The Night Driver's Bridge

Old Sun drives a taxi, has run the night shift some twenty years, and favors the small hours.

The late-night fares are scattered but quiet; the roads are empty, and he can't even be bothered to wait at red lights. Old Sun has a rule: the river bridge in the city's east, between three and four in the morning, he does not cross. He would rather go the long way through the tunnel and burn ten yuan more of fuel.

A new young driver, scorning such notions, asked him why. Old Sun would not say at first; pressed hard, he told it: in earlier years he had no such fear and crossed as usual. One night at half past three he was on the bridge; in the middle a man waved, in a soaked shirt, and he stopped. The man did not get in but leaned at the window and asked, "Driver, do you go to the riverbed stop?" A chill ran through Old Sun; he floored it down off the bridge, and in the mirror the man still stood there, slowly climbing over the outside of the rail.

That bridge, Old Sun said, was where local jumpers most liked to go. The rail was later raised, cameras installed, a counselor posted at the bridgehead; but they can stop the living, not the small, un-resolved thoughts of the night.

From then Old Sun did not cross the bridge. But he did another thing: whenever he picked up a fare in a bad state, wanting in the dead of night to "go to the river for some air," he took the long way and chattered on and on, steering them toward the lively districts, telling of his own troubles, of the breakfast stalls that open at dawn. A few times, before getting out, the fare said thank you with red eyes.

The young man asked, "You're no counselor. What's in it for you?" Old Sun said, "I'm the man who, that year, was startled awake by his own foot on the gas."

Midnight Record note: That bridge can stop a person but not a thought. Old Sun does not believe he can deliver anyone's soul; he only remembers that one dawn he too had been very close to the rail — and it was that instinctive foot on the gas that carried him back to a dawn with breakfast stalls. So he takes the long way, talks nonsense, steers strangers toward the lively places, not for money but to win someone one more dawn. In this life, who has not, on some bridge, waited for a person willing to go the long way round?