Interview with a driver

A bench in Central Park, across from the pond where little boys are sailing their radio-controlled boats. We meet a heavyset black man, a former truck driver for the legendary Mystic Transportation Inc. He's wearing a pair of cheap purple sunglasses and sighs often. His hair is grey, and he's not sure what to do with his hands. Every few seconds they find and clasp each other, somehow or another.

Q 'It didn't take long for everyone to figure out that Mystic Transportation Inc. never delivered what the shipping room gave them. Why do you think people went on offering their goods for delivery?'

A 'Well, people like to see the world throw itself for a loop, you know what I mean? And by the way, there's no truth to the rumour that the boss always switched deliveries. Sometimes he wrapped things in veils, or did something to change them.'

Q 'Are you saying you spent years working for a practical joker?'

A 'No, the boss was a magician, he did magic tricks with what people thought their things meant.'

Q 'But he liked to give people a hard time, he annoyed them on purpose, didn't he?'

A 'Not as an end in itself. His motto was: it has to be disturbing enough to stand on its own two feet. To be remembered, that was him aim, to make memories overlap.'

Q 'Memories, that's a joke. After all, because of you, a lot of people no longer know where their things are. Whatever happened to them?'

A 'You don't give the man enough credit. Sometimes it took years, but he never kept anything that belonged to anybody else. It all wound up back in the flow of goods, right? Someone's got it. Nothing's been lost.'

Q 'Some people say there was method to all those transactions and transformations, a kind of secret formula. You know anything about that?'

A 'Right, that's what people say who thought he was just the holy terror of the transport sector. I knew him. He wasn't out to make things that easy for himself. It was his life. His way of meeting the world. Sure, he liked to tie together all the things we did. But he improvised every step he took; he didn't have a program. That was the whole point. Taking the reliability out of the transport sector to give it new life, an unfamiliar idiom.'

Q 'But isn't that an awfully simple paradox?'

A 'Positive and negative can spin so fast on their axis, it makes a propeller.'

Q (É)

A 'That stopped you cold!'

Q 'Yeah, I'm absolutely speechless.'

A 'The boss would have appreciated that.'

Q 'Where is he, now that the company's gone out of existence.'

A 'He lives under the city, underground. No one knows exactly where. And he's not talking.'

Dirk Van Weelden, Rene Daniels, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven