Chapter 7 (p.6)
Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.
At twelve thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc, as his sister swears by zinc, and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.
It is one o'clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”
She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He's at lunch,” she says. He'd ad dudge.
Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”
She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He's busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He'd biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.
“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.
She shrugs, and blows her nose.
Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.
At three o'clock the woman looks at him and says, “He wode be gubbig bag.”
“Excuse?”
“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds odly by teddephode.”
“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the Forty-sixth Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.
One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim's pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than that of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad's wife (for Salim had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars is going fast enough actually to end his life.
A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.
The back seat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seatbelt.
“The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.
The cab driver grunts, and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater, and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.
From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cab driver swears in Arabic, by the beard of the Prophet.
Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in Arabic.
“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same language. “Where are you from?”
“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”
“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.
“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”
“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”
“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”
The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the taxi driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man's head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.
“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.
“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.
“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”
“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.
The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”
Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”
“What do you sell?”
“Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”
The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.
“You try to sell shit?”
“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law's samples.
“And they will not buy it?”
“No.”
“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”
Salim smiles nervously.
A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.
“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.
The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder the driver moves, and Salim's hand brushes the man's face, knocking the man's sunglasses from his face onto his lap.
The taxi driver opens his eyes and reaches for, and replaces, the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.
The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.
“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.
The taxi driver's lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver's mirror.
“No,” says the driver.
The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.
Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”
The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.
“Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.
“No. Not many of us.”
“There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.
“People know nothing about my people here,” says the driver. “They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?”
“I do not understand.”
The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim watches his face in the mirror as he speaks, staring at the ifrit's dark lips.
“They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don't. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the back seat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?”
Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrit's shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salim's hand for a moment.
Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust-storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind.
