“I know what that’s like,” Mimi said. “I hadn’t spoken more than three words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail house, proofreading the mailing labels. No one wanted to say anything to me, and I just wanted to disappear. It was soothing, in a way, reading all those names. I’d dropped out of school after Christmas break, just didn’t bother going back again, never paid my tuition. I threw away my houseplants and flushed my fish down the toilet so that there wouldn’t be any living thing that depended on me.”
She worked her hand between his thigh and the seat.
“Krishna sat next to me on the subway. I was leaning forward because my wings were long—the longest they’ve ever been—and wearing a big parka over them. He leaned forward to match me and tapped me on the shoulder.
“I turned to look at him and he said, ‘I get off at the next stop. Will you get off with me and have a cup of coffee? I’ve been riding next to you on the subway for a month, and I want to find out what you’re like.’
“I wouldn’t have done it, except before I knew what I was doing, I’d already said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ because I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. And once I’d said that, once I’d spoken, I couldn’t bear the thought of not speaking again.”
They blew through Kapuskasing at ten a.m., on a grey morning that dawned with drizzle and bad-tempered clouds low overhead. The little main drag—which Alan remembered as a bustling center of commerce where he’d waited out half a day to change buses—was deserted, the only evidence of habitation the occasional car pulling through a donut store drive-through lane.
“Jesus, who divorced me this time?” Mimi said, ungumming her eyes and stuffing a fresh cigarette into her mouth.
“Fear and Loathing again, right?”
“It’s the road-trip novel,” she said.