The Little Black Book I Found At The Bus Stop

I always stop to pick up a bit of paper flapping in the wind. I’ll read the receipt at the top of a trash can, or the scraps of old poster on the billboard when they haven’t been quite removed or covered by the new. You never know what might be on it. You never know what somebody has just lost.

And usually its nothing; at best, a little insight into the life of a stranger you’ll never meet. Half the time, that paper flapping in the wind is a shopping list which is really just like a receipt in a way, and of those shopping lists, milk and eggs always seem to dominate. But I never stopped looking because of —and I can think of no better way to say it— the chance of Adventure. Why not take a look? What’s so bad about bending over in the street for two seconds for something that only probably won’t change your life for ever? So when I saw the Little Black Book, of course I looked.

It was night, which made the book seem even more like a piece of trash for some reason. It was lying quietly on a trashcan beside the bus stop. I think I was the only person who noticed it there. An old woman in a big beige jacket was sitting on the bench right beside it, and she glared at me as I reached over her to pick it up. Nobody else looked at me, any more than at the book. My prize and I were invisible.

It was hard to the touch, but the cover gave slightly, satisfying, like the dragon skin samples in one of the Dragonology books. It was in good condition, but the second I touched it I knew it had seen a lot of use. It felt loved. A lot of people keep black books like this one; they write poetry, or sketch, or philosophise or journal. I knew what I was holding might be more than a snapshot into somebody’s life; it might be somebody’s soul. I opened it slowly.

First page was blank; a tragically untouched line, above which was penned “If found please return to.” The sentence floated there like an unused lifesaver in a shipwreck; patient, obedient, obsolete. I smiled a bit. Beige-Old-Woman said “Excuse me,” totally unnecessarily as she slowly pulled herself off the bench and onto her walker. It was like she was outraged that I should be smiling in public.

I glanced up to make sure the oncoming bus wasn’t mine, then back down at the precious fragment in my hands. I turned the page. Another blank. Ridiculous. Then I turned the page again, and almost dropped the book.

“If You Are Reading This, You Are Already Dead”

In thick pen at the top of the page. I’m not embarrassed to admit I jerked my head up, and jumped to my feet, looking left, right, behind me. I got some weird looks, sure, but if that had been when the hitman made his move, I would have put up a good fight. With no sinister overcoats in sight, I sat back down and kept reading:

“John dropped the note and began glancing around frantically, but there was no one in sight.”

My heart leapt at this line, and I was certain that the rest of the book would be some eerily similar account of a man, just like me, who finds a book, just like this, and then gets caught up in a series of murders or hauntings etc. etc. and then dies.

“A tumbleweed scratched its way across the highway that rippled in the heat, and the wind flung little bits of sand that tinkled against the phonebooth door.”

This next line gave me some comfort: I was not in a desert phonebooth, but a dark bus stop, and my name is not John. Also, the writer had misspelled ‘scratched’, which gave his or her predictions a little less weight. Only a little disappointed, I realised that this was just a bit of creative writing.

I heard the titanic hiss of a bus, and realised I’d just missed it. But I was in no rush to get home, and my jacket was warm. I slid up to the corner of the bench, crossed my legs, and laid the book on my knee. Then, I continued:

“Frantically, John picked up the receiver. Frantically, he grappled with his pockets for the coins they held in their deepest recess, ”—kind of erotic, or is that just me—"and when his fingers closed over the cold metal medallions, he slammed them” – here another ‘frantically’ had been crossed out— “into the hungry iron slot.”

Oh Boy, I thought. I decided to give John and his iron slot a break, and turned the page again. This was more of the same thick pen handwriting, and what looked like the end of John’s story. Or, in the authors words: “The End…?!” There was also a date which was about a year and a bit ago. Maybe he (I was imagining a man) had improved since then. A cold breeze picked up and I shivered a bit. The wind lifted the corner of the page a little, and I was only too happy to oblige.

As I reached for the page, something slipped out of the book gently, and was caught in the wind. I was after it in a flash, racing across the road, and narrowly avoiding a little blue buggy that honked rudely as it sped past. The slip of paper had hit the side of a white van parked on the far side of the street, and stuck there in the wind. I slapped my hand down on it, and the van shook a little from the force of the blow. Then, slowly, I slid my hand of this latest treasure. And what a treasure it was! A little beige banknote which, to my utter astonishment, had the numbers 2 0 0 0 0 printed across its front, with a bold, excited font proclaiming “20 Thousand Dollars,” in case I had had trouble counting the zeros.

My excitement was only slightly dampened when I noticed the softer font at the top of the bill, which said, rather embarrassedly, “Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.”

I darted across the street again, and back to my spot at the bus stop bench. It was still warm. There I opened the book again, and surveyed this newest page. It was a scrapbook! In the centre of the page was an old polaroid of a group of three young backpackers. They were all stuffed into a hammock on a wooden veranda that looked out onto what I could only call a jungle. It was a lot of green. They were two girls and a boy, and they were all smiling and squinting with the sun in their eyes. The man was very tanned, maybe middle-eastern or south-American, and he wore some rough stubble and a tank-top that showed his tribal tattoos. I know he sounds pretentious, but there in that photo his smile was just wonderful, and his arm over the girls’ shoulders looked like warm love. Around the photo were maybe train or boat tickets in letters I couldn’t recognise, and some stamps and what looked like an unsent letter, a pressed leaf, a little bit of string taped to the page…There were some hand-written notes in between these pieces of story, but it was in French I think. There was a little sketch of a face, that might have been one of the girls in the photo, and there at the bottom was another date, in different ink, in different handwriting. It dated this page as about a week after the first, with the story about John.

I suddenly realised I had to track down the owner of this book, and return it. It was too precious. I turned the page again, looking for an address, a name, or at least a better short story.

The next sections were sketches, but they were wild and surreal in dizzying detail: A knight in full armour and a hood, kneeling before a starry sky; in the foreground, a huge snarling wolf without any skin below its head, so that its ribs and lungs and heart were visible. It sounds gory, but it wasn’t. It was haunting though, and beautiful. The next was a pick-up truck with an Asian dragon coiled in the back, its huge, intricate head raised above the truck roof to snap at a giant koi fish that was floating above it. This page was also dated, a couple weeks after. Again, different ink, and visibly different handwriting. I turned the page again. This one was a series of poems. The first few lines were cheesy, shocking, intense accounts of the agony of teenage angst. But one line hit me like a punch, and made something well up in me and I could have cried from it, if I had wanted to. I re-read the whole poem after that, and I decided that it had a lot to say, if I was willing to listen. It was dated only a few days after the last entry, and signed this time, although I couldn’t read the signature.

The next page was another story—a fantasy adventure, which I skimmed. It was signed also, a different signature than the previous one, and dated a few days after again. The next page was just a big love-heart that was signed and dated. It barely fit in the book it was so huge, and it had been filled with watercolours that faded from deep red to dark blue, blending through pinks, purples, marron and cyan. The page after that looked like an interview with a man called Angus. The final question was “what is something that inspires you,” and Angus had apparently replied:

“The hardest things in life are often the most rewarding. Love with all your heart, pay the price, and keep moving forward. “

The next page had been cut into a snowflake, and was signed “Bonny.”

Page after page of art, secrets, thoughts, memories, each from a different person, the dates slowly counting down to me, sitting there in that bus stop on that evening. It was a treasure worth far more than 20 000 dollars.

I reached a page that had been dated yesterday. It was a mosaic of beer labels, with many names and symbols I didn’t recognise, signed “Ben.”

I turned the page. Blank. I remembered that I had a pencil in my coat pocket, and, relieved, I fished it out and stuck it in my mouth. Then I tried to think of something to write.