THE WAITING ROOM FOR THE CHINATOWN EXPRESS (or Dragon Coach or Today Bus-it goes by many names) sits in the basement of a modest two-story townhouse, two doors down from the 6th and I Streets Synagogue and across the street from the redbrick Fujian Residents' Association and the barely standing Teddy's House of Comedy Restaurant and Tavern. This is Washington at its most eclectic.
A television was playing low by the door: some grainy black-and-white movie that looked as if it ought to be starring Ray Milland. One of those church-social-size coffee urns steamed and sputtered on a Formica-topped table. The half dozen chairs were taken up by a motley collection of students, wizened Chinese-American ancients, and a pair of hard-looking women. I thought I recognized one of them from Rhode Island Avenue. Maybe the smoke had driven her to high ground.
The rest of us stood against the walls, trying not to think about what we were doing waiting for a bus at three-fifteen in the morning. The price
was right, though: twenty dollars one way to Manhattan, thirty dollars round-trip. If the traffic cooperated, the trip took only an hour longer than by rail. It was the safest way I could get up to see O'Neill to get a copy of the documents without leaving a trace. Unlike the shuttle or the Metroliner, there was no chance I'd have to show an ID. And the buses ran all night long.
I was surprised when I stepped out on the street to see more people waiting: what looked like a rock band complete with drum set, a pair of mothers each with sprawls of children, two guys who might have been pimps for the two women inside. Our Chinatown-to-Chinatown express was going to be standing room only if we picked up many more passengers in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Just at the edge of the crowd, leaning against the side of the stoop of the building next door, was a dark pile of some sort-clothing or people. I walked over and bent down for a look. An old woman was leaning against the steps, asleep, her face half covered by a worn black shawl. The rest of her seemed to disappear into its folds. In the woman's lap, cradled in her arms, also wrapped in black, was a little girl: four, five, six years old; I've never been able to tell.
I'd seen this tableau a thousand times, from Khartoum to Kabul- grandmother and granddaughter, destiny's orphans-and my response was always the same. I looked for bulges, barrels under the shawl, wires, anything out of the usual, anything to suggest that what I was seeing was what I was supposed to see, not what really was. That's how you stay alive in my world. Then the rock band shifted its drum set so that the streetlight fell on my human pile, and I felt as if I were seeing some kind of tableau of my own life.
I had no way of knowing. She could have been Afghan or Iranian. There were too many ruts in her face to say anything for sure, but in that instant when the street lamp first hit her, I was willing to bet the grandmother I was staring at was Baluch. She had the nose, the eyes, the forehead of my friend's mother who had taken me in when my own mother set across the desert for a life without me. She might even have been my stepmother if I hadn't known for certain that she had been dead twenty years,
but yes, I did make that leap, just for a second, beyond time, beyond this overwhelming doubt, beyond the suspicion beaten into me by every experience I could think of, to some innocent land where miracles do happen.
Then the grandmother shifted slightly in her sleep and the little girl opened her eyes with that stunned amazement kids have when they're pulled from dreams, and I truly was floored. It was Rikki, a look I loved from that brief moment when she had been that age and Marissa and I really were a family. Christ, I wanted to see Rikki so badly, the one true thing I knew anymore. Maybe next week. Or the week after.
I was thinking that maybe I had found that miracle land after all; thinking that I would sit with these two on the way to New York, that we could talk, swap life stories; that for once I might really tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and that maybe the old woman would tell me a truth in return-tell me how we had all come to live in a world as fucked up as this one, tell me how I had fallen into a life that piled betrayal on betrayal on betrayal-when I heard a rumbling and a rush of air behind me and turned around to find the bus, door open, ready for us to board. The Chinatown express was a luxury liner.
"Grandma," I said in Baluch, hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. "It's here. Time to get on board. I'll help you."
"No," she answered, unsurprised to find someone speaking her tongue in Washington, D.C. "No. We're waiting."
The little girl's eyes were open wide now, too. Waiting for what?