Taking a tour bus into darkness

Brent Hartinger and Michael Jensen are a gay “digital nomad” couple — two men who travel the world continuously, living in different countries for anywhere from one to three months at a time. Subscribe to their newsletter at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.

It didn’t matter where our tour bus in Iceland was going. What was important was that we were all supposed to meet at 8:30 a.m., and it was now quarter to nine.

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David, our tour guide, noticed us all shifting in our seats. “Sorry!” he said. “We’re just waiting on two more people.”

My husband, Michael, looked at me and shrugged. These things happen.

Five minutes later, the last couple finally arrived.

“Here we go!” David said, greeting them with a big smile. “Take your seats, and we’ll all be off.”

Except the bus was more of a large van, and the only two seats left together were in the very back.

“I don’t want to sit in the back,” the wife said to her husband.

“She doesn’t want to sit in the back,” the husband told David. “I don’t either.”

David stared at them, his friendly smile slowly dimming. “Well,” he said evenly, “those are the only two seats left together.”

What went unsaid was the thing that every other person in that van was probably thinking at that exact moment:

If you wanted seats in front, maybe you should’ve shown up on time, like literally every other person here!

The husband and — especially — the wife huffed and puffed.

“Can I sit here?” the husband said, pointing to a jumpseat that folded down in the front of the bus.

“Well…” David said, “It’s not very comfortable, and you’ll be blocking the view of these other…”

The husband pulled down the jumpseat and sat.

The wife, meanwhile, squeezed into the one empty near the front, next to a woman traveling alone. Her new seatmate didn’t look too happy about it.

“And we’re off!” David said, smiling again. He put on his headset and microphone and began to drive. “But if I could make one request of everyone? There are several cruise ships in town, so there’ll be lots of big tour buses going to many of the places we’re going to today. But our tour is lean and mean, and if we stick to our schedule, we can stay ahead of those buses and their crowds, and we’ll all have a much better experience. But that means that when we stop, everyone needs to be back at the van right when I say. Okay?”

Ahead of the crowds? Everyone in that van nodded enthusiastically, except for the couple who’d shown up late. They were both staring out the windows.

At the first stop, David explained what we were about to see. Then he said, “Okay, we’ll all meet back at the van in forty minutes. That’ll be 10:45, okay?”

And at 10:45, everyone was back in the van — well, except for You-Know-Who. They finally rolled in around 10:55.

“Uh,” David said to them, “I said we all needed to be back at the van at 10:45, remember?”

“Oh,” the husband said, not at all sheepishly. “Right.”

David waited with the rest of us for two of them to say some version of the words “I’m sorry.” But they never did.

At the next stop, David gathered us in a circle outside the van. “Okay, we’ll have an hour here,” he said. “That means we have to be back at the bus at 1:50.” he looked right at the chronically late couple this time. “At 1:50, okay?”

They both stared vacantly off into the parking lot.

And, of course, at 1:50, that same couple was nowhere to be seen.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” someone muttered, speaking for the entire van.

I try hard to reserve judgment about other people, no matter how annoying they are.

I don’t know the whole story, I cautioned myself. They’re not necessarily inconsiderate. What if they have some kind of invisible disability?

But these folks didn’t seem autistic — just clueless.

Plus, the man sitting in front of me literally had cerebral palsy, and he was on crutches, and somehow he always managed to make it back to the van in plenty of time!

A little after two, the couple finally sauntered up.

And the entire van seethed. I’d never felt anything quite like it. Seriously, it was what I imagine an airlock in space must be like, with the oxygen quickly being sucked out.

David cleared his throat and looked at the couple. “You folks aren’t doing a very good job of following my directions. We’re behind schedule now, which means more crowds.”

“Huh?” the husband said.

Is stupidity a disability? I thought.

Finally, we were off again. But we were in a northern climate, and even though it was only mid-afternoon in summer, the sky was overcast, almost like night was already falling.

I shivered, but it was about something more than the darkness. Something wicked was this way coming.

Before long, those who had packed lunches began eating them in the van.

This included the chronically late couple, who, of course, had packed what smelled like onions, Brussels sprouts, and maybe hardboiled eggs. It was all very crinkly, too.

If looks could kill, the rest of us would have suffocated them with their own wax paper.

At the next stop, I felt sorry for David. As someone who worked with tourists, he wanted to keep everyone happy — to preserve his tips and online ratings. But this couple was making that impossible.

“We’re leaving here at 3:45,” he said, talking directly to the couple now. “And if you’re not back at the van by then, we’ll have no choice but to leave you behind.”

“Yessssss,” someone hissed under their breath.

But the clueless couple merely shrugged and wandered off. Had they even heard?

Unfortunately, David had been right about those tour buses from the cruise ships. Now that we were behind schedule, this destination was swarming with people.

And at 3:45, everyone was back in the van except — you guessed it!

Happy-go-lucky David had been dying a little inside all afternoon. Now, he looked pale and defeated, a husk of his former self.

“Leave them,” said a voice in the van.

“Yes!” came another voice.

“Do it!” said the man with cerebral palsy.

I even found myself grunting in acknowledgment. I felt like I was in a crowd that goes berserk in a movie, like those teenagers in Suddenly, Last Summer who are so furious they tear that man apart with their bare hands.

But David hesitated.

“I knew David was bluffing,” Michael whispered to me. “This is how people with no shame always get their way. Everyone else does have shame, so they never follow through.”

David lifted his hand to close the door to the van — and we all brightened.

But then the wife appeared outside the door.

“Oh!” David said, his face breaking out in relief.

Except the wife seemed to be alone.

The tour guide frowned. “Where’s your husband?”

“I don’t know,” the wife said, entering and taking her seat. “We didn’t stay together.”

“You didn’t…stay together?” David said, somehow both outraged and deflated at the same time. “Can you call him?”

“He doesn’t have his phone.” The woman shrugged and started in on the last of her crinkly onion-Brussels-sprouts-hard-boiled-egg sandwich.

It was almost like this couple was playing this by design. I mean, we couldn’t exactly leave the husband behind with his wife already on the bus.

Sure enough, David was already on the phone to his home office, seeking guidance.

The rest of us stared daggers at the back of the wife’s head. At this point, even she picked up on the tension.

“What?” she said, looking around.

“Well, what should I do?” David said into his phone, up in the front of the van.

In the back, the rest of us glanced around at each other. Even without speaking, we all knew what we had to do.

One by one, we stood and started moving to the front of the van.

“Where are you going?” said the clueless wife.

“We’re going to look for your husband,” someone said a bit ominously. “You should come with us.”

“But I’m eating my—”

“Now,” someone else insisted.

She put her sandwich aside and stood.

It’s important to reveal one part of where our tour bus was going: we had just stopped to peer inside an active volcano.

We led the chronically late wife to the volcano’s crater, where we ran into her even tardier husband.

We all stood, wordless, standing in a row along the rim of that fiery volcano.

Then we pushed the man and his wife into the boiling lava. They both died instantly in very satisfying conflagrations. They didn’t have time to scream.

It was like the ending of Murder on the Orient Express: we all did it together — even the man with cerebral palsy, who was as determined as the rest of us to kill that infuriating couple, even climbing to the top of that volcano on crutches.

And just like in that movie, none of us have any regrets — and if Hercule Poirot investigated us, he would undoubtedly decide, Oh, well, they certainly had good reason, and reluctantly give a false solution for the couple’s disappearance to the police.

David was blameless, although he didn’t say a word when we returned to the van without the couple in question. He just fired up the vehicle and returned us to our starting point.

And then we all went our separate ways.

Okay, okay! The first part of this story — until the wife returns to the van without her husband — is (mostly) true. I made the rest up: we didn’t push them into a volcano.

But it sure is fun to pretend. And I suspect everyone in that van, including David, wishes that the last part was true.

P.S. What the hell is it with some people? Why are they so unbelievably self-centered and inconsiderate?

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