A 24-hr bus ride, the “Tutto Letto” full 180 degree reclining seat service from Buenos Aires.
The three rearmost seats that sway and pitch boat-like, worse after dinner (porkchops, polenta, a 375 ml bottle of malbec / syrah) when we’ve finally reached the open pampa and no lights anywhere, the Ruta 5 all potholed and the diesel motor on the other side of the firewall reverberating 2 feet from your head.
Some movie on, a mainstream flick with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, but mostly ignoring it, holding Micael, feeling a sense of claustrophobia, or not so much fear of being closed in but something parallel to it that no music selection from Neon Indian to Nas to finally Brian Eno can put a dent into, this general sense of not traveling but being conveyed, trapped within this particular vehicle / set of musical options / familial situation, the last of which creates an ancillary sense of guilt to the point where I feel Micael’s tiny body against my chest and wonder about the two of us actually being trapped in this situation together, which activates a paternal instinct to protect him, diminishing the fear somewhat, but then as I think about the fact that we’re heading back to where he was born, our “home” for now, and how loose of a term that is in our situation – it’s more where we’re “based out of” – I begin feeling it again, and think about getting there, if only we could just fucking get there, if we could just make, if I can just stay here lying down in the tutto letto without my heart exploding from a massive infarction – and if, in the meantime, I can just deflect the horrible looping scenarios / visualizations of having to alert my wife that I’m having a heart attack or whatever, as everyone else is asleep, the monitors dark now, Micael on my chest but still shifting positions constantly, unable to fully get comfortable, and probably affected by the constant engine noise, Brian Eno’s same riff now having looped for at least the 40th cycle, and then Micael awakening, passing him across the swaying aisle to Lau who has suddenly awoken, asking her for water to take a xanax which, as soon as I have it down my esophagus, is already creating a placebo effect of slightly diminished anxiety that then kind of stretches and spins into a taxonomy of panic attacks and factors, particularly the timing, the very first one having occurred the eve of traveling back from California (where I’d bee “based out of” Huntington Beach) back to Atlanta and this sense of not really knowing what awaited there.
I check the iPod then and it’s just turning 3 AM.
Within an hour I’ll fall asleep and dream that I’m in some kind of van that won’t crank so we neede to roll-start it (somehow it’s manual transmission) – when Lau will shake me awake saying “mira.”
The first thing I’ll notice is that the bus engine is idling but there’s no movement.
We have stopped.
Outside, the broad expanse of meseta, the hillocks and shrubby coirón will all be covered in snow. A light snow drifts down from the sky as well. The dawn just breaking over the eastern plains.
Within the general sense of disorientation, concerns about the road status, and a stoke for the terrain in the predawn colors, there will be this sense of: I made it through.
