Boarding the bus in the village of East Hampton, Jonas selected a window seat on the side behind the driver, across the aisle from a man in a light plaid jacket, too light for the wintry weather. Jonas lifted a newspaper from the aisle seat beside him.
"This your paper?" he asked the man, who had a spray of uneven gray stubble across his chin.
"Ain't interested in bad news," said the man.
"They got good news too," Jonas said, flipping through the pages.
"Nor good news neither," said the man in plaid, throwing Jonas a sidelong look. "I stay away—from the bad and the good."
Heading to Sag Harbor next, the bus pulled over to the shoulder of Rte 114, and a woman in the rear with two heavy shopping bags made her way to the door in front.
"Take that woman," the man in plaid said, lowering his voice as she descended one step at a time, "carrying home the day's booty."
"So loaded down, she can barely make it out the door," said Jonas.
"Acquisition is nothing but a jumping off point, the last stop before renunciation."
"What are you, a preacher?" said Jonas.
"Oh I'm a preacher alright."
"Sound like you're from the south."
"From the South Fork of Long Island!" chortled the man in plaid.
Dropping the paper on the seat beside him, Jonas turned back to his window and sat awhile opening and closing his hands.
"Where you headed on this chilly April morning, young friend?" asked the man.
"Riverhead. Going to see about a job."
"Going upstream," the man said, nodding. "This time of year, most folks come this way to procure their riches."
"Need to find something year-round," said Jonas.
"I'd be happy to wish you luck," said the man in plaid. "But unless my luck is good, it ain't going to help. You better wish me luck first." The man paused to catch Jonas's eyes with his. "If there were any such thing," he added.
The man in plaid stood up, stepped into the aisle, turned to face the scattered passengers, and raised his hands beside his shoulders.
"Good afternoon," he said. "I am here today to tell you not the truth that seems but the truth that is. Not what passes by the windows but what does not pass, what stays."
The man paused and looked at Jonas a moment to gather himself, holding his eyes on the young man as if he were a bellwether.
"Take for example, love," he said to the passengers. "L-O-V-E. There ain't no such thing. Not where you been, nor where you are headed. And I can prove it. Not with logic—can't prove anything with logic but what seems. But first—" The man in plaid paused, peering at a heavyset woman in a white uniform several rows back who sat gazing out her window, some Hamptons homeowners still requiring their nannies and maids to dress the part.
"If you don't mind, Mam," he said, "if there ain't no ears receiving, there ain't no words being said."
The woman turned a blank gaze to him.
"Here's why love ain't. Not because we're animals, hard wired to procreate. Not because we are the puppets of Mama Nature, filled with evanescent delusions to ward off the knowledge of our imminent demise—no, not as a hedge against mortality, nor against consciousness. Those are reasons, interesting reasons, sensible reasons, but reasons born of seeming. We bipeds with our oversized masses of gray matter, line up the events of the world, arrange them, put one before another and call a cause, a linear march toward progress, what is nothing but a circle—a tautology."
The man paused, eying the nurse or chambermaid, his lips pursed to contain his pleasure, then ran his eyes across the others.
"Love, such as it is, such as you all think it is, may put a butterfly in your stomach, a pitter patter in your chest, but those are merely signs of trepidation, of fear, anxiousness. Because the instant you feel desire, you become afraid of losing its object, fearing rejection from what you never had in the first place! No, it ain't the things that do exist that has you tossing and turning, dreading the rising sun, it's the things that don't.
"Or take hope. I'm not saying what you hope for don't exist, I'm saying hope itself does not. Which is exactly the delusion my young friend is trying so hard to fend off, living out here on the East End, riding a bus to Riverhead to find a job. You're all traveling back to the homes you can afford, but not my friend here, moving like Jeremiah against the tide." He turned to Jonas, tipping his head forward in respect. "You, son, are only being pragmatic. To imbibe the hope, gorge yourself on the tide of seasonal windfall, would be to set yourself up for an off-season of destitution and despair."
The man in plaid pulled in a breath, turned back to his disinterested audience. "Of course," he said, "if the hope don't exist, then neither does the despair." He ran his eyes from person to person. "What is needed is not a renunciation but a purgation. A purgation of whatever it was you swallowed that give you the hope, the desire to come east toward the wealth like mice to crumbs. Pursuing an evanescence that impels you each day to rake the leaves and swab the toilets of the aristocracy. Purge that which cannot be digested because it is not what it seems—one thing masquerading as another, poison disguised as hope.
"And when you vomit, when you reverse the course of that which has through seduction gained entry, what will you taste? Bile, acid. Poison. Even you young fellow"—he turned again to Jonas—"in your modesty, going against the tide of seekers, traveling one way just to come back the other, place a finger in your throat and bring it up—the fetid air of hope you have swallowed lest it putrefy into despair, what seems to be despair. Purge yourself, my young amigo, of the false notion of mobility, of commuting, with or against—if the grass ain't greener on that side, then neither is it on this. Do not be fooled by the seagull's silhouette.
"Purge yourself of the illusion of upward mobility and self-fortification—the antibacterial soap, the exercise bike, the savings account—as if anything can be saved! Expel the life that does not exist, beside which the life that does"—he spun back to the other passengers—"beside which you, my darlings, you, can only fail to measure up. Regurgitate the stories against which you pale and quiver and disappear!"
The man stood still, raising his hands again to his shoulders, and pulled in a final breath.
"Rejoice in this precise moment. Because whatever the accoutrements to waylay your unease—your cul-de-sacs named Daffodil and Honey Suckle; your congressmen with tanned faces in the wintertime; your eight-seat SUVs that stop to let you cross—No thank you, madam, I will take my chances!—I who live here, who stays here, succumbing to gravity rather than pursuing the illusion of transcendence—the Boeing 747, the Caribbean all-inclusive , the smartphone—will ingest it all—your moments of condescending consideration, your pithy aspirations framed upon your work desks, your prayers at bedtime—and vomit it back up, and in so doing, make it what it is and me what I am. Refusing to partake in the illusions of consumption and mobility—as if we might outrun the consequences—I will swallow whole the tawdry world of make believe and will, without any bromide to make it palatable—neither Pepto Bismal, nor spin class, nor a soaring bull market—spit it back up, and in so doing will rediscover myself, standing right here"—the man lifted one knee and brought his foot down hard against the floor—"fully restored!"
The man in plaid surveyed the impassive faces of the passengers, watching the words he had released rebound off them like ocean waves off a bulkhead, then lowered himself back into his seat.
"That was something," Jonas said, feeling a bit calmer, less anxious about the impending job interview.
"Yes it was," said the man.
"Now what are you going to do?" asked Jonas, the bus slowing for its final stop in Riverhead.
"First, I'm going to cash my gov'ment check for seven hundred fifty-three dollars," said the man in plaid. He leaned across the aisle and gripped Jonas's forearm with long boney fingers. "Then I'm going to meet Miss Maureen Dobbins, my concubine of twenty-seven years, and we will check into a street-facing room at the Riverhead Motel, open wide the curtains, and watch the people go one way and then go back the other."