been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.
“Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”
“Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”
“That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”
The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the taxi driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.
“Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.
“You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.
“I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”
“I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.
The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”
Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”
“What do you sell?”
“Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”
The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.
“You try to sell shit?”
“Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law’s samples.
“And they will not buy it?”
“No.”
“Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”
Salim smiles nervously.
A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.
“We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.
The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder the driver moves, and Salim’s hand brushes the man’s face, knocking the man’s sunglasses from his face onto his lap.
The taxi driver opens his eyes and reaches for, and replaces, the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.
The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.
“Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.
The taxi driver’s lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver’s mirror.
“No,” says the driver.
The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.
Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”
The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.
“Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.
“No. Not many of us.”
“There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.
“People know nothing about my people