One morning the cab driver woke up and noticed an illuminated sign in his head. It said: YOU DID IT!
It was written in a simple way; no frills or scribbles or striking graphic design of a kind to evoke any further feelings at the memory of his deed.
Maybe, the cab driver thought, it's the pay-off for the way I lived with the deed in my thoughts every day, and turned back and explored it from every angle, until I ceased to be sensitive to it, and it seemed incredible to me that such a thing could ever have happened. At moments like that he even tried (although of course it would have been better to forget it) to imagine his crime and check once more that it had really happened. And all of a sudden he wakes up and the first thing he sees is that huge glowing sign announcing his deed in the simplest of words.
And all of a sudden he wakes up and the first thing he sees is that huge glowing sign announcing his deed in the simplest of words.
He got up with the feeling that the outside world could scarcely fail to see so intense a sign, and the red light of conscience was seeping out through his skull. He therefore avoided other peoples' eyes on the way to work, as far as possible kept out of brightly-lit spots and didn't cross large open spaces.
What have we got here, the cab driver asked, rubbing his head as if looking for a crevice through which the sign might be expelled. Has my conscience just been waiting for the right moment, he wondered, letting me feel it now after all those days when I couldn't understand why it hadn't turned up yet?
In any case, despite the horror his mood was almost festive. Enriched by the deed he had committed, the cab-driver chatted with his customers with a certain hidden pride. Suddenly his deed was something that filled out the previously scanty dimensions of his stereotypical life, and in his own eyes the reproaches of his conscience meant that he was no longer a ridiculous and pointless person. Now for the first time he could proudly carry the burden of his crime, which was so great and so appalling that nobody could belittle the reproaches of conscience that it gave him, if of course they had known about them.
The only thing that made him at times uneasy was the insane REALITY of his deed, since it was no longer just one of the many dreams he could forget whenever they ceased to appeal to him, with no effects at all. The cab-driver had first dreamed of his crime - then decided to commit it, then committed it and then recalled it. It struck him as beautiful to have achieved something he had previously only dreamed of - this meant that the later dreams were not dreams but memories, which of course differed from dreams in the sense that nothing in them could be changed. With this realisation he often clutched at his forehead when he remembered some of the shortcomings of his crime - but on the other hand the shortcomings were proof of the reality of the moment.

Yes - while before the cab driver had previously dreamed perfect dreams, now he proudly recalled an imperfect reality and experienced the feeling that he had perhaps lived truly only in that moment. But for that very reason he bore the terrible consequences of that moment of life all the more proudly. Indeed, as he found when he was falling asleep in his bed at night, he had no intention of letting those consequences go, because for him they were the proof of his own existence, and without them he would fall back into the emptiness of an earlier existence in which he had vainly searched for meaning.