The Paradox of Mundanity

Somewhere between the window pane and fly screen of the bus’s window, Ayla’s vision changed. On the surface, everything had been muddled together for a while; it was a common symptom of the humidity that ran rampant in New Orleans. The window pane’s surface was slick with the air's sweat, even more effective at blurring scenery than a fast moving car--and fast her Greyhound bus was not.

On her left, an elderly man wheezed into his Blackberry, complaining of a “midsummer malady.” How he found himself remembering his doctoral days; the recollection that heat was the bed of the most virulent bacteria, the mold he found that morning on the edges of his bathtub, and the suspicious vinegar aroma his electric toothbrush was starting to give off. 

His uneven breath misted the bottom half of the window pane, and Ayla wrinkled her nose at the clogging scent of cigarette. His greying beard was long and unkempt and his eyes watery and creased. He donned the uniform of retirees: a pink Hawaiian shirt and linen Bermuda shorts dusting silver wisps of thinning leg hair beneath them. He was more colorful than the bus’ other denizens, even if he struck her as unpleasant. 

He turned a blue eye towards her then, flashing in ire as he caught her staring. She flicked her gaze away, her ears and cheeks burning. When she heard a snore behind her, she exhaled. Although she hadn’t completely avoided embarrassment, he was an old man and unlikely to wake up any time soon. He had been a good distraction for the time, but now she remembered the events directly preceding her hopping the bus to nowhere. She glanced down at the paper in her hand. 

“——Unfortunately, we must decline to move you forward in the deliberating process...there were many qualified applicants this year but the position can be filled by only one...Despite this, we again wish you a congratulations on reaching the last round of deliberation, and hope you’ll consider reapplying the following year.”

She crinkled the corners of the paper between her index and thumb. She told her fingers to relax and allowed the paper to hover in a loose hold where it floated from the tendrils of her mind’s grasp. Ayla resigned herself to attend the quiet funeral of her latest attempt at upwards mobility. Ever the undertaker, of both bodies and application, she planned to discard the corpse of the matter at their next stop; there, she would give it a viking’s funeral and let it glide out of her misery upon the calm current of the sweating air. 

A weariness rushed over her as she finally absorbed the fate of her application. The slightest of movements and thoughts had stolen her breath. The lids of her eyes gradually glided forward until the muscles in her hands relaxed and her mind forgot itself.

When the bus next rolled to a stop, Ayla no longer recognized the scenery outside her window. Bald cypress trees with great tree trunks cast shadows on the asphalt and yucca tendrils reached out with grasping hands for the bus’s ledge. The road was a patchwork of smooth and rough. Thatches of crabgrass strained through pavement. There was only one man, and no other man or woman for miles ahead. His hands flashed, flagging the bus down. 

“Hello, sir,” He addressed the bus driver squarely. “It’s just me. I know this isn’t your customary stop, but I’m in need of a ride. ”

The bus driver squinted at the man. He sniffed left and right, then motioned with a caustic finger to come aboard. The bus let out a slow groan, gently blowing the panels open for entry.

“Thanks,” The man inclined his head, removing his ivy cap. “Can’t tell you how hot it is out there right now.”

The bus driver grunted in agreement. He surveyed the figure of the man once more with narrowed eyes. The man’s smooth accent and vintage style acted as a renaissance painting does to a photo portrait; every man and woman aboard felt as if they were out of place, underdressed, and inelegant. His oxford shoes had just breached the bus’ ledge when the driver paused once more. 

“Just you? Alone out here?” The driver echoed. “Just you? Nobody else?” The man’s brow furrowed and his lips quirked like a cigar was perched between them.  

“I’ve come to the conclusion —based on what little observational evidence a quick gaze around the block gathers— that I am, in fact, the only man waiting for this specific bus at this moment in time at this very stop in the godforsaken Bible Belt boonies of Louisiana.” He coughed in a futile attempt to cover up the obvious laughter that colored his reply.

The driver sneered. There was a humor in the younger man that life had tempered like steel in the driver. Irreverence, too, though Ayla could see how the two intermingled within him favorably where others would find trouble.

“Come in, then. Mind your suit there. Can’t remember the last time I cleaned them seats. Dirty as all hell.”

“That’s no trouble. If you’ll excuse me,” he smiled wide. “I’ve got a seat with my name on it back there.” 

The driver grunted and the man set his hat back upon his head, strolling through the aisles as he searched for a vacant seat. She watched with tiny prickling needles subsuming underneath her skin as he made his way down the aisle. She couldn’t say what sparked her interest, but that it was with dark anticipation that she observed him. The man smiled and strode forward.

“Mind sharing your seat, Miss?”

“Sure,” She said, fixing her smile somewhere between friendly, flirty, and indifferent. Men liked that. “It’s you or the next townie. At least you came dressed to impress.”

“That I did.” His eyes crinkled. It was the only indicator of age she could find on his face. She scooted to the window to make room. He settled into the seat like iced tea flows from a homemaker’s pitcher. 

“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” He asked, eyes twinkling in the glint of muted sunlight that passed through the window panes. 

She quirked a brow, perturbed. Then, with slow fingers, she unraveled the  letter and pressed it into his palm. At least, that’s what she tried to do. It was not nearly as smooth and cinematic a movement as she wanted. Firstly, his hand clenched his knee, and she had had to make a sort of tapping gesture for him to flip his palm upwards. Then, she flattened the paper, and watched with an eye twitching as it kept folding in on itself. All the while, the gentleman kept straight faced, but it was his shaking fingers where she glimpsed his laughter at the unnecessarily absurd awkwardness she dumped on him.

She waited for what she thought would be only a momentary glance at the paper (it was, after all, rather obvious after the first sentence what her fate was). But he took his time engulfing the words before speaking, and when he did speak it was paradoxically brief. She would have thought he’d have spent that time marinating a great insight or critique. Instead, his words were simple. She didn’t know which she liked better. 

“How banal. A rejection letter.”

“Quite.” She replied, her stomach empty of any sugared wit to banter with. 

He laughed. It was a wonderfully hollow thing, his laugh; it battered around his ribcage and echoed in his marrow. As if someone had scooped out all his insides like carving a pumpkin, taking the scraggly pumpkin innards and seeds, all the worst bits, and throwing them in a blender.

Ayla thought back to that shining moment, just minutes earlier, when he’d stepped aboard the bus. She remembered how she’d first seen him: a young man with an old veneer, playing dress up in vintage clothing. Now, she watched time peel the layers of youth from his face, like finding a supple tree and cutting it open to see the many rings circling the tree's stump. No, he still had the face of Benjamin Button. But that oaken laugh, it had revealed him. Somehow, she suspected he was even older than the clothes he wore. Somehow, he was an old man dancing in the skin of youth.  

In the back of her mind, she remembered that the bus would be making another stop soon. She’d already waited far too long to be rid of the awful paper; she was not going to miss this second opportunity to discard it.

With narrowed eyes, she moved to snatch the paper back from the man, who she revulsed at mingling skin with. He was so clean, so well dressed that she forgot she was still in a musty bus in the middle of nowhere. Anyone riding the wheezing scrap heap that was their particular greyhound was bound to be off in some form or another. He wasn’t as vibrantly loud as the retired doctor, but all the same he was just as — well, icky. Not right. Or too right. She could not decide.

But before her fingers could clutch the letter once more, he deftly deflected it and held it above her head. The white of the paper glowed translucent in the strident sunlight. 

Then it glowed with alien red light and dissipated into a thousand golden embers, showering her lap with the stuff. She gasped softly. Ayla looked around to see if anyone else had witnessed it. None had. They were all asleep. 

The man next to her muttered under his breath. Then, as quickly as it had become dust, it reshaped itself into paper once more. Although, the text was in the wrong place. It was no longer written like a letter. Instead, it was formatted rather like a resume. At the top of the page was her name, her full name. Her real name. 

Ayla Akdeniz. 

She had changed it long ago to Ayla Smith, an alias she used for greater job opportunity. Seeing her name, laid bare on paper, she felt something familiar stir in her. Something she had long abandoned in the rat race. Then she wondered, rather numbly: how on Earth did he know her name? 

“Ayla Akdeniz. 23. Graduated law school at 20. Achieved her bachelor’s magna cum laude at 16,” The man began to rattle off the paper. At first, it sounded like her resume, the one she’d typed up not even a month ago to apply for the position she’d just been rejected from. But then he continued, and her stomach sank. 

“Yet, with all the fanfare of her earlier years, the work ethic has dissipated to make room for bottomless, abject ambition. Over the course of Akdeniz’s life, she has consistently sought work above her station. She applies and is denied. When she is accepted to a position, she is fired within a matter of months. She is antithetical to the protestant work ethic but lives and dies a million deaths for every achievement and rejection received. For this, and many other reasons, she is nothing at all.”

Ruby flakes of dried blood began to make their home in the creases of her palms as the crescent nails of her fingers sank into her skin. The red flakes crumbled into a staining powder when she poked too hard, tinting her hands a copper tone. It recalled a memory from long ago, of her mother putting henna on her hands in preparation for Ramadan. It was the same color, but it was a different tone. The henna coated her skin in the very image of golden sunlight, uncovering warm green veins and gently urging them out of hiding in the sumptuous under layer of skin. However, unlike the henna, the blood brought out the blue of her veins, an inhuman color that made her feel more corpselike than anything else. The man made eye contact with her then.

“And how does this sound to you, Ayla?”

A salty tear trembled in the waterline of her eye. 

She admitted, “It sounds…true. It’s true.”

He grinned. “Well. I’m not a magician, despite the trick I just pulled. I can’t change the truth, the very fabric of your existence on a whim. And you’re right, by the way. It is, in fact, the truth; the worst portent of all and yet it is a collection of moments that have already happened. 

“But,” he continued with dark glee dripping from every youthful pore. “Let’s talk about what you can do for me. And then, only after, we can further discuss what I can do for you. That is, if you want me to fix your miserable slice of life at least.”

She only blinked and nodded in response.

“Wonderful. Now, you remember that beastly old man I passed by earlier?” He didn’t wait for any affirmation of his words before moving on. “Well, I want you to kill him.”

Well, that woke her up from her daze.

“Kill him?” She exclaimed, her pitch almost high enough to shatter the bus windows. Still, the other riders did not stir from their sleep. “Alright, someone’s having a laugh right now and it isn’t me. You’ve been discovered, cut the cameras, I’m tired of this. I’m not here to be made a mockery of.” Her dark eyes flashed as they met his own eyes, twinkling in the artificial glow of the unearthly paper he held in his hands. 

“You see, I was like you once. Tired, broke. Intelligent but under-achieving. Hard-working but lazy. Stuck in the mud and pressured to break out and be something. God, I always forget just how much I wanted to be something! That’s mortals for you. Always caught in the climb of Babel. Well, a man found me in a bazaar, as I was prepared to sell off the last of my mother’s jewelry and my father’s generational watch. He gave me an offer, a job to do. Nearly identical to the one I’m giving you now.”

“Kill the old woman who lived next door, and I would be granted eternal youth in exchange. A harmless deed, really, considering the man told me the old woman was on death’s door anyway. A harmless deed with great payout. After all, here I am, nearly one hundred and fifty years later. And I look the same as I did all those decades ago.”

He paused to glance at himself in the mirror, then. He winced. 

“Well, mostly. Of course, there are a few…minor changes. Expect to experience things most won’t. Great highs and even greater lows. All with the caveat that in this moment, you must kill the old man in the other seat. Not to worry, he’s nearly dead already. But, you would deal the final blow.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And what, exactly, do you get out of this? Earlier, you made it sound like I was doing something for you. Seems to me like the opposite.”

He cleared his throat. “I’m just following orders, really. As an immortal, there are a few… less than savory duties I have in my occupation. This one of them.”

He continued to ramble about the various mundane aspects of eternal life. She watched his lips move, but her ears were deafened with the noise of her own thoughts. She had been without a job for so long. Mostly of her own fault. She was exhausted. Tired of being insignificant, average, and, worst of all, unworthy. Everyday for the past three years, she’d taken the bus. Just once, she’d like a car. 

Looking over at the man in the other seat, she observed the specimen that was a fully lived life. He was insignificant too. Probably had been worth much more when he was younger, but by now he had outlived most of his usefulness. She had already bypassed most of her own. She had been a mature child and had progressed linearly into an elderly twenty-something.  

Try as she might to imagine into existence her hands taking action and squeezing the life out of the man, she could not. For life, even in a compact bus in the middle of a humid day, was precious. And her own life, no matter how dull and disappointing, was still her own to figure out.

“No,” She said finally. “No.”

He smiled. 

She waited for, “Are you sure?” But it never left his lips. He was the salesman of a deadbeat product, and he knew it.

When the bus rolled to another stop, he gathered his things somberly. And all the humor that had graced his youthful body scattered into the air. As he walked past the bus driver, she realized that they were more alike than she had previously thought. Both cursed with an occupation they had long since found resentment in. And no matter how exciting immortal life must have started out as, the throaty goodbye he cast her way revealed that the road he took, although obscure, had somehow led back to the mundanity that was every human’s existence. At least she knew that, one day, hers would end. When the man’s eyes turned back for a final glance, she swore she saw a hint of envy in their depths.

She set her sights for the window once more. The glass pane was still muddled, the humidity exacerbated rather than calmed since the beginning of her ride. But, for once, she felt peace in her observation.

She settled into her seat with renewed vigor. This was, after all, the bus she’d be riding for the foreseeable future. At least for the next 365 days until she picked up and found another city to look for work in. 

She’d better get comfortable.