by Xue Yiwei
I handed my father two napkins. He glanced at me, but showed no sign of wiping the tears from his eyes.
“Actually there are many possibilities, and we can make various hypotheses about the incident. The hypothesis I’ve spent the most time considering is that if I had gone to save that child and nothing had happened to me, your mother might not have followed through on her threat to divorce me. She might have soon forgiven me for abandoning her, or for doing my duty by the boy. Our marriage might have survived, and you might have still come into the world. Another possibility is that your mother would have remained aloof, as on the night of the incident. In this case, I have often wondered, would we have been able to carry on?” Father said.
“The second evening, her attitude toward me totally changed, completely unexpectedly. As soon as I lay down in bed, she grasped my hand, and begged me to hold her. My heart palpitated violently. I thought that my heart and mind would stop me from responding in kind, because such reciprocation would have indicated that I was already over the feeling of estrangement that the incident had brought on. It would be as if I’d crossed the line between life and death. I never thought I would do that so calmly. I turned on my side, and laid my hand on your mother’s hip. She tapped my nose with her forefinger. ‘I know you would never leave me,’ she said warmly, her voice full of emotion.”
I gestured for my father to wipe away the tears that were about to fall.
“But on the way back from the cemetery, I thought of another possibility,” Father said. “Had I not dared, had I been reluctant to cross over that threshold, had I brutally brushed her loving hand away, what then? What would have become of us?”
I put my right hand on my father’s knee. I wanted to tell him that Mother wasn’t there with us anymore. You two are now forever separated by that brutal line. What’s the point of mentioning all of this now?
The Taxi Driver
The taxi driver drove into the company parking lot and saw his space was taken. He did not even glance at the licence plate, but saw another space on the north side and parked there. The taxi driver got out and looked around. He walked to the end of the car, opened the trunk, and took out a backpack with just a few odds and ends in it. He lightly closed the trunk, muttered something, and tapped the lid twice. Then he looked up. A raindrop fell on his face.
The taxi driver would normally have noted the number of any car parked in his spot. The next time he took the car out he would have chewed out whichever colleague had parked it there. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he would have yelled in a venomous voice. But just now he hadn’t bothered to check. He walked into the office and gave the keys to the old man on duty. The old man gave the taxi driver an apprehensive glance and immediately looked away, as if afraid that the taxi driver would see the look on his face. The taxi driver hesitated a moment, then patted the old man on the shoulder. The old man got all choked up. “Those poor girls,” he said in a trembling voice.
The taxi driver seemed not to hear. He calmly turned and would have just walked out, had the old man not cried out for him to stop. He looked back.
The old man poked his head through the office window and called, “The manager wants you to come on Thursday to do the paperwork.”
“Got it,” the taxi driver said in a low voice, as if talking to himself.
The rain still would not fall. The air was oppressive. The taxi driver walked along the crosstown street towards his home. It was still rush hour. Many cars had their brights on; an awful glare.
The taxi driver crossed two streets and reached the entrance to the biggest pizzeria in town, which is where the woman had hailed him when he was driving past at the end of his shift. There were only two patrons inside. In this bustling city, this restaurant was always nearly deserted, which was exactly the kind of atmosphere he wanted right now. He needed peace and quiet.
The taxi driver ordered a large cola and a seafood pizza, his daughter’s favourite. As he ordered the pizza, his eyes filled with tears, blurring his vision. The cashier had to remind him three times before he realized he hadn’t paid. He quickly got out the money and handed it over. “Sorry,” he said, a bit choked up.
The taxi driver sat at a table by the window. His daughter sometimes sat across from him. She was always in a hurry to take the first bite when the pizza arrived, and it’d be so hot that it burned her tongue, making her gasp for cool air. Then she would roll her tiny eyes and smile a silly smile. From that seat, the taxi driver could see a busy street scene, watching the cars file past in an endless stream. He had made his living in this environment for fifteen years. Every day he would shuttle down busy city streets in his taxi. He was familiar with that, inured to it. But a few days ago, he suddenly felt he wasn’t so used to it anymore. The same thing with the lot. Where before he would check the licence plate of anyone who dared to park in his space, now he did not feel it belonged to him, or that he belonged in the lot. He no longer had to bother, because he would never take the taxi out again.
Before he drove the taxi into the parking lot, he had already had his last fare as a taxi driver. At dusk, he had been worried it was going to pour, worried because the windshield wipers weren’t working, worried he would be forced to end his last day at work early, which he didn’t want to do. Maybe he still felt attached to his occupation, or maybe he felt attached to the taxicab that had accompanied him all these years. The taxi driver’s wish came true. It didn’t end up raining. Just as he was bidding his taxi adieu, a drop of rain fell on his face.
The taxi driver wiped away the tears in his eyes and had a big gulp of his cola. Lost in thought, he seemed to once again see the woman with the grave expression as she had gotten into his taxi at the entrance to the pizzeria.
He had asked her where she wanted to go.
She said go straight.
The taxi driver was puzzled. He asked where exactly she wanted to go.
Again, she wanted him to go straight.
The taxi driver glanced at the woman in the rearview mirror. Her attire was formal, her expression solemn. She obviously had something on her mind.
Soon, her cell phone rang. The woman seemed to know that the phone would ring just at that time. She got it out of her purse in a leisurely way, apparently displeased with the interruption to her thoughts. “Yes, I know,” she said.
The taxi driver gave her another glance in the rearview mirror.
“What else can I do!” the woman said.
The taxi driver could hear from her simple reply that she was distraught.
“Maybe that’s it,” the woman said.
The taxi driver saw she had turned her head and was looking out the window.
“I don’t want it to be this way,” the woman said.
A kind of mystified curiosity stirred in the taxi driver’s soul. He started to imagine what kind of person would have made such an upsetting call to his customer.
“You couldn’t imagine,” the woman said.
No, the taxi driver could not imagine. It must be a man she was talking to. But then he felt that it was also very likely it was a woman. In the end he even thought it might be a child. This final thought made his steering wheel shudder.
“You’re completely wrong,” the woman said.
The taxi driver thought of his own daughter. In the past week, every time he’d answered the phone he had hoped to hear a miracle, a child’s voice from another world. He did not know whether his daughter would still call. It was a call he imagined in his despair.
“No way,” the woman said.
Perplexed, the taxi driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror. He noticed her sexy hair.
“You’ll never get it, will you?” the woman said.
The taxi driver slowed down. He was worried that the woman might miss her destination.
“There’s no reason to worry,” the woman said.
The taxi driver found her resolute voice difficult to bear. He wanted to interrupt her and ask her where she was going.
“I will tell you,” the woman said. She was clearly tired of talking. She said goodbye impatiently. Then she put her cell phone back into her purse. She looked at her watch, then at the clock in the cab. Her expression was still solemn. “Let me out after the next intersection,” she said coldly.
The taxi driver felt relieved. He stepped on the gas and angrily passed the truck that had been blocking his way.
As soon as the taxi came to a stop, she passed him a hundred yuan note. Then she opened the door and got out. The taxi driver called to tell her to wait for her change. But the woman did not stop. Her seductive hair made the taxi driver feel a rare moment of loneliness.
The taxi driver had viewed that woman as his very last fare. That’s what he had been thinking, looking her over in the rearview mirror. He was happy that his final passenger had stirred his imagination and hope with half a conversation. But right when he was calling out to his last customer to say he would make change, about half of what she’d handed him, another two passengers, a couple, got into his taxi. They were going to a place not far from the parking lot of the taxi company. The taxi driver hesitated but did not refuse them.
This couple were very concerned about the amount of space between them, as the taxi driver noticed from the start. He also noticed that the man was about to say something several times, but was stopped short each time by the cold look on the woman’s face. Apparently she was the one who was keeping her distance. The rush-hour traffic was chaos. There were accidents on several major arteries. The worst one was on the northwest corner of the midtown square. They were stuck there for the longest time. When the driver at last managed to make it through, the man finally broke through the line of ice. “Sometimes I miss …,” he said haltingly.
“Sometimes?” the woman said harshly. “What is there to miss?”
Her reply got a rise out of the man. “Right,” he said ruefully. “Everything seems wrong.”
“How can right possibly seem wrong?” The woman said, her tone still severe.
The road was so heavily congested it was hard to make any headway at all. The taxi driver had even more free time to wonder about this couple, but he reminded himself not to keep looking in the rearview mirror. To keep his mind on something else, he forced himself to think about the woman passenger just before. He felt that her caller could not have been a child in fact, because the woman’s expression was so serious from beginning to end, her tone so cold. At the thought, he felt frustrated. For the past week, he had been waiting for a child’s voice, full of life, to call him from another world.
The man and woman were still engaged in a difficult dialogue. The man’s voice was faint, the woman’s harsh.
“I really don’t understand why …”
“You’ve never understood.”
“Actually …”
“Actually that’s just the way it is. You’ll never understand.”
“Can’t we find or try to think of some other way?”
“Can we? Is there any other way?”
Due to the weakness of the man’s voice, the conversation never turned into an argument. But it never made any headway, either. The woman met all his questions with the same severity, keeping the conversation stalled at whatever starting point the man had managed to find.
“Don’t assume …,” the man said finally, distraught. He was obviously trying to give the stuck conversation one last push.
“I did not assume,” the woman replied, cutting him off again.
The taxi driver had put the car into neutral and stepped lightly on the brake. The taxi came to a stop at the location the man and woman had indicated. This woman also passed him a hundred yuan note. When the taxi driver looked back to give her change, he discovered her cheeks were covered in tears.
Sitting in the pizzeria, the taxi driver remembered how he used to pass a napkin to his daughter. “Wipe your face,” he would say impatiently. Most of the time, she would sit across from him, her lips covered in sauce. The taxi driver had always been careless. He had never much cared about the expressions on his daughter’s face, or about her existence. He was the same with his wife. He’d never imagined that they might cease to exist. But in an instant, they had. A void had suddenly appeared in his life, leading the taxi driver to a sudden discovery of the past they all shared.
For the past week, he had been grieving, diving deep into his memories. Just like that, his world had lost its most essential voice, becoming unbearably quiet. But he could not keep his thoughts quiet. His nights were sleepless, as long-neglected moments in his life suddenly became vivid, crashing into his heart. He didn’t even have the courage to go to his own house, not anymore. He was afraid of a house that was no longer a home. He was afraid of a pitiless silence that would stifle his memories. In the past week, he had turned into a careful fellow, replaying the past in his imagination in every detail.
The taxi driver knew he was in a dangerous mental state. He quit his job. For the past week he’d seen his daughter and wife over and over, as they kept inviting him to revisit their shared past. The life he had never really cared about suddenly became full of colour and drama. He filled in their expressions and their gestures with a fine-grained memory. He did not want to miss a thing. Of course he wouldn’t want them to just appear one day in front of the taxi. He would freeze at the sight of their terror-stricken faces, unable to react in time. He would slam on the brake, knowing it was already too late. He would be in unbearable pain. He was in unbearable pain. Wrongly assuming he was the person who had caused the accident, he sank into an abyss of self-reproach. Only when a truck appeared in his field of vision would the truth drag himself out of the abyss. Irate, he would step on the gas and pass the truck.
The taxi driver had been on the road from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, en route to the fare of a lifetime, when a truck carrying a load of books ran over his wife and daughter.
The taxi driver finished his pizza in the tangle of his thoughts. He recalled the way his daughter looked when he was eating and how his wife used to sit to the side, teasing them happily. The taxi driver finished the last sip of his cola, got the ice cubes out of the paper cup, and arranged them in a row on the table. This was a game his daughter had liked to play. He couldn’t bear now to see that line of ice. He closed his eyes and saw his daughter’s thin finger moving over the tabletop, a gesture that had seemed meaningless at the time but was so deeply meaningful to him now. The taxi driver opened his eyes and turned his head to look dazedly out the window at the busy streetscape. The familiar scene suddenly seemed uncanny, so much so that his heart ached. He’d spent the past fifteen years shuttling through those city streets day and night, and he hadn’t left a single trace.
He was sure he could not go on living in such a foreign city. He decided to move back to the countryside, to take care of his aging parents and keep them company, and also because he believed that only their presence could quiet his mind. Fifteen years had passed since he had left them. His reappearance might seem like his resurrection—a miracle, it would seem to them. He looked forward to the satisfaction he would give them. He even fantasized that in fifteen years, a similar miracle would see his daughter and wife also return to his side. Yes, he would go back to his hometown, where, he hoped, he could reclaim the meaning of his life and find the peace and quiet he so desperately needed.
His last passenger had given the taxi driver’s mood a bit of a boost. He was surprised to discover that he was still curious about life. His sense of hearing had been eroded by extreme sorrow, but his ears continued to function. He could still hear other people’s voices. And he was still curious about them. Yes, he’d actually heard what the old fellow at the company office had said so emotionally: “Those poor girls!” At the time the taxi driver had shuddered, but he hadn’
t made any reply. He had quietly turned and walked away, as if he had not heard the old man’s agonized sigh. He was afraid to hear it. He was afraid of himself. He’d chosen to leave his life behind, and had resolved to refuse the company’s compassionate request for him to stay. After signing the paperwork on Thursday, he would no longer be a taxi driver. The decision had been made.
The taxi driver turned his head from the uncanny street scene. Up ahead, not far away, were a mother and daughter, who didn’t seem to catch his eye. He stared at the table in front of him. He discovered that the row of ice cubes had already melted. Affectionately, he stroked the melted water on the table with his fingertips, as if stroking the ethereal past.
Suddenly his fingertips touched his daughter’s. He heard her piercing laugh. He heard his wife ask why she was laughing so happily, but their daughter did not reply. Her soft fingertips pressed against his, as if to invite him to play their familiar game. He accepted, and pressed his fingertips against hers, causing her fingers to withdraw slowly in the ice water until they reached the edge of the table. In the last instant the taxi driver felt that disaster was upon him. He wanted to grasp his daughter’s lively little impish hand, but could not.
The taxi driver knew he had missed his chance and would not get another. This was the last time he and his daughter would ever get to spend time together in the city. He would never again touch the tabletop in the pizzeria. He would leave the city, never to return. To the city, which to him had become suddenly strange, it was as though he were already gone, as though he had departed with his wife and daughter; as though they had all disappeared together. Their going gave the taxi driver a serenity he had never felt before, a sense of peace and quiet that was of an incomparable purity. This sacred sensation, which had appeared earlier than he had expected, moved the taxi driver so much that he burst into tears.