Beyond Comprehension
Anonymous The words were arranged in the subject-verb-object order, as is proper in the English language. The sentence was short to the point that a three-year-old might as well have assembled it without breaking a sweat. The pronunciation, the annunciation, the diction—all were flawless. Yet what had come out of my father’s mouth was beyond comprehension. “I don’t believe in taxis,” he had said, lying on the white hospital bed. To which I had nothing to say. Who the hell believes in taxis? As far as I, a relentless pragmatist, was concerned, taxis weren't something you believed in. Taxis were a facet of life that merely existed, but overall languished in irrelevance. As far as I, a man of no faith and few deep-rooted convictions, was concerned, the great dichotomy of earthly life that unfurled before us did not pit belief against disbelief, but adaptability against rigidity. In my world, you could no more believe in a taxi than you could believe in a tree. “Drake, I don’t believe in taxis,” he repeated. A look of deep-rooted uneasiness descended upon his wrinkly face, the one in whose contours I had once found such solace in the numerous upheavals of my life. When I was younger, his face seemed to glow in bliss, but time had taken its toll, and the aging could no longer be ignored. Gentle lines of youth crispened to the harsh, caked ones of elderly. Tumors protruded from his once-smooth skin, a face which, if word-of-mouth is to be believed, had captured the imagination of many girls in the olden days. Cancer—that’s what it does to you. It gnaws away at you day by day, first lurking in the cocoon of the unknown before bursting out for the gotcha moment. By then, it's too late. The nastiness has gained too much ground. And all you can do is wait for the end. “Drake?” he called. “Yes?” “Promise me you’ll never take a cab again.” I stared at him. “Promise me you’ll never take the cab again,” he repeated. “I can’t,” I said. “Dad, don’t you know? I need to take the taxi to work.” His face swelled red. “Tell me, right here and now, that as long as you live, you’ll never set foot in one of those darn yellow pizza boxes!” The guy’s lost it, I thought. I stood up. “I don’t have time for this,” I said, before slamming the door shut. The next morning, I received a call from the hospital’s director. He informed me of an “unfortunate development,” which turned out to be my father’s death. But before it was my father’s death, it was a grammatical sequence of words, constructed in the proper fashion, that mysteriously defied all comprehension. |