The Seven

All was gray—street, sky, cars, pigeons, buildings. Except it was not: there were bright yellow lines on the road, a purple umbrella, flashes of red hair. Strange, how the scene registered as so monotone, even when it wasn’t. Or was it the girl’s dreary mood, tinting the world gray? It was depressing, really—the idea that her mood alone could render the world so dismal.

Movement around her. The bus halted with sudden noise, but it hardly registered in the city’s tumult. The small cluster of people waiting perked to attention as one, the most life they had shown in the past ten minutes. People climbed on, desperate to claim a place so few of them actually wanted to have. They were eager to get to the other side of their journey, of course, but in the moment they seemed so foolish as they jostled onto the dirty seats, heedless of their surroundings and driven only by desire for their destination. Wasn’t there that town in a book—The Phantom Tollbooth, she remembered—where the world had disappeared for lack of attention? Yes, that was it—everyone walked too fast and cared only about where they were going, not where they were. The prescience of it had always struck her. Though it was published in 1961, decades before cell phones or virtual reality, it held a warning for the ages.

She boarded the bus reluctantly, unintentionally glaring at the world around her, until the driver caught her eye and she was embarrassed to be so annoyed about a short ride in front of someone whose daily life involved hours of steering this metal contraption from a worn-out seat. The bus driver was a stocky, middle-aged woman in a forest green fleece and bandanna. The girl gave her a smile as she tapped her underused card, inwardly apologizing for her rudeness.

The woman nodded at each passenger in turn, their faces blurring into the hundreds she saw for mere moments every day. It was her job to be constant, calm, impersonal, her job to reduce her personality to hands that could be trusted to hold a steering wheel. The newest crew was full of interesting characters, like the skinny teenager with a drooping ponytail who smiled at her almost apologetically, as if she were an added burden to her load. What did she have to feel guilty for? This generation was strange. Teenagers were supposed to sail through the world as if they could cause no harm, not trip over their feet in fear of having made some invisible mistake. Her attention was drawn to a woman walking onto the bus with two children in tow. The elder, about seven, was wearing a navy sweatshirt and pink leggings with silver stars on them. The younger, maybe five, was clinging to a plastic figurine—a dinosaur, upon closer inspection.

If she had asked him, he could have told her it was a Velociraptor, which lived during the Late Cretaceous Epoch. People—especially his teachers—were always surprised by his knowledge of dinosaurs, which made him smug, but also irritated. His antipathy toward subtraction didn’t mean he couldn’t understand the Late Cretaceous Epoch. Frustration rising, he kicked the bus pole. People stared at him. He buried his head in his mother’s skirt. Why wouldn’t they leave him alone?

Poor kid. He must feel so trapped on this dusty, noisy bus, unable to run free through the world. A young man gave him an encouraging look, then, when that elicited no reaction, sighed and refocused on the music blaring through his earbuds. He too was a city kid, born and raised. He had never sprinted carefree through some idyllic green meadow, adrenaline coursing through his body. He was skeptical that grass could induce such euphoria; maybe it was only a fantasy. Who alive could now vouch for that form of physical freedom anyway, with everyone cooped up in cars and offices and schools? He pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. Maybe his grandfather could have, but he would never know for sure; he hadn’t bothered to pay much attention to the old stories. It was a timeless regret: the desire for a second chance, the ruefulness at having lost one’s only opportunity for information, connection, appreciation. Humans never learned lessons, they tired of them—called them clichés—but ignored the fact that those clichés were still relevant. Repetition and memory are not the same as comprehension and internalization.

The bus pulled forward, throwing everyone into their neighbors. The girl stared out the window at the cityscape creeping past, buildings that contained so many people, so many stories, invisible to the naked eye. The more they built and constructed, the faster they moved through space, the less they saw, just like those poor souls envisioned in The Phantom Tollbooth. Imagination was supposed to be the place where new, original, ideas were created, but they were never totally new, she decided. They were always a reflection, a distortion, an exaggeration of real life. This bus was real life, in all its dull and ordinary glory. These people were real life, staring at their phones, absent and inscrutable to the outside world. Only one adult was not attached to a glowing screen—a young woman in a skirt and jacket, bent over and scribbling in a book. Her hand obscured the title; there was no way of knowing if it was a legal handbook for an important trial or a cheap student copy of some old classic.

To the disappointment of the woman’s parents, who had always dreamed of their daughter becoming a high profile attorney, it was the latter—a flimsy paperback of Milton’s Paradise Lost. She crossed and uncrossed her legs uncomfortably, worrying that the cheap hosiery would snag at any moment. She had to be ready to discuss the book at her class that night, but her day would be filled with numbers and spreadsheets under the oppressive lights of her office job. Everything in the world was divided into boxes—spreadsheets, cubicles, buses, buildings. Why boxes? Why so many corners and lines? Wasn’t the planet itself round? 

The bus stopped in front of a graffitied storefront, and an older woman climbed on, swathed in a mountain of scarves—a shield or a trap, it was impossible to know. She brushed a hand across her shoulder, as if clearing it of dust, or perhaps fur.

It was fur from her cat. A cat the color of sandstone, with patches of snow showing through—if snow had ever appeared in a landscape with sandstone. The cat loved her scarves, loved to leap through them, to bat at the tassels, to curl up in their security. It had been the cat, in fact, who had inspired her to start collecting scarves, after he played with a polka-dotted one, a gift from her sister, until it was little more than shreds. Now she had no shortage, and her arrival home was doubly exciting for the feline because she brought the scarves along with herself. Another stop and she left the bus, hastening home to the awaiting cat.

The not-a-lawyer woman left too, and, one stop later, so did the young man with earbuds. In exchange, a trio of college students and a man in a bright orange coat joined them. The mother and her two children still remained. The mother whispered something in her daughter’s ear, prompting her to grin. Good news—a promise of some special treat—to brighten this undeniably ordinary day. Except it wasn’t an ordinary day at all, it was the girl’s birthday, and her mother was surprising her with a trip to her favorite bakery. Her brother had originally disliked the plan as yet more proof of his parent’s seeming preference for his sister, but he had been partially consoled with the newest addition to his dinosaur collection.

The bus stalled, then jolted forward with great effort. What would the bus say if it could talk? This machine was doing everyone’s work for it, saving them the trouble of making their own journeys. The girl almost pitied it, but then again she was pitying everything that day, whether or not she had any proof that they deserved it. Except maybe they all deserved pity for being stuck on a battered bus in a battered city in a battered world. 

The buildings shrank, spread out, lost some of their metallic uniformity. The girl knew these streets, registered the buildings like an internal checklist, making sure each one was where and as it should be. Her stop came, the outside world awaited. The sky was just as gray, but it was no longer as dull against the green of the yards and the red of the brick. Expand those yards tenfold, and you would perhaps have the meadow the man with earbuds had imagined. Add an extra story to the houses, and they might resemble the sort the woman’s parents wished for her, rather than living in a crowded apartment with three roommates. Travel back some millennia, and the boy would be thrilled by the creatures roaming this wild land. They were tantalizing hints of dreams that would never come true. The girl glanced back at the woman with her two children and had the urge to say something, something hopeful, something meaningful, maybe just happy birthday—except she had no idea who they were, or whether it really was the girl’s birthday, or whether the boy knew anything about dinosaurs, or whether the bus driver even noticed her passengers. She hopped off the bus and took a long look in every direction, as if she could single-handedly prevent the descent into a neglected, disappearing world. The bus rocked on, carrying its multicolored load with it.