The Logos by Mark de Silva

Author:Mark de Silva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-9196398-3-3
Publisher: Splice
Published: 2022-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

20

Not having to be anywhere at any particular time, I savored the ride home, buzzing through the night from a vantage not much a part of my life—a yellow cab’s. Unlike the outbound journey earlier in the night, we took a looping route back. No sane person, in the era of Google, could believe the shortest drive between Fort Greene and my place beyond the Patterson Houses could bring one into Chelsea, but this is just what the driver attempted to convince me of, getting lost here and there, claiming that FDR and the whole east side of Manhattan was clogged when it was simply not possible at this hour. I didn’t care. His deception, the manner in which he was making me an instrument of his own financial designs, was just another part of my pleasure by this point. I surveyed my circumstance as if it were someone else’s, because, in a way, it was: Garrett’s cash would cover all of this. Given how much there was to observe, and even more to entertain, to anticipate, I liked being just where I was, taking the long way home. The longer the better.

I think what caught the attention of this opportunistic Balkan—wherever else they might take you, taxis and Ubers took you around the world right within the cars themselves, with every nation contributing its unwashed to their fleet of drivers—was the source of my sense of anticipation. He figured, correctly enough, that a man’s attention would simply have to be consumed in its entirety by the woman sitting beside me; there’d be no way to mind the driver as well. Certainly it would have seemed that way to him in the early stages of our trip. Just after Daphne and I dodged the rain and slid into his car, she poured a hand mirror, lipstick, eyeliner, foundation, and rouge into her lap from that deceptively capacious clutch. While the car’s creaky suspension had us rocking about, she proceeded with remarkable facility to do herself up again, instinctively altering the angle and placement of each stroke as we drove, anticipating bumps and turns as deftly as the bartender had foreseen trouble.

I asked her not to do this. There really was no point, we weren’t going out anywhere else. Yet my protest was somewhat undermined by the intensity with which I watched her primp and preen. She knew to disregard my words. I, like any man, was taken with the ritualized face-painting of womankind. Couldn’t I see that masks were her passion? By the way I was staring at her, she said, it seemed to be mine, too—other people’s masks, at least. From there, she expounded eloquently on the subject, even if she broke no ground. Actors are prone to giving this particular speech, about the truth in masks: namely, we cannot be seen properly until we don one or another of them, and without a frame for our face we are, all of us, amorphous, unformed, undercooked: in brief, sloppy. And she despised sloppiness—she avowed as much while looking sternly in my direction.

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