my computer has died, but this has been squatting unwritten in my head for weeks
Over the past year I've built up an interesting relationship to one of the bus drivers who drives the route I take to campus. In my first year he was the quietly jocund one who greeted his passengers with a genuine sort of smile, the sort that crinkles the eyes at the corners. But you can see it immediately: there's something of him that just isn't as present as everything else; a certain dreaminess, an aura of removal. It was that, more than his mild amiability, that I was drawn to. That Christmas I handed him a card without knowing his name. Inside I'd written, "Thanks for the lift". The next time I saw him, he grinned at me and said, "It's Viv, Viv is my name." First thought that crossed my mind: Viv, Viva, "alive".
I remember mentioning him to another bus driver, who snorted derisively and said, "Viv? He's in a world of his own, that one."
Over my second year we spun out an academy of protracted conversations. I would go weeks without seeing him, and one day I'd chance upon his bus, and we'd pick up the thread of the last conversation as though nothing had lapsed in the space between then and now. I'm allowed to stand up at the front and intrude upon him while he drives. In this way, sporadically, I learned his almost spartan life history: born in Wales, moved to England, became a bus driver. No wife or children, immediate family scattered around the UK. Tea, not coffee. He'd love to visit America. He hates when other bus drivers drive past waiting passengers. He's unaccustomed to driving buses that aren't double-deckered. Once I got him to narrate his average day: "I take the 4pm to 2am shift," he said, "and by the time I get home I'm too tired for much else apart from a cup of tea, and bed. I wake up at about 10, read the Bible, run errands around the house, and by 2.30 I've got to be ready to go in and do it all over again." That was when I learned that he filled all the spaces in his life with God.
To be fair, until recently he had never tried to preach to me, apart from asking if I'd ever read the Bible. But the other day he asked me, "Rachel, have you ever been baptized?" I tensed, mentally. He went on to explain the difference between those who are Of Adam, and those who are Of God, and that the Day of Revelation spells doom for those who are not Of God.
"You must be baptized," he said earnestly, "otherwise you will die."
My usual morbidity: "We all die."
He shook his head serenely. "Not those of God." The bus clamoured to a halt; a crush of people surged in and out, while he continued, issuing bus tickets over the bustle. His gaze remained distant, reverential. "We are in the Kingdom of Men now, but there'll come a time of Revelation. The Kingdom of God will come. When it comes, there'll be no more suffering, no more pain, no more famine and war and poverty, and eventually," - here, he clipped the last passenger's ticket and eased the bus back into traffic - "no more death."
What I remember most was that powerfully removed serenity, buoyed up amidst this unlikely tableau of day-to-day scurry. He had the look of an altar about him - nothing baroque, perhaps a small wooden construction set into rough stone walls. He wanted to convert me because he genuinely cared, because he fears for my ignorance of what seems to him, in his faith, an incontrovertible destiny of the human race: a march towards God. On his terms, it was like an act of love.
"Good people shouldn't have to die," he declared clumsily, over the steady hum of the bus rumbling through Kenilworth. "You're a good person, Rachel."
I'm incorrigibly irreligious; I've never really taken well to being preached to (ref. Jehovah's Witnesses), and I can't accept faith, you know, on faith. And the absurdity of the whole situation hadn't escaped me: I was in a bus, in backwater England, on my way back from campus, discussing the dissolution of half the human race in the face of an oncoming Resurrection of some unfalsifiable Creator. I can't buy into this stuff.
But this was the first time ever that I'd felt the tug of sincerity. This isn't a religion putrescent from institutional wrangling, from politicking, factionalism, wars, and the rancid consequences of mixing church and states. This is faith like glass: pellucid, incorruptible. This nondescript, strangely ageless bus driver with his inscrutable smile describes, for me, the simple trajectory of faith - love, goodness, reflection. And so it's in this way that when I stepped off the bus that night, I found myself wondering for the rest of the night, in vain, just what had gone wrong, and where.