I was sitting on a bus in Seattle bound for Vancouver. I waved, blew a kiss and mouthed an endearment. My son Daniel, slightly embarrassed by our prolonged farewell, attempted to appear nonchalant, but it was obvious he cared too.
Just as the bus pulled away I noticed I was being watched by a boy sitting quite close to me, at the very back. “Mothers …” I said and we exchanged smiles. He was perhaps in his mid-teens, maybe a couple of years younger than my son, with whom I’d been visiting for a few days before he was due to move to New York.
As I gazed out the window at the green farmland, I started to get anxious about returning home since that meant dealing with a multitude of moths that had invaded my kitchen about a week before I’d left for Seattle. They’d entered with the oats I’d bought at a bulk food store and had rapidly embedded themselves in rice and other grains, all of which I had to throw out.
But still they lived on. Trapping each individually and ushering it out of the house proved to be pointless because for every one I removed, a dozen more sprang up to take its place. Even the cedar-scented balls that were supposed to repel the insects seemed to act as a fertility drug.
I was busily plotting a new strategy about what to do with them next when the young man who’d watched me say goodbye to my son was suddenly by my side. He was lanky, handsome in a brooding way, wearing fashionably baggy cutoffs, which were creeping down his hips and clinging to his calves. He asked if he could sit with me and the moment he did he began to weep.
I managed to calm him down enough for him to tell me “I’m only eighteen,” that’s how he said it, and that he was “very scared.” He was coming back from Seattle where he’d met the girl he’d been corresponding with for months on the internet. She’d been driving him back to get the ferry to Victoria, where he lived, when her car broke down, so he’d had to take a bus to Vancouver instead.
He was afraid he’d come in too late to catch a bus to Victoria, and that he’d have to spend the night alone in Vancouver where he knew no one. He said, “The worst thing is that my mother will be very worried because she knows I can’t take care of myself.” Just when I thought he was going to hit me up for hotel money, he pulled out a thick wad of cash, which I cautioned him to put away. “Why not call your mother,” I suggested. “I lost my cellphone and don’t know how to make long distance calls on old phones,” he said. I promised I’d help him when we got to Vancouver.
He had an air of discomfort about him but said, “This look I have, so sweet and innocent, is just to get across the border. I’m a musician and when I perform I pattern myself after Sid Vicious.” He told me Johnny Rotten named Sid that after his hamster, “Vicious,” that had no teeth, and couldn’t chew his way out of a paper bag. “Sid was like that too, very unaggressive except on stage. My new girlfriend is Nancy, the groupie, and I’m Sid Vicious, but I don’t do drugs,” he said. Again he broke into long sobs until I held him and he gradually fell asleep with his head on my chest.
The bus had been completely quiet, and everyone could hear our conversation and his crying. Every few minutes someone would twist around to gawk at us. This included the bus driver, who didn’t hide his relief that it wasn’t him who had to deal with this kid. Nervous that he’d hit someone or something when he took his eyes off the road, I’d signalled that all was okay.
When the bus pulled into the once majestic, now garishly lit station at Main and Terminal in Vancouver, the boy and I dashed around looking for the connecting bus to Victoria but all the wickets were closed and the buses sat empty as husks.
At a payphone the boy asked me to talk to his mother on his behalf because he was too stressed out, but just as the operator placed the collect call, a man in his early thirties approached us. He was dressed in a sports shirt, dockers and a baseball cap. It was unlikely he was the boy’s father since he was too young, of a different race, and his tone was very formal when he asked, “Are you ready?”
The boy nodded, picked up his guitar case, which was the only baggage he had, and started to leave with the man. I hung up the phone and chased after them. “Do you know this person?” I asked, alarmed that the boy might be going off with a total stranger, though that’s what I was to him too.
He nodded again and they began walking at quite a clip, with me running alongside to keep up. I was hoping for some explanation, but there was utter silence from both of them, and neither of them made eye contact with me. When they reached the man’s late-model compact car, they got in, still without acknowledging my presence, and drove off.
That the boy had sucked me into the vortex of his crisis and then left me high and dry confounded and infuriated me. When I hopped into a taxi and the story came spilling out, the driver launched into his theory that, “It’s the internet that makes people crazy, people meet too soon and too intimately in unnatural circumstances.” We had a bit of a discussion over this, but when he asked me if I thought the X-Files stories were true, I stopped talking to him and he spent the rest of the trip chortling to himself.
By now I was too drained to care. Along with the wrench of saying goodbye to my son and the machinations of the boy on the bus, I’d had little sleep. The neighbours in the apartment below Daniel’s had been leaving the building too and had spent several nights with their bass blasting. Our requests that they tone it down fell on deaf ears, probably because their own music had destroyed their hearing. I was longing for the peace and quiet of my own bed and was also ravenously hungry.
As soon as I got home I made a beeline for the kitchen, for the canned soup, the only impossible-to-infest food. I braced myself to be swarmed. But when I finally opened the cupboard door there was not a moth in sight.