The Paper Man - Gallagher Lawson

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was happening in the city—art galleries, movie houses, all-night bookshops, concerts.

      “Is it dangerous?”

      The man laughed. It was so loud people nearby glanced at them. Michael tried to lower his head.

      “The city’s anarchists are the problem. Criminals have been in the pockets of the politicians for too long.”

      It was Michael’s turn to shrug.

      “That’s right,” the man said, grinning. “Just like all the others, ignore all the problems and pretend everything is okay. You got your entry form squared away, right?”

      Michael didn’t say anything. The man scoffed.

      “Good luck in the city!”

      The possibility had never occurred to him that he would not be permitted entry. What would he do then? He couldn’t go back. He had often heard his brothers complaining about the city’s problems and how it prevented them from expanding their coffee business, but he had always reasoned that they were intimidated or scared. Perhaps their truck’s axles could not handle the drive over the mountains? What little he had read in the newspaper never mentioned the situation had turned. The city, as he understood it, was a place where he could finally fit in, and this news prompted him to sit up anxiously, as the curtain in the window shifted and splashed sunlight onto his expressionless face.

      The man’s single eye widened. His lip curled as he finally recognized something was different. “Do all inlanders look like you?”

      If Michael had real skin, he would have blushed. He would have given away that he didn’t like talking about his appearance or being singled out as representative of inlanders—a term he hated and hoped to leave behind. If he had real skin, he wouldn’t need to say a single word to explain all of this—it would all have been said through his body. But he didn’t.

      “I don’t look like them, and they don’t look like me,” Michael said.

      The man continued to stare, but a cruel little smile rose on his lips. This confused Michael—after all, the man himself sported an eye patch, so why would he stare as though he didn’t understand? Michael pulled the curtain to hide again in the shade.

      “There was an accident,” he finally said. “I didn’t always look this way.”

      “So what happened?” The man raised his hand to touch Michael’s face, an echo of the uniformed man reaching toward him. Michael leaned against the wall, realizing how trapped he was in this small space. When the hand, large with filthy fingernails, attempted to reach forward again, Michael panicked and heard himself lash out.

      “And your eye? You did all that damage at the funeral office, but what did they do to you?”

      The man’s skin rippled with rage, something Michael wished his own could do. Inside was a distant building of some feeling; since his mind was so separated from his body it took time to register what was happening within.

      “Or maybe you’re wearing a patch for the fun of it? That’s certainly why I’m this way. Just to be different.” His own voice was trembling. He hated himself when that happened. He identified the feeling inside—he was terrified and completely vulnerable. Overwhelmed, he surrendered his nostrils to the surrounding smells: coffee from his case. Lemon and laurel. Diesel and dirt. Camphor.

      “Excuse me!” The woman across from them was now awake, grimacing. A few others in the surrounding rows turned, including the woman who had her lemons taken away. Michael shriveled from all the attention.

      The woman, whose blanket smelled of camphor, continued: “Will someone shut this boy up!”

      He grabbed his valise and dashed for the back of the bus.

      The last row was a single broken chair missing the seat cushion. By propping his case over the armrests, he was able to make his own seat. There he pulled out his ledger and began to draw the face of the one-eyed man. Michael’s hands were clumsy, and most of his drawings, made to calm himself or release any unwanted feelings—a habit that had turned instinctual—would have appeared to most people to be made by a child. He exaggerated whatever he saw. Sketching the man, Michael added—instead of an eye patch—a large egg lodged in the man’s face. This was Michael’s style. Style, he thought, was what made you unique. And to create things, whether on paper or with paint or metal, required style. He drew to develop his style but also to take out his frustrations and anger on his subjects. Acts he could not commit in real life, therefore, were staged and practiced on the page.

      He tried to ignore what the man had said. There had to be a way for him to enter the city. Leading up to his departure, he had already begun to imagine himself living there. Perhaps as an artist, perhaps as someone with friends who looked different too. Any situation was better than rotting away inland.

      For several hours, he watched the road and changing landscape. The inland was far gone. No inspectors were looking for him. Inside he continued to daydream, while outside the sparse shrubs and hills of sediment began dwindling. Finally, as the sun was setting, the bus descended the highway down the last hill, revealing the first glimpse of the city. Michael’s fear faded, and he tucked his head under the curtain for a better view.

      The city rose from the top of the large peninsula, which was shaped like a ragged ellipse, with a bay on the east and the vast ocean to the west. A thin isthmus attached this autonomous southern region to the northern continent, a vast sprawling land filled with a network of cooperatives and city-states. But they were all uniform and had no real presence, Michael had heard, nothing to compare with the dazzling city that overlooked the great eastern bay. Towering buildings with impenetrable glass shimmered with the setting sun, matching the ocean beyond them. What was inside them? The north coast was a sharply rising hill with a cliff that faced the bay, covered by a canopy of trees. In the middle of the trees stood a white lighthouse, overlooking the ships entering and leaving the harbor. Michael took a deep breath, imagining the scent of salt water and secrets buried deep in the ocean. He was no longer an inlander. He would be an urbanite.

      Yet as the highway off-ramp curved and his anticipation grew, something appeared in the road ahead: a slumped body with a sickly iridescence.

      “Look out!” he shouted. The heads in front of him looked in every direction.

      He was thrown forward. The bus skidded and swerved to the right. The wheels moaned louder than any dying animal he had heard inland. They slammed against a cement wall. A moment later something broke, a heavy sound of metal separating from metal, and the bus fell forward. Suitcases pinwheeled down the aisle, and bags from the storage shelves above dropped like falling fruit. Passengers on the left were flung to the right, screaming, salmon-pink mouths gaping.

      As Michael plunged through the air toward the front of the bus, along with the suitcases and bags and newspapers from other passengers, he was surprised to find he could see everything very distinctly at once: he saw a stray lemon tumbling down the aisle; he saw a series of hats and scarves climb over seats; he saw, through the windows, the iridescent body in the road that lay motionless, and at the same time he saw the other side of the canal they had fallen into and that the bus was teetering on the cement wall that divided the street from the sewer; and he saw himself, in mid-air, somersaulting, snagging his blazer on one of the armrests, sensing a sharp tear in his body; and then he saw himself falling slowly, past the two stowaway silverfish, and it seemed to him that he could die, if not by smashing into the glass at the front of the bus then at the moment when the bus would finally fall into the canal and be swept away by the waters. At that moment, a sadness, a heavy feeling of regret, sank with him to the ground, as he understood that just when he thought his new life was beginning it was already over.

      A blast of humid air entered the bus.

      An overzealous young man with a barking voice had opened a side window as an emergency exit and commanded that everyone waste no time and climb out. Michael, though, lay on the ground, watching this exodus, numb, trying to make sense,

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