In the cab beside me, a long soliloquy would express the young man’s stammering inchoate dream, then as seen from the heights of the city painted lights began to swirl and mix in the rain dripping off the unseen artist’s brush.
I took observations in pencil that I wrote balancing the page on my thigh, would never look at them again, ripped out of something that hardly belonged to me.
Dad looked at the mountains that bordered their property, fenced with gravitas much as we were trying to do with wire, low gullies chiaroscuro in the deepening shadows, fingerprints of ridge lines half seen, darker seams of box and cypress; he was shepherding the family after retirement as best he could, a sadness at the vastness of his paternal ambition broke through at times like this.
He would ask respectfully as we coughed out our genetically shared rheum nosed allergy, while we then stacked hay bales in the last acts of the working day, what value I saw in my work driving a taxi, and his response, when I told him, invoked his Shakespearean uncle, the peripatetic chemist who walked the streets and recited to passersby well into his dotage. I knew it was a compliment.
When I worked it seemed like a city of millions lurched along only well known arteries of escapist grog and grief.
The mother locked in the lifelong care of her disabled daughter, the daughter’s eternal deep sleep, held onto my arm as she said sardonically she was frightened now even of the crawling shadow that she showed me was like a spider. Tenderly she relinquished her story to my care her grief so exposed no point in dissembling.
It seemed to me that what I wrote down in those notebooks was so far off from the main highway of belief of what is generally known, was perhaps valuable for this reason alone.
Humus on the forest floor, edge of knowledge, edge of my knowledge anyway, truth sought for its own sake, the fantail surely would scratch and turn over my observations into some redeeming use.
Perhaps I was eyewitness of the almost missed, the lost drunk who fell overboard at night and washed up in the seagrass on some undiscovered continent.
Sensed something deeper but unproven at the very back, felt there was no sense or any way to articulate it for many years, often to do with this sort of ebb and flow of events in the cab and looking out.
Meaningfully parceled performances often alcohol loosed, random festooned staged, threats on the tongue – seek the heroin hit straight out of jail, then a minute later the richest man in the country arrived, I know because I read it off his credit card.
They changed seats and you could hardly tell the difference.
In the cab one arrival posed a question for consideration, the answer was often suggested by the next.
A mother’s child now in my headlight on the outbound freeway, made a mistake that was no longer material for he was calipered in the metal cloak of roof and doors with nowhere to look but straight back at me.
While he heaved I took off my shirt to wipe his blood; a young man lay alone on a northern footpath, would be like detritus if left there for a day or so, his viscous blood floods the concrete, the centre of his thoughts loves and dreams.
