Abel Mensah

Night driver, Route 9

Abel Mensah has driven the Route 9 night service for eleven years, which he will tell you is a temporary arrangement. He is fifty-eight, punctual to the pin, and holds that a printed timetable is a promise made to strangers — the last kind of promise a careful man can keep perfectly. He keeps it perfectly. On paper.

What he wants (and needs)

Wants: the audit passed, the route preserved, the hour protected — everything exactly as it is, forever, please.
Needs: to admit that the timetable decides his nights so he never has to; and to let the bus finish the one delivery it has been attempting for eleven years — its driver, to Corvus Road, four minutes from the depot, where a two-year-old letter has been waiting for its answer.

The flaw that costs him

Order worn as armour. Abel’s exactness looks like virtue and mostly is — but the false log that shields the hollow hour also shields him: a man who forges the record every night never has to ask which record he’s really keeping. When protecting the secret and serving the hour finally pull in opposite directions, he protects the secret, and someone else pays the fare.

Voice

Cool, procedural, quietly devout about the trade; measures everything, names almost nothing. First person, past tense. The feeling arrives late, through the numbers.

Appears in

The One-O'Clock Bus novella