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CARLOS 2

DANE

IS IT OKAY?

Ruthless City

The driver is outside talking to some men. He recognizes me first. We fold into his car. The night is cool and the wind is soft. We roll down the windows.

I stare at the luxury of Fifth. It's 2 AM on a Monday turning into Tuesday, too early in the week for people to be out sputtering gin and tonic down the sewers. Everything is empty and the hard edges of the buildings jut out into the soft night. Harsh lines everywhere.

Sighing, I look forlornly out into the street. It is impossible not to have a romantic drive through the city when it is 2 AM. Everything is sad and every neon bulb seems abuzz with song --a lonely, heavy, stone of a song that weighs in at the bottom of your lungs and be stills ships and other man-made buoyant containers.

We drive down to the Brooklyn Bridge. I have run out of sighs and now turn to a hardness of spirit. What. In. The. Fuck, I whisper through the sliver of outside above my window. I imagine my hard syllables clunking into the water below as we drive over the bridge. What. In. The. Fuck. I pull pettily at my seatbelt.

This place is so hard and no one cares and everything is in passing to everything else and there are no long-lasting associations and --then he curves into my neighbourhood without a word and I --realize that I haven't said a word but that the driver of car 200 has remembered me and where I live. He has been exuding a sort of calm and caring like a light scarf, like a shawl all night that has gone by unnoticed until now. And now, he drives past the closest intersection because --I remember him now-- he is the driver that refuses to drop me off at the nearest intersection because he will only drive me home and no where else. And he is the driver that always stopps right in front of my door, not a fire hydrant further, "the white one," he murmured the first time he found it, peeking through the low hanging branches with me. And he is the one that fills out my voucher in neat block letters so that all I have to do is sign it, and he is the one that idles in the street until I unlock the door and close it safely behind me.

As I realize this, at T minus 30 meters from my house, I feel walloped, not by a hard thing but by a strong thing, not by a flimsy gesture but by a soft touch.

I say "thank you" twice before I slip out of the car but really I don't think I can thank him enough.