Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [198]
What human language captures the dislocation, the acute insufficiency of being in the presence of the superorganism, the sinking, shrinking feeling at this display of industrial steel and light and might? It was as if nothing Id ever done in my life prior to this counted. As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow.
The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.
Memory.
I WAS ALONE in my hemisection of Mr. K. L. Hamid's cab, my luggage next to me, and a scratched Plexiglas partition between us. Two strangers, isolated and distant, in a car so broad that the backseat alone could have held five humans and two sheep.
My muscles were tense because of our speed, worrying about a child drying cow patties on the hot tarmac or the cow or goat that surely would wander into the road. But I saw no animals, no humans except in cars.
Hamid's bullet-shaped head was covered with tight black swirls. On the laminated license next to the meter, the camera had caught his shock and surprise. The whites of his eyes showed. I convinced myself it was a picture taken on the day he landed in America, the day he saw and felt what I saw.
Which was why Hamid's discourtesy so wounded me. He wouldn't look my way. Perhaps when one has driven a taxi for a long time, the passenger becomes an object defined by destination and nothing else, just as (if one isn't careful) patients can become the “diabetic foot in bed two” or the “myocardial infarction in bed three.”
Did Hamid think that if he looked I'd want his reassurance? Did he think I'd seek his explanation of every sight along the way so as to assuage my fears? He would have been right.
In that case, I said to myself, Hamid's silence must be instructive! An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now. That was his message. That was the point of his rudeness: Find your backbone, or be swallowed whole.
I smiled now, relaxing, letting the scenery rush by. It was exhilarating to have arrived at this insight. I slapped the seat. I voiced my thoughts.
“Yes, Hamid. Screw your courage to the sticking place,” I said aloud, invoking Ghosh, who never got to see what I was seeing, never heard the superorganism. How joyfully he would have embraced this experience.
Hamid jerked back at the sound of my voice. He glanced at me in the mirror, then away, then back again. Eye contact for the first time! Only now did he seem to acknowledge he was carrying something other than a sack of potatoes.
“Thank you, Hamid!” I said.
“What? What you say?”
“I said, ‘thank you.’ “
“No, before that!”
“Oh, that. It's Macbeth,” I said, leaning forward to the Plexiglas, overeager for conversation. “Lady Macbeth, actually. My father used to say that to us all the time. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place.’ “
He was silent, his gaze flitting from road to rearview mirror. Finally he burst out.
“You insult me?”
“Beg your pardon? No. No! I was merely talking to myself. It is as—”
“Screw me? Screw you!” he said.
My mouth fell open. Was it possible to be so completely misunderstood? His face in the mirror said indeed it was. I sank my neck back and shook my head in resignation. I had to laugh. To think that Ghosh—or Lady Macbeth—would be so misinterpreted.