Page 22 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
Ricky
At home in Colombia, Ricardo had graduated from university with a chemistry degree with a goal of becoming a pharmacist. Here in New York, though, he was just Ricky the driver.
It wasn’t so easy to translate an overseas degree to work in the same field in the United States, and he needed to go through another four years of a pharmacology doctorate program before he could be what he’d intended to be.
But graduate programs didn’t come cheap, so here Ricky was, three years deep into working for a car service that shuttled around executives, bankers, and lawyers, while he was never acknowledged as an intellectual equal.
Never really acknowledged at all.
The only thing his passengers usually said as they got into his spotless black town car was “Hi,” followed by an address.
They didn’t even look up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror.
Sometimes, they would glance at Ricky’s phone, mounted on the dashboard, to double-check that the right destination was showing on the map. But that was it for communication.
Ricky sighed silently as he picked up Michelle, a high-powered woman in a suit in the Financial District. She slid in, said “I’m going to Rockefeller Center,” then immediately went back to tapping away at her phone.
And to think, I picked driving because I thought it would be a good way to get to know Americans. Ricky shook his head. Colombians were so much more open. Even after three years of being here in New York, that culture shock still hadn’t worn off.
He navigated through the crowded streets efficiently, knowing exactly where all the construction was today in Manhattan.
In the background, his car radio played inoffensive soft jazz.
When he pulled up in front of Rockefeller Center faster than the map app had originally predicted, Michelle got out with only a mumbled thanks.
Ricky hoped she would tip him well for the extra effort he’d made in avoiding construction backups.
In reality, he knew she wouldn’t even notice the difference, but it wasn’t in his nature to do things half-ass.
That’s how he’d been top of his class in bachillerato and then university.
Ricky held himself to high standards, even if it was just driving a town car.
He was about to drive to his next pickup two blocks away when he glanced in his rearview mirror and noticed that Michelle had left something behind in the back seat. A yellow paper rose.
Ricky rolled down the window and shouted after her; she was almost at the entrance of the building. “Excuse me, ma’am! Michelle! You left a paper flower!”
She glanced over her shoulder with a frown. “What?”
By then he had gotten out of the car and retrieved the yellow rose. He left his car unattended on the curb and jogged over to return the paper flower to her, but as he held it out, she waved him away. “It’s not mine.” She pivoted on her stiletto heel and walked off without saying anything more.
Ricky winced. He had slowly developed a thick skin for being ignored, but sometimes, it still stung like windburn, the assault invisible yet biting. It was one thing to not be seen. It was another to be disregarded intentionally. It made him feel subhuman.
Back in the car, he allowed himself a minute to change the radio to a Spanish pop station. He leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes, and inhaled the beats of reggaeton and the homesickness that came with it.
“Un día a la vez, Ricardo,” he reminded himself. One day at a time.
When he opened his eyes again, he looked down at the paper rose still cradled in his hand. Its folds had started to loosen, as if the flower wanted to come undone. Exactly how I feel, too, he thought.
Ricky tugged on the corner of a petal, and the paper unfurled.
To his surprise, there was a handwritten message inside:
You cannot disappear if you refuse to be invisible.
It was signed with a tiny heart-shaped rosebud.
Ricky started to laugh. At first, it was just a small sound, but then the words in the yellow rose washed over him like a revelation, and it felt ridiculous and true all at once.
You cannot disappear if you refuse to be invisible.
He had allowed himself to vanish. When Ricky had first started driving for the car service, he had chatted with the people he picked up from the airport, from hotels and offices. Even if they only said a few sentences, there had been a brief intersection of their lives.
But then he had gotten worn down by the effort it took to break the ice.
Being an immigrant in a new country was exhausting; every detail of life required more energy than it ought to, from navigating subtle cultural cues to grocery shopping to dealing with passive-aggressive resentment against foreigners.
So Ricky eventually gave in to the tendency of New York passengers to construct walls around themselves.
Silence was easier to succumb to than trying to push through the initial resistance of connecting to another human being.
That’s how conversation died. How Ricky became easy to ignore, because he had unwittingly erected his own walls around himself.
And then he gasped. Because he’d been feeling so sorry for himself being invisible that he hadn’t realized he had also made his passengers feel unimportant by not engaging with them.
It took effort on both sides for people to be seen.
“Basta, Ricardo,” he said aloud to himself. Enough .
He headed toward his next assignment two blocks away. When he pulled up to the curb of Intelligentsia Tech and a thirtysomething executive slipped into the back seat, he turned and smiled and made sure to meet her eyes. “Good morning. I’m Ricky. How are you today?”
She seemed caught off guard at first that he was talking to her, but then a smile crept onto her face, too. “I’m well, thank you. I’m Claire. How are you doing?”
“Nice to meet you, Claire.” He turned back around and pulled away from the curb, but once he merged into the street, he waved the yellow square of paper in the air. “I’ve had an interesting morning. I found this in my car—”
“Oh! It’s one of the origami flowers that are spreading around town,” Claire said, leaning forward.
Surprised, Ricky looked up at the rearview mirror. “You’ve seen one before?”
She nodded. “I go running in Central Park every morning. There’s a woman there who folds them. Sometimes a couple older ladies help her. But I don’t know why they do it.”
The center of Ricky’s chest warmed. Claire might not know the point of the paper roses, but Ricky had a guess as to the reason behind them.
It was this. The little purr of hope that now pulsed where his heart was.
Gracias, he thought to the woman in Central Park who had shown him, a total stranger, this small gesture of kindness.
And in return, he would pay it forward.