These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

What? She looks over. “It is him!” he says again, by which he means a dealer who sold him bad drugs or a businessman who cheated him in a contract or someone who slept with his wife (whom he isn’t sleeping with anymore anyway) — none of them necessarily more or less likely than the man Jasmine has mistaken the stranger for; in fact the man in the street is a cabbie, getting in his taxi. Regardless, he’s the object of no small ire, as becomes clear when calmly, with the tremendous focus and determination that the driver next to her brings to anything he wants to, he aims his car at the other and plows into it.

Jim cries out from the back. Of course there’s an outburst from the surrounding throng on the busy boulevard and particularly from the cabbie, who leaps from his taxi and then, mid-protest, bolts, leaving the singer with the bright red hair to reverse the car, back up and then plow into the other again, and to keep doing it again and again. In the passenger seat in front, Jasmine grabs her belly so instinctively and protectively that had either man noticed, immediately he would have known; but the driver is only intent on demolishing the other car even as he demolishes his own, and his cohort in back is only intent on surviving the onslaught. “Stop!” is all she can keep saying.