Finding Seth Haines: Part IV

On Susan Morgan and the Traveling Sardine Can

I’ve been working on a series of stories, “Finding Seth Haines.” The story is taking a turn, and I’ll likely retitle it in the future. In any event, today’s installment is the turn. If you’d like to read Part I, Part II, and Part III, feel free. But today’s story is it’s own thing—a standalone piece, you could say.

Enjoy. If you do, you can throw a tip in the virtual jar to help caffeinate this story.

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IV.

1% is a very small amount. If the world was a Utopia in Year One, for instance, and it grew 1% worse oi Year Two, it'd still be 99% Utopian in Year Two. Run the math out over a decade, and Year Ten’s return on Utopia would be 90%, which by today's standards is a dream. After forty years, it'd only be 67.12% Utopian, which my high school literature teacher, Mr. Werner, would call a D+. "Dystopia" starts with a D.

Now consider this: The Modern Tempest Trust has run this world since they learned to stand upright and use language.

This is just math, and math is nothing more than the cold calculation of facts. Stories are made of facts, which is to say stories are made of math. Math is full of repeating patterns, which is to say stories are made of repeating patterns. Everything is an equation.

Here's an equation.

In 1984, Susan Morgan of Utica New York hopped aboard an oversized, rolling sardine can and made her way to California. The 2,700-mile trip only cost a hundred dollars, which meant she spent 3.7 cents per mile. Had she taken the oversized sardine can with wings, she'd have spent nearly sixteen times that amount, and she'd not saved nearly enough to indulge that kind of equation.

As I said, it was 1984, which means both rolling and flying sardine cans carried smokers. The Tobacco Division of the MTT was still in good graces with the powers that be on account of all the money they printed. (Money is also an equation.) This was just before the Tobacco Division's scientists grew consciences and confessed that, Yes, there is a connection between smoking and certain death. and maybe the Marlboro Man might be able to rope a cow and pick off a Coyote with his heirloom Henry Repeater, but the rifle between his teeth was ripping tiny holes through his lungs. Anyway, the trip was an exercise in torture for Susan Morgan of Utica because she was asthmatic. She traveled with a blue inhaler.

Susan had never left the state of New York in her whole tiny life. The old men at the diner where she worked thought she'd never leave. Her curly black hair would turn gray waiting on those tables, and her boobs would lose their shape and her thin frame would grow gaunt. She’d still be pretty—some might say striking—though the missing upper molar on the right side of her smile would always keep her from being confused for classically beautiful. She was not the kind of woman who’d ever earn exquisite things from a gentleman.

Susan Morgan smiled a lot, especially when the old men slapped her backside or undertipped her or when her boss yelled at her for screwing up egg orders. Over easy or over hard? It's not that difficult of a thing to write on the pad, Susie.

My name is Susan, she thought but never said. Instead, she smiled and offered apologies.

From her window seat on the wheeled sardine can, Susan saw things: wind blowing through the green fields, the grass rolling as waves; the red and white tail lights at the various bus stops, smeared through drops of rain; billboards in Kansas warning sinners of eternal damnation. This is America she whispered, and the woman with the bag next to her asked What's that honey? Susan Morgan had not realized she'd said anything aloud.

Susan considered the Regular. That's what they called him even though he was anything but. He came in every morning in his black shirt and white priest collar and ordered the regular—coffee, one egg, two slices of toast. The same four things, seven days a week, 363 days a year, except on Leap Year, in which case it was 364 days a year. He tipped a dollar every day, which meant that if he’d skipped breakfast, he could have bought so many bus tickets, so many trips to see so much country. But as was the way with priests, he was anchored to a people and a place. That place was Utica.

Anyway, the Regular mostly read passages from a book with thin pages while he ate, and that little book was stained with drops of runny egg and grape jelly. Quiet was not the word Susie would have used to describe him. Maybe incisive, which was a word she'd learned in the fourth grade. Susie, you always ask the most incisive questions, Ms. Burr used to say. In her adult years, hungry men called her anything but incisive. Mostly, they called her Sweetie or Honey or Hot Pants if they slicked their hair back and carried leather briefcases.

The week before Susan left for Glendale, the Regular had taken up his regular spot, eaten his regular breakfast, and read from his thin-paged book. When he was finished, he placed a dollar bill on the table—as was his regular custom—and he thanked her.

Standing to leave, he said, Oh… one more thing: What do you want?

She cocked her head to the side as dogs do when they hear a high-pitched frequency.

This is a question Jesus asked the blind, the lame, and a few wandering men, he said.

Susan had a habit of seeing men as they were: hungry, ravenous even. This was not the case with the Regular, at least, not the way it was with so many men in her life. How had she never noticed the color of his eyes?

Blue is light seen through a veil.

I'd like to have my tooth back, she said, smiling, but this was not the answer that fumbled through her brain. The black-shirted regular cocked his head, mirroring the waitresses, looked past her eyes, and said, Try again. Then he left.

There was no reason she should have found herself in the bathroom washing her face, no reason she should have stood weeping over the tiny sink like a bullied grade-schooler at recess. But she was. And when she'd dried her face with the backside of her white apron, she pulled her inhaler from her skirt pocket and took a whiff. Walking to the front of the cafe, Susan Morgan loosed the tear- and egg-stained apron and placed it on the glass display case covering the pies. She didn't say goodbye. She just took her tips and her gap-toothed smile and walked out the front door.

This is how Susan came to be on this bus, watching America roll by. There were mountains between New York and Pennsylvania. There were oceans of corn and grass across the Midwest. Hours from now, the desert would fill her with such emptiness and homesickness that she'd feel compelled to walk into the heart of all that heat and thirst herself to death.

How could everything be so exquisitely terrible?

She’d think this question, rip a puff off her inhaler, and fall asleep, her cheek pressed against the warm window.

I could feel the warmth of that window, even though this was not my memory. I smelled the smoke and gas and the bodily fumes leaking from under the door in the bus’s rear bathroom. I looked across the hardpan of the desert, saw the cacti, wondered what it must be like to store up so much water for the dry season. I was invisible, just behind Susan’s eyes. Somehow, I’d moved through the hole and into the sardine can on wheels. How is such a thing possible?

I could not say, but this memory was not mine, and still, I remembered all of it.

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