The Authentic Eclectic

The Second Level

The bleary misery of rising at dawn. Grey owl moon slipping away. She traced the lines in her palm, trying to remember which were heart, head, and life.

When such things turn out accurate, we alieve them to be true; she rather cherished that instinctual spiritualism, so at odds with her conscious thoughts. She imagined it as a sprite dancing about the depths of her mind, causing mischief.

The bus turned into the forest. She pushed down the window in hopes that the rush of fresh air would wake her up. There was commotion in the brush, and the flash of a deer’s tail. The speeding bus tore a terrific wake.

She watched the zoetropic scenery for a moment, then shook her head, yawned, and walked down to the third level for breakfast. There were a couple of tourists in the cafe seating area. She ignored them and went up to the counter.

“Morning Harold,” she said to the back of a very large man.

He turned around, smile ready. “Morning Tansy. What’s your fancy? Waffles? Chapattis? Banchan? Mandazi?”

“A cup of coffee and a cucumber sandwich, please.”

“On it.” He opened the refrigerator, and she covered her eyes with her arm to shield them from its intense glow. She heard him placing the objects on the counter, and looked down with deep satisfaction at the steaming cup and the neatly sliced sandwich.

“Thank you Harold,” she chirped. “Is this sandwich from Japan?”

“Did you want it from Japan?”

“I guess so. It just looks that way to me, the slick way it’s packaged.”

“If you wanted it from Japan, the fridge got it from Japan. You know that.”

“I didn’t know they had cucumber sandwiches,” she muttered as she walked away.

Instead of returning to her seat, she climbed up to the tenth level, her view of the trees changing with each set of stairs. She sat by the ice skating pond. There was only a young girl on it, but she clearly had been practicing for years. Tansy contentedly munched her breakfast and enjoyed the girl’s graceful spins and glides.

As she pulled the plastic strip off the edge of her second sandwich half, the bus braked with sudden force.

She dropped her coffee on the floor. The skater slowly got to her feet. Tansy turned her head and stared out of the window. What she saw was…stillness.

The bus had stopped.

Tansy was twenty-three years old. She had been born on level fifty, and she had never set foot off the bus in her life. The bus had never stopped in her life.

An announcement crackled, “We deeply apologize for the inconvenience, but the bus has died. Passengers may either await the next bus, which will arrive in three hours, or disembark and try their luck.” The curt words were exactly in character for the captain. Tansy knew that complaining would be to no avail. But how could they simply abandon an entire bus system? What about lifers like her, the environments, the performers, the zoo animals, the bus itself?

The skater sat down at the edge of the pond nearby to remove her skates. “Well, this sucks.”

“Yeah,” Tansy replied, unable to convey to a tourist how very much it sucked. She hated the stillness. She felt a little sick.

“When one of these buses dies, it dies,” the skater added, which pierced her heart. It wasn’t just any bus; it was like a second womb.

The first step onto the ground was easier than being born, at least. As she moved between the trees, she kept her arms pressed hard against her sides, nervously rubbing her hands. A fly buzzed by. She squealed and covered her head. From an open window on the 8th floor, she heard the orchestra starting up. She felt tugged to reboard, but a larger part of her hated the thought of setting foot on the corpse. Boarding a new bus seemed even worse.

She walked back along the bus’s path until she reached the road, where she flagged down a passing car.

“Come on, girl,” a middle-aged woman called. She raced over and climbed into the back seat, and the delicious feeling of motion swept over her.

“Where’d you come from?” her new captain asked. But Tansy was far too busy examining the unfamiliar environment. It wasn’t a very clean place, with greasy bags and toys scattered about. They drove for nearly an hour in silence.

At last, Tansy couldn’t stand it any longer. “Excuse me,” she said. “It’s been real nice sitting here with you. But can you tell me how to get to the second level?”

“Level?”

“Right, the level of the car above this one.”

“Honey, I don’t know what kind of car you’re used to, but this car’s only got one level, and you’re sittin’ in it. Where are you getting off, anyway? Next city’s in about twenty miles.”

There was a long pause as this information sunk in. Then, with a horrified gasp, Tansy shrieked, “TURN AROUND!”