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 on the move 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 and I 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 lines half seen, ridges of box and cypress shadows; he was shepherding the family after retirement as best he could, a sadness at the vastness of his paternal ambition broke through very briefly at times like this. And that mountain.
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 lifelong care of her disabled daughter, in her eternal deep sleep, who pled to be helped, and held onto my arm as she said sardonically she was frightened now even of the crawling shadows. Tenderly she relinquished her story to my care, her grief so exposed no point in dissembling.
It seemed to me what I wrote down in those notebooks was off from the main highway of belief of what is generally known, but perhaps could be valuable for this reason alone, so I should not let it slip through my fingers unexamined.
Humus on the forest floor, the 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, or I was the lost drunk who fell overboard at night, and washed up with the seagrass on some undiscovered continent.
Sensed something deeper but unproven at the very back, felt there was no sense to it or any way to articulate for many years, to do with this sort of ebb and flow of events in the cab.
Meaningfully parceled performances often alcohol loosed, random, festooned, staged, threats on the tongue – seeking the heroin hit straight out of jail, then a minute later the richest man in the country enters, I read it off his credit card.
They changed seats in my cab and you could hardly tell the difference.
In the background one arrival posed a question for consideration, the answer suggested by the next.
Mothers’ children one now in my headlight on the outbound freeway, made a mistake that was now immaterial, for he was crushed in the metal cloak of roof and doors nowhere to look but back at me.
While he heaved I took off my shirt to wipe his blood; then elsewhere days later a young man lay alone on a northern footpath, would be like a piece of cardboard if left there for a day or so, his viscous blood flooding the concrete, the centre of his thoughts loves and dreams.