Druff’s back sank into the cab’s plush, port-wine upholstery, his knees, compromised in the taxi’s close quarters, pressed almost gynecologically toward his chest. He didn’t weep or sob or cry out. Just felt himself awash in the deep sads, bobbing there in his loneliness and melancholy as if it were the universe.
“Of course,” he went on, “you don’t have to tell me a thing. I’m City Commissioner of Streets. Does that make me your ruler? It’s just, I don’t know, your name or something. Hell,” Druff said, “I can’t even pronounce your name. You could be a Sid in a suit. A dad from the thirties poking around in the back of a radio checking the vacuum tubes with a flashlight and duct tape. A guy whose kid is going to remember him fondly.
“Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Tell me. Don’t try to humor me. Don’t even bother. Don’t count on my being a good tipper. I haven’t been in a cab in this city for ages. I probably tip for shit.”
“What do you want?” Mrentzharev said.
“Your blessing, little Father,” Druff said, somehow, even if Mrentzharev thought him nuts, even if he took down his statement and ran with it to the rest of the city’s taxicab drivers, meaning it, every word, all of it. A blessing, a peasant’s good word, a benediction from the salt and bread and garlic. Admiring this Edouvard Mrentzharev immensely, even envying him. His bravery, for one. For picking up and making a new life. For learning the language. For crossing the time zones to Druff’s city. Manifest destiny generally over now, a closed book, a done deal. Shut down with the heart’s and spirit’s white flight of the nineteenth century, a decade or so of the twentieth. Mrentzharev was a straggler, with boat people mixed, with Marielitos, all the forced marches of all the exiles from all the losing sides. “Hence, buddy,” he might have told him, “these tears ripe for the picking, and all the low, blunt blood of my fate’s mood swings.” Such boldness, Druff thought, examining Edouvard’s picture, imagining him throwing in his lot with other oppressed and ordealed folks as easily as a traveler in Oz. There had to be wisdom and the deep abidings in this fellow.
And debriefed him. Getting the goods. Comparative shopping digs in Mother Slavia against what was available here. What Mrentzharev thought of America’s stocked shelves, of the number, not counting cable even, of its TV channels. Warming up, practically rubbing his hands, feeling the return, just from fucking talking to the guy, to old Edouvard, of his energy. Of course, of course, Druff, nodding, agreeing, could barely keep up with him, with Mrentzharev’s volunteered, exuberant information, his won-over trust.
“Yes, yes, of course,” acknowledged Druff, a born-again sucker for the human-spirit thingy, “I understand about the curriculum, how every schoolboy is obliged to know English, but to learn how to drive? Professionally? At your age? This is something special.”
The cabbie looked at him.
“What?” Druff asked.
“What so special?” Mrentzharev said. “Is everywhere traffic.” And, laughing, began to boast to the City Commissioner of Streets of the small scams, what one did about tickets in the old country. “Oh,” he said, breaking off, “please excuse me.” And abruptly lifted a receiver. “Yes?” he said. “Yes?” And repeated numbers. Jotting them down with the stub of a pencil. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and replaced what turned out to be his car phone. “You were saying?”
Who wasn’t saying anything. Who had lost interest. In the human spirit. In the black-and-blue marks on his own low melancholy. (Because this happened too. Life goes on. Indeed it did. It wasn’t only the brushing and flossing, the taking of pills and making sure you had stamps. It wasn’t just buying batteries for your wife’s hearing aid, or carrying a handkerchief, or any of the rest of the light housekeeping of existence. It wasn’t only coincidence or chaos or the scrambled random’s unbroken code. It was this. Mostly it was this. The deep, hidden peristaltics of mood. Its tidals, its sink or swims. Life goes on. Saving a specific threat to the system, its pull on adrenaline, there was no such thing as priorities. Life goes on. Having a MacGuffin didn’t change that. Who thought otherwise was a chump.) Who wished the ride over and was as good as his word about his shitty tipping.
Who hadn’t kept up, what it came down to. Simple as that. Not even stupidity. Who still operated by the outdated laws of an older dispensation. Well, damn me, Druff thought. Well, fuck me and damn me. Well, kiss my ass. Well damn me and fuck me and lick my wounds. Whose premises had collapsed like a bridge. Who in the back of a cab had suddenly awakened to discover that all of it was real, all of it, everything, each and every worst-case scenario, that disease wore you down, that death actually happened, that the goblins would get you, and that though everyone was expendable not everyone was expendable at exactly the same time. This was what made all tragedy inconvenient, inopportune. The world happened piecemeal to people. The best parts, the worst. Bad timing was what got you in the end. Not knowing what others knew when others knew it. Thus spake the philosopher king. He had traveled miles on fools’ errands on the streets he commissioned. And mourned his lost chances, his blown hope.
Changing his mind, turning back superstitiously to slip Edouvard Mrentzharev a few extra dollars. But it was too late. The fellow was already turning the corner, on his way to pick up a customer who had the number of the émigré’s car phone.
Well, here we are then, Druff thought, no longer sure why he’d come, and saw he’d been let off in front of a rather substantial-looking apartment building with two distinct wings angled to a central pile, vaguely Tudor, with a courtyard, and wide, tall stone urns on either side of each of its three entrances. It was, he realized, astonishingly like the buildings he’d grown up in himself, and he was disarmed, not nostalgic so much as bewilderingly at ease, as if he’d been given nitrous oxide by the dentist. It was in this mood (another reversal; this didn’t escape him) that he rang Doug’s bell and could almost have danced chipper in place while he waited for the answering buzz that would admit him.
“What is it? Who’s there?” Doug’s voice hummed and gruffed from the perforations in the dull brass speaker alongside the mailboxes.
“Druff,” Druff said. “Jeez,” Druff, usually not, waiting for the beep, at his best on answering machinery, the long-distance telephone, on intercoms (but this was different, he was at ease now) said, “what’s it been, a hundred years in the development and the bugs ain’t all worked out. Still sounds like we’re talking to each other out of our respective caves and sawmills.”
“Commissioner?”
“Mrmp mrmp. Nhhh. Mrump nhh mrmp.”
“Commissioner?”
“Because crackle there’s crackle phht crackle cellular even in taxis these days. I just drove over with a guy who has one. A simple immigrant. Two lines, little pink Princess speakerphone, answering machine, the works. Is this the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, or what? You say, Doug. You tell me.”
“Are you a little tight there, Commissioner?”
“Mrmp phhtt.”
“Hold on. I’ll buzz you aboard.”
Thinking as he climbed the two flights to his driver’s landing (since he really hadn’t any reason for coming here, that it was just some buying-time thing, not in his game plan, that he was running on instinct now, less than instinct, hunch, less than hunch, bald, gut-level opportunism, serendipity, chasing down his casual, pig-in-a-poke fate) that perhaps Doug had an idea there (since Druff had none of his own and it occurred to him that for an old campaigner — and this happened too: adventure, the whole MacGuffin thing, maybe even heroism itself, volitionless as a knee jerk — he was rather at odds with himself, with his very nature, what with his having no strategy and all, or even the paraphernalia of one — bumper stickers, campaign buttons, position papers, even positions, and, though he didn’t, he should have felt uneasy) with that drunk bit tossed in his lap, a ploy he could use. Sure, he’d play along. Doug wanted tipsy, he’d give him tipsy. Why not? He was already punchy.