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On the Express Bus 73 A
Chapter 13
At a mountain cabin for a guys-only weekend away.
Larry:
“You know, Charles, sitting here by this fire, I’m wondering about you and your background. What brought you into your studies and what caused you to start doing your graphic novels?”
Charles:
“Well, you know that I am British. Before I came to the United States, I was a teacher. I taught literature at an exclusive private school. Very posh. Upper end. Ties and jackets always.
At Oxford, I had studied medieval literature, focusing primarily on the time before Chaucer. And I had served in the Army. I was in Korea just after the so-called Korean War, monitoring the Demilitarized Zone. In Korea, I studied a holistic approach to Mahayana Buddhism of the so-called wonyung school.
One of the key insights that I learned there is that any individual thing (person, object, force, or phenomena) exists only within the total nexus of reality. Its existence depends on the total network of all other things. It is connected to every other thing. Everything is connected. My teachers said, ‘each individual thing is within all other individual things.’
Each is contained within the other.
Every individual thing exists in a state of mutual dependence on each and every other individual thing. They are interfused within each other. This interconnection is not hierarchical. There is no above or below, more important versus less important. Nor is it a relation of opposites. There are no contradictions. No conflicts. All are equal. All are balanced.
So, Larry, I began my career seeking to unify what I had learned about medieval literature with what I had learned in my study of the wonyung.”
~~~
Many contemporary hi-tech employees ride express commuter buses daily to and from their work sites. Mr. Larry J. Connors is just one of the many.
Larry is a numbers guy, a veritable filing cabinet for numbers, whose speciality is making fiscal projections, doing benefit analysis, and generating cost-to-price determinations. Unfortunately, Larry is also a “quasi social isolate” who stares at his own shoes to avoid eye contact with others. As our story begins, Larry’s personal life has been reduced to doing his laundry, playing with his dog, and watching old, classic movies on television.
One morning, when he boards his usual commuter bus, everything changes. He is no longer who he is. He is now living another’s life and he is a stranger in his own body.
