Carnival

by Rawi Hage

  Hey, Fly, Tammer said as I turned to walk back towards my car, could you buy us some hamburgers? And Skippy repeated, Hamburgers.

  Not today, I said. Got to go back to work.

  THE NEXT DAY I went to the hospital to see Linda. And there was Skippy, smoking and juggling rocks in the parking lot.

  Is Tammer inside? I asked.

  No, he went to buy cigarettes.

  Did he already visit?

  Yeah.

  How is his mother?

  Not good.

  Did you go in?

  No.

  Where do you come from? I asked the bug.

  The moon, he said, and laughed. I come from the moon.

  You have the gun on you?

  He laughed.

  Is that why you waited outside?

  Yeah, outside, he said. Tammer is coming. Tammer is coming, he said, and laughed.

  How is your mother? I asked when Tammer had reached us.

  He ignored my question. He just passed me and kept going and Skippy trailed along.

  THE WORD ON the street had it that Fredao, after damaging Linda, had lost the respect of his girls, and that they had rebelled against him. A new pimp had already taken over Fredao’s corner and no one had seen him for days. Rumour had it that he’d gotten ill and nostalgic and decided to go back to Angola with a suitcase filled with money.

  I went up to Linda’s room. Her teeth were now completely gone. Her jaw was so damaged that she could hardly talk. I had to decode every word she said. When I told her that I had seen Tammer outside, tears went down her cheeks and she reached for my hand and squeezed it. Her eyes and her fingers stayed fixed in the same position for a long time.

  Two weeks later, the body of Fredao would be found on the shore of the river. He had been repeatedly shot in the head. The news, in a small article on a back page, would report that three of his limbs were missing. The bites would be attributed to hungry stray dogs, though the report would go on to mention that there were knife cuts and pieces of missing flesh.

  BIRDS

  ON THE WAY back from the hospital, I saw Zainab on the street, walking towards the bus station. I stopped my car and called to her from across the road. She barely waved at me and continued walking. I made a U-turn and drove up alongside her. I opened my window and asked her to get in. She hesitated, and then she opened the door and sat next to me. I’ll drive you to school, I said.

  She was quiet. And then she said, There’s no need. I am leaving.

  Home?

  Where is home for us, Fly? My home was taken, occupied. I am moving to another city.

  Gina, I said.

  You saw us?

  Yes. I didn’t know.

  She was travelling in Jordan and we met and fell in love. And I had to leave. I left everything for her. A relationship like ours is not accepted everywhere.

  But Zainab, that is the consequence of those religions you so defend and embrace. I don’t understand you.

  Fly, religion is here and it will always be here.

  Am I going to see you again? I asked.

  I don’t believe so, Fly.

  For once you don’t believe.

  She smiled and said, Fly, what do you believe in? What do you live for?

  What do the stars believe in, Zainab? Where do the dead horses go, what do the birds worship, and what do the rivers live for?

  Take care of yourself, Fly.

  She leaned over, kissed me, and left, and I’ve never seen her again.

  ACT FIVE

  CRIMES

  NUMBER 6 WAS found shot in the district of St. Lucas Island. His car was discovered six hours after his disappearance. The first alarm was given by his partner, Number 107. They shared the car in two twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. Every morning for the past ten years they would meet at the same taxi stand and exchange the car keys and a few words before the night driver went home and the morning driver started the day. When Number 6 didn’t show up after his night shift, his partner called the dispatcher, who repeatedly tried to reach Number 6, to no avail. At that point, the police were informed.

  His car was spotted by a security guard who heard the repeated calling of the taxi dispatcher coming from the radio. Number 6 had been shot in the side of the head. The shot must have come from the front passenger seat: blood was splattered all over the front seat and the glass. The car was held as evidence and couldn’t be driven for months. After fifteen years of driving, Number 107, the partner of the deceased, gave up the taxi business and thought of opening a restaurant.

  NUMBER 48 WAS found on his knees, beaten by a rock, down by the train tracks. He was discovered by two hobos who said they heard the loud buzzing of the flies and saw a stray dog escaping with a human limb in its mouth. As they approached the car, they smelled and then saw the dead man. The police came and the newspapers went on a frenzy of photographing the crime scene. The hobos were asked to pose for a photo next to the car. They both smiled and everyone in the editorial office commented on their missing teeth.

  Number 48 had a young wife and two young children. His wife, who had no other means of income and no family in this land, decided to go back to Algeria and live with her brother and his wife.

  NUMBER 96 DIED of a broken neck. His car was found in a hayfield by a farmer. The radio in the car had been left on and played loud music all night. In the early morning, the farmer took his shotgun and drove his pickup truck to the murder scene. The farmer later complained that the loud radio had echoed all the way back to the barns and scared the cows, depriving them of a good night’s sleep.

  The victim’s four brothers, who were, like him, recent immigrants from the Eastern bloc, stayed up all night drinking. Two of them wanted to bury the body in the new country, as they called it, and the other two wanted to ship the body back to the victim’s place of birth. They argued, then they drank, sang, cried, and fist-fought among each other. The fight turned violent and the police came and arrested them all.

  THE LAST TIME Number 72, also known as the Sex Spider, was seen, he was walking into a hotel with a prostitute on his arm. He drove mostly in the evenings because he preferred the quiet night shift to the traffic jams of the daytime. He also had a few regular travellers whom he drove in the early mornings to the airport, which was always a good fare.

  Every evening, Number 72 waited for a big, voluptuous lady at the door of a corporate headquarters and drove her back to her house. Through the years they had gotten in the habit of teasing one another and sharing sexual fantasies over the seats, and then she would leave him a big tip and get out of the car. Once, after many years of these erotic, sexless games, she invited him in to her apartment. She chained him to her bed and left. He was chained there for two days without food or water. When she came back, he was dehydrated and delusional. When he asked her why she’d done it, she simply replied: You asked for it.

  His car was found under a bridge with five bullets across the door and the windshield. The killer, the police deduced, must have stood outside the car and shot inside. At his funeral there were quite a few women, and most of the men in attendance were taxi drivers. The victim had no family and no one knew much about his life. Number 92 said, I wish we had asked. We were too busy listening to his sexual escapades. He was a funny man.

  Earlier, however, at the wake, five transvestites and two women had shown up and surrounded the coffin. One, by the name of Larry, or Limo, wept the most. Limo stood up and walked into the middle of the gathering and said, Please, please, turn off all the lights. I will show you what Mani thought of us all. And she stood in front of the coffin and glowed. Little sparks of light began to appear on many of the attendees’ chests. Beside Limo, the two women glowed brightly, and, in the corner, a male taxi driver glowed lightly as well.

  NUMBER 18 WAS found floating in the city’s main rive
r. His car turned up six miles north of the place where the body was spotted. The autopsy showed that he had been stabbed and then thrown into the river alive. The current carried him away from the original crime scene. The stabbing must have occurred on the boardwalk. Little patches of blood were noticed on the wooden deck, not too far from the car. He must have swum for a while before his wounds spilled too much blood and weakened him and he drowned. His cousin, Number 59, said that they had grown up on the Caribbean shores and they were both fishermen and good swimmers. The official death certificate stated death by drowning. The victim was a born-again Christian, and everyone at the church he had attended seemed to believe that his next life would be better.

  ALL FIVE CRIMES were committed over the course of two days. It was established that all the rides must have originated in the city, somewhere between downtown and the riverside.

  The dispatchers’ records showed that none of the drivers had picked up the fatal call from a house or a specific address. Most likely the passenger or, more appropriately, the killer, had hailed the taxis off the street or off the stands. Which led the police to deduce that the killer must have chosen his victims at random.

  YET THERE WERE common threads. All of the victims were male and newcomers, also known as immigrants. They all worked the night shift, and none of them bore any marks of fighting or physical confrontation. As a matter of fact, it was thought that the victims must have conversed with their killer; each of the last cigarettes smoked by the drivers turned out to be the same brand, so it appeared that the killer had offered them a cigarette.

  Another detail in common was that all the cars had their radios tuned to the same spot on the dial. The frequency in question was a hip hop station, which led one policeman to let slip that they suspected a young black man or men to be responsible for the killings. The odds, they reasoned, that five middle-aged immigrant men had all been listening to this station were slim.

  The killings caused panic among the drivers. The taxi commission organized a protest drive through the city. About seven hundred cars drove through downtown, resulting in a great gridlock. Flags of the countries of origin of the victims, black ribbons, and photographs of the dead men dangled from taxi windows. The families of the deceased rode at the front of the parade, and some walked alongside the cars. Some of the victims’ children carried their father’s photographs. The kids were swamped by journalists and photographers.

  Young black men suddenly found themselves unable to flag a taxi off the street. Some of the drivers who used to wait, at the end of the night, at the doors of bars and dance halls that played hip hop and R&B and even jazz didn’t wait there anymore. After two in the morning, when the public transport had stopped, and the dance clubs shut their doors, one could see black kids walking in the middle of the road, waving and blocking the path of taxi drivers, even banging on their windows and hoods to try to get a ride. The police were called in one night when, after a few young black men tried to force their way into a taxi, a small riot took place. Several arrests were made.

  The taxi commission blamed the mayor for the murders, because he had refused to authorize glass buffers between the front and the back seats. A buffer would limit the passenger capacity to three, and since the mayor was all about attracting families and visitors to town, a four-passenger capacity was perceived as more hospitable. The anti-discrimination league accused taxi drivers and the taxi commission of discriminating against black men. A taxi driver from a Middle Eastern country was caught on camera saying that all the problems came from them, blacks. The footage was aired on the six o’clock news. When the taxi driver was confronted by activists and people from the black community, he stated that, as a Muslim, he never differentiated between races, since the Prophet, peace be upon Him, urged good Muslims to treat all races equally, but then the driver stressed that the young blacks in the city were dangerous and immoral.

  During the funeral of Number 18, the church reverend accused the local radio stations of spreading hate and corrupting the youth, and said that such stations should not be allowed to broadcast violent music that called women bitches and whores.

  And then, in the course of a televised debate, a music producer replied to the accusations of a campaigning politician by stating that hip hop was listened to by everyone, regardless of race, and he cited sales statistics to prove his point. When the politician condemned the violent language, the producer reminded him that none of the lyrics was any more or less violent than those of the colonial song “Rule Britannia.”

  It came to light that one of the victims, when he first entered the taxi business, had driven illegally for years. Having failed the taxi commission’s written exam because of poor language comprehension, the victim had resorted to using his cousin’s licence. Their similarity in looks could easily have fooled any inspector. At last, only six months before his death, he had finally passed the exam and been assigned the number 48. In the aftermath of his death, the taxi union representative raised the issue of exclusion and demanded that taxi permit exams be permitted in many other languages.

  At the taxi stands, drivers were urged to look out for each other and to be leery of customers who hailed them from the streets. Many of the drivers decided to stop working the night shift and switched to mornings. Of course, the owners of the cars hiked the rental fees for morning shifts. The Carnival was still on and some taxis refused to take people with masks on. Those who did made sure to look at the skin colour of the passenger’s hands before unlocking the doors. A gay couple who were dressed in matching cowboy suits and hats were refused entry to a cab because of the plastic guns that rested at the sides of their exposed hips. When they complained to the commission, the driver stated that he had also refused them for hygienic reasons: one of the cowboys wore leather pants that left his ass completely bare in the middle.

  Headlines such as Are Taxi Drivers Racists? flashed across the news. “The Newcomers Who Discriminate,” a special report, was repeatedly aired on various radio stations. “Should We Tolerate Those Who Don’t?” was another variation on the same theme. The only woman taxi driver in the city, a butch named Baby, was pursued by three different producers to be interviewed.

  Is taxi driving dangerous for a woman? she was asked on air.

  Not if the doll is riding with me, honey, Baby answered, and laughed.

  And then a young graduate from the creative writing department of the local university, who had driven a taxi for two years, was contracted by a publishing house to gather taxi stories. The book was to appear in the fall, in time for the national awards season. The title of the book was Taxi Stories.

  INDEED THE TAXI killer, as he was called in the news, triggered a new interest in the romantic and dangerous side of the taxi profession. Journalists and producers would hire a taxi for a whole day for a flat fee, or simply let the meter run while they asked the driver questions or rode with him through so-called dangerous neighbourhoods. Taxi drivers were ushered into the labyrinths of the TV stations for interviews. They were offered cups of water from the cooler and called by their last names, which were mispronounced by secretaries and producers alike. The anchors would often come out of their glass rooms and shake the drivers’ hands, and they would ask them the correct pronunciation of their names, repeating it to themselves many times on their way back to their high chairs and microphones. In many sound studios, wires were passed underneath the drivers’ jackets, all the way up their necks, and down inside their ears. Sudden voices saying things like Can you hear me, sir? elicited fierce head shakes by some South Asian drivers, which made it hard for the technicians to detect the meaning of the answer as a yes or a no. Makeup was applied to the drivers’ foreheads and below their eyes to cut the flare and shine. Some drivers, though, refused to wear makeup, stating that it was a woman’s affair.

  Nearly overnight a reality TV producer introduced a new show, The Longest Ride, which consisted of celebrities drivi
ng taxis equipped with hidden cameras. The show was almost cancelled after a passenger attempted to mug a celebrity driver at gunpoint. The television crew that was following the taxi in a separate car saw the gun in the kid’s hand and alerted the police. It could well have escalated into a hostage-taking situation if the celebrity hadn’t informed the mugger that he was without cash because, he said, This is The Longest Ride! The mugger, who happened to be an admirer of the show, was ecstatic to discover that he was on television, and he agreed to sign a modelling contract before he surrendered to the police.

  CRIMES (AGAIN)

  MORNING. AFTER THE burial of the latest victim of the taxi killings, a psychiatrist was slain inside his clinic as he was about to leave his office. The doctor’s coat was found hanging behind the door. According to the police report, the patterns of blood on the coat suggested that the killer had worn it while he slashed the doctor’s throat.

  Many of the patients who were being treated by the psychiatrist got sick reading the news. A computer was missing, as well as a radio, two hundred dollars, and a box of Cuban cigarillos, but the rest of the place was untouched except for the blood that had splattered all over the room. The police confiscated all the doctor’s files as part of the investigation. Patients and privacy advocates protested, stating that the police were violating citizens’ rights to privacy.

  A PROMINENT CEO was found shot next to his car, in the parking lot of the gym where he worked out three times a week.

  The CEO was the head of a large mining company. A few years before, the company had been involved in arming rebels in an African country in order to overthrow a left-leaning regime that had demanded the nationalization of the mining company. After the scandal, the then-CEO resigned and a younger CEO, by the name of Edward Stain III (in certain disco circles known as Eddie), was promoted to the job. The young CEO’s first proposal to the shareholders was to hire a PR company to conduct a campaign that would highlight the company’s social responsibility programs, including job creation for third-world workers and new, advanced environmental technologies to foster better and more environmentally conscious mining practices. The “step technique,” one of the new techniques was called, since the excavation and stripping were to be done in a series of steps that would allow future plants and new vegetation to eventually cover the sites. The CEO invited environmental groups to discuss the new procedures.