He sort of wished he’d got into the back seat of the cab, but at the time, that felt kind of rude. And the driver was East Indian. He might take it the wrong way, Buddy fretted. So he sat next to the cabbie and watched the numerals on the digital meter rack up his fare as they hummed south, toward Chemainus.
“You get lost or something?” the driver inquired.
“Fell off my bike.”
“Oh.”
They drove on for a while, the silence between them growing awkward, the awkwardness made worse somehow by the slipstream whistling around their hurtling cockpit.
“Didn’t see a bike there?”
“The cop put it behind the concrete barrier.”
“Oh.”
Buddy could feel the cab’s tires gripping the pavement, sustaining momentum, making a perpetual lunge out of it. He felt somehow trapped, forced to go forward, always forward, never allowed to rest. He closed his eyes, drifting into semi-consciousness for a second or two. Felt a childhood sensation he’d long forgotten… of rocketing backward, as if the car’s polarity had suddenly switched and it was his fault, for not paying attention.
He and his sister played a game when they were kids, headed from Toronto to Cape Breton on their annual holiday pilgrimage to the paternal Mecca. They’d kneel on the back seat of their station wagon, hands folded across their chests, watching through the windscreen between the bobbleheads of their mum and dad. Then, on an agreed cue, they’d close their eyes. The objective was to remain upright for as long as possible without the visual coordinates needed to correct your balance.
“You’re going to make yourselves carsick,” their father would warn when he spotted them in the rearview mirror, an admonishment they always ignored and which never came true. It only made them giggle.
You were supposed to confess, if you actually had to touch the seat between you or the door on the other side to keep from tipping over. Buddy always cheated and he assumed Fran did, too. But there was no way of innocently accusing your fellow contestant without revealing your own guilt. If you shouted, “You touched the seat!”, your opponent could just as easily shout, “You had your eyes opened!” So the balancing acts always ended in some sort of squabble.
“Dangerous road to peddle on even in daylight,” the cabbie said.
“Sometimes we do stupid things,” Buddy agreed.
He considered telling the whole story of his trip down Yellow Point Road and the TCH, but decided it hadn’t had time to mellow… that it was too soon to laugh at this prank… that maybe it would always be too soon to include this one in his catalogue of stupid exploits.
“Have you ever driven with your eyes closed?” he asked on impulse.
“What!” The driver glanced at Buddy, as if trying to identify what species of maniac had slithered onto the passenger side seat, disguised as a fellow human. As if Buddy was inviting him to take up a challenge.
Buddy laughed. “Let me rephrase that. Have you ever—as a passenger—closed your eyes and appreciated the sense of a car’s momentum from a blind man’s point of view?”
The cabbie shook his head and grumbled something indecipherable.
“You should try it sometime,” Buddy insisted, taking the cabbie’s head shake as a negative, not a commentary on the sanity of his fare. “Two sensations will surprise you when you do,” he pressed on. “First, you can’t tell which direction the car is moving in—forward or backward. It’s really strange. Even when the brakes are applied, it’s hard to tell if that’s acceleration or deceleration. Your body gets confused.”
He let that settle for a spell.
“And?” the cabbie probed.
“Huh?”
“You said there were two sensations to driving with your eyes shut.”
“Oh yeah! The second is, you can’t tell if the car is moving at all or if its wheels are making the world spin underneath you. That’s okay if you’re driving west to east, cause you’re not disturbing the natural order of things. But if you’re going east to west, well, that would mean you’ve reversed the spin of the world and, from a pre-Copernician perspective, of the whole universe. Disastrous, I would imagine! And god only knows what would happen if you drove north to south or south to north.”
They rolled on in silence.
“You must have a pretty high opinion of yourself,” the cabbie offered after a while.
“Huh?”
“To think you can put your own spin on the world just by closing your eyes.”
They laughed.
“Try it.”
“Huh?”
“Close your eyes. I’ll keep a lookout and let you know if you’re drifting off course.”
“Are you crazy?” The cabbie stared at him. “I’ve got a wife and kids at home, thanks. I’ll keep my eyes on the road.”
“Me too,” Buddy admitted glumly. “Just joking.”
The cabbie seemed intent on driving after that. Buddy, on being a passenger. “That will be fifty-one dollars and eighty-five cents,” the cabbie echoed the readout on his meter when they pulled up to the Looner Module.
“Expensive lesson,” Buddy commented, adding a fifteen percent tip. “But worth it. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” the guy said, rocketing off as soon as Buddy shut the door.
Guess he’ll have a story to tell the wife and kids, Buddy thought, watching the taillights vanish around the bend of Esplanade.
A full moon was arcing over the jagged backdrop of Chemainus. It lit Buddy’s way as he groped along the flank of the Looner Module. Certain he’d placed his foot firmly on the rickety aluminium steps, he looked up toward the door. A note was taped to it. “Call me when you get back!” It said. “PLEAZE!”
Next: Goddess of the hunt