At a cafe in Ambon, my table separated from the din of a busy intersection by a hedge of shrubbery. I can't see the street, but I can sure hear it. From the depths of an intensely involved conversation, an intrusive noise begins to tug on the short hairs of my attention, penetrating the protective membrane of my focus, stinging the thriving white noise of traffic like a rubber band snap to a bloodshot eyeball.
It's a whistle. One of those infernal blasted traffic cops, with all the self-importance of a rookie bureaucrat, is spewing a near constant stream of whistle shrills into every hapless ear-hole within a precocious radius. Expletives begin to suggest themselves to my mind. I turn them down, return my focus to conversation, but the assault continues. Irrational feelings of violent loathing surge into consciousness. I interrupt the conversation to comment.
"That is one whistle-happy traffic cop," I say.
The noise continues. Insistent, tenacious, almost desperate, it even seems to intensify. Suddenly a threshold within me is crossed from annoyance into genuine curiosity. Who is this abomination? I must see his face. I must assess the nature of this creature who wrings his lungs with such wanton abandon for so menial a purpose.
I excuse myself from the table, walk out to the street. It takes all of one second to find the man, and immediately all of my accumulated irritation is dissolved. The source of the disturbance is not a traffic cop at all, but a small-framed man wearing only a pair of shorts six sizes too big for him, brandishing a bright green whistle with an intensity of purpose normally reserved for slam poets or curbside evangelists.
I consider what happened next a rare and glorious moment. Seconds after I took the man's picture, two actual policemen approached the whistler as he stalked up and down the curb screeching his gospel of distraction. At first it appeared as if they wanted to question him, but as the quality and intensity of his crazy became apparent they decided to just keep walking. As they passed, striding with the authoritative air common to men in uniform, the blessed green-tongued prophet turned, fixing them in his sights, and began marching high-stepped directly behind them, swinging his arms and marking the rhythm of his stride with his whistle. I could not believe my good fortune. The cops tried to ignore him at first, failed within seconds, then turned around and yelled while he scampered off.
Grinning from ear to ear, I returned to my table. The conversation resumed, and so did the whistling, but this time it didn't bother me at all.
