New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 34

Robert took a cab to the suburbs. It was expensive but could not figure out the bus schedule. It was possible he could do the whole thing with a minimum of one train and two busses, but coming back would have been harder, with an additional bus added for reasons Robert could not quite explain.

He had taken the cab from his apartment. It would have been easier, of course to catch a cab from downtown, on his way home from work, but that would have required explaining or lying to Bree. And while he was not above lying to Bree, he preferred the sin of omission.

“What are you doing tonight?” she had asked him as they walked to the train and he had said: “I’m going home.”

So he went home and changed into jeans and a dark t-shirt and then borrowed Mr. Carleton’s phone to call the cab. Mr. Carleton was surprised to see him; in his time living in the building Robert had knocked on his door no more than half a dozen times. But he invited him in and offered to make tea. Robert thanked him but told him he just needed to use the phone to call a cab. That there was something he had to do and he couldn’t figure out how to get there by bus.

The apartment was much the same as Roberts, with the addition of several shelves of books and a pervasive scent of dust. Mr. Carleton had stood around anxiously while Robert made his call. He did not seem to want Robert to leave. Maybe there was something that he wanted to talk about, and for a moment Robert considered canceling his plan, and staying there. Certainly that would be easier and cheaper. But he did not.

The cab picked him up in front of the building some fifteen minutes later. Robert gave the cab driver the address in the suburbs and sat back in the seat, watching the meter.

It had been a long time since Robert had taken a cab. He did not like cabs. He did not like the smell of them, or the general demeanors of the drivers, or the ticking away of his money on the meter. He did not like that the meter kept running even when they were stopped at a light, even when the cab driver had made a mistake and had to drive around the block to correct it. And the drivers made him nervous — were they really trained professionals? They did not seem like it to him. They seemed always like men inordinately proud of their ability to cut off other cars or to swerve from lane to lane, or make turns at the last possible second. And they were not always honest — who knew how accurate the ticking of their meters really was? Who set them? Who checked them? Robert once had almost gotten into an argument with a cab driver over a charge. The driver had driven around the same block three times before taking him to his destination. Robert pointed this out to him when they finally had arrived and the driver had feigned ignorance and repeated the price of the ride over and over again as if it were a mantra or the only phrase he knew. Eventually Robert had paid the fare

The whole way over the bridge that went out of the city the driver drove too fast while speaking on the phone in a language that Robert did not understand or recognize. The city was receding behind them. He could not see the water beneath him, only the pylons and cables of the bridge around him, but he felt it there, like the moat to a kingdom he had never left, a moat he was crossing for the first time. For a noble cause, he thought.

Though Robert had been raised in the suburbs, he had not returned for years. His parents no longer lived there; they had retired to a small community in the southwest: a place in the desert with its own moat and gates and castles. He had visited them twice since they had moved there. They were growing old and shrinking but were still taller than him. They doted on him while he was there, constantly offering him food and beverages. It was their way of expressing affection and concern. They were disappointed that he did not have a girlfriend or a wife, but they did not know of the shoddiness of his apartment or his loneliness beyond that. They were old and sometimes he remembered that they would not be around forever, that they would probably die before him, and not neatly in bed both at once, but one and then the other, and there would be illness and funerals and comforting and travel. The dullness of his life would again be interrupted. But not by hope.

It would be better to die first, Robert thought, but then it is always better to die first. Mourning is sadder than nothing.

Robert wished the driver would get off the phone and pay more attention to the road. The cab was drifting a little between lanes. Now and then another car would honk, and Robert saw the angry or disgusted faces of drivers going by. The cab driver was oblivious.

But he lived and the suburbs finally appeared: first in the form of green highway signs, then in the form of trees and houses. He rolled down his window as far as it would go, which was not very far. Half a foot. It was probably a security precaution to keep people from leaping out of the back seat of the cab to escape paying the fare or to save their lives.

The world outside the window seemed alien to Robert. It smelled of leaves and lawns that had recently been watered by sprinklers. Some of the lawns seemed almost blue in the fading light. Others were overrun with dandelions.

A much maligned flower, thought Robert. Unloved because it grew too easily. He had read somewhere that there was a place where the dandelion was treasured — for its flower or its leaves or its root, he was not sure which. Somewhere where it was hard to grow.

“Let me off a block before that address,” Robert told the driver.

The driver looked at him in the mirror.

“A block before?”

“Yes.” Robert recognized the driver’s accent no more than the language he had been speaking on the phone.

The cab stopped, Robert paid the driver and got out. And here he was.