It seemed like we drove for an awful long time. I was alone in the rear of the ambulance. There was a partition between myself and the driver’s compartment. I had seen similar partitions in movies about taxi drivers set in New York City. Except the partitions in the New York taxis were made of transparent Plexiglas and were designed to prevent cabbies from being robbed, whereas this partition was opaque, although it did have a sliding window that opened and closed on occasion. When it opened I saw one of the nurses look in at me. I thought of the two men in white as “nurses.” I don’t know why. I had long ago given up trying to get a fix on the random associations that floated like flotsam on my brain. Or perhaps “given up” is not the right phrase. I think the right phrase would be associated with the idea of a disfigured man who refuses to look at his face in a mirror. Not that I have anything against disfigured people—hell, half the fares who climb into my taxi look like they wandered out of a Lon Chaney movie.
“Is that so?” I froze.
I looked around. A man was seated on a chair a few feet away. He was wearing white clothing, but rather than the soulless pajamas that male nurses wear in movies, he was wearing a long white laboratory coat and holding a notebook and pencil. I assumed he was a doctor. I doubted that the nurses were authorized to carry pencils. But he did have the same rubber-soled shoes that nurses wear, the kind of soles that squeak on linoleum. You would think that after thousands of years of wearing the flesh of dead animals on our precious little sensitive feet, someone would invent a shoe that didn’t squeak. But then maybe the people who manufacture footgear have more important things on their minds than the things that are often on my mind.
“That may be true,” the doctor said.
I looked at him again. Then I looked around. I didn’t seem to be in the ambulance any longer. I was lying on a bed. A hospital bed, I assumed. I will stick my neck out here and assert that hospital beds are the ugliest beds ever designed by humankind. They make me sick just to look at them.
“How long did you drive a taxi before you came here?” he said.
I looked at him again. But my eyes kept wandering around the room, which I found ironic since there was nothing worth looking at. It was as rectangular as the inside of a locker. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was worth looking at because it was the sort of room that might have been designed by an avant-garde artist who was making a statement about the sterile vaccuousness of human existence. If I were an artist, that’s the kind of statement I would make. Fortunately I’m not an artist. I’m a commercial novelist. I’m in it strictly for the dough.
“Have you ever made any money writing novels?”
I looked at the man again, but my eyes kept drifting away from him in the way that normal eyes drift toward things that stand out from a background, like a soldier’s eyes looking at sudden or subtle movements in a jungle terrain.
“No,” I said.
“You have been writing novels for more than twenty years, is that correct?”
“Well ... it depends on your definition of the word ‘novel.’ I’ve been writing book-length manuscripts ever since I was in college but so far none of the publishers in New York City have opted to categorize them as ‘novels.’”
“You spend a great deal of time parsing the meaning of words, don’t you Mr. Murphy?”
“I’ve never clocked myself.”
“I am not so much concerned with the amount of time that you spend doing it as I am concerned with the fact that you do it at all,” he said.
“Well I ...” I said, then I paused, hoping he would interrupt me the way obnoxious people do in movies during arguments. I wanted him to interrupt me because I didn’t really have a coherent explanation as to why I spent so much time parsing words, although I did have what might be termed an “incoherent” explanation.
“And what might that be?” he said.
“I was just pretending to have a response to your observation.”
“So you didn’t actually have a response?”
“That is correct,” I said.
“Why would you pretend to respond to something that another person said?”
“Oh ... you know ... I never have much interest in anything anybody has to say, so I pretend to respond to their questions in the hopes that they will be satisfied and go away.”
“Because you have no interest in hearing what they have to say?” “That’s correct.”
“Why do you have no interest in hearing what other people have to say?”
“Oooh ... probably because I spent twelve years in school listening to teachers say things that had no relevance to anything on the planet earth. It cured me of listening.”
“I beg to disagree with you, Mr. Murphy. I find that your explanation is not at all incoherent. All of your explanations appear to be grounded in a well thought-out system of consistent though unorthodox logic.”
“A method to my madness, huh?” I said.
“Nobody said you were mad, Mr. Murphy.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I was just making a joke.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“You joke a lot, don’t you Mr. Murphy?”
“Not about jokes.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I told you I was making a joke, I was serious.”
“I take it you are referring to your statement about a method to your madness.”
“Correct.”
“But the madness statement itself was a joke.”
“Correct.”
“You seem to be awfully concerned about establishing the specific meanings contained in words, statements, and concepts in general, Mr. Murphy. I wonder if you could give me some insight as to why this is.”
“I would say that it is most likely due to the fact that I spent my entire childhood listening to adults tell me things that I knew or else believed weren’t true.”
Case in point: when I was ten years old my Maw told me that astronauts could not possibly leave their orbiting capsules for a spacewalk because they would be swept away by the wind.
“Knowledge and belief are not the same thing,” the doctor said.
“You better believe it,” I snarled.
“Calm down, Mr. Murphy. I’m your friend.”
“Please doctor, I’m not interested in your nickel psychology.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not my friend. I don’t have any friends. You’re just trying to put me at ease. I can read you like an X-ray.”
“You say you don’t have any friends. Why is that?”
“Because half the people I used to think of as my friends weren’t interested in hearing the truth about anything, so they dumped me.”
“What about the other half of your friends?”
“They couldn’t handle my sarcasm.”
“You seem to feel that you possess some sort of monopoly on the truth, Mr. Murphy.”
“You got that wrong, doctor.”
“How so?”
“I never have a clue as to what’s going on. That’s why I’m always trying to ferret out the truth. My friends couldn’t have cared less about what was really going on.”
“What did they care about?”
“Music and sports.”
“Don’t you like music and sports?”
“I like the Beatles, and I am suspicious of golf. That’s all I have to say on those subjects.”
“All right,” he said, leafing through the pages of the notebook. “What do you say we get back to the subject of the key.”
“What key?”
“The key to locker number ninety-six.”
“What about it?”
“When you opened the locker did you find anything inside it?”
“No.”
“How do you explain that?”
“You’re assuming I have an explanation. But I don’t. Unlike twits, jerks, and pompous asses, I never explain things that I don’t have answers to.”
“What about conjecture?”
“Oh yeah, I do that all the time. But I don’t define my conjectures as explanations.”
“Are your listeners always aware that you are engaging in conjecture?”
“Perhaps not.”
“It seems to us that you were considerably determined to access locker number ninety-six. According to our report, you illegally took possession of the key and went to Union Station and opened the locker.”
“I don’t know that the illegality of my action has been established.” “What do you base that statement on, given the fact that the key did not belong to you?”
“I base it on the fact that I have not been arrested for theft.”
There was a moment of silence. A long, long moment.
“You say that you found the key in an ashtray of your taxicab,” he said. “Correct.”
“Is it possible that someone gave you the key?”
“Yes and no.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Anything is possible in this three-ring circus we call life—and no, I was not given the key by anybody.”
“Is it possible that Mr. Zelner gave you the key on the night he died?”
“Yes and no,” I said.
“Yes it’s possible but no he didn’t?”
“Correct,” I said. I just about had this guy trained.
“Aside from your word, do you have any proof that he did not give you the key? Or any proof that you found the key in your ashtray?”
“No.”
“Did Mr. Zelner mention locker ninety-six after you were stopped by the policeman who told you about your defective taillight?”
“No, he didn’t say anything. He just sat back and died.”
“Do you know for a fact that he died right then?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say he sat back and died?”
“Conjecture. But he might as well have died right then. He never spoke another word as long as he lived, which was three minutes tops.”
“What made you feel that you were authorized to open the locker at Union Station?”
“Oooh, various things. Mostly the fact that Mr. Weissberger had pulled a gun on me. I guess you could say that after being threatened with a gun, and riding a boxcar in a rainstorm, and having my car stolen, I felt sort of ‘special.’ I decided I would go to the terminal and open the locker and take a look at the thing that nearly cost me my life.”
“And what did you intend to do with this ‘thing’ as you describe it?”
“I don’t know. I never got that far with my plan.”
“Would you care to conjecture?”
“Maybe.”
“Were you going to keep it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Suppose you had found a valise which contained high-grade cocaine or heroin. Would you have thought about keeping it, or perhaps selling it to a drug dealer?”
“Sure.”
“Why is that?”
“I’m only human. I probably would have said to myself, ‘I’m rich!’ I’ve had thoughts like that before under different circumstances involving different found things, such as stolen money and plaster of Paris and so forth. But the thoughts didn’t last very long.”
“Why not?”
“Oooh, various reasons. For one thing, it would take a professional drug dealer to pull off a scheme like you described, and not a professional taxi driver. Taxi drivers aren’t very good at most things. But I don’t break the law on purpose. I’m pretty honest I guess.”
“You illegally opened the locker on purpose.”
“That’s true, but when I’m filled with umbrage my brain tends to fly out the window.”
“What if the valise had contained something far more valuable and deadly than heroin?”
“I would have called the police.”
“You didn’t call the police after you looked into the locker. You exited the terminal and got into a taxi.”
“I know.”
“Where did you intend to go?”
“To the police.”
“Even though you found nothing inside the locker, and possessed no evidence that anything you said was true.”
“That’s true.”
“Weren’t you worried that the police might not believe your story?” “I’m used to that. But I figured I would tell them anyway, especially since everything I said was true.”
“Let’s recapitulate,” he said.
“Again?”
“Yes. You found the key to locker ninety-six in your ashtray. Nobody gave it to you. You went to Union Station and opened the locker and found it empty. Then you went outside and climbed into a taxicab and fainted.”
“Yes, although you left out a number of tangential facts.”
“You had no idea what was in locker ninety-six, is this true?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Zelner did not mention anything about a valise being inside the locker, or what might be contained inside the valise.”
“No.”
“You have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever concerning the contents of locker ninety-six.”
“I already told you it was empty. I keep telling you that. Why do you keep asking me what was inside locker ninety-six? There was nothing in the locker except a rectangle of air the same size as the interior of the box. I know that because I stuck my hands into the rectangle and felt all around and there was nothing in it but air!”
“Who is Stew?”
“Pardon?”
“Who is Stew?”
“I know a man named Stew who works in the cage at Rocky Cab.”
“The cage?”
“The little room where the cashier sits. We call it ‘the cage.’ The man in the cage takes my lease money and gives me a trip-sheet and the key to my taxi.”
“So you don’t get to take the key home with you. The man in the cage keeps the key, is this correct?”
“Yes. Well. No. I mean, if you have a weekly lease you get to take the key home. But I always work a daily lease, so the man in the cage takes the key away from me every night.”
“Why doesn’t he let you keep it?”
I rolled my eyes with impatience. I hate it when people ask me questions that have obvious answers. I always assume they do it to get attention. I know I do.
“Because the driver who works the night shift needs the key to my taxi,” I said.
“So they do not make duplicate keys and let each driver have one?” I almost rolled my eyes with impatience, but then I realized that the answer to his question was not so obvious. I’m willing to cut people slack when they make ignorant remarks about things they know little about. I’m not like an algebra teacher.
“You seem to take a great deal of umbrage at the existence of algebra,” he remarked out of the blue. He frequently said things out of the blue. I assumed he did this to throw me off balance. But what he did not realize was that I had patented the off-balance remark. I decided to play along with his insidious little mind game. Maybe I could “turn the tables” on him. I’ve always wanted to do that to somebody.
“You bet I take umbrage,” I said. “Why is that?”
“Because I was forced against my will to study algebra for two years in high school, and after graduation I found out that algebra has no relationship to anything on earth.”
“Engineers use algebra in their line of work.”
“Well I’m sure Julius Caesar used Latin in his line of work but he’s been dead for two thousand years!” I barked.
“Calm down, Mr. Murphy. No need to get upset over something as meaningless as Latin.”
His words had an instant calming effect. Someone was on my side for once. I felt as if he had injected me with the opposite of an upper.
Some people call it a “downer.” Not me, baby. I’ll take a downer over an upper any day. When I was in college I once took an upper in order to study for a test during finals week, and I ended up mopping an entire dormitory. I have no idea whose dormitory it was but the dorm adviser gave me an A+. After I got to San Francisco I mentioned my grade when I applied for a job as a janitor in a medical clinic. I think it tipped the scales in my favor. I spent six months mopping floors in Hippie Town before I moved on down the road.
“If you mop floors as well as you drive a taxi, I’m sure you made a very successful supe.”
“What?”
He repeated it. I won’t run you through that again. But it reminded me of something someone else once said, although I couldn’t remember who, when, or where.
“I learned to do it properly in the army,” I remarked.
“Do what?”
“Mop floors. Fire grenade launchers. Wrap bandages around sucking chest wounds. But mostly I mopped floors.”
He nodded. “You once called this man Stew on the telephone and asked him how you might go about contacting a man named Mr. Heigger. Is this correct?”
I paused before nodding. The pause went on so long that it ceased to be a pause. It became a non-answer.
“We have you on a recording tape talking to Stew about Mr. Heigger’s phone number.”
My chin started to bob slowly up and down. But I wasn’t setting into motion the previously unexpressed nod. I was acknowledging to myself the fact that my phone had been tapped after all. The doctor misinterpreted the nod of course, which was exactly what I wanted. I often want people to think something entirely different. My success rate is occasionally higher than I expect it to be.
“Why did you wish to contact Mr. Heigger?” he said.
I stared at him for a moment, then articulated the most-feeble effective excuse ever invented by humankind—to wit: “I don’t remember.” I did this because the doctor was a stranger and I had no idea what the consequence of my answer might be. Before he took this grilling any further I wanted to know who he was, where I was, and what was going on. I reached deep down inside myself and hauled out a facial expression that communicated those very questions. I rarely dig down that deep—it can get scary.
He closed his notebook.
“That will be enough for today,” he said, as he stood up.
“Doctor?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Murphy?”
“What day is today?”
“Saturday,” he said, just before he opened the door, stepped outside, and closed it.
I nodded, even though he did not see my nod, and even though the day of the week meant nothing to me because I did not know how long I had been inside what I could only conjecture was some sort of mental institution. I was reduced to conjecture because I could not remember being brought there, and because I had seen plenty of movies about insane asylums. My favorite was The Snake Pit, which was based on a novel by Mary Jane Ward. I saw the movie version when I was six years old, which is probably never a good idea.
The Snake Pit starred Olivia de Havilland, whom I often confused with Yvonne DeCarlo. Yvonne rose to the summit of immortality by portraying Lily Munster, the wife of Herman on the TV series The Munsters, which I always thought of as the poor man’s The Addams Family. But when you are ten years old and there are only three broadcast channels to choose from you take whatever you can get, like a kid dying of thirst on the burning sands of Death Valley. I prefer Morticia Addams over Lily Munster though. “Tish” was portrayed by Carolyn Jones. She co-starred with Elvis Presley in King Creole, where the king of rock ’n’ roll sang my favorite Elvis song, which is titled “Trouble.” He wears a busboy uniform when he sings it. He looks sort of goofy because the white jacket doesn’t fit him very well, but when he belts out ”... If you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place ...” I forget all about costume design.
“What are you singing, Murph?” I looked around.
A woman wearing a long white coat was standing in the open doorway.
It was Octavia Brandenburg.