not his original one, that had disappeared and tried to think. The teenagers across from him (when had they multiplied?) all wore Sarah's face now, aging in reverse with each row. The businessman with the leaking briefcase had become his father, or his father's corpse, or the idea of his father translated into bus passenger.

The whispers grew louder.

"Should have called a cab."

"Should have called Sarah."

"Should have called anyone."

The bus stuttered. Not the engine, reality itself, jumping frames. Passengers vanished mid-word, reappeared mid-sentence. The floor became ceiling became floor again. Mick's reflection in the window started moving independently, mouthing words he couldn't hear over the growing roar in his ears.

Then silence.

Then memory.

Rain on the windshield. Wipers beating time. The radio playing something about tomorrow's weather, which seemed optimistic considering. Headlights coming at the wrong angle. The peaceful moment when physics stopped mattering and everything became geometry and velocity.

Metal folding. Glass becoming diamonds. The steering wheel trying to merge with his ribcage.

The beautiful, terrible second when he'd thought, Did anyone else see that? before the world went black.

"No," he whispered. Then louder: "No. That's not...I'm on a bus. I'm going home."

The passengers spoke in unison, their voices creating harmony from discord: "Not your stop yet."

The bus glitched harder. Doors appeared in the ceiling, opened onto nothing. Seats melted and reformed. The driver split into three versions of himself, each one wearing a different century's interpretation of death's uniform.

Outside the windows, all the windows, even ones that shouldn't exist, a hospital corridor scrolled by. He saw himself on a gurney, EMTs pumping his chest with mechanical determination. Sarah in the waiting room, still wearing her gym clothes. The doctor's mouth moving in shapes that meant "I'm sorry" in every language.

"Did anyone else see that?" he asked the darkness.

The teenage girl with Sarah's eyes touched his shoulder. Her hand passed through his jacket, through his skin, straight to whatever counted as a soul.

"Everyone saw, Mick. That's why we're here."

The bus stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. As if it had never moved at all.

The driver, singular again, solid again, terrible in his mundane uniformed existence, turned to face him. "Final stop's ahead. Most people don't notice until now."

"I can fix it." The words tumbled out, desperate and small. "I can wake up. I can go back. I wasn't...it was only two beers. Maybe three. I was fine to drive."

"You already woke up." The driver's mismatched eyes showed something that might have been sympathy if sympathy could be packaged and delivered on schedule. "You just didn't stay."

Mick looked around. The passengers had vanished, leaving only impressions in vinyl. Except for the girl. Sarah's eyes in a stranger's face, or maybe a stranger's eyes in Sarah's face. The distinction stopped mattering when nothing mattered.

"It's okay," she said, and her voice carried every age Sarah had ever been or would have been. "Nobody ever wants to get off."

"But I'm not ready."

"Nobody's ready. That's why we have buses. Transitions need vehicles."

The logic of it almost made sense, which meant he'd gone completely insane or completely sane, and he couldn't tell which would be worse.

The driver stood, joints creaking with the sound of old trees falling. "Last stop before morning."

"What morning? Whose morning?"

"Morning's a construct too." The driver opened the doors onto darkness threaded with light, dawn seen through deep water, stars viewed from underground. "But it's still morning."

Mick stood. His legs moved without his permission, carrying him toward that impossible doorway. Each step felt like walking backward through his life. His first day of school. His mother's funeral. The night he met Sarah. The night he lost her. All of it compressed into the ten feet between his seat and the door.

"Will it hurt?"

The driver considered this. "Did being born hurt?"

"I don't remember."

"Then we'll call it even."

Mick laughed, actually laughed at that. The sound echoed in the empty bus, multiplied, became a chorus of every laugh he'd ever laughed, from baby's giggle to dying man's rattle.

He stepped through the door.

The pavement didn't exist, but he stood on it anyway. The bus didn't leave, but it was gone. The city rebuilt itself from memory and intention, becoming real through consensus rather than physics.

He turned to look back, but there was no back to look to.

Then darkness.

Then light.

Then...

When Mick woke up, the bus had changed drivers again.

The fluorescent lights overhead stuttered their familiar seizure. His mouth tasted of copper pennies and yesterday's coffee. Outside the window, the city wore a different face but the same expression.

The teenage girl sat across from him, Sarah's eyes older now, or younger, or exactly the same age they'd always been.

"How many times?" he asked her.

She smiled with kindness that could kill. "Until you're ready to get off."

"And if I'm never ready?"

"Then you'll have company." She gestured to the other passengers, new faces, same slouch, all of them riding routes that went nowhere and everywhere and the only where that mattered.

The driver (different body, same presence) caught his eye in the mirror. "Next stop, downtown. Anyone getting off?"

Nobody answered. Nobody ever answered.

Mick settled back in his seat. The vinyl complained with familiar discomfort. Somewhere behind or ahead or beside them, sirens wailed for accidents that had already happened, would always be happening, would never stop happening until everyone finally reached their stop.

"Did anyone else see that?" he asked, but this time he knew the answer.

Everyone had seen.

Everyone always saw.

That was the worst joke of all, the one where everyone got the punchline except you, until you became the punchline, and then it wasn't funny anymore.

But you laughed anyway.

Because what else could you do on a bus that never stopped stopping, never started starting, never ended anything but beginnings?

Outside, the city folded and unfolded, trying on different faces. Morning threatened from somewhere beyond the paper sky. The radio played tomorrow's weather, which seemed pessimistic considering.

Mick closed his eyes and waited for the next time he'd wake up.

The bus continued on its route, carrying souls toward stops they'd never be ready to reach, through a city built from everything they'd never been ready to leave.

The driver hummed something that might have been a hymn or might have been static.

The engine wheezed its tubercular rhythm.

And somewhere, in a hospital room that existed in every direction except forward, machines stopped their mechanical breathing while Sarah finally went home.

The bus drove on.

It always drove on.

That was the only thing that made sense anymore, the endless transit between waking and sleeping, between living and leaving, between the stop you missed and the one you'd never reach.

Mick laughed again, but softer this time. Almost fond.

After all, he'd always been halfway somewhere else.

Now he finally knew where.