(no subject)
If people ask me what's at work here, I most times don't know what to say. And not just because they hardly ever ask. It's because simply saying destiny or karma or just what goes around comes around...that's too weak a way of putting it. There are multiple forces in balance, if everything's healthy that is, and sometimes strange things happen. But you don't question it. I mean, you can--of course you can. But I don't see what good it comes to. There's things operating on a scale here that we simply can't fathom.
Like my girlfriend and I, ending up driving this cab. Nothing you can foresee, and nothing that made sense--at least not at first.
But after a while, after watching who gets into your cab and where they go, you begin to think maybe you understand. Not all of it, of course, but you understand enough to make it okay. To make it so you can get by.
The dead people are the worst. Oh sure, I could come out and say ghosts, but again that just feels wrong. You get to this level of things and you know just how useless language is, believe me.
But anyway, the dead people. You pick them up from hospitals, mostly. And for the most part all they do is say a single word: Home. And you drive them home. You don't have to ask where, you just know where, and you take them there. They don't feel like walking, and they don't know any other kind of motion besides a car, so there's us. Charon for the 21st Century, I guess.
I drop them off in front of their home, and sometimes they go inside. Sometimes they just wander off, confused and unaccepting. And sometimes they just fade away, standing right there on the sidewalk. You want to think that they're at peace, but you don't count on it. You can't.
More interesting, to me at least--Cynthia and I don't talk about our job much--are the live people. They climb into the cab and ask to go to dead places. Maybe it's the house they were born in, long since torn down to make room for condos. Maybe it's an apartment where a lover once lived, and now the building is gutted and awaiting its end. Sometimes it's even a field that's no longer there.
But it doesn't matter. Sometimes they go inside, and sometimes they too simply stand and stare, rather than enter. But they don't disappear, at least not while I'm watching. I sometimes think that it's their time and they know it, and they go to these places to be somewhere familiar when it comes. So many people simply disappear and the body is never found. That could be it.
Of course, I don't how it works for certain. I don't ask questions, as if there was anyone to ask. You take them to where they want to go, and you can drive by the same spot the next day and you see it for what it is: a caved in foundation roped and chained off. Sometimes there's a sign there promising something new to be built, sometimes there isn't.
Cynthia takes first shift, I take second shift and we're together during the late night hours. Which is nice, all things considered. Suitable reinbursement, I guess, for having to drive the cab we were killed in.
After the driver pulled the gun on us and his friend hopped out of the trunk and joined us, the rest of the evening became a blur, up until the first gunshot. It's selfish, it's horribly selfish, but I'm glad they killed me first so I didn't have to watch what followed. I know what happened, but at least I didn't have to watch it. Knowing is bad enough. I don't know how much Cynthia remembers. We don't talk about what came before often.
We found out later that they got theirs. After they got cocky and were killed by an off-duty cop halfway through their eighth couple, yes, but they got theirs. And they still do.
Because like I said, it's not karma. It's not destiny. It doesn't always make any sense. People need to go places and we take them. And we're happy to do it. We're happy to be able to do anything at this point. And I wish I could say I didn't give me satisfaction to know that the souls of those two sons of bitches weren't keeping us from ever having to fill a gas tank again. I sometimes hear their screaming in the pistons, or when the transmission switches gears. Just for a moment.
Of course, they could be doing it all the time and I'm just used to it so I tune it out.
Sometimes, when I'm out looking for a fare, or the one that I have isn't talking at all, I wonder if that's not why God setup mankind to fall in the first place. Because things work on a scale, like I said. And the power for everything has to come from somewhere. So that's what I think hell is, sometimes. An engine for His creation. Hell is just another engine.
