To observe such extremes in the absence of any real threat was not a delight. It was not a pleasure. It was a revelation. And once a person had had that revelation, he returned to daily life awakened to the fact that beneath its bland surface there gushed a hidden tumult. And no sooner had that awareness begun to fade than the seeker longed, with mounting urgency, to witness again that coursing cataract. Why else did Renaissance painters keep painting Christ on the cross （to use an example of Alfred’s） and only in the distant background add diminutive folk hunched under loads of rocks and hay? Because transcendent death is what people want to see—not the hauling of heavy loads! And Alfred had found a way to achieve that revelation whenever he wanted without having to die, or kill anyone else!
There was nothing quite like that first scream, so said Alfred, who likened it to the initial gurgling sip of wine on the palate of an expert. But the last bit was important, too, and to get at that, he had to keep screaming. He had only one rule: Don’t interact. His job was simply and only to scream and await the Something Happens Phase—“something” usually taking the form of a physical incursion. Alfred had been slapped, punched, tossed out doors onto sidewalks; had a rug thrown over his head, an orange wedged into his mouth, and a shot of anesthesia administered without his consent. He’d been Tasered, billy-clubbed, and arrested for disturbing the peace. He’d spent eight separate nights in jail.
About thirty seconds after Alfred’s first scream, the Avis bus veered to the curb and the driver, a tall African-American man, parted the flailing crowd and strode to the back. Alfred braced for physical confrontation, being guilty of prejudice about Black men and violence despite a passionate belief that he was free of it. But the driver, whose name patch read “Kinghorn,” fixed upon Alfred the laparoscopic gaze of a surgeon teasing muscle from bone as prelude to excising a tumor. His invasive scrutiny prompted a discovery for Alfred: Being studied, while screaming, was actually more uncomfortable than being thrown or punched or kicked. And that discovery yielded a second: Physical assaults, while painful, gave him a way to end his uninterrupted screaming. Which led to a third discovery: Screaming is not uninterrupted. In order to scream, one must breathe; in order to breathe, one must inhale; and in order to inhale, one must interrupt one’s screaming.
“Did someone hurt this man?” Mr. Kinghorn inquired sharply during the first such interruption. Having discerned a united denial and noticed a pale, distraught face close at hand—Kristen’s—he addressed her quietly. “Are you traveling with this man?”
“I was,” she murmured.
“Does he have psychological issues?”
“I don’t know,” Kristen said wearily. “I think he just likes to scream.”
Mr. Kinghorn injected into Alfred’s next several inhalations: “Sir, you’ve made your racket for going on two minutes now… I’ll allow you thirty more seconds… at which point you’ll either have to stop hollering or leave my bus… Am I making myself clear?”
Alfred found himself nodding his compliance, a heinous breach of his “don’t interact” rule. Mr. Kinghorn consulted his wristwatch—a big chunky diver’s watch, or a skydiver’s watch, a watch that could make you an omelet or teleport you into another millennium. Then he waited. But Alfred couldn’t keep screaming in quite the way he had; Mr. Kinghorn’s authority soothed the ravaged passengers, neutralizing the screams’ effects. Alfred had a sensation like a tent collapsing; awash in fabric, he fell silent.
Mr. Kinghorn gave a curt nod. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I appreciate your willingness to pipe down. Now let us proceed.”
His voice rose with these last words, a sonorous baritone filling the bus and apparently also people’s hearts, for there was a round of applause. The bus swung away from the curb and soon was hurtling toward the Avis rental lot buoyed by communal jubilation that knew only three exceptions: Alfred, who drooped in mortified exhaustion from his bar; Kristen, who stared furiously at the bleak airport landscape; and Mr. Kinghorn, whose expertise at subduing disruptive passengers made it clear there was nothing so special about this one.