Some People Become Guides Because They Failed to Get Off the Bus

There is a dangerous comfort in other people’s guilt.

The moment we discover someone else has a wound, especially a wound like ours, we feel relief. Not compassion first. Relief.

Good.

I am not the only one.

That relief is not noble, but it is human.

Chapter 13 of TARTARUS turns the attention toward Phil, the strange man in the brown coat who has been sitting beside the narrator since the bus left the station. Until now, Phil has seemed like a guide — cryptic, tired, irritatingly accurate, the kind of man who speaks as if every sentence has already survived a funeral.

But Nadine leaves the narrator with a question:

Ask Phil why he really sits next to you.

And for the first time, Phil looks afraid.

Afraid people become very still, as if the body has remembered an ancient agreement with predators: movement gives you away.

Phil became still.

Brown coat. Paper cup. Leather satchel. Thin face under dirty bus light.

For the first time since he had appeared beside me, he looked less like a man who knew the route and more like someone who had woken up mid-fall.

Phil is not a guide in the heroic sense.

He is not a mentor.

He is what happens when a passenger refuses to get off.

That is one of the central ideas of this chapter: sometimes the people who seem to understand the road best are not enlightened. They are trapped. They have simply been trapped long enough to develop vocabulary.

Phil’s wound has a name too.

Aaron.

A younger brother. Nine years old. A boy told to wait by a quarry road while the older boys went off to be older boys. Phil promised he would come back.

He did not.

“I told him to wait by the road.”

There it was again.

Wait.

The cleanest word in the vocabulary of abandonment.

The narrator’s guilt and Phil’s guilt begin to echo each other.

Nadine waited outside a depot.

Aaron waited by a quarry road.

Different children.

Same architecture.

What makes Phil’s story brutal is not only that he failed Aaron. It is that years later, when the bus brought him back to the moment, he still did not get off.

He saw his brother.

He understood what he was supposed to do.

And the doors closed again.

This is where TARTARUS becomes more than a story about memory. It becomes a story about the second failure — the moment when we know better and still choose safety.

Because recognition is not transformation.

Understanding is not repair.

A person can describe their wound beautifully and still live exactly the same way.

At the end of the chapter, Phil’s past appears outside the bus window: a narrow road, black water, a small boy in a blue jacket waiting in the cold.

The notebook asks the question Phil has spent thirty-one years avoiding:

Why did you make me wait?

Full chapter on Substack: https://substack.com/@alexkorneliuk

existential fiction, literary fiction, weird fiction, magical realism, road novel, guilt, brotherhood, abandonment, inner demons, psychological fiction, dark literary fiction, serialized fiction