Neil pushed the last bottle into the recycling container. Swindon. His father almost never asked him to do things, but he had sent Neil a package back in November, saying that his friend’s daughter was also living in the UK, so he and his friend had decided to swap presents through them. It’ll be a way for you to meet someone new, Neil’s father had said. He always wanted to know if Neil was meeting new people, which was sort of funny, because Neil was pretty sure it was a hereditary awkwardness passed on to him through his father that kept him from meeting new people, and that, when he did, kept him from saying the interesting things that would make them want to be his friends.
From the shape of the gift, Neil could tell that it was one of the miniature handcrafted bow-and-arrow sets his father liked to buy from the Ute ladies, who sold them for surprisingly high prices outside the Conoco at Christmastime. The present had sat under Neil’s bed since then, and every time he planned to take the bus to Swindon—which it turned out was a long way from London—something came up or he forgot, and he had to call what’s-her-name (what was her name?) and make up some excuse. Okay, iss okay, she would say. You come next week okay?
One of the bottles hadn’t been entirely empty, and Neil’s hands were sticky with wine. He wiped them on his jeans. It would be nice not to have his father’s package under his bed anymore, reminding Neil of home every time he looked for his sneakers. It was wrapped in the same Santa Claus paper Nan and Pop had always used. Nan used to tuck a dollar bill, new from the bank, into the paper as an incentive not to tear it, and each Christmas Neil and his cousins dissected their gifts, slicing Scotch tape with their thumbnails and sliding out whatever was inside. Nan would scoop up the paper and smooth the creases out of Santa’s beard to use again next year—it became a family joke, since obviously she could have just saved those dollar bills and bought more wrapping paper. Neil had put his father’s present under his bed in the first place because it was depressing. When he turned the package over he could see that one edge of the Santa Claus paper was cut in a sawtooth pattern and there was a bit of yellowed tape where it had been attached to the cardboard cylinder, showing that his father had finally used up the last of the roll. Nan had died when Neil was about to start high school and now Pop was gone too, but somehow Neil hadn’t imagined that even the Santa Claus wrapping paper would come to an end.
The clock was just striking ten. If he hurried, he could probably make the bus. After he’d delivered the Christmas present he would call his father and tell him that Professor Piot had picked Neil to be one of his research assistants for the summer. Neil had found out two weeks earlier and it was a big deal—Professor Piot was practically famous. Plus he got to go to Paris for the summer. Neil had almost called his father with the news a couple of times already, but didn’t. Neither of them was very good on the phone, and the last time they’d talked, back in January, they’d had what was almost an argument and Neil had said some unnecessary things. He knew he should have called his father back and apologized, even if it wasn’t really his fault. But with the present still under his bed he’d put it off, knowing his dad was sure to ask whether he’d made it out to Swindon.
On the bus Neil’s hangover really got going. His stomach felt empty, but also like it wanted to be emptier; he took a few deep breaths. As they bounced along the little streets leading out of London he felt each dip and speed hump add to the disorder of his gut. He wished he’d bought a bag of the curry crisps Veejay swore by. He wished he were at home in bed. He caught sight of a homeless person asleep in a doorway and would have pawned whatever social privilege he’d been born into if it meant trading the jostling bus for the sidewalk, which moved only very slowly as the earth spun on its axis, the planets rotated around the sun, tectonic plates shifted and—
Neil’s stomach gave a small, terrible hiccup, its contents apparently seeking a more stable environment. He looked around. The door to the lavatory was taped shut, the bus windows weren’t the kind that opened. The seat beside him was empty, but across the aisle there was a woman and a little girl. The girl was sleeping the determined sleep of a child on a bus and the woman’s eyes were closed. Her hair was twisted on top of her head in an African cloth and the weight of it made her chin dip down onto her chest. Each time her chin touched down, her eyes opened. Nothing would spoil her bus ride like watching Neil throw up all over his seat.
Now the speed humps were gone and they were stuck in traffic. The bus lurched into an intersection and stopped. The light was green but no one moved. It turned red, then green again. Next to them a truck’s engine stalled and started up with a puff of bluish smoke. The light turned red, and the cloud of truck exhaust floated up and made it purple.
In his lecture on the Second Industrial Revolution, Professor Piot had brought blackened, half-eroded bricks to class to show the effects of air pollution in London at the turn of the century. Umbrellas are black even today, he told them, because they first came into fashion when that was the color of the rain, and in the late Victorian era silver tarnished so quickly that people stopped eating off it—although it could have been due to socioeconomic factors as well. As factory jobs became more plentiful and the price of labor rose it would have been more expensive to hire servants to polish all those cool heavy plates . . . They were moving again. Neil leaned against the cool glass of the window, imagining Victorians pressing their aching heads to gravy bowls. The bus picked up speed, the suburbs passed by behind a smudge on the glass. Letting his thoughts smudge with them, Neil fell asleep.