LAKE SHORE DRIVE

Ade tells me the first time I meet him that his name is short for something that I will not be able to pronounce. His cab is immaculate; he owns it and takes pride in its cleanliness. And yet, over the course of our three-year-friendship, I come to recognize a faint sour smell. Could be the peculiarities of his ethnic diet. Could be a phantom smell born of Ade’s confession that the constraints of his business force him sometimes to piss in a jar.

We are driving past Chicago’s austere skyscrapers of steel and glass with their reflections of pink clouds and dusky deep blues. Seagulls circle the yachts in the harbor. And it’s the seagulls that I’m thinking about, the consciousness of a bird over the shore of Lake Michigan, when I say, “If I had the choice, I think I’d be reincarnated as a bird.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Ade bellows. Ade is always bellowing, perhaps because he is African, or perhaps because he is always talking over his shoulder at me. Me and everyone else – he’s chauffeured the general public since his boyhood in Lagos, Nigeria, when he started a business rowing people back and forth from the mainland to an offshore island. “A bird? That’s just stupid.”

“A bird for obvious reasons,” I tell him. “Flight. Don’t you want to fly?”

“Okay,” Ade says. “What kind of bird would you be?”

“The only qualification is flight,” I say. “You couldn’t pay me to be a penguin.”

“What about a pigeon?” Ade asks.

“I think I could probably settle,” I say.

“Wit-miss,” he says. These are two syllables he says often: ‘wit-miss.’ A holdover from his native Yoruba, maybe, or a mispronunciation of the word ‘Witness,’ which could be a literal translation of a hedging word taken from his third language, French. Whatever the case it seems unconscious – he denies that he ever says it.

“Wit-miss,” he says, “you would not want to be a pigeon in Nigeria.”

I take his word for it. I’m watching the gulls against the pinks and blues. The twinkle of the Ferris wheel lights on Navy Pier. The wind is on my face and for a moment, if I concentrate, I can tuck my consciousness into that feathery white body, the mechanical power of wings and the majesty of perspective. It’s pretty great, but I begin to wonder whether there’s some other more exotic fauna I should have considered. I ask Ade, thinking he’ll come up with something better.

“I think I would like to be a squirrel,” Ade says.

“A squirrel? That’s worse than mine. A squirrel’s just a rat with a better tail.”

“I don’t know,” Ade says. He’s lost in thought a moment – the cab seems to drive itself. “One Sunday afternoon,” he continues, coasting nearer the curb, narrowly missing it and veering back, “I was watching the squirrels in my backyard. Even when they are working to get a nut, they are still playing.”

We’re both content with this idea; I decide a squirrel isn’t such a bad choice after all. Then something comes on the radio and Ade turns it up, it’s jazz, a piano solo. Then he turns it down again. “Wit-miss you would not want to be a squirrel in Nigeria.”

I try to picture Nigeria but I’m only getting a desert, a dead tree, and a man in rags.

“You could be a goat,” Ade offers. “In Nigeria, goats are like the family dog. They get the run of the house. Wit-miss I owned a goat – oh yes! This is customary, on the eighth or ninth birthday a boy will receive a goat as a present.”

Winds are coming in colder off the lake and mingling with the coppery smells of the city. “What was the goat’s name?” I ask.

“Oh, he didn’t have a name, but we treated him like one of the family. Very protective, that goat! Oh man! If he does not know you, he will run at you and kick you. Neighbors were scared to walk on our property! We kept him tied to a stake in the backyard. Some days he would free himself and run amok.”

The word ‘amok’ takes on a heightened significance the way Ade says it. It comes from farther back in his throat, the ‘k’ almost like a ‘g,’ and somehow this makes his goat more reckless in my mind’s eye. It knocks over small children, braying, its legs flailing at unnatural angles.

Ade turns off Lake Shore and coasts through North Chicago – his old stomping ground, back when he was a bachelor, frequenting the Green Mill Club and the used record stores. Before his wife and kids came to join him in the States.

“Of course, we eventually had to eat that goat,” Ade says.

“You ate your pet goat?”

“Wit-miss if you wait too long, the meat goes bad.”

“But he was your goat,” I say. “It was your birthday present.”

“Yes? And?” Ade smiles big and straightens up in his seat to get a better look at me in the rearview mirror. I don’t know exactly what he sees in the darkness of the backseat. A goofy young white boy, sure, but what else? Maybe a surrogate son, being that the constraints of his business, after all these years, still keep him from his real children too often. This thought of being a son to Ade is one I can entertain from the backseat, but not from outside, where Ade’s physicality is overwhelming, and to face him is to be dumbstruck by his bulk and the deep blackness of his skin.

“And how did it feel?” I ask him. “At any point during the meal, didn’t you connect the meat on your fork to the memories of your pet?”

Ade shrugs – at least I think he does; it’s dark now and I can’t be absolutely sure. Anyway he’s noncommittal. We’re at my apartment now, and Ade’s got another long drive to think about, 20 miles or so south along Lake Shore Drive to his home in the suburbs.

I’m still thinking about the goat when I say goodbye to Ade, trying not to close the cab door too loudly (his pet-peeve). Then, as I walk up the carpeted steps to my apartment, I’m back to thinking about birds, and how to a bird the sky would not be the sky, but just an empty part of the matrix through which it moves up and down, right and left, and how this would be routine and unimpressive. Except at sunset, when being a bird would be like living in a painting and swooping with the grace of a brushstroke. Like Ade, flying down Lake Michigan, returning to his wife and kids, his mind following the whims of a jazz solo. Or, rather, it would not be ‘like’ anything at all; just the compression of air, the unknowable consciousness.