Up ahead, two lanes over, a woman talking on a cell phone misjudged the distance to the car in front of her. Even before she noticed the trouble she was in, I was already heading for the off ramp. Ten seconds later, driving along the side street that paralleled the highway, I saw the traffic on it come to a complete halt.
"Amazing", said a voice in the back of the cab.
"What?" I asked, looking in the rear view mirror at my current fare, a tall thin man, wearing a London Fog trenchcoat and a fedora.
"The way you dodge those traffic problems. It's like you know what's going to happen before it does. That's the third time since I got in that you've done that." He had a deep, gruff voice, the kind you associate with radio announcers and drill sergeants.
"I know what you mean," I agree, "It's not prescience though. It's just practice. Most cabbies are good at it."
"I'd wager you're better than most," he said with an odd intensity.
I studied him in the rear-view mirror. His hat covered most of his face in shadow, leaving only his mouth (which was curved in an enigmatic smile) visible.
"I'm not sure what you mean," I answered.
Thing was though, I did know what he meant. It was a gift I'd always had: the ability to see the patterns in every day occurences. It had been extremely useful in the last job I had had -- a programmer-analyst for a large New York business. In fact, that job had proven to be so reliant on the ability that I eventually left it; the work had been so artificial in its essence that I felt as though I had lost track of day to day reality. This job, a cab driver, suited me better. I liked the feel of adding value to people's lives. The occasional rude or irritating individual was worth it.
My fare lifted his head, and the rest of his face appeared from under the fedora: a sharp, grecian nose and intense, steel-grey eyes under thin eyebrows that tilted up at the sides. His eyes briefly met the reflection of mine in the mirror, then he looked down at his lap.
I returned my focus to the trip, just in time to realize that fourth street was going to be a better route than third given the speed we were moving. I twitched the wheel right, accelerated down an alley, then burst out onto fourth, neatly dodging the oncoming traffic and slid in behind a cube van.
I heard faint clicking, sliding noises like plastic moving against plastic, and with traffic moving well now, I could afford to look over my shoulder to see what the fare was doing. He was holding a small, box-shaped object in both hands, and seemed to be sliding and moving pieces of it, causing it to emit faint flashes of light. Intrigued by this, I asked, "What you playing with, some new kind of Rubic's Cube?"
"Well, you might say that," he replied with the first glimmer of humour I'd heard in his voice, "It's a present for my ... nephew."
With one last left turn and a sprint down a side-street, I pulled up beside the hotel that was our current destination and ducked into a parking spot that had just become available. To finish our previous conversation I said, "Looks like fun.", followed by "Here we are sir." Checking the meter I added, "That'll be thirty-six fifty." at the same time as I thought, "36.50, that's one tenth of a year, if I was counting days."