Waiting for Aristotle

“Is there something about my face that makes you think I would like to engage in conversation?” Fergie squinted up at the white hot sun. She opened her silk umbrella.

The young man shrugged and hitched up his saggy pants. “All I asked is where you was going to. Being friendly, that’s all.” He leaned against a pole that held up the little square of roof over the bus stop. Not another single rooftop or building of any kind marred the beige expanse of desert that rolled out to the edge of the horizon. “It’s not like I committed a crime or something.”

Fergie rolled her eyes. “Not yet.” She pulled a book out of her bag and turned her back on the boy.

The boy looped his earphones over his head. He pushed the button on his music player. He shook it and pushed the button again. Still it didn’t work. “Damn cheap-ass thing.” He stuffed everything in his pocket and folded his arms. He glanced at the tall fence behind them. Sunlight glinted off the razor wire along the top. He turned away deciding instead to scowl at the pearl buttons down the back of Fergie’s dress.

The heat rose in waves up from the black top of the road. The boy jingled the bus tokens in his pocket as if somehow the metallic clink would magically bring the bus into view. “What you reading?”

“A book.” Fergie replied without looking up.

The boy jingled the tokens in his pocket. He clinked them together. He jingled them again.

“That’s rather annoying.” Fergie looked at the boy. Her eyes fell on his hat. “Niik.”

“What you call me that for?”

“That’s your name, isn’t it?” Fergie looked over the top of her glasses. “That’s what it says on your hat.”

The boy took off his hat and looked at it. He laughed. “Gordon’s my name.”

“I see.” Fergie pushed her glasses up on her nose. “That fidgeting with the coins in your pocket is annoying.”

“Sorry,” Gordon replied. “What”s that book you’re reading?”

Fergie sighed a slow, long-suffering sigh. “Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard.”

“Good story?” Gordon jangled the tokens in his pocket.

Fergie frowned.

“Sorry.”  He pulled his hand out of his pocket.

“It’s not a storybook.”

“What’s it about?” Gordon ran his hand over his close cropped hair and put his hat back on. “It’s got to be about something, don’t it?”

Just across the road a wind devil swirled. Dust, pebbles and bits of plants swirled around and around in the tiny tornado to become all of a piece – one swirling thing.

“It’s a treatise exploring the aesthetic and ethical stages of existence,” Fergie explained.

“What’s that?”

Fergie shrugged in the face of the monumental task of educating the boy. She glanced down at the page as though she might return to reading without answering his question. “The book’s central concern is the question asked by Aristotle, How should we live?”

Gordon turned his face to the fence. He looked up at the coil after endless coil of the razor wire, then to the prison beyond. “I wish my Mama had thought about that.”

Fergie breathed in – a tiny gasp of hot desert air.

“Who you got in there?”

Fergie’s swallowed. “My daughter,” she said with a shaky voice.

“Hey look.” Gordon pointed.

Far off down the road, as tiny as a toy, the bus rolled toward them.

Fergie folded up her umbrella and closed her book.

Gordon clutched the tokens in his pocket.

They both turned toward the approaching bus.

“You think we can answer that question?” Gordon asked. “You think there’s an answer to that?”

Fergie drew a long deep breath to give herself time to think. “I want to say yes. But I don’t think I can.”

“Sucks, don’t it.”

“That it does, Gordon, that it does.”