The Bus Ride

This morning I did not feel like driving. Not with the barium cocktail percolating through my system from the night before. I still had half a bottle to drink, an hour before my scheduled CT-scan.

I wasn’t nauseous, just unsettled. Unwilling to fight through rush-hour traffic and to worry about finding parking downtown, I decided to take the better way, the GO bus. Let the driver worry about those things and get me there safely.

It was a good thing I wasn’t going to the States, I thought, setting off the radioactive sensors at the border. I would probably be arrested for terrorism, trying to smuggle in a "dirty" bomb.
So it was that I boarded the southbound bus almost full with regular commuters. Halfway back I found a seat and gratefully slid into it. The bus lurched forward and eased into the traffic. I tried to relax, swallowing the back-pressure of the barium. To divert my mind, I tried to calculate how much money I saved by not driving, not using gas and not having to pay the exorbitant ransom they demand for parking in the City.

The thing was I now had an hour and a quarter with nothing to do. I brought nothing to read, nothing to amuse myself. I used up not quite 10 minutes cleaning up my cell phone, getting rid of unsolicited numbers from the memory.

Now what? I looked around at my fellow travellers and tried to guess about them. The seat ahead was occupied by a burly Italian, the type I recognized from working in construction. Hardworking, hard-driving men, swearwords punctuating every sentence. Him I knew all too well. My eye skipped to a young man, phones in his ear, listening to his music; he was in a different word.

Across the aisle sat a Middle Eastern woman, dressed in ethnic getup that covered her from head to toe, but her face was free, radiating a healthy, burnished glow. She had a wonderful smooth complexion that reminded me of sandalwood. No blemish to be seen. Her nose was straight, delicate, what one would call aquiline. Her lips were precise, perfectly formed. Graceful thin eyebrows arched across her forehead. Everything about her testified of her heritage, the composition of her face, the quiet repose of her features.

Her dark eyes flashed at me, saw me looking, and just as quickly veered away. I too averted my eyes, but soon found myself returning to her.

She was dressed in layers of colourful flower-print cloth, slightly bulky in the manner of eastern fashion, hiding female contours. All the covering, though, directed the viewer’s gaze back to her face, so unlined, so radiant, the kind advertisers stage in skin commercials. But this was not applied or airbrushed, it was natural and unaffected.

She had a tote bag cradled in her lap, something native in texture and design. Her hands rested around it, the fingers interlaced. From time to time she shifted her weight, her hands moved gracefully to counterbalance the motion. Mostly she was cocooned in an aura of calmness that expressed a dignified reserve.

She wasn’t willowy anymore and I guessed her age at 35, though her face did not say so. Time had left no marks on her smooth skin. More than likely she was a mother, and given an early marriage, maybe even a grandmother. There was a sense of maturity about her, even a suggestion of wisdom. Was I reading too much into her self-possessed repose?

Personally, I know no Mid-Eastern people close up. What I knew came from movies, news flashes, and prejudices built up over many years. And those haven’t been kind of late. In reality though I had no reason to despise them, or to like them for that matter. I was largely unaware of the cultural nuances.

For instance, did her calmness came from resignation, that she, as a woman, was powerless in her own society? Was it her dignity born out of endurance, that had experienced the full range of good and bad? Marginalized perhaps, even repressed? Was it just a quiet fortitude? Her part of the world was in turmoil. Full of wars, conflicts and terrorism. Centuries of ingrained customs and inflexible conservatism.

Yet she did not have the black dress of martyrdom. No bitter lines marred her expression. No frown crossed her brows, no tension etched her cheeks. She was a piece of polished sandalwood, sculptured, balanced and centered within herself.

Was she perhaps high born? An elite of her race, entitled? No, that not. Or she would have worn something internationally elegant, high quality but muted. She was committed to her heritage, her attire declared it.

Was she happy in Canada? Did she assimilate successfully? Certainly not fully, again her clothes set her apart. Probably she had to balance between two values, from the old country and the new.

Coming from a different word myself, I knew what it was to be considered alien, a stranger, stupid for not knowing the language, low caste for an accent and the funny way of talking. Yes, I felt sympathy for her, sympathy for myself, for the boy who had grown up trying to fit in. Could I say all that with a single look?

Sensing my scrutiny, she turned her eyes on me. This time she did not veer away, but looked on, challenging. She caught me staring, an act considered rude in her culture. With difficulty, I kept my eyes locked on her. And for half a second, we traded looks. Her eyes were deep obsidian, the kind of darkness that swallowed light. Did I imagine seeing sparks in them?

As we maintained this lock, the eyes spoke their own language. The biases and preconceptions melted away, the contact became human in which her gender, her ethnicity disappeared, it became a face to face contact, undefended, unpretentious. I felt a flush of kinship with her, a feeling of sharing and a connection so rarely found in life. She was feeling something similar, I swear, she had to be, the connectivity had to be induced from both sides. I was mesmerized by the experience, one on one, human to human, without an agenda or other ambitions.

Then ... then my male reactions betrayed me. My eyes looked down on her chest, unintended, on their own, I swear. Mortified I looked up. Her face had become blank, her eyes guarded as she looked out the window. Whatever it had been was lost. We were strangers again.

Why had I done that? There had been such a sense of sharing, and now like a gift snatched away, by my own foolish reaction.

Next stop, she got off and I registered her walk, compact and purposeful, her posture ever dignified. She knew where she was going in life. Again I chewed on myself for losing an opportunity. But for what exactly? Perhaps for a rare insight that flashes and illuminates everything else, the connected and the unconnected. I felt like I had been on a threshold of something, but now the door had closed. I had mishandled the situation.

A black man sat down where she had been. He was so dark that all his features disappeared into a black hole. That is until he smiled. The teeth, whiter than white, dazzled me. Then I saw the eyes, dark orbs in a dark face. Again I was conscious of a rising recognition. However, having been burned once, I looked away and closed my eyes. I had no energy to decipher a new language.

Later on in the day, as I was lying in my hospital gown on the board with the donut of the CT- machine over me singing its electronic song, I found the technician looking down at me reciting her standard caution, "You might feel some tingling or a flush of warmth as the dye diffuses into your blood stream . . ." She was fussing with my IV, injecting new chemicals to increase contrast, she said. Was the liter of barium not enough already?

I looked up, she looked down, her eyes distant above her face mask. What did she see? Me? Or just the sickness she was trying to measure, to diagnose or monitor. "Take a breath and hold it ... now you can breathe normally." The machine about me hummed, taking electronic slices of me. Cross section after cross section. Hold still, do not move, I told myself, we want clear resolutions. "My God, she gets to look at all this, slice by slice, and she will know me more intimately than my wife knows me. She will know in detail, what was deteriorating, degenerating, atrophying, or enlarging, swelling and growing, what is out of whack. But still not know me at all. She sees only the container but not the real content.

Her eye remained solicitously professional. And again I had to wonder about the language of the eyes. What they say, what they read and take away. Did she see anxiety reflected in mine that ... that she might find something?

I closed my eyes to shut her out of my mind and soul, trying to think of something else.
"I wonder what are we’re having for supper tonight?" At the thought of food, the barium lurched and glowed in my stomach. I wonder if the CT-scan caught all that?