The Number 7 Bus
By Nick Valdez
Mario Garcia was two days from death. Of course, he didn’t know it yet.
While he waited for the number 7 bus, Mario thumbed through the day’s headlines on his smartphone.
Teachers in elementary schools across the state of Wisconsin were staging wildcat sit-ins, refusing to teach and refusing even to leave their classrooms. One kindergarten teacher in Green Bay, now on her fifth day of a hunger strike, had sparked the revolt.
The lone survivor of an avalanche that had swallowed a ski resort in the Sierras spoke to the media for the first time. His first words were, “It was white—just white. And then, black.”
For the second week in a row, more Americans died from strokes than from any other cause.
The Global Society on the Recovery of English Words named their word of the day: Wether n. [ME.; AS. Wither.] a castrated ram.
When the number 7 bus arrived, Mario noticed the new bus driver behind the wheel, an elderly man with cleanly cut white hair, dark brown skin, deep creases on his forehead and around his eyes and mouth. The man turned his face and smiled, and Mario saw two teardrops tattooed near the corner of his left eye.
Mario stepped onto the bus, paid his fare, and sat at the window seat in the second row behind the driver.
It didn’t surprise him that no one else was on the bus at this hour. It was, after all, the last bus heading back across town, and of late it had been showing up sporadically. For that reason, most people didn’t risk missing the bus that preceded it.
The bus driver’s gray eyes studied Mario in the rearview mirror. “Late night?” he asked.
“Late enough.” Mario sighed. “I’m glad you’re running today.”
“Yeah?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d show.”
“Why’s that?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t.”
“It does when I’m driving,” said the bus driver.
Mario watched the streetlights pass outside the window. The overhead lights on the bus blinked.
Now that he had settled in, Mario noticed that the bus, the inside, smelled strangely.
He placed the smell somewhere between a waning campfire and a burnt flour tortilla.
“This your last route for the day?” Mario asked, making conversation.
“Nah,” said the bus driver. “My routes never end.”
“Yeah, I hear that,” said Mario. “I feel the same way.”
“People…” the driver said cryptically. “They’re here . . . And they need to go there…”
“Ain’t that the truth,” said Mario, staring through his reflection at the outside world.
“Everyone has to go somewhere, sooner or later.”
Mario looked down at his smartphone and read another headline. This one for an op-ed. It said, “Antitypes Are the Foundation of All Moral Philosophy”.
“Hey,” Mario said, looking up from his phone, “where’s Warren tonight? He usually drives this bus, doesn’t he?” Mario wondered why he had asked the second question: he knew that Warren usually drove the number 7.
The driver’s eyes narrowed, sending his wrinkles out like opening fingers. His eyes, gray as the winter sky, gazed at Mario from the rearview mirror.
Mario had never seen anything like the bus driver’s eyes, except in films featuring a character who is expressly blind.
“Warren’s gone,” he said. His voice had become like sandpaper rubbed over a thick plank of wood.
“What? Why?”
“He decided not to come back.”
“They fired him?”
“Not exactly. He was given the choice to return. He didn’t want to.”
Mario couldn’t imagine why Warren would decide not to come back. He seemed so excited about being a year away from retirement. In fact, the last time Mario saw him on the bus, Warren had said, “Forty-two more weeks, kid. Every day I’m inching closer. I can almost taste it — pension.” He wore that wide smile he had, a generous display of his partiality toward coffee and tobacco.
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Mario aloud, mostly to himself.
He became aware of low static coming from the radio.
“What doesn’t make sense to me,” said the bus driver, “is when a man’s given a chance to stay here, and he doesn’t jump at it.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Mario said again.
“No, it sure doesn’t,” the bus driver agreed. His eyes fixed on Mario. “What about you, what would you do?”
“That close to retirement, you mean? No way I’d leave.”
“That’s what I thought.” The bus driver nodded. “I get a feeling for people right away.” He stretched one side of his neck and then the other. “Warren, for example. See, I knew right off he wasn’t going to want to come back. Some people just don’t. We can’t figure it out. We’ve practically busted our heads trying.” Mario looked out the window.
“What do you do for a living?” asked the bus driver.
“I’m a reinsurer.”
“A reinsurer?”
“I basically figure out whether or not it would be profitable to provide insurance to a first insurer on the same property.”
Mario didn’t recognize the area they were passing through. Rather than the flatlands of the county, large mountains piled up with desert boulders covered the landscape.
“So, I imagine you’re the kind person who looks for potential behind potential, the thing behind the thing.”
“Where are we?” Mario asked.
“I wonder if maybe you can help us understand something. Let’s take you. Let’s say I told you that in two days you’re going to take your last breath and die. What would you say?”
Mario didn’t answer.
“And then let’s say I told you there was a way for you, when you take your last breath, to wake up at the very start of your life, to wake up breathing your first breath again, and every breath after it — and here’s the real kicker — you get to keep everything you know now, all your thoughts, all your memories. You get to take it all with you.
What would you say then?”
Mario’s smartphone had powered down. He pressed the home button and then the power button. The screen remained black.
“What I mean is, you get a chance to come back, to live your whole life again. Would you do it?”
The smell on the bus was getting to Mario. His thoughts blurred. His tongue felt thick and dry. “Sure I would,” Mario labored to say. “I don’t recognize this area. What route is this?”
“I knew you would!” The bus driver slapped the steering wheel. “I told you, I get a feeling about people.”
The lights inside the bus blinked when the driver put his foot on the brake pedal. The bus came to a groaning halt. Mario looked out to see that they were at his stop, three blocks from his house. Mario stood up quickly, anxious to be outside.
“There’s no easy way to say this, and I can’t tell you how I know, so I’m just going to say it,” said the bus driver. “You’re going to die in two days.” His voice was somber.
“Okay,” Mario chuckled, making his way to the door.
“I’d like to tell you how I know. But we’re not allowed to,” said the bus driver. “I can do something else though. I can offer you a way to live your whole life over again. You’re thirty-two, aren’t you?”
The man didn’t appear to be joking. His lips seemed to get smaller as he spoke.
Mario nodded.
“Take tonight to think about it,” the bus driver said. “Sleep on it. If you decide you believe me, or even if you decide you don’t, be at this bus stop at exactly eleven thirty-three tomorrow morning. I’ll be here. We can take care of the details then.”
Mario said nothing. He stepped off the bus. The driver gave him a nod, a two-fingered salute, before he closed the doors and pulled away from the curb.
Mario’s phone lit up again, fully charged.
He watched the taillights of the bus recede until they disappeared into the night.
*
The bus driver had told Mario to sleep on it. It was good advice. But Mario couldn’t sleep. Instead, he spent the dark hours sitting in his bedroom, staring at the multicolored Marvel of Peru on the bedside table, petals opened but slowly closing. By morning, the flower would be closed and wouldn’t open again until the following afternoon.
The night passed like a long drive through heavy fog.
When the sun finally climbed above the horizon, Mario took a warm shower and ate a small breakfast, a simple egg burrito. He drank a hot cup of black coffee. Then he called in sick to work.
At 11:30, he found himself sitting at the bus stop. A street cat with a large head, dark brown fur, and crossed eyes padded toward him. The cat looked at him as only a cross-eyed cat can before it rubbed against his leg. Mario had seen the cat many times before.
But this was the first time it had ever come near him.
Mario stroked the cat from head to tail. As he did so, the cat lifted every part of itself in a wave to meet his hand.
By the time the number 7 bus turned the corner and pulled up to the curb, and as the cat trotted off and slipped into the hedges of a nearby house, not a single discernible thought occupied Mario’s mind.
At the sight of the bus, Mario felt less than human, as if his mind and body were mechanized. But for the electrochemical impulses that compelled him to stand and the basic motor reflexes that made him greet the smiling bus driver, he felt empty. He noticed that in the hours between last night and this morning, the bus driver had added a third teardrop to the corner of his left eye.
Mario stepped onto the bus with no feeling in his legs. He pulled three dollars from his pocket and was about to pay when the bus driver lifted his hand. “No fee today,” he said.
As usual, Mario pulled out his phone and scrolled through the day’s headlines. The word of the day was the only thing he was able to focus on long enough to read:
Combinate a. espoused; betrothed. [Rare.].
The bus driver asked him several questions to which he answered yes, even though he didn’t hear or understand them fully, mostly because through the static over the speakers, Mario was hearing what sounded like an audiobook, a theatrical reading of some kind. He heard, “…throws it to Lucky. Adieu!”
The bus driver laughed. “This is one of the funniest plays I’ve ever heard!”
“A play?” Mario asked.
“Yes,” said the bus driver. “The guy who wrote it was one of ours for a long time.” Moments passed.
“Listen,” the bus driver said. “This is how it will work. Upon final agreement, you will lose consciousness. After that, you’ll wake up in your own bed. When you wake up, it’ll be the final day of your life. This one, at least. Do you understand?” Mario said he did.
“Do you consent?” Mario said yes.
Mario felt as if two fingers were lowering each of his eyelids. They fluttered like struck birds before he finally closed his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he was in his bedroom. He had lost an entire day.
Today he was supposed to die.
*
Mario Garcia took his last breath at 5:42 p.m.
Cause of death: Sudden and protracted loss of blood flow to the brain.
*
At 5:42 a.m. Mario felt his heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings. He breathed a sharp, gasping inhale. He heard, from the interior of his body, a high-pitched wheezing cry. With every breath, the crying continued. His body rattled. Everything moved both inside and outside of his head. It was a newborn’s cry, rife with the anguish of air.
The recesses of his memory kicked up the words of a song, one he had been listening to on his earbuds during work a few short hours before he got on the number 7 bus and met the fateful bus driver. As he heard the words, he also saw a line of lyrics, which scrolled across the darkness of his mind: “My mind is a butterfly net that I use to catch many, many things, but not, not never, no butterflies…” The text was rendered as a silver alphabet on an otherwise blank background. It bounced off an invisible boundary and circled back on itself like a Mobius strip, snaking, twisting, swallowing its own tail.
His body was being handled. He was jostled and turned. He was wrapped in cloth and held. Then he went to sleep.
It was true. He was alive again.
He had all of his thoughts and memories, just as the bus driver said he would. “Our delivery of death is less like going to sleep and more like waking up,” he had said. Yes, it was true. Except for one thing. Because he was in such an early version of his body, Mario couldn’t see. Everything was light and dark impressions. Moments came and went. Smells surged through him in soaked bundles. He couldn’t keep from crying. He couldn’t control his head or limbs.
Over the unfolding weeks, Mario’s body went to sleep but he, whatever such a pronoun could now mean, somehow remained awake. He felt the sleep of the body while he continued to think, to wonder. This gave him time to consider what was happening to him.
For the first time in the circuit of his life, he was experiencing events that he, as an adult, had never been able to recall. In some ways, the experience was like being trapped in a chunk of orthite. Sparkles shimmered on the walls of black and brown corridors.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Mario to realize that, even as his memories and thoughts expanded, he could neither control nor influence his body. No matter how much he concentrated, no matter the determined exertion of conscious will, he couldn’t alter his actions. He could do nothing more than witness them and feel their causes and effects.
*
Years later, after (expectedly) wetting himself and the living room carpet at Daniel Valentino’s 10th birthday slumber party, Mario knew the day would come when his grandfather would die. And then his grandmother. And then his aunt. And then his father.
After that, he’d graduate high school.
All of it happened again as it had happened before.
After college, Mario got a job, not exactly in the dead letter office, but close. Selling insurance to insurers was as delicate a business as it was dull. Day and weeks became blurs. He fed street cats in his spare time.
Then he met the cat with the big head and crossed eyes. The cat wouldn’t come near him, and he was reminded that the day wasn’t far off, the day when he would leave work, catch the number 7 bus, and receive the news that he would die.
He had, up to now, been unable to change anything that had happened in his life. Not a gesture, not a single word. It all went precisely as it had gone the first time, if in fact it had actually been the first time. Because his thoughts and memories broadened, he began to have questions. How many times had he lived this life? Had another him been riding along in silence, another trapped passenger, as he lived the life that preceded this one? What good was it to develop thoughts and memories if he could do nothing with them, nothing to change the course of his life?
Could it be that he was condemned to live his own life forever, a never-ending loop of already completed actions, like the eye of a needle searching for the middle of an endless thread, a tongue licking the reappearing salt off the same finger? To what end?
Mario had no way of knowing.
*
The portentous day came at last.
Mario waited for the number 7 bus, the last bus of the day. He read the day’s headlines on his phone.
When the door opened, he saw the bus driver’s face. A strange sensation corkscrewed through his neck. The number of teardrops near the driver’s left eye were different than the last time. Instead of two, there were four. Mario felt the hair rise at the base of his skull. In the full three decades of the life Mario had been living over again, this was the first and only detail that had changed. Otherwise, the bus driver said what he had said before and so did Mario.
The sleepless night passed as he lay next to the Marvel of Peru.
In the morning, he got up, took a shower, ate breakfast, and at 11:30 a.m., he found himself sitting at the bus stop, petting the cross-eyed cat. The cat disappeared into the hedges when the bus pulled up to the curb.
On seeing the bus driver, now with five teardrops under his eye, Mario stood. He looked at the first step. Words formed where they weren’t before.
The bus driver frowned.
Mario didn’t know what he was going to say. He couldn’t finish his thought. The smell of charcoal gave way to one of damp grass. Reflected in the bus driver’s eyes, he could see the place. There it was. Frozen like a photograph in the driver’s irises. A land of rivers. Mario reached into the doorway of the bus as though he might touch that place.
He lifted his foot but didn’t step onto the bus. He set his foot back down on the curb. The moment his foot touched the ground the bus stretched out like a long road. Then the road recoiled into itself and disappeared.
Mario looked around. He was in a silent place, silent except for the sound of moving water.
His eyes adjusted to the light. The bus driver stood next to him. They stood at the edge of a river. The water dug into the land like a large finger.
“We can’t figure it out,” the bus driver said. He stared at the water. “This has been happening since the beginning.”
“What has?” Mario asked.
“Same place. Same everything. Only the water changes . . . or so we’re told.”
“Told by who?”
“We don’t know that either. We don’t know who’s telling us. But we know what we hear.”
Mario sat down and put his hand in the water. He removed it and the wetness immediately disappeared, dripping from his fingertips like mercury.
“Can we drink it?” he asked.
“No.”
Mario tried anyway. He cupped his hands and held the water in his palms. He tilted it to his lips. The water moved away from his mouth. He tried again. The water spilled across his face, fell to the ground, and rejoined the river.
They listened to the river for a time. The bus driver sat down.
“What do I do now?” Mario asked.
The bus driver shrugged. “I do my best,” he said, “but I can’t convince anyone to stay in that life. Most go back once or twice. But that’s it. One person went back three times.”
“Then what?”
“Then this. They jump in the river. They want to see where it goes. You’ll do the same thing. Everyone does.”
“Where does it go?”
“If I told you it went nowhere, that it never ends, would you believe me?” Mario smiled and shook his head.
“What will you do?” Mario asked.
The bus driver looked up at him. “I’ll go back. I’ll talk to someone else. I’ll try again to convince them to return to their old life — that’s what I do.”
A new teardrop formed under the bus driver’s left eye.
“Enjoy the journey,” the bus driver said. He gave Mario a two-fingered salute. And then he was gone.
Mario stepped into the water. He walked until it was at his waist. Then he lifted his feet. The river carried him. Its wetness was also enigmatically dry. Mario laughed. He laughed for the first time in a very long while. He laughed until his chest felt full and light. With the smell of damp grass in his nostrils, he watched the sky pass. After a while he let his body sink beneath the surface of the river and he closed his eyes and opened his hands, and he went off to a place where there was no day and no night, where the petals of the world neither opened nor closed.
Nick Valdez (he/him) lives in Santa Rosa, California. He is the creative nonfiction editor for Wordrunner e-Chapbooks, and also works at the Sonoma County Library.