Blind Corners

I jumped on the back of the motorbike, welcoming a ride to my hotel, after a long walk across the city in the sticky wet air.  The bike was an old Honda that looked as if Mel Gibson had driven it through forty miles of bad desert road to meet Tina Turner, dressed in snake skins, at the edge of a metal-wire gladiator dome.  The man driving it smelled of gasoline and sweat, his clothes covered in dirt and oil stains.  He wore shades and a scarf over his mouth.  I held the handle on the back of the banana seat, clenching my knees against the bike’s steal frame.  

    The wide roads of the city were compressed with thousands of motorbikes. There was a stray car or bus here and there, but mostly motorbikes, arm to arm across the width of the streets – no matter the street, and tire to tire up and down, forward and back.  Engines buzzed about like hornets streaming from their nest toward some doomed prey.  Bikes zig-zagged around, jumping in front of one another, breaking, shoulders bumping – but mostly horns honking.  ‘Beep! beep! beep!’ was a constant. The whining screams of the bikes echoed from all directions and from beneath the engine that carried me home.  The street noise was like a line of pinball machines, beeps, long and short, bouncing off one another’s motorbikes like tetras walls.  

    When bikes approached intersections they road straight through.  There were no traffic lights or stop signs or conductors to organize the confluence of hornets that swarmed from three or four directions at one another.  The bikes interspersed among the narrow gaps, seemingly clasping like the fingers of folded hands.  Some bikes seemed to transparently pass through others like ghosts into fog, emerging on the other side unscathed.  The swaying and acceleration of the bike was all I felt, not knowing if a sharp lean to the left or right would tilt back momentarily or meet with a crushing end.

    After my ten minute sojourn I was released to stand again on the sidewalk, out of the way of the flashes of motorized steel careening about like cannon balls in an artillery barrage.  I counted the bills to pay and looked at my driver.  He raised his shades up on his head, looking straight at me with two sockets of dark, empty, bottomless craters.  He smiled at me, gazing past at some infinite space beyond.  I looked about nervously and saw other drivers getting off motorbikes all around me.  They all wore scarves and shades.  They all stumbled about, feeling for the edge of walls - some tripping over cracks in the sidewalk cement.  

    I gave my driver the money and hurried away.  The bikes swarmed past me, barking ferociously, building into frenzies as they approached intersections, corners and one another. 

    “Motorbike…sir, sir, do you need a ride?  Motorbike!” yelled a man leaning against another Honda as I walked the last two blocks toward my hotel.