Excerpt

The 9:30 Bus to the Crab Nebula

"You going to the book convention?" the bus driver said as we headed down Michigan Avenue toward the Chicago Convention Center.  "Are you a writer or something?"

I smiled.  Suddenly the last ten years of my life all made sense.  In just a few moments, I would see my book for the very first time.  It didn't matter that I wasn't staying at one of the nice hotels, but rather taking a bus from a cheap roach trap, forty minutes away on the north side.  My book was at the end of this line.

"Yes, I am," I said with pride.

"I'm a writer too," he said, as if we were long lost brothers in the midst of the big bad city.  He had turned hi head toward me, and nearly ran over a pedestrian running to the bus stop.  I looked around the bus.  Other than the bum sleeping in the back, I was quite alone with the bus driver,  I still had about a mile of Michigan Avenue to go.  The light had now turned, but the bus wasn't going anywhere.

I did something I knew I was going to regret, but couldn't help.

"What's your book about?" I asked.

He smiled, pulled the bus back into traffic, then turned around to talk to me.  I gestured that he might want to look back at the road.  He kept his head tilted at an angle where he could talk and drive at the same time.

"You ever see Da Vinci's The Last Supper?" he asked, as if I was a student rather than a passenger.  "The painting?"

"Of course."

"I mean, have you ever taken a really good look at it?"

"Not in person, no."

We were now stopped at a stop light near the Wrigley Building, the world's longest stop light.  He made no pretense of even looking as the road now.  "Leonardo Da Vinci was an alien.  I have proof ...."

He kept quiet as we crossed the Chicago River, almost as if he was scared that someone, someone from above would hear him in the open air.  We were soon right by the art institute.  " I come here everyday during my breaks."

I feared that he would drive the bus around the corridors if he could, past Georgia O'Keeffe's clouds and the impressionist Isle of the Grand Jete, just to show me his knowledge of art.

A car honked.  He frowned, then started driving again.  He came to a stop at the next light.  With this early morning traffic, it would take forever.  I had to bite.  "Proof?"

The light turned, but he didn't go forward.  "If you look closely at some curtains, you can see the Crab Nebula in the background .... "

"Crab Nebula?"

I had no idea what he said for the next seven blocks of Michigan Avenue, but somehow everything seemed to make sense to him.  Leonardo Da Vinci had deliberately put the Crab Nebula into The Last Supper as some kind of message.  This was years before the novel The DaVinci Code had come out.

His theories of conspiracies in the Old Church started out as straightforward as Michigan Avenue itself, but eventually they made a left turn at the corner of Michigan and Reality, headed over the Lakeshore Drive and out to the deep blue waters of the lake.  He kept talking about "Crab Nebula this" and "Crab Nebula that" with an eerie familiarity, as if "Crab Nebula" was Sammy Sosa's old batting coach who'd just come up from the Dominican Republic to help with Sammy's swing.

The driver swerved the bus back and forth with each course of the supper, each revelation.

"That's what my book is about," he said, "What do you think?"

"Wow," was all I could think of in terms of a response.  "Sounds interesting."

We had now made it to the convention center.  I got up to leave, but he put his hand in front of me, blocking my way.  "Maybe you can get me in.  I gotta tell them about my book."

"Ummm .... "

"I worked on it for twenty years!" He said that alone as if time alone justified the book's quality.

"I'll see what I can do," I mumbled.  "You can just let me off here."

As I got off and hurried across the street, I realized that if time and effort were a factor in books, this guy had left me in the dust.  I hadn't even made it out of orbit compared to him.  Who knows how good my book could have been if I had stayed on all the way to the Crab Nebula?

I noticed a man wearing an orange "publisher" button about to board the bus as I got off.  I wanted to signal to the man, but it was too late.  Hopefully he got off the bus before it made a left turn at Jupiter.