Taxi

Whenim S. Toned

David Foster Wallace: My whole life I’ve been a fraud.

So I’m driving a cab in San Francisco, which is not something I tell people at parties (not that I go to parties, but you get it), mostly because they either don’t believe me or they believe me too much and start talking like they’ve just discovered moral clarity in a podcast. This is the kind of job that people who used to have “big ideas” end up doing after life gently but definitively kicks them in the ass.

Franz Kafka: It was raining in a way that made the city appear unformed. Not simply blurred — erased. I could not recall how long I had been driving the taxi, or when I had been assigned to this district. The streets rearranged themselves as I moved through them, and the signs on the buildings seemed to shift language when I tried to read them.

Raymond Carver: It was raining. Not hard, but enough to smear the lights and make the streets look like they’d been rubbed with a dirty rag.

Cormac McCarthy: He’d been driving a cab for nine years. Maybe more. Couldn’t say anymore. The clock in the dash didn’t work and neither did most of the things in him that used to keep time.

Sylvia Plath: The rain was stammering down in little needles, striking the windshield in fevered rhythms, like a Morse code I was too tired to decipher. The meter clicked forward like a slow drip from an intravenous bag. I was driving again. Nights were easier. The city had less shape then. You could pretend the ghosts were just people with umbrellas. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

Joan Didion: There was a fog that night. The kind that settles in the Financial District and makes the traffic lights blur at the edges. I had taken the late flight from L.A., not for any particular reason except that I had nowhere better to be, and San Francisco always seemed more plausible at night. You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

Ernest Hemingway: It was raining hard in San Francisco and the cab smelled of leather and old coffee. I was driving the night shift. A yellow cab on wet streets. People coming from the airport, people going to the hospital, people who had no homes anymore and wanted to go back to places that didn’t exist.

I stopped in front of the St. Francis. She stepped out of the lobby with a small suitcase.

Black umbrella. Red mouth. Tall. Her coat was good. Real wool. Wet gown underneath. She said, “16 Parkside Lane.”

I knew her.

She didn’t know me.

I drove.

She lit a cigarette. The kind that comes in silver cases. The window fogged. The radio was low. Jazz. Coltrane or something trying to be. I didn’t speak. I watched her in the rearview.

“You used to be taller,” she said finally.

“I used to be a lot of things,” I said.

Didion: He was already parked outside the hotel when I came down. Yellow cab, unwashed windshield, a crack in the dashboard near the meter. I slid in, careful not to catch my coat on the exposed metal of the door.

“Sixteen Parkside Lane,” I said.

I saw him glance at me in the mirror.

He didn’t say anything for the first few blocks. Just drove, left hand on the wheel, right hand resting on the stick like it might matter. He had the radio on low — something jazz-inflected but tentative, like it didn’t want to commit.

“You used to wear a leather jacket,” I said.

He kept his eyes on the road. “You used to act.”

Plath: She got into the cab at the edge of Union Square, under one of those awnings that flapped like the hem of a dead woman’s dress.

“Sixteen Parkside Lane,” she said, voice low, contained, like a secret someone had folded too many times.

I looked at her in the mirror. Her hair was pulled back too tightly, as if to hold something in. Red lips, the kind you wear like armour. There was perfume, faint and expensive, like wilted peonies in an old vase.

Something about her was familiar. I could swear I’d seen her face before.

She didn’t recognize me, or maybe she did and simply chose not to. That’s the thing about certain kinds of recognition: it’s not about seeing, it’s about choosing to keep your eyes shut.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” she said, somewhere past Market Street. Then she didn’t say anything more.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

McCarthy: The rain was light. Cold. The kind that spat not to cleanse but to wear down. He watched it ribbon down the windshield like oil from a bone saw. The wipers clacked back and forth without rhythm. I needed one more fare to make my night. A lady up ahead waved to flag me down. She got in at the light.

Like something remembered.

Gown tight. Wet. Black shoes. Pale face like a lantern in fog. She said 16 Parkside Lane.

He nodded and pulled out into traffic. It’s a shame you ruined your gown in the rain.

They rode for a long time without speaking. He could hear her breathing. Could smell the perfume. Expensive. Bitter and green. The scent of gardens no one tended anymore.

You used to act, he said.

She looked out the window. I still do sometimes, she said.

Carver: I was driving the cab. It was Friday night. Downtown was full of men in suits they hadn’t taken off in three days and women walking fast with their heads down.

She waved me down in front of the Mark Hopkins. Blue coat. Red lipstick. Gown. She looked like she didn’t belong there, but also like she did. Like someone who’s been pretending so long it finally stuck.

Sixteen Parkside Lane, she said.

Her voice was the same. A little lower maybe.

It took a while but she looked in the mirror. And she glanced at the licence by my name. A smile seemed to come to her slowly. It was a sad smile just the same.

We didn’t say anything for the first few blocks. Then she leaned forward, just a little.

You’re not going to say anything?

I didn’t know if I should.

So you’re a cab driver now?

Yeah.

You were going to learn to fly.

I tried, I said. Then I didn’t.

Kafka: At some indeterminate hour, a woman emerged from the revolving doors of a hotel. She moved like someone who had memorized the idea of movement. Her umbrella was broken, or perhaps it had never been whole. She stepped into the cab without hesitation, as if she had been expected. Perhaps she had.

Sixteen Parkside Lane, she said.

I hesitated. I had heard of it, yes. It existed on several maps, none of which aligned. I did not tell her this. I began to drive.

There was something familiar in her face. Not familiarity in the sense of recollection, but the way one might recognize a name in a dream without knowing why it feels like truth.

Her expression was unreadable, but not empty. Her eyes contained a kind of exhausted judgment — the sort that follows sentencing, but precedes execution.

You were going to be something, she said after a long time.

I did not respond. I had once been many things, but the documentation of how we learned about love in the back of a Dodge had been lost in a flood. Or perhaps a fire.

I thought you would write novels, she said. Or fly airplanes. Or disappear.

I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.

The lesson hadn’t gone too far.

Wallace: It’s raining the kind of rain that makes everything look like it’s dissolving — like the city’s been printed on thin newsprint and the ink’s running — and I’m sitting at a red light trying to remember the word for that feeling where you know a moment’s important but also somehow deeply, cosmically pointless.

Then she gets in.

She’s wearing a coat over a drenched gown that costs more than my month’s rent, which I am behind on. The perfume is familiar in a stomach-sinking kind of way, like something from a back-of-a-Coronet night you only sort of remember but that always makes your throat tighten. She doesn’t look at me, at first. Which is a mercy, kind of.

Sixteen Parkside Lane, she says, and crosses her legs in a way that triggers an unhelpful memory cascade involving jazz records, a futon, and a time in my life when I thought eyeliner was a form of political speech.

I look in the rearview mirror. She looks up.

Oh, she says. It’s you.

Which — yeah. It is.

She used to act. I used to drive to the airport and watch planes land. We both had Ideas, capital-I. She had this voice that could cut through a party like a needle through cloth — smooth, deliberate, weirdly inevitable. She once told me I was the only person she’d ever trust with her silence. Which, at the time, felt profound, and now just feels like an overly poetic way of foreshadowing the fact that she was going to leave.

You still flying? she asks.

Taking tips and getting high, I counter. You still acting?

She smiles, barely. She’s married now. Pacific Heights. He’s rich. And — she says this with a kind of verbal shrug that people in nice coats learn young — he’s not cruel. Just uninterested.

Are you happy? she asks, which is not a fair question.

I drive. That’s something.

Something as though inside you is this enormous car full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older jobs with roll-up windows. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

We sit in it, the rain and the past and the version of ourselves we were supposed to be.

There is a thing, a fact, about seeing someone who knew you when you were still making the blueprint — it’s like watching an old film of yourself speaking a language you forgot existed. You remember all the words, but none of the grammar.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way down deep they are different from everyone else.

Kafka: I continued driving. Outside the window, the city appeared to be folding inward — buildings collapsing with the silent decorum of officials receiving bad news.

She lit a cigarette. The smoke smelled like confession.

I act now, she said. But only for audiences I cannot see.

We turned onto Parkside Lane. It was not the Parkside Lane she had mentioned, but I could not tell her that. The buildings were tall and crooked, like bureaucrats leaning to whisper to one another. I stopped in front of a door that may or may not have existed.

She did not move.

Do you believe we were ever real? she asked.

Real, I said, is a kind of paperwork.

She handed me money. It was not the correct currency. I took it anyway. That was what we had been trained to do. I’ve got something inside me to drive a princess blind.

Carver: She lit a cigarette. She held it like someone who had learned to do that from watching other people. Or maybe she taught them.

You used to talk about Paris, she said.

So did you.

I know.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

There was a silence after that. Not awkward. Just thick. She rolled the window down and let the rain in, just a little. The air smelled like wet leaves and exhaust.

I married a banker, she said.

I didn’t ask.

We passed the place where the theatre used to be. The one where she used to appear. It was a frozen yogurt place now. People were still going in.

He lets me redecorate, she said.

That’s something.

We pulled up in front of a building with two trees out front that looked like they didn’t want to be there. She didn’t get out right away. She kept the cigarette going and looked straight ahead.

I think we could have been happy, she said.

Maybe, I said. But probably not.

She nodded. Like she knew that already. She handed me a twenty. I tried to wave it off. She wouldn’t let me.

There’s a wild man. Wizard. He’s hiding in me. Illuminating my mind.

McCarthy: You married?

Yes.

Rich?

He buys things, she said. That’s different.

They passed the old clocktower. The one that never worked even when things did. She said nothing for a long time.

You were going to be a pilot, she said.

I flew for a while.

Why’d you stop.

You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.

She turned and looked at him like she might say something but didn’t. Her mouth opened just slightly. The kind of silence that hums.

Do you ever think about back then, she asked.

No.

That’s a lie.

He didn’t answer.

They stopped in front of a brownstone with a red door and brass numbers polished to shine. There was a doorman. A hedge trimmed into the shape of nothing.

She reached for her purse. He waved it off.

I owe you something, she said.

You don’t.

Plath: I didn’t answer. I remembered. She used to declaim like a cathedral burns. Quiet, then blistering. Her voice was always more honest than her mouth.

“And you,” she said, “you were going to be a pilot. Or a poet. Or something that started with a ‘P’ and ended in disappointment.”

There was something cruel in her smile. Or maybe it was just tired.

“I became something else,” I said.

“What? A driver of other people’s delusions?”

“More or less.”

The streets outside swam with light. Fluorescent puddles. Neon confessionals. The rain made everything look weepy and strange, like the city had mascara running down its face.

We used to talk about Paris. We thought the Seine would save us. That was before the voices in her head got louder than mine.

“Do you miss it?” she asked. “Us, I mean. Or the idea of it.”

“I miss the version of us that never happened,” I said.

She nodded, like she understood. Maybe she did.

On Parkside Lane, she didn’t move to get out right away. She just sat there, her hand resting in her lap like something forgotten. “I married a man who buys people,” she said.

“Art. Land. Me.”

“Do you love him?”

“I love the quiet. He doesn’t ask questions.”

She opened the door and the night spilled in, cold and damp and full of that sharp metal smell the air gets before something breaks.

Didion: There was a time, years ago, when we thought we would live in Paris. Not together, exactly. But adjacent. The kind of adjacency people mistake for intimacy. He wrote stuff and watched the sky. I wore eyeliner and read Doors lyrics like scripture. We didn’t really love each other. But we did believe we were something.

Outside, the city passed by in layers. Glass buildings, steel scaffolding, neon signs for sushi and payday loans. The kind of things that used to be exotic and now just looked tired.

“Are you writing anything?” I asked. “Flying on weekends?”

He shrugged. “I drive now.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

He laughed then. Not kindly.

I looked out the window. I could still remember the exact night it ended. There had been a party. Someone’s record deal. We had sung. He had left before finishing the second verse. I don’t know why I remembered that.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

“I live in Pacific Heights. I throw fundraisers. My husband owns a piece of the Giants.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” I said. “But it’s quiet.”

We stopped at a red light. For a moment I thought he might say something else. But he didn’t. He just sat there, the engine idling.

When we pulled up in front of my building, I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change. The door clicked behind me. The fog had settled in, soft around the streetlamps, like something that wanted to stay longer than it should.

Hemingway: The streets blurred. The wipers moved like tired dancers. She looked older. Not bad. Just older. Softer around the eyes. There was still something in her face. That thing women have when they’ve been loved too long by the wrong men. Or not enough by the right ones.

“You used to act,” I said.

“I still do. Sometimes. Mostly for my husband’s friends.”

“He rich?”

“Rich enough.”

“Happy?”

“No.”

We passed the park. I remembered kissing her there once. She smelled like gin and lilacs then. Not now. Now it was cigarettes and Dior.

She leaned forward. “Do you think we did it wrong?”

“We did it the way we had to.”

“That sounds like something you tell yourself to sleep.”

I didn’t answer.

Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

I pulled up in front of a building with a doorman. She handed me a twenty. I didn’t want it. I took it anyway.

The rain hit her hair and her shoulders like the end of a dream. She didn’t look back.

I pulled away and turned up the jazz.

There wasn’t much to say.

There never was.

Didion: I didn’t watch him drive away. I didn’t need to. Some people exit your life in increments. Some people were never really in it. Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Plath: She didn’t say goodbye.

She never had been good at endings.

I watched her walk to the door. She disappeared the way people do in dreams — slow and dissolving.

I sat there a long time, with my hands on the wheel.

The cab ticking.

The rain twitching on the glass.

The ghosts settling back into their ovens.

McCarthy: He watched her walk through the rain, the shape of her retreating into the blur of it. The air was the colour of iron and wet paper. She never looked back. He didn’t expect her to.

When she was gone, he lit a cigarette and turned the cab around. He didn’t check the meter.

The city was quiet and endless.

Parkside Lane was empty.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

And still he drove.

Carver: She got out. Didn’t slam the door. Didn’t say goodbye.

I sat there a minute. The meter still running. The rain soft against the roof.

Then I pulled away.

Wallace: We get to Parkside Lane. The version of it she asked for. She hesitates. She’s always been good at the moment before the door opens. Not the opening itself. She reaches for a bill and hands it to me without looking. Twenty dollars for a two-fifty fare. She says, “Harry, keep the change.”

Her fingers touch mine and it feels like an accident and also completely scripted.

You could’ve come with me, she says.

Yeah, I say. But I didn’t.

She steps out. The cab fills with the smell of her coat and the ash of her cigarette. I sit there for a while after she’s gone, watching the meter tick upward in tiny red numbers that don’t mean anything anymore.

There is no music playing. Which somehow says more than if there were.

Kafka: She stepped out. The rain did not fall on her. It avoided her with an almost institutional precision.

I remained in the cab, unsure whether I had dropped her off or had simply imagined her.

The meter continued ticking.

I could not shut it off.

Chapin: Well, another man might have been angry. And another man might have been hurt. But another man never would have let her go.

I stashed the bill in my shirt.