The bus home is crowded, even though I arrived with many minutes to spare. It is so crowded, I have to take one of the less comfortable seats up front but that’s okay because a cute, young woman arrives thereafter and has little choice but to take the space next to me.
What fun!
Not that I engage her in conversation, mind you, or even dare look at her. Oh, no. That would be improper, forward, rude, awkward … brave.
No, instead I simply muck about with my things, my spider-haired legs splayed out akimbo before me: I futz with my tattered cap, take off and wad up my coat, untangle my ipod, read a few pages from my little sci-fi novel and then, contrary, rifle through my backpack to fetch out my journal and fountain pen, the latter of which has lain dormant so long – over a year – that the ink has dried to a flaking skin inside the bone-dry cartridge.
Replacing the old cartridge with a fresh one, I begin the arduous task of priming the nib, an effort that leaves the pen, journal, my skin, and many of my belongings, speckled and blotted with smears of the ink, which seems content to ooze forth from every part of the pen but the curlicue tip of the nib. Eventually it acquiesces to my ministrations and I settle down to some narcissistic scribbling.
Just before takeoff, the last straggler, a large man with a cropped, curly beard, tie-dye shirt, and a backpack slung over one shoulder, comes aboard and is left wandering up and down the aisle, looking for somewhere to sit.
Across from myself and the young woman I am so studiously ignoring, another short bench seat has been folded up against the wall to make room for a lone woman’s considerable pile of stacked belongings. She is older, with long, grey hair and a plain face. She wears a puffy coat and holds a woven, colorful blanket by her side. The pile of belongings at her feet is more than she can keep with her but not so much that she couldn’t make room for the other seat’s deployment. She knows this and the plainness of this plays across her face while an elderly gentlemen of more genuine character eases himself over in his seat with an arthritic grimace and bids the newcomer sit. The driver fires up the engine and we ease out of the bus station.
“Will any one else be getting on the bus?” the overly laden woman asks the just-seated man as we roll down the road. What an odd question.
“I don’t know,” he replies, “this is my first time on the bus.” As if those of us who ride daily might have somehow gained a kind of prescience from our extended ridership.
“Because I could move my things … ” she says, eyeing her things and holding herself in such a way as to make it obvious, for those of us with eyes that, really, she’d rather not.
“If anyone else gets on,” I offer, “you could simply move that down and over and there’ll be room to lower the seat.” I indicate a box sitting atop a short case next to a bag that would also have to be pushed over a bit.
“Ah,” replies the woman, looking dubious and with poorly concealed irritation at my words. I attempt to lighten the mood by adding “And then, if too many more folks come in the front, we’ll just throw some off the back.”
There is some light laughter and smiles within earshot of my silly comment but the woman appraises me with round, wet eyes.
“So we’ll just throw people off?” She asks. “We’ll just kill some Americans?”
“Everybody’s killing Americans,” adds the bearded man, with a laugh, his body jiggling lightly with the travel of the bus. “We’re hated everywhere these days.”
It’s a sad sentiment, made all the more so by the truth of it, but he says it in a good-natured, diffusing way as in “what can you do” and “lighten up.”
But the woman isn’t laughing.
“They’re going to kill 600,000,000,000 humans and you want to murder some more humans right here,” she says. “600,000,000,000 humans. They’re going to do it. Do you think that’s okay?”
“I was simply attempting some humor,” I reply, already aware, due to the radical shift of her demeanor, of the futility of any response. What the hell is she talking about?
“Well perhaps, if my day had been better, if I hadn’t had such a bad day, I could laugh at murdering humans but with the planned death of 600,000,000,000 about to happen, I don’t find the idea of more murder fun, do you?”
The silence produced outside the chugging motor and the woman’s unhinged accusations is a wonder of absoluteness. I scan my fellow riders peripherally and they are a unison of feigned ignorance: closed, lowered, or otherwise directed away, all eyes pretend with a fierce concentration at what the ears cannot do: look away. It is the universal body language of “There’s a goddamn nut. Right. Over. There.”
“I didn’t suggest murder,” I assert in a tone I reserve for the clinically dramatic, the criminally annoying, the humor-retarded, “I was just trying to lighten things up.”
And I’m out. I know a no win situation when I’m attacked by one and this is it. No more eye contact for Mrs.600,000,000,000 Humans. No more breath. I’d sooner argue with meat on a stick – and expect a greater intellectual challenge from one to boot. I plug my headphones into my ears with a firm finality.
But I don’t turn them on.
Like my fellow travelers, I find myself drawn to the spectacle of her lunacy. Ages back, one had to go to the carnival to catch a geek biting the head off a live chicken. Nowadays, all you have to do is regularly utilize mass transit. The shows are unscheduled, catch as catch can, but at least you’re getting somewhere at the same time.
I’m wondering what tragedy she can be referring to. 600,000,000,000 humans? That’s quite a number. Could she mean the Jews of WWII? Cambodians under Pol Pot? The Civil war? It’s obvious the number is randomly chosen for its shock value, so I don’t waste time comparing history for a corresponding number. Besides, she says “planned,” as in: “to come.” Tobacco companies? Monsanto? Obama?
I don’t have long to wait.
“The Draco Reptilian Overlords are going to kill 600,000,000,000 humans. It’s a known fact. It’s scheduled. You can’t stop it. It’s going to happen. There are books. It’s all over the internet.* President Eisenhower brought them into power in the US in 1953. There was a congressional rule from the Draco Reptilians right after that expunged any mention of their spacecraft from school books. Look it up. There’s proof. The Draco Reptilian Overlords are in charge of everything from the laws we pass to the food we eat. Why do you think so many people are in jail? Why do you think so many people are fat in this country? How do you explain the fluoride in the water, the chemtrails in the sky, the genetically modified foods that poison us all? It’s the Draco Reptilians, and now they’re going to kill 600,000,000,000 humans. Just like that.”
The man in the tie-dye is the only person not looking away from her, so she addresses him despite his disbelieving, good-humored smile.
“Go ahead and smile, your ignorance is proof,” she says. “If you knew of it, if it was in the papers, on TV, it might be a joke, a lie, but the ignorance of the general populace proves the existence of these things because they don’t want you to know they exist. Anything you sit there smiling and believing? That’s a plant; a lie they want you to believe so they can keep on doing the things they do. The more supposed proof there is of something, the less likely it is to be true. That’s a natural law. Everybody knows that.”
Realizing just how far off her plate the muffins have slid, her audience of one can no longer hold back his nervous mirth.
“What,” she askes his broadening chuckle, “you don’t believe me?”
“No,” he laughs. “No, I don’t.”
“You’re laughing at me?” She squints.
“Yes, yes I am.”
“Proof!” She barks, then settles back, her lips a tight, confident bow of self-satisfaction; her point has been proven via its lack of acceptance. Game, set and mulch.
The nature of the conversation – the lizardmen, the spaceships, the absolute denial of common sense coupled with an ignorance and twisting of natural and historical facts – transports me back to my five years as the world’s most unlikely new-age bookstore employee. During my time there, I noted just such a disturbing tendency for the most mundane of conversations to suddenly veer off into the astronomically ridiculous. The usage of common terms that would spark inane offense; the political conversations that would take unexpected hairpin turns into conspiracy, astrology, and numerology; the most blatant pillars of tissue-thin ignorance supporting fantastically arcing canopies of dangerous fantasy; the dearth of humor.
Over the years, having gnawed endlessly at such perplexities, I have come to the conclusion that they, like so much of the rest of ill-advised human behavior, pivot on fear: fear of not fitting in, of being left out, of not understanding, of not having control. To give in to these nonsensical theories is to release one’s self from the burden of uncertainty; to enter refreshed into a calming world where at least you and your philosophical compatriots know better than anyone else what’s going on, no matter how dark or ridiculous that is. Whether you feel yourself one of your god’s faithful few or a soldier in the army of the illuminated, you join a club of those who have a special knowledge, a wonderful gift unhindered by and raising you up above the seemingly ugly facts of the hard, cold world around you in which you do not seem to fit. Wittingly or not, you take upon you the cloak of what you avoid and become that which you rail against; disparity, denial, blindness. Laughing at the fools around you, you transform yourself into something as terrible and improbable as one of the Draco Reptilian Overlords.
I spend a good deal of my social time being righteously indignant over the oppressions endemic of the garden variety religious beliefs that permeate everything in the spiritual cafeteria of our neo-puritan society and then I run into one of these David Icke-type dingbats with dilated pupils and a hair-trigger need to spout their absurdities in an ever rising vocal timbre to whomever will listen: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!” Two minutes of that and I suddenly find myself yearning for the earnest and eager proselytizing of a bright-eyed missionary in a three-piece suit, the difference being that at least one of these people may produce something of worth while in their delusion; at least one has the potential to eventually see far enough past their own asshole to scramble out whole.
Getting off the bus some thirty minutes later, I warn the driver: “Watch out for lizards.”
* she’s right, you know. I only dimly remembered her term for the perpetrators of this upcoming heinous crime but, when I punched “reptile and conspiracy” into Google – bingo – there they were: the Draco Reptilians
