Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [197]
It was while bending down to help her that I saw the sign in the hand of a swarthy brown-eyed man. He held it at waist level, as if he didn't want to be identified with the liveried sign holders. His bush shirt hung out over baggy white pajama pants. Brown sandals on sockless feet completed his outfit. The letters on his sign could have spelled MARVIN or MARMEN or MARTIN. The second word was STONE.
“Is that supposed to say ‘Marion’?” I asked.
He surveyed me from top to bottom, and then he looked away as if I weren't worth a reply. The Ghanaian woman gave a cry of recognition and rushed away to family.
“Excuse me,” I said, stepping into the man's line of sight. “I'm Marion Stone. For Our Lady of Perpetual Succour?”
“Marion is girl!” he said, his accent guttural and raw.
“Not this one,” I said. “I'm named after Marion Sims, famous gynecologist?”
There was (according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) a statue of Marion Sims in Central Park, at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue. For all I knew, it was a landmark for taxis. Though Sims started off in Alabama, his success with fistula surgery brought him to New York City, where he opened the Woman's Hospital and then a cancer hospital, which later was named Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
“Gynecology should be woman!” he rasped, as if I'd broken a fundamental rule.
“Well, Sims wasn't and neither am I.”
“You are not gynecologist?”
“No, I meant I'm not a woman. And yes, I'm not a gynecologist.”
He was confused. “Kis oomak,” he said, at last. I knew enough Arabic to understand that he'd just invoked a gynecological term that made reference to my mother.
THE BLACK-SUITED DRIVERS led their passengers to sleek black cars, but my man led me to a big yellow taxi. In no time we were driving out of Kennedy Airport, heading to the Bronx. We merged at what I thought was dangerous speed onto a freeway and into the slipstream of racing vehicles. “Marion, jet travel has damaged your eardrums,” I said to myself, because the silence was unreal. In Africa, cars ran not on petrol but on the squawk and blare of their horns. Not so here: the cars were near silent, like a school of fish. All I heard was the whish of rubber on concrete or asphalt.
Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our giant African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration, of the super-organism. It's a sound I believe that only the new immigrant hears, but not for long. By the time I learned to say “Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce,” the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism.
The silhouette of this most famous city—the twin exclamation marks at one end, King Kong's climbing toy in the middle—was familiar. Charles Bronson, Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, the Empire Theater, and Cinema Adowa had seen to that. My hubris was to think I understood America from such movies. But the real hubris I could see now was America's and it was hubris of scale. I saw it in the steel bridges stretching out over water; I saw it in the freeways looping over one another like tangled tapeworms. Hubris was my taxi's speedometer, wider than the steering wheel, as if Dali had grabbed the round