short story: the rearview
His taxi was stopped in front of the biggest apartment complex on the block. The blinkers were on, but the drivers of passing cars would still stick their heads out the windows and honk or shout as they drove by. The taxi driver ignored them: he squinted into the sunlight that reflected off the building’s glass door, blinked his eyes a few times and then rubbed them with his palms. He tilted his head to the right and his neck cracked loudly. It was eleven o’clock, Monday. There were two saran wrapped bologna sandwiches underneath the passenger seat, two diet cokes sitting unopened in the cup holder. A group of teenage girls walked past his window; they wore denim shorts and carried shopping bags with names like Gap and Coach, which he recognized. One of them was eating a strawberry ice cream cone. Three cyclists with matching green sweatbands and track jackets baring their last names swerved around his taxi into the street, prompting move-it’s and get outta the road’s from the other cars. Couples jogged with their iPod shuffles fastened around their arms; a young woman pushed a stroller down the sidewalk and cut in front of the old woman who carried a single plastic bag of groceries; groups of leather-briefcase-holding men and women hopped into taxis together. He waited.
The doorman at the apartment complex pulled the door open for a young woman who was walking stiffly and wheeling two large white suitcases behind her. She wore an unzipped jacket that looked too warm for the early summer weather and a pair of gray slacks with high-heeled shoes. Their eyes met for a second and he scrambled out of the cab to grab both her suitcases.
“Hello,” he said to her. She smiled slightly and said hello back. Then he asked her where she was going, but she couldn’t understand him. He turned the radio off and repeated himself, slowly, pausing in between each word.
“Where are you going?”
“Franklin Park, 1451 Elder Lane, please,” she answered, but it sounded like she was speaking a language he had never heard before.
So he turned around to face her. She had her right hand thrown protectively across a leather purse that sat in the seat next to her and was fumbling with her left hand to align a pair of expensive sunglasses on her face.
“Excuse me?”
She made a small noise, but didn’t repeat herself. Instead, she handed him the address on a scrap of legal paper, withdrawing her soft-skin quickly when his hand brushed against hers. She didn’t look at him again: she cast her covered eyes outside the window where the morning sky made silhouettes of the tall buildings.
He turned the scrap of paper over in his hand and read the address slowly, contemplating the expressways that would take him out of the city. He adjusted the mirrors, paused for a second as he stared at the business suits on their way to meetings or lunch or golf games, and he pulled his car out into traffic.
Ibrahim had been a taxi driver for three years, spoken English for two. It was his first job after leaving home for America, excited by the stories of cousins of family friends who were never seen again, but whose letters home were read aloud at parties and to neighbors and talked about in loud voices on the street.
He was currently living with one of those cousins in a small apartment off the Green Line where sometimes, the water or electricity would shut off for no reason and their landlord would come and demand the rent a few days early.
Ibrahim’s cousin had a job at the O’Hare Airport, wrapping dinner entrees in saran wrap for an eight-hour night shift. They didn’t see each other much, but Ibrahim felt a sort of relief to come home and see clothes that weren’t his, to hear the shower running. They laughed together about the letters they would write home, the way they would paint everything better. If Ibrahim could have shaken his hope, he would have left already, the cousin too, but it was already too deep a part of him.
Ibrahim looked back at the girl in the rearview. She was still wearing her sunglasses. Her shoulders were hunched, making the muscles of her neck tense up. She was thinking about an expensive Persian rug that sat in the middle of her living room and how she wished it would have fit into her suitcase. There was something almost magical about it, and depending on the direction you were looking from, its threads took on a different hue.
So she was making little noises and wiping her eyes from underneath her sunglasses with her fingers. Ibrahim wished he had a Kleenex to pass her, but he only had a handful of used napkins in the glove compartment. They were hiding the Hustler magazine another taxi driver had given to him a few months ago. It was a year old probably, its pages already creased and folded. After the first day, he had hidden it in the glove compartment with the intention to give it back or get rid of it altogether. It was still there.
He turned the radio on. Reggae music came out through the speakers and recognizing the song, he drummed his fingers to the beat on the steering wheel and looked again in the rearview.
The girl in the backseat was skinny. The outline of her breastbone jutted out from her low-cut blouse and her knobby wrists stuck out from the end of her jacket sleeves. There was also a certain shallow and gaunt look to her face, but in a way that didn’t take away from her beauty. He wondered if you could see her ribs when she extended her arms in the air and if she was one of those girls whose shoulder blades stuck out like something you could grab on to. Then he imagined her little naked body as the centerfold in the Hustler magazine. Briefly.
Ibrahim merged onto the expressway. He double-checked each of his mirrors before changing lanes. A silver sports car whizzed around him and down the exit ramp. He watched it go. He drove five miles per hour above the speed limit.
He thought about this dream he had the night before, where the shoulder blades of skinny girls like the woman in the backseat were considered something of a step toward human flight. In his dream-future, sure enough, red and blue feathers had poked through the skin of all the underweight models on television and the girls in the porn magazines.
In his dream, men would brush up against these winged women while they waited their stop on the L or while they walked down Michigan Avenue with their heavy shopping bags. They would wait for them in dark street corners, squinting to catch their eyelashes in the light of streetlamps, their soft footsteps, the way they seemed to hover above the sidewalk. They would follow them home and use the sound of the feathers rustling to mask their footsteps. So the women ran home. Some flew into the sky and never came down; others chopped off their wings with meat clippers, staining bathroom floor tiles forever red. And worse still, Ibrahim was one of these men, squinting to catch their eyelashes, their silhouette in the light of the streetlamps. He just wanted so bad to reach out and touch their feathers.
From this dream, Ibrahim had woken up suddenly, shaking, sweating cold, pants tight. His cousin had opened the door to his room to ask if he was okay.
In response to the memory, he turned the music up a little louder.
This, the woman noticed. She found it strange that an Indian would listen to Jamaican music, but the thought passed quickly.
He turned left at the next light. The woman looked out the window and watched the yellow lines on the road that led back to the suburbs. She listened to the reggae music. She thought briefly of the old rug and the busty Latina secretary at her husband’s office. She thought of the key she still had in her pocket.
Ibrahim drove down residential streets lined by houses with flowers in the front yards, children’s bicycles parked on the sidewalk. He pulled up next to a brown house with two evergreen bushes, a long black driveway, and a small tree in the front yard: 1451 Elder Lane. Ibrahim couldn’t really place the look on the young woman’s face.
When the taxi came to a stop, he helped pull her bags from the trunk and walked her to the door, brown hands on her white suitcase. He looked at her face, at her sunglasses, at her red lips. She told him, “Thank you” and rang the bell.
Ibrahim Patel turned around.
It was nearly one. He closed the door to his taxi cab while an aged woman pulled the girl into her arms. He unwrapped one of the bologna sandwiches and took a bite before driving away slowly, his eyes focused in the rearview, on her legs.