My Beautiful Bus. Jacques Jouet

      Not you. “Yes, even me.”

      No.

      Time . . . It’s about time to leave again, time for the most distant collusions, using the rearview mirror or collective memories as the intermediary, amid the usual peacefulness of a trip without surprises, if all goes according to plan.

      Pshhhh.

      Basile turns the key to the ignition and puts the engine in gear. The motor hums, as it’s supposed to. The turn signal blinks. The bus has the right of way as it leaves its stop. In a flash, Basile thinks about his back, the compressed vertebrae, which is a common condition in his profession. Others have it worse than he does. He thinks about the required solidarity between time and space, the Siamese twins of his toil. He awaits the sight of the mansion with a bare triangular pediment that he has watched crumble to ruins over the past twenty years, little by little, in the same spot. To keep his fear at bay, he inevitably muses on his two-part obsession, each part undoing the other: the first one involves him crushing a child under the wheels of the bus, a child that turns out to be his own daughter; second, he thinks about the punishment he would have liked to wish upon himself to prevent the first: a truck ahead of him carries a heap of scrap metal. A scrap severs the strap holding it in place, takes flight as the truck passes over a bump too quickly, passes through the windshield of my beautiful bus, and decapitates Basile the driver—a negative consequence of the fact that the new roads permit higher speed limits by bypassing the center of large towns. Fortunately, the bus, for its part, still has to pass through towns, regularly exit the national highway, slow down, and snake through the old road that all of the traffic was once forced to squeeze through. The bus has to wind its way to its stops at the plazas lined with plane trees, and be received ceremoniously as the vehicle of saving grace that opens up all of the Republic’s enclaves to the rest of the world.