Don Delillo - Cosmopolis

The driver's name was Ibrahim Hamadou and it turned out that he and Anthony had driven taxis in New York, many years apart.

Eric sat in the barber chair watching the driver, who did not take off his jacket or loosen his necktie. He sat in a folding chair, his back to the mirror, and spooned his food sedately.

"I drove a checkered cab. Big and bouncy," Anthony said. "I drove nights. I was young. What could they do to me?"

"Nights are not so good if you have a wife and child. Besides, I can tell you it was crazy enough in the daytime."

"I loved my cab. I went twelve hours nonstop. I stopped only to pee."

"A man is hit one day by another taxi. He comes flying into my taxi," Ibrahim said. "I mean he is flying in the air. Crash against the windscreen. Right there in my face. Blood is everywhere."

"I never left the garage without my Windex," Anthony said.

"I am Acting Secretary of External Affairs in my previous life. I said to him, Get off from there. I cannot drive with your body on my windscreen."

It was the left side of his face that Eric could not stop looking at. Ibrahim's collapsed eye fascinated him in a childlike way, beyond the shame of staring. The eye twisted away from the nose, the brow was straight and tilted upward. A raised seam of scar tissue traversed the lid. But even with the lid nearly shut, there was a sediment stir to be detected in the eyeball, a roil of eggwhite and mottled blood. The eye had a kind of autonomy, a personality of its own, giving the man a splitness, an unsettling alternative self.

"I ate at the wheel," Anthony said, waving his food carton. "I had my sandwiches in tinfoil."

"I ate at the wheel also. I could not afford to stop driving."

"Where did you pee, Ibrahim? I peed under the Manhattan Bridge."

"This is where I peed, exactly."

"I peed in parks and alleys. I peed in a pet cemetery once.

"Night is better in some ways," Ibrahim said. "I am certain of it."

Eric listened distantly, beginning to feel sleepy. He drank his liqueur out of a scarred shot glass. When he finished eating he put the spoon in the carton and set the carton carefully on the arm of the chair. Chairs have arms and legs that ought to be called by other names. He laid his head back and closed his eyes.

"I was here what," Anthony said. "Probably four hours a day, helping my father cut hair. Nights I drove my cab. I loved my cab. I had my little fan that worked on a battery because forget about air-conditioning in that day and age. I had my drinking cup with a magnet that I stuck on the dashboard."

"I had my steering wheel upholstered," Ibrahim said. "Very nice, in zebra. And my daughter with her photograph on the visor."

In time the voices became a single vowel sound and this would be the medium of his escape, a breathy passage out of the long pall of wakefulness that had marked so many nights. He began to fade, to drop away, and felt a question trembling in the dark somewhere.

What can be simpler than falling asleep?

First he heard the sound of chewing. He knew where he was at once. Then he opened his eyes and saw himself in the mirror, the room massing around him. He lingered on the image. The eye was mousing up where the edge of the pie crust had struck him. The camera cut on his forehead was discharging a mulberry scab. There was the foaming head of hair, wild and snarled, impressive in a way, and he nodded at himself, taking it all in, full face, remembering who he was.

The barber and driver were sharing a dessert of finely layered pastry glutted with honey and nuts, each holding a square in the palm of his hand.

Anthony was looking at him but speaking to Ibrahim, or to both of them, speaking to the walls and chairs.

"I gave this guy his first haircut. He wouldn't sit in the car seat. His father tried to jam him in there. He's going no no no no. So I put him right where he's sitting now. His father pinned him down," Anthony said. "I cut his father's hair when he was a kid. Then I cut his hair."

He was speaking to himself, to the man he'd been, scissors in hand, clipping a million heads. He kept looking at Eric, who knew what was coming and waited.

"His father grew up with four brothers and sisters. They lived right across the street there. The five kids, the mother, the father, the grandfather, all in one apartment. Listen to this."

Eric listened.

"Eight people, four rooms, two windows, one toilet. I can hear his father's voice. Four rooms, two with windows. It was a statement he liked to make."

Eric sat in the chair and half-dreamed scenes and wavery faces out of his father's mind, faces levitating in his father's sleep or his momentary reverie or final morphine relief, and there was a kitchen that came and went, enamel-top table, wallpaper stains.

"Two with windows," Anthony said.

He almost asked how long he'd been asleep. But people always ask how long they've been asleep. Instead he told them about the credible threat. He confided in them. It felt good to trust someone. It felt right to expose the matter in this particular place, where elapsed time hangs in the air, suffusing solid objects and men's faces. This is where he felt safe.

It was clear that Ibrahim had not been told. He said, "But where is the chief of security in this situation?"

"I gave him the rest of the night off." Anthony stood by the cash register, chewing. "But you have protection, right, in the car."

"Protection."

"Protection. You don't know what that means?"

"I had a gun but threw it away."

Ibrahim said, "But why?"

"I wasn't thinking ahead. I didn't want to make plans or take precautions."

"You know how that sounds?" Anthony said. "How does that sound? I thought you had a reputation. Destroy a man in the blink of an eye. But you sound pretty iffy to me. This is Mike Packer's kid? That had a gun and threw it away? What is that?"

"What is that?" Ibrahim said.

"In this part of town? And you don't have a gun?"

"There are steps you must take to safeguard yourself."

"In this part of town?" Anthony said.

"You cannot walk five meters after dark. You will be careless, they kill you straightaway."

Ibrahim was looking at him. It was a flat stare, distant, without a point of contact.

"You will be reasonable with them, they take a little longer. Tear out your entrails first."

He was looking right through Eric. The voice was mild. The driver was a mild figure in a suit and tie, sitting with cake in his outstretched hand, and his comments were clearly personal, extending beyond this city, these streets, the circumstances under discussion.

"What happened to your eye," Anthony said, "that it got all twisted that way?"

"I can see. I can drive. I pass their test."

"Because both my brothers were fight trainers years ago. But I never seen a thing like that."

Ibrahim looked away. He would not submit to the tide of memory and emotion. Maybe he felt an allegiance to his history. It is one thing to speak around an experience, use it as reference and analogy. But to detail the hellish thing itself, to strangers who will nod and forget, this must seem a betrayal of his pain.

"You were beaten and tortured," Eric said. "An army coup. Or the secret police. Or they thought they'd executed you. Fired a shot into your face. Left you for dead. Or the rebels. Overrunning the capital. Seizing government people at random. Slamming rifle butts into faces at random."

He spoke quietly. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on Ibrahim's face. He looked wary and prepared, a disposition he'd learned on some sand plain seven hundred years before he was born.

Anthony took a bite of his dessert. They listened to him chew and talk.

"I loved my cab. I gulped my food. I drove twelve hours straight, night after night. Vacations, forget about."