It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”
She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He’d ad dudge.
Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”
She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.
“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.
She shrugs, and blows her nose.
Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.
At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says, “He wode be gubbig bag.”
“Excuse?”
“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds odly by teddephode.”
“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the Forty-sixth Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.
One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than that of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for Salim had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars is going fast enough actually to end his life.
A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.
The back seat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seatbelt.
“The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.
The cab driver grunts, and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater, and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.
From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cab driver swears in Arabic, by the beard of the Prophet.
Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in Arabic.
“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same language. “Where are you from?”
“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”
“From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.
“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”
“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”
“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”
The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the taxi driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.
“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.
“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.
“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”
“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.
The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”
Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”
“What do you sell?”
“Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”
The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.
“You try to sell shit?”
“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law’s samples.
“And they will not buy it?”
“No.”
“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”
Salim smiles nervously.
A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.
“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.
The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder the driver moves, and Salim’s hand brushes the man’s face, knocking the man’s sunglasses from his face onto his lap.
The taxi driver opens his eyes and reaches for, and replaces, the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.
The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.
“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.
The taxi driver’s lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver’s mirror.