Everything is stopped.
Twilight is settling through the trees as he gazes down to where the street-light flares curve and evaporate and the unsmelt vapours of the River Tiber unsettle upwards and block the air above it.
Time to wait.
Time to lean on his oil-streaked, silent, white box-for-hire, time to hunch for shelter against the feeble drizzle, waiting for the sake of waiting in this part of the wildfire-viral city that is noisy-quiet tonight, noisy-quiet as a snoring snake, where the fares are thinly sown in the streets that always seem as dry as parched fields in the run-off rain. He is first and last in the queue at the taxi-rank, nobody else willing at this particular time to stake out this particular spot that lies out on a discarded limb of a neighbourhood away from the main pickup points, this place where the thick air is resonated by the intermittent comfort of bells and the drizzle is spiced by droplets of sap from the pine-needles.
The light is dusking over.
He inhales, and exhales. (There is always something to do.) No need to smoke: too much smoke trapped in the air. The beer from last night sitting heavy. (His liver invaded.)
He can see someone's phantom, but it is shapeless and unrecognisable, and it is swilling over him like wafts of damp smoke, imposing the crossing of its rhythms on the breeze, fraying and consolidating, but always just about remaining in one piece. Whose it is he may never know.
No matter. Another night; another place; another phantom: the same old story. The lattice of its splitting and rejoining imposes a remembered map onto the air, and that map is of the interlinked complexity of the tousled rush of the inland delta of the Niger River. But there is something different about this phantom somehow: an unusual insistence; a solid underpinning that is both an antidote and an anchor to its bendy ethereality. There is something about it that suggests it may never go away.
No matter. Another night; another place; another phantom: the same old story. The lattice of its splitting and rejoining imposes a remembered map onto the air, and that map is of the interlinked complexity of the tousled rush of the inland delta of the Niger River. But there is something different about this phantom somehow: an unusual insistence; a solid underpinning that is both an antidote and an anchor to its bendy ethereality. There is something about it that suggests it may never go away.
Especially now. Even though the sound system in the cab is switched off, he can still hear the remembered notes, as if the phantom has not only summoned the notes into his head, but has also chosen to portray them visually on the air in front of him, which means that he can now see the pulse of the bass notes as regular splashes of mud and the flurried notes of the tune as raindrops breaking the river-surface-meniscus and the organised unpredictability of the improvised notes as a salvo of iridescent fish, and all these things intermingle in front of him as the sounds coalesce in his head, and together they drag him kicking and breathing back to an image of the past washed by the deceitful currents of the rising waters of the Niger River, and he can see his small child self as others would have seen him then, squatting cross-legged in the well of the boat because there's nowhere else for him to go, building miniature mosques to an ancient design from the sand provided by the endeavours of his father who is constantly disappearing into the depths from the boat with an empty bucket and re-surfacing with one full of sand to fill the boat and feed the burgeoning concrete building programme, then disappearing again into the world of by now hopefully fled hippos, a one-man bucket-chain throughout the long hot day. Down. Up. In. Out. Slop plop drop.
And he can feel two thumbs and two fingers fading away as the music decomposes, and he sees a fare approaching, puffing up the steps, business-greyed, tall, slim, hat pulled down, buttoned-up into his raincoat, laced-up into his uniform of commerce.
The fare nods, but doesn't speak, and holds out a card with a destination.
He takes the card, makes a brief scrutiny, sweeps his arm as if throwing aside a cigarette, and then opens the door for the fare, who gets in without speaking. He goes round the back of the cab, pulling his driving gloves back on.
He climbs in through the driver's door and puts the card in the slot on the dashboard.
He glances into the three segments of the mirror, which show his own eyes, a perfectly formed picture of the fare, and the street behind, at this moment rarely and mercifully empty of the scrawled chaos of traffic. He smells stale smoke from his stubbled hand even through the glove as he brushes it across the sweat of his nose. Urban sweat. Soured.
He turns the key to induce the familiar contralto diva snarl from the engine and floors the pedal, wincing at the clenched cramp in his foot - another fallen arch in a city full of them - and in spite of the gunning noise, they merely trickle away, in a clutch-fighting crawl down the slip road, the tail juddering behind, reluctant to leave, even though the fare is not heavy, choosing their merge-point into the flow of traffic, edging in slowly before finding their level and then they go crashing through the crush of the hook-punch melee blur of the city-at-night that uncurls before them, and a carbon monoxide furl of blaring noise envelops them and to damp it down he flick-punches a key on the dashboard, and the actual, not the remembered, music curls out and flays the taxi's air with the selected rhythms and it's like he has used them to impose his own private independent state in his cab.