The 41 bus runs between Lake City and downtown Seattle. In the mornings the bus is fairly empty where I board it on the corner of Lake City Way and NE 125th Street. I usually get to sit in the back seat, on the right, away from the sun. Here I can write, as I do now. On most days the bus fills up with people who instantly go to sleep, or incessantly worry their phones. There’s very little difference between being asleep and swiping away on a screen, and so these people all look crazy to me. But now and then there’s someone who’s really crazy on the bus. These people are always tolerated, silently, no matter what they do. I’ve seen a woman with blue hair in a fairy outfit, waving a little wand about and putting charms on everyone around her. No one said anything. I’ve seen a businessman in a pinstripe suit, with pointy shoes, who looked perfectly normal except for the fact that he wore a Mr Incredible eye mask. No one said anything. One afternoon an educated drug addict made an impassioned speech about social reform to a Starbucks cup he held aloft. People glanced at him, but no one said anything.

The problem wasn’t that these people needed to get a grip. They had a grip, but they were holding on to the wrong thing. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. I marveled at their craziness, saw myself reflected for a moment in the warped mirror they held up to the world, and moved on. But with Zelda it wasn’t like that.

Zelda squeezed into the seat next to me one morning. She had to squeeze to get in because she was basically a stove with a head and two stubby arms. I think her name was Zelda because it said so on a hardcover notebook that she clutched to the continental shelf of her bosom. On the cover of the book was written, in an ornately curly script, Zelda’s Spiral. The text had been adorned with little flowers and there was a small kitten poking its head out from behind the Z. Besides that, Zelda was odd in two ways. Every few seconds she bared her teeth, like a macaque monkey. As she did this, she hissed and sighed. When she hissed the first time, I thought that she’d seen something on my screen and disapproved of it. But she continued to bare her teeth and hiss, as though her gums were itching. It had nothing to do with me. The other thing she did was more disturbing. She rocked from left to right and back again on her vast buttocks, lifting each one from the seat and tucking it in more tightly as she put it down. It looked like she was doing origami with her underwear. Maybe, I thought, she bared her teeth whenever she got a fold wrong. Her rocking and hissing was beginning to annoy me when she opened the notebook.

Every page was a marvel of pygmy cartoons and a dense spiral of writing. The writing started at the top of the page, then continued down the right, then along the bottom, up the left and then on and on like that toward the center of the page. Drawings of cutesy cats and podgy birds and flowers with faces filled the gaps between some words.

Zelda has produced a monument to OCD, I typed as a new line on my screen. Then I deleted Zelda, and replaced it with She. Zelda hissed and sighed and tucked in her right buttock. She had already progressed a few lines along the page that was now open, and I glanced at it furtively.

“M didn’t come this weekend,” she’d written along the top of her page.

I looked out the window to feign disinterest while Zelda hissed and tucked in her left buttock, bumped against me and sighed.

Who can blame M?, I typed on a new line.

Then I deleted blame M and typed we blame as Zelda turned her book.

“Saw M at UW,” she now calligraphed down the inside right edge of her spiral.

She bit her pen, added a small dot to a row of dots in the top left corner of the page, drew a little cat and tucked in both her buttocks. As she sighed, I glanced at the page again and tried to read other sentences.

“300 lbs by Friday,” one line read.

Along the bottom it continued, I could tell after turning my head a little, “Call D if I make it.”

Zelda hissed and bared her teeth, and sighed. I looked out the window again and wondered what it must be like to hope to weigh three hundred pounds. Zelda rocked toward me and tucked in her left buttock.

Hands-free origami, I typed on a new line. Then I deleted the line and let the cursor blink where it was. I wanted to type And tell D what?, but I was afraid she might read what was on my screen.

Zelda turned the book again and bit her pen for inspiration.

“YES to focus. NO to fuss,” she wrote along the bottom edge of her spiral.

I felt like asking what that had to do with the rest of what was on the page, but of course I couldn’t. She added another dot to the row of dots in the corner of the page, which I now decided was a count of some kind. She bit her pen again and drew a Tweety-like bird that perched in the Y of YES. Then she rocked away from me and tucked in her right buttock.

I glanced at her page. Down the right, amid other lines, was a line that was adorned with a sad-faced flower and read, “Called D anyway.”

Beside me, Zelda hissed and sighed and turned the book so that she could write along the left edge of her spiral. I watched as she carefully wrote, “Creep on the bus is reading what I write.”