A brindled bull named Trucker.
Mien.
Anticlimactic, really, when you think about it.
He used to be my friend,
though not anymore:
things got too competitive.
It’s too similar.
Dreams of God,
ineluctable and ineliminable.
I kept reading, periodically looking up toward the office building, toward the lobby, the elevator bank. The kid might have promise as a poet, I thought; I really had no idea but thought some of his notes and thoughts were funny, at least. There were some haikus, too, but I had time to copy out only one before Darren got off the elevator. I read and wrote:
Love vanishes fast
For some it never comes back
That’s where I am at
I quickly returned the notebook to the knapsack, making sure it was slightly sticking out, as Darren exited the building, approaching the hatchback. I wondered if Darren had recently had his heart broken. I wondered why he wrote that haiku — why he wrote haikus in general. Maybe he was just messing around in his notebook, I thought. Perhaps it had no great significance and it was simply silly, like lots of haikus. I wasn’t sure. Darren got into the car and fell into his seat, heavily, I thought, for such a skinny guy, and he seemed exhausted and beleaguered. Darren possessed a sadness that I hadn’t initially detected. Obviously, I thought, I hadn’t been paying enough attention.
‘If statements — ideas in general — couldn’t be simultaneously both true and false, then communication — ideas in general — would be severely hampered.’ Darren made this argument and I saw no reason to disagree. In fact, I was happy he was talking, for he hadn’t uttered a word for at least fifteen minutes, while we were driving toward his next stop for delivery, a hospital. The bouquet was for a patient, not surprisingly, a patient who’d gotten in a head-on collision. ‘Supposedly he’s pretty banged up but going to be okay,’ said Darren. He had no idea how the other driver was doing, he said. ‘Ideas of an afterlife,’ Darren was saying, ‘are true as ideas, of course we have these ideas, but they’re not true — we don’t live on in these ideas.’
‘You live on in other people’s minds,’ I offered lamely, and Darren said, ‘Sure, yes, for other people, not for you. Mere imitations. You’re dead. Your conscious mind is dead, your heart no longer beats and your lungs collapse.’
Perhaps, I thought, consciousness is ideology; perhaps it’s that simple and that inescapable. I tried to express that to Darren but couldn’t find the words.
‘It’s not that surprising that humankind’s obsessed with apocalypse,’ said Darren. ‘You head toward death from the day you’re born. Of course thoughts lead to destruction.’ I had a coughing fit. ‘Here we are,’ Darren said, pulling up to the hospital, parking curbside: ‘Death’s Waiting Room.’
I told him not to be so morbid. ‘The guy who got in the head-on collision’s going to be okay, eventually,’ I said, and Darren said that we still had no idea what happened to the other guy, then he flicked on the hazards and got out and grabbed the bouquet from the back seat.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘however,’ leaning his head into the car, ‘death isn’t a one-time eventuality, of course.’
All day long the detective carries on this work, I thought, observing, weighing, comparing values of which he nor his client may know the significance. Somehow, this work does lead to solutions, outcomes, I thought, sometimes. Like looking through binoculars backward, what I was focusing on seemed vague and faraway, I thought, confused and distorted by false distance. Her thoughts were so far from mine, I thought. ‘Where is Elaine?’ I said and bounced my fist off the dashboard. I wanted a cigarette. I thought — erroneously, as it turns out — that there was something between her and me. Now I needed to track her down, I thought, as I stared at the hospital, where Darren was delivering flowers to a man who’d gotten in a head-on collision, survived, and was now convalescing, banged up but going to live. I kept thinking about smoking, nonstop. Some shamus I’ve turned out to be. Losing my only client and the woman I love in one fell swoop, I thought, staring at the hospital where Darren was giving flowers to a man most likely in traction. The thing about smoking that makes it so tempting, I thought, is that for generations cigarettes have been requested by countless numbers of people before they’ve been executed. Overhead I heard the thudding propellers of a helicopter, though I couldn’t see it. I got out of the car and looked up at the greying sky, with purple cloudbanks in the distance, and saw the orange chopper heading toward the hospital’s rooftop helipad. My head tilted skyward, I watched the chopper make its descent and disappear somewhere on the rooftop where I could no longer see it but could still hear the all-consuming propeller. The grey sky pulsed and throbbed under its hard beating of the air.
Darren returned in a much more chipper mood. He told me that the man, the man he was delivering flowers to, the one who’d gotten into the head-on collision, was in a full-body cast, with his left leg and right arm elevated. Regardless, he seemed like a great guy, Darren said, and he was high and happy to be alive.
‘He said that. He said, “I’m high and happy to be alive.” And he laughed. Cool guy,’ said Darren. ‘It turns out that the other driver’s 100 percent fine, too,’ Darren told me the man in the cast said. The man in the cast went on and on listing the things in life he’s grateful for, said Darren, including waxing on about the breeze from the open window and about how said breeze made him think of when he was a kid, when he was around eleven or twelve years old, and he was sitting by an open window wearing shorts and talking to his then-babysitter, Marlene, and he felt the wind lightly blow up his shorts along his inner thigh and he realized that he had a hard-on, he said, and Marlene was laughing at something he’d said and she looked beautiful in the late-afternoon light and the breeze gently caressed his dick. He told Darren he’s never felt so in love in his life and he’s now married — not to Marlene — with three kids. He was really fucked up, said Darren, and they’d given him a shitload of morphine. And then Darren went on about how lucky we are to live in a world with drugs. I listened but was starting to doze off, dreaming of the mummified man in the hospital, who lay in traction dreaming of his former babysitter, past breezes and past erections. But then my dreams shifted. I thought of Elaine and hated the fact that I’d been used and duped by her. I felt cuckolded but she was never my wife and I’ve never been married. We needed to make one more delivery, then we’d go see the lawyers.
We drove past the cemetery first and Darren said, ‘That’s probably where they’re burying the guy,’ and in the distance I could see two gravediggers smoking cigarettes beside a backhoe. Then we approached the funeral home about five kilometres up the road. The parking lot was full and there was a hearse (black, of course, I thought) out front. According to Darren, the flowers he was delivering to the funeral home were from the firm the deceased worked for as a chartered accountant for thirty-odd years. We pulled into the U-shaped driveway and Darren parked behind the hearse. ‘I’ll be quick,’ he said. ‘They’re used to me making deliveries and they’re a really sombre crew, especially if there’s a funeral in progress.’