Cab Water

My old friend Mika called me up one night and I cut my thumb on my cracked phone screen trying to answer him. 

‘I’m going to become a cab driver,’ he said. 

‘Oh, really?’ I mumbled. I studied my thumb. It was bleeding slightly. The rain watered it down to a thin, suspicious substance. A few wet droplets of my blood formed under Mika’s name on my screen. He was always telling me about strange ideas he’d had since he graduated from university unemployed. Last time, he was dead set on becoming a journalist, but he struggled to comprehend events that were so fleeting. From my restaurant job I’d had for years, I sat and watched him make shadow puppets of his future. 

‘I’m absolutely certain,’ he confirmed.

I kept walking to the bus stop by the height of the distant Saturday. Around me, the street crackled with tires and footsteps.

‘You can’t drive,’ I reminded him. 

‘That’s temporary.’

I manoeuvred past a woman pushing a child in a pram. Right at the centre of busy Edinburgh Princes Street was what I would call sea foam, that brief moment when the ocean water bubbles up into one tight fist before sinking back into the flat. In the middle of these people, I was there floating, not yet directionless but perhaps heading that way. 

‘Is that so?’ 

Mika’s basalt overtone chewed up my headphones. ‘Before you know it, I’ll be taking you where you want to go.’

As he willed it, Mika picked me up in his black cab on the same street over a year later. I was still working at the restaurant and he insisted on meeting me after my shift. I expected him to be loitering in some god-awful outfit, itching to take me to another new pub he always seemed to know about, but there he was. Leaning against his new ride like it was a big old horse he’d tamed out in the country with no saddle. In fact, he was wearing one of his god-awful outfits. A bright orange jacket covered in pins of social movements I’m sure didn’t exist. Cobblers for swimming! I didn’t suppose I would decipher what that might have meant. 

Like it did over a year ago, the chill in the air bit into my cheeks. If I was surprised to see Mika this way, I wouldn’t show it. It was hard to tell if the things he said were the musings of a general city bum, or if he had some master plan we were all sock puppets in. Maybe that’s why I was still friends with him years after graduation, when most people had gone their separate ways. There weren’t many left who followed through on any old idea they happened to have. Perhaps I still wanted to believe it was possible to become who you were on the inside. 

I stood at the curb where Mika’s cab was parked and studied it loosely. ‘This is yours?’

‘As mine as my brain.’ He grinned. ‘Get in. I’m not supposed to stop here.’

Mika drove around central Edinburgh aimlessly while he told me about what it was like to train to be a cab driver. It was unbelievable that he’d learned to drive just to make a few pennies in cab fare. There had to be more to it. I had a general rule that if things felt simple, you hadn’t yet turned the lights on. Always at night were the medieval details in the shadowy buildings that passed us by riddled indiscernible. 

‘Do you remember that study about the cab drivers' brain structures changing?’ He asked me.

‘Vaguely.’ 

I was familiar with this research from our undergrads in psychology. I wasn’t sure if I agreed with the empiricism these papers relied on, though. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, to be a psychologist - or a scientist of any kind - you had to give up your own feelings to some unavoidable biology. Evidence wasn’t convincing to me, even if it shouted in my face. So I never ended up doing anything with my degree. Mika, on the other hand, had terrible grades because he was always busy. I was surprised he remembered any of it. 

‘What did it say, again?’ 

‘Their hippocampus adapted because they spent all day navigating,’ I recalled.

He smacked his lips. ‘Isn’t it crazy that your brain can reshape? That a few measly choices can change you right down to the fundamentals?’ 

‘Your brain is always reshaping,’ I corrected. As I did, the cab flew over Leith Walk. ‘That’s how memories are formed. That doesn’t make you a different person. Every single choice you make changes your brain. If anything, the more choices you make, the more you become yourself.’

Mika paused at the lights. ‘Maybe I’m more everyone else nowadays,’ he mused. 

‘What do you mean?’

He kept driving. Parts of the city beyond the centre bobbed beside us. ‘Whatever’s going on in my brain, it’s all swimming in cabs.’ 

Mika recalled one night when he and his friend Cadenza were drifting around town. Cadenza spilled red wine down her skirt at a pub hours before and it had dried up to a rindy colour she was telling everyone was a blood stain. Sometimes, she claimed it was from winning a fight with a feral chihuahua down a back alley. Others, she chalked it up to a period mishap. At the mouth of Cowgate, she and Mika danced around like loose teeth scaring all the university students. An old geezer out after a depressing game of televised football screeched at them to get out of his life, or the general vicinity, depending on what you might take him for. Largely offended by the overall state of things, Cadenza dove into the most immediate cab in Grassmarket with Mika as her parachute. 

Together, they drove freely around the moonly city centre until Mika remembered black cabs aren’t cheap. By then, he spent the next few moments wondering why the meter on the dashboard read £CHECK AGAIN until he forgot about it. 

Apparently when Cadenza puckered her lips, they were about the size of a ten-pence coin, that’s how small her mouth was. Despite this, she found a way to get an awful lot of words out of it and kept asking the driver questions you’d never need to know about someone you’d hardly met. 

‘How many pillows do you sleep on at night?’

‘About two and a half,’ replied the driver, an old Northern fellow with a sniffy nose. 

Cadenza just about fell to pieces laughing and went on asking questions. Mika supposed he should put the poor driver out of his misery and give him Cadenza’s address, but he seemed to have lost his voice. Not in that croaky way, where a bird claws up your throat and caws out your mouth. Rather, it had been misplaced. Desperately, Mika looked all around him in the dusty cab and couldn’t find his voice anywhere. Indeed, when he looked down to check the carpets, his shoes appeared to be wet. 

‘Wet?’ I frowned.

Mika grinned. ‘Like grass in the morning.’ 

I often gave people the benefit of the doubt. If I ever wanted to go beyond empiricism, I had no choice. I couldn’t tell if Mika deserved it. 

Naturally, Cadenza kept asking the driver menial questions. Given no interruptions, she’d probably ask his mother’s maiden name and compile his information into a successful banking scam. While that went on, Mika searched the floor to identify a source of wetness. For an Edinburgh autumn, it had been reasonably dry. Yet, his shoes were sopping. He took them off and his socks were bone dry. When he looked up to show Cadenza, they were far from the city centre, further away than they could have driven in just a few minutes, all the way at the coast across the walk of Portobello Beach. 

How did we get here? Mika thought, but it turns out that everything he thought he ended up saying, and everything he tried to say he only thought. 

Cadenza gazed out of the window with him, into the ocean that rippled black in the night. 

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asked, not in the slightest bit concerned. 

 ‘We don’t live anywhere near here,’ Mika frowned. He picked up his shoes and a pile of sand fell out. He decided then that this must have been some sort of lucid dream. 

Sitting in his cab, as he kept driving, I understood where Mika was taking me. When he and I studied together at university, he was always frustrated that our professors brushed over most unconscious experience in favour of neuroscience. If our prefrontal cortex is almost as active during a lucid dream as it is when awake, what’s the difference between the two, besides opening your eyes? For all Mika knew, reality was one long lucid dream. 

In his story, Mika leaned over to tap the driver on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, but can you stop for a moment?’

‘No harm done,’ said the driver. 

Mika got out of the cab without his shoes and left Cadenza inside. He walked all the way to the cusp of the ocean. He let the water creep up on him and the sea foam sunk into his socks. Apart from the waves sloshing up against the flat, nothing around him was alive nor audible. The gentle water stretching to the North Sea rippled under the light of the moon. Mika turned around to face the seafront and all the people on the other side of it, obscured by buildings. Nothing else. Then he rubbed his eyes. The cab appeared on the walk, a black smudge on the city. Had it always been there? He walked back through the sand and got into the cab with his damp socks still on. Cadenza was fast asleep, slumped over with her head on the window facing the land. 

‘You can keep going,’ Mika told the driver, who pulled off the shore and drove deeper into town. ‘Why did you bring us this way?’ 

“Well,’ began the driver, staring down the barrel at him through the mirror, ‘Stuff like this, my detour to the sea, your wet shoes, it happens every time. All the time. Everywhere you look, there’s that beautiful ocean waiting for you. Most people don’t pay attention. They don’t have time. You were just open to seeing instead of imagining.’

It was around then Mika looked at the meter again, and the fare had changed to read £MIKA. 

‘What happened after that?’ I asked. 

Mika shrugged. ‘The cab took us home and I woke up in the morning.’ 

‘And that made you decide to become a cab driver?’

‘I didn’t decide anything. I woke up knowing that’s what I was going to do. I’d moved into the blindspot.’

I laughed. ‘...The blindspot.’ 

He smiled, sheepish. ‘Most people don’t even know they have it. But everyone does. It’s a bit outside the centre of your vision. I guess your brain fills in what it presumes is there. But there’s something true there that exists. That’s where I am.’ 

‘Right now?’

‘In general.’ 

I peered out of the window. We were coming up to Portobello beach. If I looked hard enough through the gaps in between ordinary buildings, I could see the stretch of the ocean winding out to distant lands. Unlike Mika, I was lucid for the journey. This was real. 

I glanced back at my old friend who kept driving onwards. He yawned. Involuntarily, so did I. My professors would chalk that up to my mirror neurons. Was I becoming myself, different to him?

When I followed Mika’s gaze to the sparkling water, the windscreen of the car looked like the mouth of a cave. I glanced at the dashboard. Written in digital letters on the meter was my own name. As fate would have it, I had spare change.