It stopped outside the passenger window. Up close, so close, too close, she could see its body was a thick column of shredded raffia, pieces of cloth, and strings of red beads. She tried to open the door again. The handle wouldn’t move.
“Open!” she heard herself screaming, “Plea . . . !”
A sudden breeze from nowhere filled the interior of the cab with the heady aroma of palm wine. Ngozi pressed herself against the car door, raising a leg and arm up as a shield. The creature standing outside the taxi dissolved into a rose-hued mist and came wafting slowly in through the window. Pressing against the door now, Ngozi started to laugh uncontrollably. Once fully within the cab the being rematerialized, its fragrant bulk completely filling the seat beside her and threatening to spill over onto her cringing lap.
Rough raffia scratched at Ngozi’s face. At least it was dry now. The wooden head perched atop the raffia mass had a stern female face. Now it turned, slow and silent, and stared down at her. She felt every hair on her body stand on end.
“Just stay calm,” the driver suggested, unperturbed. “It’ll be a short ride. She’s just another passenger.” As he pulled away from the carwash he turned up the music again. Fela sang:
“Ever day na de same thing
Shuffering and Shmiling!”
As they drove, the masquerade shook to the beat of the music, the raffia that composed its body quivering and shaking.
When it got out of the cab ten minutes later in the parking lot of a bookstore that wasn’t open for business yet, Ngozi was left half paralyzed and with nothing more to say. Her arms and right cheek sported fine scratches from the brush of the creature’s leaves. And the blast of rose-colored mist the masquerade became when it exited the car had left her clothes and hair damp. Fragrant and sweet-scented, but damp.
“Chicago’s a big place,” the driver declared amiably. “You work graveyard, you pick up all kinds of immigrants who work all kinds of jobs.”
Clearing her throat, Ngozi managed to find a voice. Though reduced to something like a whimper, it did resemble hers. “I want to go home.”
The driver smiled, the driver laughed, just as he had before. “You worry too much, girl. Woman,” he corrected himself. “I suppose it part of being a big lawyer. I said I’d get you there.”
“Home,” she croaked weakly, repeating herself. Slouching low in the seat, she grasped her short dreadlocks. I am seriously screwed, she thought. They were barely clear of the parking lot when the car shook yet again.
DOOM!
The image on the monitor changed to that of a rotating ax. Immediately, the driver slammed on the brakes and turned around.
“Where are we—who are you picking up now?” Her voice had turned shrill. “When am I going to get priority here? When are you going to start listening to me?”
“Sorry,” he murmured regretfully. “Gotta pick this one up.”
“Why? Why one more? Will there always be ‘just one more’?” She was staring fixedly at the rotating ax on the monitor, trying to square the image with everything else that had happened this morning. Thoughts of her sister’s missed wedding were receding rapidly into memory. They had been replaced by: Will I ever be allowed to get out of this cab? And will I get out alive?
The man stood under a street lamp on the side of Lake Shore Drive. Encouragingly, dawn was not far away, but the city lights were still on. Staring at this latest phantom, Ngozi couldn’t understand why people who passed him on the highway did not use their cell phones to call the police. If she saw someone like him, she certainly would have. She started to reach into her pocket. Then she remembered that Festus guy—who was probably some sort of Nigerian vampire—had stolen her cell phone.
Of course, the driver slowed to a stop right in front of the guy on the side of the highway. The door swung open opposite her. After her ears popped, she could hear the big man breathing, even over the increasing roar of early commuters zooming by on the road. Raspy and heavy his respiration was. He was large, African, and clad in jeans and t-shirt. She couldn’t tell what color the shirt was because its owner was spattered from head to toe in what could have only been blood. Once more she found herself scrambling to the far side of the seat. Digging into a pocket, she pulled out the only hard object she had in there. A pen.
Bending forward, he peered into the cab. His eyes met Ngozi’s. He smirked.
“Hello there and good morning.” His voice was exceptionally deep, somewhere down near the lowest register of which a human being was capable. His accent was Nigerian but very slight. His face glistened as he slid in. Ngozi shut her eyes and squeezed her hands into tight fists. The handle on her door still refused to work. She heard the worn leather beneath the beads creak as the passenger dropped his weight onto the seat. The cab filled with the coppery smell of fresh blood. He said something in Igbo to the driver.
“Sure thing,” the driver responded in English, maddeningly accommodating as ever.
The man’s breathing remained loud and grinding, as if he was trying to digest something in his lungs instead of his stomach. Every so often he grunted to himself. Trapped, weary, frightened, Ngozi wished the driver would turn his music up loud enough to drown out the sound of the new passenger’s merciless respiration.
Not long after but far too much later, the cab finally slowed and stopped. She heard the door open and shut. Her ears popped. Cautiously, she opened her eyes. The sun was just starting to lighten the sky. Had she made her plane, she would now have been an hour closer to where she needed to be, instead of stuck and terrified in the confines of a cab not far from her townhouse. No, this wasn’t even a cab. The driver didn’t have a license displayed anywhere; it was probably illegal. She’d somehow wound up in a kabu kabu right here on the streets of greater Chicago.
“Why didn’t you call the police?” She didn’t have any energy left to shout.
She stared at where the passenger had been sitting. The space was stained with blood. Her stomach rolled.
“For what?” the driver asked innocently.
She managed to muster a little more volume, a smidgen more outrage. “He was covered in blood!”
“Oh, that. That’s just the Butcher’s preference.” He was counting money as he deposited bills into the cab’s lockbox.
“ ‘Butcher’? Butcher of what?”
“Not my place to ask,” the driver replied solemnly. “He tips very very well, also. Hates my music, though. Maybe hates all music.” He paused. “I take you where you need to go now. No more pick up. It’s daytime anyway.” He touched the screen and the image changed to that of a waving Nigerian flag.
She had given up trying to predict whether the driver meant anything he said or if she was interpreting his words correctly. She just rolled with it. When he finally slowed to a stop, she wasn’t sure if they were still even in Chicago. In front of them were the remnants of what might have been an open flea market a half a century ago.
“My God. A friend of mine told me there were places like this in Chicago, but I’ve never seen one of them. She calls them ‘dead zones.’ ”
“Ha!” Accelerating slowly, the driver turned the cab into a narrow alley that ran parallel to the ghost market. “Dead indeed, for sure. Lots of wahala, places like this. Trouble, trouble, trouble. But plenty useful to folks like me. And today, folks like you.”
They drove along flanked by red brick walls. Very red. If Ngozi had not already seen all that she had seen, she would have been sure that this taxi driver, having had his fun, was taking her to a secluded place where he could dismember her at his leisure.
“Why do we have to take this way to get to this mystery airport of yours?” She struggled to keep the shakiness out of her voice.
He opened the cab’s skylight. “You see the sky up there?”
It was the first time she had looked up, instead of just out, since she had first entered the cab. “Oh my,” she whispered, forgetting her uncertainties. Even as the dawn sky continued to brighten
, she could see millions of twinkling stars, with the plump, white, full moon perfectly framed in the rectangular opening. She inhaled sharply as she spotted a shooting star. And then another. And another. Shooting stars at twilight, she thought. What a treat. A large bird soared by, passing low and slow. It was gray with a very large beak. She thought she could see it looking at her, following her with its eyes. Impossible, of course. She was exhausted, and lapsing into anthropomorphization.
“What kind of bird was that?” she asked herself.
Gazing at the expansive, clear, waking sky filled her with more than a little sense of wonder. The weariness dropped away from her like a cheap rapa. The voice of the driver interrupted her unanticipated reverie.
“You might want to hang on for this.” It sounded like a warning.
“Huh?”
The car started shuddering as the ground beneath the tires became rugged. With no seatbelt to hold her down she was thrown from side to side, the wind knocked from her lungs.
“Biko-nu, just hold on,” he shouted over the rumble of the wheels. “It won’t last long!”
The bumping became too violent for her to even speak. At any moment she expected the doors to fall off. They would be followed by the floor, the roof, the engine, and finally her seat. In addition to the deafening noise of vibration, the interior of the cab was filled with a rushing sound, as if the earth was whistling in her ears. Above it all she could still hear the rhythmic pounding of the cab’s stereo, though she could no longer make out the words of the irrepressible Fela.
Almost as soon as it had commenced, the brutal jouncing stopped. When she had recovered enough to look out the window, she saw that the brick walls had been replaced by trees on both sides of the road. A park. They were driving through one of Chicago’s notable parks. At any minute she expected to see the Museum of Science and Industry, or one of the colossally expensive new high-rise condos set in carefully landscaped faux natural grounds.
Up ahead the narrow, badly maintained dirt road joined a paved one. Must be coming out of the park, she told herself. As they drew closer she was able to make out the details of the cross traffic. She sank as far down into her seat as her shaking spine would permit.
“Good idea.” The driver was watching her in the rearview. “I was going to suggest that you do exactly that.”
“S-s-stop the car!”
“Don’t worry.” He did not slow down. “I’m known here.”
The cab’s tires screeched as he dug out of the dirt path and pulled onto the main road. A minute later they were stuck in the most bizarre traffic jam Ngozi had ever seen.
Monsters. Insane vehicles. Monsters riding insane vehicles. And every and all things in-between. Creatures sporting every color imaginable, and some that were not. Some insubstantial as mists, their selves half there and half elsewhere. Figments of imagination, fragments of unreality. But not of her mind. She could never have envisioned a fraction of what she was seeing.
They were all traveling, on the move, all heading somewhere. To where exactly was another question to which she did not wish to learn the answer. On the left side of the road they trekked in one direction and on the right in the opposite way. As they moved, they made sounds like the wind in the trees, the water in the river, the bees in their hives. Individual yet uniform buzzing and howling and screeching and whispering that ebbed and flowed to a rhythm only they understood.
She saw a milky gray-skinned humanoid giant walking on all fours. It had very large breasts and what Ngozi thought was a purple vagina. An equally enormous male ghost dragging an immense penis followed her closely. As Ngozi looked on, speechless and frozen by the sight, he thrust into the giant female-thing and the two continued on their way without pause, walk-crawling as they copulated.
Turning away, she found herself gazing at a small truck that looked as if it were fashioned entirely from moist eyes. Each eye stared in a single but different direction from the others. As she looked at it, one after another every one of its intense blue eyes swung around to fixate on her.
“Oh God oh God,” she hissed. Shaking, holding herself, she dropped back down on the seat.
It was a position neither her spine nor her curious mind allowed her to maintain for very long. Moments later, she was up again and peeking over the lower edge of the window. Thankfully, the eyeball truck had dropped out of sight. Her cab driver had shifted into a slightly faster interior lane. As he drove on they were surrounded and hemmed in by thousands, by millions of spirits and ghosts and specters.
Some had many legs, some bounced, some drove, some sat inside things that drove. Others crawled or tumbled, flew or dragged themselves along. Shrieking madly, a skeleton woman rode by on a skeleton ostrich. A ghostly man with feet facing the wrong way sprinted swiftly backwards past the cab. A phantom woman walked by on her hands, herding before her a pack of pig-like things that were completely covered with wooly black hair.
“We all must travel,” the driver said, keeping his eyes on the way ahead. His hands grasped the wheel firmly. “It is the essence of all things, to move and change and keep going forward and backward and around. Even the spirits and the dead.”
He had turned the stereo down low. Clearly, this was not a place where one wanted to aggravate one’s fellow travelers. Ngozi tried to concentrate on the muted music as she spoke a silent prayer to whatever gods were hopefully watching over her. She had long since turned her back on Christianity, but she was not an atheist, either. In this moment and in this place, atheism was a joke. She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see anymore.
Time passed. Long minutes, or maybe it was a short hour. Unable to keep them closed any longer, she finally opened her eyes. They were on a wide road now.
And alone.
“You see,” the driver told her confidently. “We were just passing through.” He sighed. “Traffic can be a problem anywhere.”
Outside the cab, the terrain looked nothing like Chicago, a city park, or even the far south suburbs. It did not look like any place she had been. The road ahead was old and worn out. The soil on the side of the road was red instead of brown. In place of oak and pine she saw palm, iroko, mahogany, and oboche trees.
Something finally came unhinged in her brain. It was all too much, she’d had more than enough of a morning unreal. Twisting around on the seat, she kicked at the car window as hard as she could. Part of her wanted to stop, but a larger part craved the hopeful tinkle of shattering glass. Her foot merely left a print on the window.
“Ah, what are you doing?” The driver screamed and the cab took a sudden swerve.
“Where are you taking me?” she screamed. “I can’t stand this anymore! I’m going crazy! Let me out! Let me out!”
“Where do you think I’m taking you? I’m taking you where you need to be! Are you stupid? Big lawyer?”
Staring wide-eyed at the latest manifestation of impossible surroundings, which happened to be a stretch of palm trees, Ngozi fought to get herself under control. “This can’t be,” she whimpered. “It can’t be.”
“If it can’t be then how we be here? Lighten up,” he instructed her. “I said I get you where you have to go—and I will.”
Ngozi shut her eyes. She opened them. “Stop the car.”
He glanced at her in the rearview mirror but kept going. She took a very deep breath. “Stop the fucking car!” she screamed loud enough to strain the lining of her throat.
He pulled over at a crossroads. Tentatively, she tried the door handle. It turned so easily she almost sprained her wrist. She stared at it.
“It’s open.” He turned around in his seat. “What did you expect?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. Gripping the handle hard, she pushed. It opened effortlessly. Her ears popped and a rush of warm, humid air caressed her face. Before anything else could happen, she jumped out of the car.
She just stood there.
The sun beat down hard, the heat and light heavy and hot on her skin. A diffe
rent kind of sun. The air smelled different, too. She sniffed a hint of distant burning wood. A subtle, invisible, but nonetheless very real shift ran through her entire being, like ripples from a stone cast in flat water. She knew where she was.
“But—how . . . ?”
Wordlessly, the driver got out of the cab.
She knelt down and touched the ground. She rubbed the red dirt between her fingers. On the road, occasional cars zoomed by. As if this was all normal.
“Are you coming back in?” He was standing behind her now.
She grabbed a rock, rose, turned, and threw it at him. A part of her wanted the stone to hit him square between the eyes. “All I wanted was a goddamn ride to O’Hare!” she screamed.
“You can’t always get what you want.” He smiled. That same, damnable smile. “But if you try sometimes . . . ”
“Don’t you dare finish that . . . ”
His smile widening, he sang the last part of the annoying Rolling Stones song, “ . . . you get what you nee-eed!”
Bending, she found and threw another stone at him, aiming for the knees. This time she had better luck, and he had less. He let out a yelp and grabbed at himself where the rock had hit. The tide of satisfaction that flowed through her was brief.
“So you do feel pain,” she snapped. “Well, that’s good. At least you’re not some fucking demon.”
“Spoken like a true American girl—woman—I must say.” He winced, rubbing the bruise he was going to have. “Are you going to get back in the cab, so we can finish this trip and you can pay me?”
“No.”
They were silent, staring hard at each other. She felt as if she had just finished two triathlons in a row. Without food. Across Death Valley. Or maybe been chased around the world. Unexpectedly, she found that she had to stifle a sudden urge to laugh.