Liz's car dodged its way through the tangle of freeways at speeds ranging from a crawl to a blur. At precisely quarter to nine, we arrived in the parking lot of the terrible fast-food joint where I had been told my bus would soon appear under the black sky.

I got out and ducked into the restaurant to be sure I had the right place. The guy at the counter pointed out the window down an alley a little way where the bus already huddled behind the chain-link fence.

As Liz and I said our good-byes next to her open driver's door, Liz looked sad, and I didn't enjoy leaving her either, but the idea of escaping the eerie stasis of Los Angeles had become irresistible. We hugged, I pulled my bags from her back seat and then I walked to the end of the line of people paying and getting on. I watched Liz and her tail-lights slip out of the parking lot, and I gave them one last wave as they disappeared around a corner.

Waiting in line, I reminded myself that the many stops and slow speed of the bus meant we wouldn't reach San Francisco until morning. Trying to gauge what sort of conversations I'd be having for the next nine hours, I looked over the other people getting on the bus. Just then I had a moment of deja vu as I caught sight of someone toward the front of the line with a short blond pageboy cut and a red sweater sliding off one shoulder. One streetlight hovered blindingly just in front of the bus, so I couldn't be sure of gender, but the slow sensual sway of those shoulders suggested it didn't really matter. The cat-holding red sweater got on with blond hair falling forward and I smiled at the chance for a few moments of mystery.

Instead of seats, the Turquoise Tortuga had bunks and large square mats with storage space underneath. I stowed the frame pack and my sleeping gear under the rear mat and tried to chat with the four or five guys sitting at the back. They seemed friendly enough, but they had already settled into two separate conversations hours ago.

A few minutes later, as the bus left the lot, I climbed up into one of the two rows of bunks lining the ceiling, but the window was so narrow I had to turn my head sideways to see out. The bus couldn't have been going any faster than fifty- five, but not being jammed into rows of upright seats, I didn't particularly care. The black speckled landscape and the sandpaper concrete blurred by, leaving a metropolis of several million isolations behind.

Looking sideways put a crick in my neck, though. Pretty soon I got down and sat on the front mat with my back against the wall of the bus and my socks stretched out in front of me. The red sweater sat on the front edge of the mat, blond mop facing forward and talking to our driver, whose beard had to be even longer than the hair stretching past my shoulders. They spoke so low I couldn't hear the sound of their voices over the rumble of the bus. I smiled again as the mystery stretched a little further into the future.

The front mat held a pleasant and intelligent mix of crunchy west coast backpackers and adventurous European and Australian travelers. I found myself discussing customs and social attitudes with a teacher from Australia in his thirties, and a student from France in her last year of university. I spared them the burden of criticizing the attitudes prevalent in my native country, and I listened with more than a little envy to those prevalent in theirs.

As we approached the first stop, a backpacker discreetly offered to smoke a bowl with the group on the front mat, but as we stepped off the bus, the driver warned no one in particular to wait a stop, on account of the reputation of that particular town. The driver's gentle and sympathetic response amused me, as did his acute radar, since he had seemed well out of earshot a moment before.

The backpacker turned out to be a kid from Portland named Phil. As the bus gently chugged along once more, we got into a friendly conversation about our ongoing travels from city to city, his mostly on the west coast, and mine you know.

"Sometimes I like the journeys that happen in one place as much as the ones from place to place," winked Phil from out of the shadows.

'The journeys within?' I smiled back.

Phil sighed and looked up at me. "Yep, in fact I've been hoping to run into my old friend tim again for a while now."

I turned to see Phil's face, then let my eyes fall unfocused to the center of his shape, listening to the whispers that follow each of us around. I inhaled sharply. Not much risk if I watched what I said. And I had already decided I liked Phil, or his sense of humor, which came to almost the same thing.

'Well, I've got one tab in my jacket I'll split with you, to make the ride a bit more interesting,' I said, letting a sly smile slip across my face as I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

He grinned back at me, with the broad amusement that comes from kicking the universe-sized soda machine in just the right spot. "Fine with me."

Blue and gray stripes slid across his face as the highway lights ticked past as I reached for my jacket, and we talked in low voices, laughing at the other's jokes.

At the next stop, about an hour later, as we were getting off, Phil repeated his offer, and this time the driver had mysteriously disappeared as we descended the steps to the parking lot. The Australian teacher, the French student, and a few guys from various west coast cities came along, as did a man from Dublin in his fifties who didn't seem to understand the purpose of our stroll. The red sweater veered off from the bus to fall in behind us, blond hair sliding away from a quizzical look on feminine features.

'Care to get high?' I asked her, and she nodded, following Phil as he ducked down an alley out of sight of the bus.

Phil murmured as we came to a stop behind some garbage bins, "Actually, I'm not sure how much I have."

'Not to worry,' I murmured back as he added a small nugget to his glass pipe. I finished the salad with a couple pinches of green left over from the joint I'd rolled many miles ago. The guy from Dublin didn't want to smoke and stood genteelly if awkwardly outside the circle.

As the pipe traded hands, names floated up. "Anna," said the red sweater.

'And the kitten's name?'

"Leo, of course," she said, flashing a wry smile in defense of her fierce tiny beast.

Little bursts of conversation crackled around the circle, and as the bowl ended, the gentleman from Dublin led the way back to the bus with a nonchalant stroll. Just as the group of us emerged from the mouth of the alley and began to cross the street, a burgundy sedan headed toward us, yellow signal blinking, and then turned down our alley, its headlights blazing alarmingly . Phil and I nodded to each other.

"Timing," said Phil.

'Synchronicity,' I smiled at him.

The bus rolled to life again as midnight fluttered past. Soon Phil tapped me on the shoulder. "Y'know, I'm not really feeling it."

'Serious?' I asked him. Little technicolor flames danced and spun for me at the edge of the lights through the window behind him. The tires rumbled beneath us into a long unearthly didgeridoo spiral droning higher and higher as the bus came up to speed.

"Yeah, pretty much. Plus, I'm hella tired. Cheers."

I laughed as he climbed into one of the empty bunks above the center of the bus. 'Dream well, cousin,' I called to the vanishing trails of his feet.

Somehow, I next ended up talking to the bearded driver myself. People on the front mat had begun to follow Phil's lead into slumber, and I thought it possibly rude to join Anna's discussion of football-- soccer-- with a good-naturedly handsome blond Australian boy.

I asked the driver what his job was like, visualizing myself behind the wheel. He proved himself such a likeable and intelligent conversationalist that I felt a strange sympathy for his loneliness, and also for mine, in which all guilt dissolved.

"I've been doing this job for almost a year. I had a really serious relationship end and I'm still kind of getting over it. I thought it would be good to be moving for a while."

I sighed quietly. 'I can relate to that, all right. How long were you going out with her?' I asked.

"Two years," he said, and then he exhaled so hard that for a moment I felt worse for him than I did for me.

'Don't they say it takes half as long as the relationship itself to be over it?' I asked hopefully. And suddenly I had a new goal, six months to be over my own dissolved relationship of just under a year. Then considering the chances of this, I sighed again.

"At least. At least half as long." He almost smiled, his eyes flickering away from the road for an instant. "At first, you think about it constantly. Then a few times an hour, a few times a day." His voice sounded cold and distant.

'And now?'

A musty tang of bitterness crept into his words. "Well, I was doing better, for a while... but I've been having a bad couple of weeks. I still think about her all the time... wonder why she left."

While he spoke, we stared together past the glowing round dials of the instruments through the enormous windshield, watching columns of cars take a wide exit ramp to our right, hurtling off in some unknown direction. Instead of rushing to agree with him, an odd spark of gratitude settled on me. My vanished girl had loved me as long as she could, leaving only an immense sadness in her wake, and a layer of pain wrapped around me began to unfurl. A blur of white lane markers rolled endlessly through the wedge of road lit by headlights before speeding up and diving under the bus.

By now, the inside lights had been turned down and general conversation had faded as more people went to sleep. As my conversation with the driver drifted into a silent space of shared sympathy, there came another rest stop, just long enough for people to get midnight snacks at the truck stop's convenience store. The driver wished me good night and then disappeared into a separate rear sleeping compartment where his relief driver had been out of sight since I'd gotten on.

I dug out my walkman and sat under a window waiting for everyone to return. Anna of the red sweater got back on, putting Leo in his cage at the front of the storage space, and as the bus rolled out onto the highway, she sat just in front of me toward the center of the pad, alternately hitching up her shoulders and tilting her head around in circles.

This seemed more interesting than trying to find a radio station in whatever town this happened to be. Not particularly caring whether this was an invitation of some sort or just an opportunity to perform a small kindness in the soft twinkling light, slightly teasing, I asked mildly, 'So, do you accept neck-rubs from strangers?'

"Yes," she said flatly, answering the question as a vague hypothetical, but shooting an amused expression at me over her shoulder.

'Well, do you want me to give you one?' I asked her, tossing back an equally coy smirk.

"Sure." She scooted back against me and I rested my thumbs against the very soft skin around her neck and shoulders as I gradually dug down into the knots, working around the sweater as I went from side to side. Her head began to flop gently in a circle as I began to make progress and she sighed a little sound I suspected she had stolen from Leo.

We chatted pleasantly in the long dark stretches of highway between cities while I leisurely worked down her spine. She told me that she had actually gotten on the bus hours before I had, on her way back to school somewhere in San Francisco. We said nice things about the first driver and the instant rapport each of us had had with him.

Satisfied I had covered every knot at least twice I stroked a hand up to rest on one shoulder, and asked, 'Okay?'

"Perfect," she said, without moving. I gave her shoulder one tiny tentative tug and she relaxed back against me.

Suppressing a very faint smile, I whispered, 'So, are you attracted to me?'

She turned around to answer me, I thought, in words anyway, and then she kissed me so suddenly and intensely that I quite forgot the next five things I had planned to say. We followed one long strong dragon surge to its end, then looked up at each other to share a shy little wicked smile.

'Nice lip ring,' I whispered, gently encircling her waist.

She flicked it out naughtily, pointing her lip at me.

As our tongues chased over each other for miles and miles, she stroked my cheekbones, ran her fingers along my shoulders. We moved stealthily, although I had long ago begun to suspect we were the only passengers awake. The unknown relief driver, listening to a small radio just at the edge of hearing, sat motionless, staring away through the windshield into the silhouetted trees. The air in the bus had grown cold. Still figures in the bunks and against the far wall slumbered deeply, only an occasional heavy snore audible above the roar of the bus along the highway.

'Do you have a sleeping bag?' I asked in her ear.

She shook her head & shrugged.

'You can borrow half of mine,' I offered, 'if you want to.'

She nodded, so I unpacked the bag and tossed a corner over her, then sank down onto my elbow. She rolled onto her side and we spooned together gently and quietly. I leaned into her ear to say good night, but she twisted her head at the last minute to lick my bottom lip, then pushed in her tongue along the wet spot.

Suddenly I relaxed, finally warm and snug. I slid my hand up her sweater and found her bare nipples stretching up to meet my fingertips as she rolled onto her back. For another dozen miles, we kissed that way, the thick wool of her sweater softly scratching the back of my hand, the grumbling of the bus gently humming through our bodies.

Seized by an irresistible impulse, I tucked my head under the edge of the sleeping bag and lifted her sweater just above her breasts, kissing the nearest nipple, then licking and nibbling as it pushed back against my lips. My tongue wandered down, circling and circling her navel as she squirmed, then teasing the tip down under the waistband of her jeans and sliding back up her stomach to the lonely nipple on the far side.

She flopped her legs over mine and craned her neck down for a kiss that never stopped. I stroked her gently, amazed just to be curled around her. My fingers closed around the end of her thick leather belt, and she slowly lifted her hips and sank them down again so that the end pulled free with a muffled clank. I tugged the end taut until the prongs slipped from their holes and then let the studded leather collapse out of the way.

I twisted her top button open between my thumb and finger. Her stomach sank inward to guide my fingers down over smooth surface over soft hair over sharp bone and down warm slipping down slickly sliding down bucking squirming down.

Her hips still circling against my slippery fingertips, she leaned her head close, breathing hard, and with a cruel smirk, delicately whispered in my ear, "I'm not having sex with you on this bus."

Blinking innocently at her, I breathed, 'Why not?'

"Because I'll make too much noise, and we'll wake everybody up," she whispered, vainly attempting to conceal a naughty grin.

'How about this? You'll put your hand over my mouth, and I'll put my hand over yours? It'll be fun,' I teased, as my fingers slid under her neck and leisurely curled over her widening smile.

Wriggling and tugging until two pairs of jeans and two sets of boxers were out of the way, I pawed a condom out of my jacket, which, old and sticky, failed to unroll properly, but as I peeled it off again, an unexpected calm washed over me. Whether due to the half hit I had taken, the miles and miles of kissing, or just relief that there was a backup in the jacket, everything curled into a stasis still sweetly waiting as the second condom rolled smoothly down.

'Still okay?' I whispered. In response, she shifted her hips against me slowly, slowly, until a flash of red and blue pulled us into an invisible landscape, impossibly frictionless, silky, muscular and warm.

One hand gently covering her mouth, I slid the other between her legs and stroked and tugged my fingers up along her clit until we twitched and breathed in sync. We rocked our hips inside against together and back again onto a plateau that stretched out vast and indefinite, until at last she shuddered, bucking against my hand and I followed her through a beautiful soft affectionate window, my folded legs straining against curved soft all the way down.

We stayed curled together, motionless except for long soft kisses twisting together slow as a heart-beat, willing to call a truce with the universe for a couple hours, at least.

'You know, it's funny,' I said in her ear, beneath the drone of the engine, 'I wouldn't normally think of doing anything like this, I mean, end up having sex or anything. But this whole trip I've been reading this book by Henry Miller, and he gets laid about every fifteen minutes, so I just thought I would see what would happen...' I trailed off, waiting.

She smiled in the dark, still curled against me, and said, "That's really funny, I was just thinking that today I was in an Anais Nin mood, myself."

'Synchronicity,' I smiled back at her. 'Loki must be feeling benevolent today.'

"Loki? Like, the Norse god of mischief?"

'Sure, why not? I've always thought that the more you know about any particular situation, the funnier it is. So if there's a supernatural force out there, it's got to be a malicious practical joker. Doesn't Loki seem to fit the bill?'

"I agree," she said, kissing my lip, "very benevolent today."

The cool gray blue of dawn had begun to creep through the window. The Santa Cruz stop was a strip-mall, islands of little trees and wood-chips book-ending each row of the parking lot. She said, "This is actually my stop. My dad lives in Santa Cruz-- I'm going to stay with him for a day before he drives me up to San Francisco."

'Cool. You get along with him?'

"Oh, yeah, he's really cool, I just hope he's here on time."

She asked me to go make a phone call with her. As we walked past the store-fronts to the phone, I stroked her arm once, and she grabbed my hand sweetly. She dialed a number, listening as I watched her, taking in her graceful neck and tousled blond hair. She said, "Well, his machine picked up, so he should be here soon."

'Good. Does this count as on time?'

"Close enough."

'Well, I'd better get back on the bus then.'

"No, it's okay, I want you to meet him."

Well, this would be an adventure, no doubt about that. There was a drinking fountain set into the white-pebbled outside wall of a big grocery chain and I washed off my hands thoroughly in the cold water while I got a drink.

"Yeah, absolutely!-- I'm going to be staying with friends, but I'll give you their number." She wrote it out in thin red felt-tip on a random slip of paper.

As we headed back across the parking lot, her head bounced up. "He`s here!-"

Anna ran over and gave him a bear hug. I hung back for a few uncomfortable seconds before she introduced us. Her dad had a firm but friendly grip, and smiled at me, so I instinctively liked him, even as visions of sugarplums and shotguns danced through my head.

Oh, so many things that just couldn't be said. Yes, sir, it's true, your daughter is one hell of a fuck. No sir, I don't usually seduce art students in public while I'm tripping, but in this case I made an exception. And I simply can't tell you sir, how relieved I am that I just washed my hands.

Her dad receded to his car and opened the door. Anna and I faced each other and I stuck my hand out, widening my eyes to ask if-- she hugged me tightly and then broke off to get into the car.

"Call me," she said firmly.

'I will,' I nodded, waving, then climbing back on the bus.

I absently pondered a couple hour nap, snuggling under my sleeping bag, now cold. I lifted my head slightly to stare out the window into the parking lot, newly filled with light, waiting for the bus to move again, when from the edge of the bunk above me, upside-down shoulders and a face appeared, one of the guys who had smoked with us, demanding, "Get that stupid grin off your face!" and then laughing at me before disappearing again.

Phil leaned out from his own bunk to defend me, saying, with mock sorrow. "Well, at least someone's having a good time."

'I have no idea what you gentlemen are talking about,' I said, with injured dignity.

"Give that up right now," Phil advised me. "You remember that half-thing? It kicked in a little bit after I tried to sleep," he said with a knowing wink.

I blinked innocently at him and then closed my eyes, curling up while I listened to the two of them discuss their destinations in Oregon. The other guy told Phil he was going back to turn himself in for parole violation on some larceny charge long ago. Not all on the same planet, I mumbled to myself. Opening my eyes again right before I plunged into my nap, I watched the black granite coastline vanish into the blue and white waves, growing ever smaller into the distance.