Chapter Thirty-Eight
THIRTY-EIGHT
Human beings are capable of such unbelievable stupidity. We speak of the birth of a child as a miracle, but really the miracle is everything that comes after. The artist used to sit in a big window in his apartment looking at the people down in the street and muttering: “The dinosaurs died out, but you and I and all these idiots managed to survive? We do nothing but try to find ways to destroy everything that’s keeping us alive, but we’re still here?”
Then Ted used to go to the stereo in the living room and play some opera, to remind them that humans are also capable of… that.
“How can there be enough room inside a person for something this beautiful?” the artist had whispered once when they were listening to Maria Callas.
Then Ted had thought about the myth of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, and the curtain that wasn’t a curtain, and he thought that Maria Callas’s voice sounded like the artist’s paintings felt. As if they were more real than reality.
“But there isn’t enough room. Art is what can’t fit inside a person. The things that bubble over,” Ted had said.
“Sometimes you’re really smart,” the artist had replied.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t true. Everything Ted has done in his life since then suggests the opposite.
“TED?” Louisa repeats, making him jump.
“What are you yelling for?” he snaps, looking around the parking lot in panic.
“You’re not listening!”
“I’m listening… now.”
Louisa gestures toward the taxi.
“I said: if you’re worried about being robbed in the taxi, you don’t have to worry. You don’t have anything left to steal!”
“Really? You think so?” Ted replies, affronted, and holds out his arm where his watch used to be.
Louisa rolls her eyes toward the taxi driver.
“Ted’s generation is very ironic, you know.”
“Ah,” the taxi driver says understandingly.
Ted breathes in through his nose irritably, which is much more difficult now that there’s so much blood in his nostrils. Deep down he wants to point out that in this particular case, he was actually being sarcastic, not ironic, but instead he just sighs:
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Louisa says suspiciously.
“Okay.”
“I mean… okay? Or okay-okay? Or okay-okay-okay?”
Ted frowns.
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
He groans.
“I said okay! Let’s get in the taxi. And try to catch up with the train. We might die, but what does that matter, this day can’t really get any worse anyway…”
“I’m sitting in the front!” Louisa exclaims quickly, then shrugs off her backpack and rushes around the car.
“Then you’ll have to sit with Albert,” the taxi driver nods to Ted.
“Excuse me?” Ted says, but it’s already too late.
Albert is sitting in the back seat. He’s a plant. A very, very, very large plant. The taxi driver explains that her house is very dark at this time of year, and Albert needs a lot of sunlight, so she takes him to work with her. Ted looks out the window: pitch black.
“Good idea,” he says, trying to avoid getting one of Albert’s leaves in his eye as the car turns around in the parking lot.
“Ironic?” the taxi driver whispers to Louisa, while putting her foot down on the accelerator as if it were trying to steal her break-fast.
“No idea, Ted is very complicated,” Louisa replies, and squeals with delight as the taxi flies along parallel to the train tracks.
“We’re driving very fast,” Ted points out in terror from the back seat.
“THANK YOU!” the taxi driver cries.
“He probably didn’t mean it as a compliment,” Louisa says.
“You’re right, very complicated. Youngsters these days,” the taxi driver snorts, like it was a swear word.
“Did you hear? She called you a youngster!” Louisa grins toward the back seat, but Ted is fully occupied regretting every one of his life choices.
Louisa looks around the car curiously, pressing all the buttons. The taxi driver isn’t the least bit annoyed, just smiles.
“Like my children. Pressed everything, they did.”
Louisa’s expression swings between embarrassment and enthusiasm.
“I’ve never been in a taxi before. I mean, I’ve been in police cars a few times, and they’re a bit like taxis, right? Only there, the doors are locked!”
She carries on pressing buttons, and accidentally turns the stereo on. Terrified, she tries to switch it off, but the taxi driver shakes her head calmly and turns the volume up instead. She hums along to the music.
“What’s that?” Louisa wonders.
“Opera! In Italian!” the taxi driver yells.
“What are they singing about?”
“Love!”
“It must be nice to speak Italian,” Louisa says dreamily.
“Italian? Can’t speak a word of it!”
“How do you know they’re singing about love, then?”
The taxi driver chuckles, turns the volume up until the speakers rattle, and promises:
“My friend, all opera, always about love!”
Albert is asleep on Ted’s shoulder in the back seat. Ted shuts his eyes tightly and tries to think happy thoughts, he isn’t very successful. People say that anxiety is fear for no reason, but Ted’s brain is very helpful when it comes to providing suggestions. Once he read a book that said that people with neuropsychiatric disorders need to “make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.
Ted shouldn’t be here, his brain says. He shouldn’t be the only one left. What sort of selfish God deprives humanity of a world-famous artist and leaves behind a neurotic high school teacher? Ted can’t look after Louisa, he can’t even fall asleep without her going missing. He can’t take responsibility, not for art and not for people, he can’t even walk off a train without getting beaten up. One person can achieve a lot of stupid things, but managing to lose his best friend’s watch, his best friend’s painting, and his best friend’s ashes in the same evening surely must count as some sort of record?
Maria Callas is singing on the radio. Albert is good at keeping secrets, no one will know that Ted cries on him then.
“Is that your husband?” Louisa asks in the front seat, pointing to a photograph on the dashboard.
“That’s my man, yes, yes,” the taxi driver smiles, waving a wrinkled finger and a worn ring.
“How long have you been married?”
“Forty years.”
“Wow,” Louisa gasps, because that’s a length of time that no eighteen-year-old can comprehend, the fact that they’ve been with each other for more than twice as long as she has been with herself.
“Secret? You know, everyone ask: What’s the secret? Do you know? Holding hand!” the taxi driver nods.
“Holding hand?” Louisa repeats.
“Everyone say: Don’t go to bed angry! But you know, if you hold hand, very hard to be angry for long, you know? So you hold hand, when you go for walk, when you watch TV. You hold hand, so you know: You and me. Always.”
“That sounds simple,” Louisa smiles.
“Other thing, important! In restaurant, he orders food I like, always. Halfway through meal, we swap plates. You understand? You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”
Louisa nods. She’s never been to a restaurant, but when she and Fish stole ice cream, they used to swap halfway too.
“Is that your children?” she asks, pointing to another photograph taped to the dashboard.
“Yes, yes, seven children!”
“SEVEN? Have you and your husband ever tried just going to the movies one night or something?” Louisa exclaims, and then Ted leans forward between the seats and scolds:
“Louisa! You can’t say that!”
“What? I’m just asking. I mean, I like babies and all, but… seven?” Louisa points out.
The taxi driver just grins.
“Seven children. All grown-up now. Two dead. But: have grandchildren now! And Albert! A person needs to keep something alive, you understand? Otherwise: we are not people.”
Louisa nods seriously and adds:
“Ted hates children. He’s scared of babies.”
“I’m not scared of babies!” Ted protests, so annoyed that he accidentally hits Albert.
“No, no, you’re really brave,” Louisa giggles, and the taxi driver chuckles, and then Ted glares at the pair of them.
“Well, the conductor on the train believed I’d been in prison!” he snaps.
You say a lot of stupid things when you’re feeling stupid.
“Sure. But for some financial crime or something. Or for riding a bike on the sidewalk, maybe,” Louisa informs him.
“I could very well have been in prison, and I’m not scared of babies,” Ted says, and it’s hard even for him to decide which lie is biggest.
Albert lurches as they go around a bend and ends up lying in Ted’s lap.
“Or dog! Also not scared of dog?” the taxi driver nods encouragingly.
“I’m just not hugely fond of them…,” Ted grunts, carefully putting Albert back in his seat and fastening his seatbelt.
Then the taxi driver puts her foot down and clutches the steering wheel tight, and every bit of metal in the car shrieks.
“NOW! THERE!”
They can hear the train in the distance. The taxi driver skids to a halt by the steps of the station and Louisa, who has already taken her seatbelt off, jumps out of the car while it’s still moving, scraping her shoes so that bits of rubber swirl like snow around her feet.
“This certainly, certainly isn’t a good idea!” Ted says to Albert, because Albert is really the only one listening to him nowadays.
Then Ted jumps out of the car too, and runs as hard as he can. Or limps, anyway. He can see Louisa far ahead of him, she flies up a flight of steps and rushes out onto the platform, waving and shouting like someone possessed. The train thunders into the station and thunders straight past her.
“WAIT!” Louisa roars, but the train doesn’t care. It’s already thrown itself into the darkness and been swallowed up by the night.
That’s how quickly it’s all over.
Ted stands with his hands on his knees, so out of breath that it hurts to even think. He hears Louisa screaming furiously at God and the universe and everything, but what does that matter now?
When they eventually stagger back down the steps, Albert and the taxi driver are still there waiting. They look apologetic, or at least the taxi driver does. Albert just looks like Albert.
“Come! Next station! We go!” the taxi driver shouts encouragingly.
“We’ll never make it in time,” Ted sighs.
The taxi driver laughs.
“No, no, of course, never make it. What you think I am? A moon rocket?”
“Then what’s the point in even trying?”
The taxi driver shrugs her shoulders.
“Next station: lost and found. Maybe someone leave what you lost there?”
“I doubt it, it’s very valuable,” Ted says disconsolately.
The taxi driver shrugs again.
“Maybe people surprise you? What to do without hope? Eh? Come on, I drive you!”
So they get in the taxi again, driving at a more civilized speed this time, following the train tracks into a small town where the main street is paved with cobblestones, so Ted and Albert bounce around like pinballs in the back seat. Most of the shops look like they’re boarded up, but there’s a small hairdresser’s and a small café, and at the far end a small sporting goods store with bathing suits in the window. Optimistic at this time of year, Ted thinks.
“Only Easter now! But in summer, all tourists come!” the taxi driver informs them.
Louisa peers out into the darkness in the hope of understanding what would attract tourists, but sees nothing but buildings. They could be anywhere.
“Wow! What happened there?” she asks as they pass a parked car with its windshield covered in white splotches.
“Bird shit. Really big birds here. Worst thing about living close to sea,” the taxi driver replies.
Louisa splutters as if she’s just choked on air.
“Are we… near the sea?” she manages to ask, astonished.
“ Near the sea? If I turn right here, we in the sea!” the taxi driver grins.
But she turns left instead, toward the next train station, and adds:
“The birds are like tourists. They screech and make a mess, but you’re not allowed to shoot them…”
When the car stops Louisa opens the door and breathes in deep, astonished mouthfuls of the darkness outside. It tastes of salt.
“The sea,” she repeats.
Ted doesn’t hear her, he’s busy checking his pockets with growing panic.
“Oh God, I don’t have my wallet! It’s in my suitcase on the train!” he wails in despair.
“I’ve got money,” Louisa says calmly and pulls some crumpled bills from her pocket. “I got it out of your suitcase on the train.”
The taxi driver takes the money, moves Albert to the front seat, then turns to the pair of them.
“You take care of yourselves now, you hear? Don’t forget: hold hand!”
Ted and Louisa really, really don’t look like they’re planning to do that, but Louisa hugs herself and calls brightly:
“Thank you for rescuing us! And thanks for the lift! And thanks for the love story about you and your husband!”
Ted is a little more restrained.
“Thanks for… everything,” he says, and really tries to look like someone who isn’t scared of dogs.
The taxi driver takes one last look at him, up and down.
“How do you say? The first day of the rest of your lives, this? So live this life!”
Ted feels fully occupied just trying to get through the night, but the taxi driver glares at him until he doesn’t dare do anything but nod. Then she and Albert drive off around the corner, on a long road toward sunrise. Ted watches them go and thinks exhaustedly that it doesn’t matter if life is long or short, it isn’t time that’s the problem, it’s the speed. Far too much happens when you’re alive, everything goes so damn fast, how are you supposed to have time to be a human being?
Louisa clears her throat twice behind him.
“Aren’t you going to say thank you to me? For paying for the taxi?” she asks.
Ted’s eyebrows bounce.
“With my money?”
“You can still say thank you, right?” Louisa points out, affronted, and starts heading toward the sign on the station that says “Lost and Found.”
Ted follows her with a sigh that could have toppled trees. This is the first night of the rest of his life, and it starts with a squelch.
“Watch out for that dog shit!” Louisa calls, precisely one second too late.