Jules appreciated the silence. The method of the majority of Singaporean taxi drivers, at least in his experience, was boisterous loquaciousness, the activity of eager sponges willing to chat on almost any subject imaginable. The government, the road taxes, the building of the new casino (euphemistically labeled the Integrated Resort), their upbringing, their schooling (especially once they dig out that Jules was a teacher), the water fights with Malaysia, the charismatic and calm new president of the United States (once they discovered he was American). All these topics and many more: was he married, was his wife Singaporean, was she ethnically Chinese, how much did he pay for his flat, why is he living in an HDB estate rather than a condo, did he have children, was he disappointed he had a daughter rather than a son, when would he be trying for his next child, in which primary school did he plan to enroll the aforementioned daughter and others endlessly. Jules found it difficult to deny the answers to these questions, so affable were these taxi men, but the process drained him, bled him of his internal strength, transforming him into an utterer of monosyllabic affirmations.
The landscape of early-morning Singapore rolled past, concrete and glass and steel and carefully managed nature, and Jules thought of what awaited him once the taxi had arrived at his destination and he had alighted in the secondary school's car park, his eyes still heavy with too little sleep, his canvas messenger bag weighed down with marked tests. His later class of the day was to be observed by his reporting officer, his immediate supervisor, the head of the English department, and in charge of Student Development. Once a year he was subjected to this hour-long torture, set to stammering and sweating and nervous bloviating in the face of his superiors, a process to cast an eye to his teaching methods and the effectiveness of such, but which instead made of him an utter wreck, so different from his normal lessons full of lightness and whimsy and passion. So aware was he that this annual observation directly affected the quantum of his year-end bonus and raised the question of his continued employment that he gibbered and stumbled through the entirety of these sixty minutes of hell.
The mere thought of his forthcoming observation unleashed a fine patina of saline around the perimeter of his face, in his armpits, down the small of his back and between the cheeks of his buttocks, dampening his dress shirt and slacks in strategic places that were quickly chilled by the overpowering air conditioner of the taxi's interior. Were he a stronger man, of more confidence and extroversion, he would have instructed the mute stone-like taxi driver to return him home, to his wife and his infant daughter, or better yet, to just drive and drive over Singapore's expressways and flyovers and slip roads until the fare overcame the cash in his wallet, but look there at the driver's electronic payment machine, cashless funds transfer, and he with his debit card, so they could roll over asphalt and concrete until his bank account bled dry if he wanted. Could he dare? Could he shirk? Was he a shirker?
But Jules was not even given the chance to propose such a reckless irresponsible action, for it was in that moment that a vast fluttering of shadows filled the sky in front of them, an amorphous assemblage of darkness that still somehow featured coherence, as if a cognizant storm cloud, changing size, changing shape, but retaining a level of concrete thing-ness that allowed Jules to continue referring to it as one singular item. As the taxi sped ineluctably toward it, and as it pushed and twisted and writhed its way toward the taxi, Jules had the momentary thought that all of his several pressures both at work and at home, all of the stressors that coalesced his daily existence into a knot of worry in the pit of his guts, all of these things had finally driven him mad. Chauffeured by a sculpted simulacrum toward a vast patch of malevolent darkness, yes, he could only be mad.
Jules exhaled, his muscles unclenched, the sweat dried on skin. He had snapped, so be it. A calm acceptance washed over him, as if plunging into the coolness of a neighbourhood swimming pool on one of Singapore's many sweltering days. The other vehicles on the expressway had, at some point without him noticing, vanished, disappeared from the roadway, possibly as a result of the oncoming storm, or maybe as another function of his madness. He took a deep breath, the crisp dry conditioned air seeping into his lungs, and as he exhaled, the fluttering darkness descended and enshrouded the taxi.
Butterflies. A swarm of fuliginous butterflies, black as the void of space, thousands of them, millions of them, settling on every square centimetre of the taxi's exterior, bringing with them a barely detectable scent of night-blooming jasmine. Jules tried to recall the wording for a group of butterflies: was it a swarm? No, he remembered instead the word "rabble." A rabble of butterflies. And as the rabble adjusted on tiny legs, so small that Jules could scarcely make them out through the taxi's side windows and front windscreen, there was a collective moment of polarisation, as if an enormous magnet in the sky had lined them all up like an agglomeration of iron filings. As one, the butterflies flapped downward, and the taxi lurched.
Jules reached out to touch the driver's face, to find the surface, rather than giving and pliable, now hard and rough, literal stone. He rapped knuckles on the back of the driver's head, abrading them, and causing a fine mist of masonry dust to drift downward. Jules leaned back again, and although the view out of the taxi's glass was completely obscured by the butterflies, he could still feel reality beyond, but the connection became more tenuous with every passing second. As a child, he had often imagined that each automobile excursion was an elaborate facade, that the vehicle in fact remained stationary and the world rolling by was merely a complex illusion transmitted on a series of seamless connected projection screens. This impression revisited him now, as the flapping increased, and the taxi groaned and then humped itself upward, releasing its gravitational contact with the highway.
And as the taxi, now airborne, lifted up into the early morning skies of Singapore, to ascend above industrial hydrocarbon fumes and the constant hum and clank of progress, above stress and worry and the relentless pace of productivity, Jules recalled that butterflies were originally thought, but by whom he could not recollect, to be witches in disguise, consuming edibles carelessly left uncovered. Was this then his fate as well, consumption by this aggregated rabble, to be digested piecemeal in infinitesimally small stomachs? If this experience was still a breakage in his mental faculties rather than a fantastical event that was intruding into consensus reality, a supposition that he become more and more unsure of with each successive collective flap of tiny wings, then it did not really matter, did it?
He adjusted his posture, closed his eyes, and inhaled the faint hint of jasmine. Were he to ever return home, he would search out the fragrance as a present for his wife, but for now, he breathed it in, the smell of freedom, perhaps, or release, a manumission of the self.
