“I didn’t mean like a star. More like somebody who was on the news.”
“Well if he wasn’t already on the news, he might get there now.”
The air was full of whirling colors, like the beating of giant shimmering wings. When I identified these as the flashing lights, red and blue, on top of all the clustering official vehicles, I thought, Oh, sure. But even then, the mystery taken out of it, I liked the idea of breathing colored air.
A woman came up to me then, an older woman with a face that looked like flour had been sifted into its cracks. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said. Her hands fluttered up and she seemed to want to touch me. I shrank away. “Oh well,” she said, and I could tell she was a little hurt. “I guess, under the circumstances . . .”
Someone said to her, “It was an unavoidable accident. Even insurance companies allow for such things.”
“Not my insurance company,” the woman replied glumly. “There are no acts of God for those people.”
“And here you have to buy coverage, you’ve got no choice. They get you coming and going.”
“Death or Dismemberment. Now there’s a choice.”
“Shh.”
The crowd stepped back. An officer of the law appeared in the cleared space. His sword and shield were burnished, his face radiated glory. “Mr.———? We’re going to hand you over to the boys here. They’re going to take you the hospital. You understand?”
I tried to indicate, with my humble posture, that I did.
“We’ve talked to your wife and she’s going to meet you there.”
I didn’t want to think about my wife. She was not the same woman she’d started out as, all those years before. Time had gotten into her veins and made her anxious. I figured she was already hightailing it for the hospital. My cell phone there on the ground made yipping noises, and I knew it was most probably my wife, but I didn’t pick it up.
“Should we answer it?”
“I guess not. I mean, where do you start explaining?”
They put me in the back of an ambulance but they had me sit up, like an ordinary passenger. One of the ambulance guys sat across from me. “Still a little shook up? You got to expect that. I mean, one minute you’re solid, you’re wheels up, in a manner of speaking, well on your way to another day of Normal, and next thing you know, it’s all catawampus. Total befuckedness. I’ve seen it many a time, and friend, I’m here to tell you, the little ride we’re taking is easy-breezy. You just got your soul pulled a ways out of you and now we got to stuff it back in. The things I’ve seen! The times we’ve had to coax a soul back into a body, or practically whack it with a broom to get it down from the walls. Our whole bag of tricks: defibrillator, fluids, epinephrine, oxygen. IV Valium for those seriously nervous moments. Sometimes it’s enough, sometimes not. And when it’s not, we are your ambulance of last resort, Your Ride To The Other Side. Discreet. Professional. Caring. But you, friend, are only going partway, a short hop, an excursion. A dry run before the big fun. How are you feeling? Any pain? Difficulty breathing? Nausea? Dizziness? Ennui? Dissatisfaction? Anger, sloth, envy, and so on? Are you paying attention yet?”
We reached the hospital and I was unloaded. This time they strapped me on a gurney and whizzed me through the hallway so that I saw mostly ceiling, a checkerboard of tiles interrupted by white fluorescent tubes. I couldn’t see who was pushing me, couldn’t see their faces. Nurses, I guess. They smelled like baby powder. They were talking but I couldn’t understand their speech, which was like the speech of birds. The white fluorescent tubes ran together into a single track. Then there was a terrifying lurch as the gurney came to a halt. “The doctor will see you now,” the bird chorus announced.
I couldn’t see the doctor’s face either, because the room was dark and he wore one of those headlight things, a light strapped to his forehead radiating brilliance in all directions. I lay still as he picked and sorted through my body. I knew he could tell what was wrong with me without my having to speak. After a time the light withdrew a little and he said, in his doctor voice, stern and wise, “I think what’s needed is a course of electro cortical magnetic absolution therapy.”
I opened my mouth but it just stayed open. There was no force of words behind it. I knew the doctor was right. Wasn’t he always? Then another mouth-shape opened before me and I knew it was the machine, into which I was inserted like a tray of cookies into an oven.
The door closed and a pulse started up, a throbbing just below the threshold of sound. Nothing more happened. The arched roof of the chamber, only a little ways above me, was ribbed with dark and light bands, light enough to make out the nothing that surrounded me.
I felt inclined to fidget. For the first time in the proceedings I began to have practical, worried thoughts. The woman who had hit me from behind: Had anyone taken her name, her phone number, license and registration, insurance information? Were there witnesses? What sorts of calls would need to be made, and my poor poor car, ah, better not to think of that, the car thing, although I did not think I had been At Fault. I wondered if the woman who hit me was At Fault, in the way these things are reckoned, hitting from behind being one of the criteria of Fault. I knew she had been worried about the looming possibilities, including my own injuries. If I had been damaged, or even inconvenienced, if I was some unpleasant and litigious type—and I very well might be, I couldn’t yet say—there could be a lot of trouble.
I imagined her going home from the accident scene, driving in some overcautious, rigid, shell-shocked way. She lived alone and kept a cat. She was the kind who would keep it all together until she was safely within her own four walls, the car garaged, her purse and keys set down on the kitchen counter. But when the cat came up to greet her, making its plaintive noise, its tail held up like a question mark, that’s when she’d break down, weeping because there was no one else to weep for her.
And what about the criminally negligent owner of the ladder, the immediate cause of all the trouble? It was harder to get a picture of him—surely it was a man—some contractor or painter who loaded up his truck or van every day and set off for work. There was probably something like clamps that held the ladder in place, clamps on the top rack of the vehicle. I’d seen such things, without really seeing them or paying attention, any number of times. I didn’t do that sort of work, building and repairing things. I didn’t have a clue, and not much curiosity. Something broke, and you made phone calls, and men came with ladders and all sorts of other gear to set it right. You paid them and they took themselves off again.
Always there had been myself, and then there was everything outside of myself, and whatever effort I had to make to deal with it. With other people: get what I needed from them, work around them. A clear boundary that was turning soft and blurred, or maybe it was my own self that had gone so blurry. The machine throbbed. The light was the blue of thunderstorms. A man with a ladder wasn’t anyone I usually cared about. But the ladder was the last thing I remembered with perfect clarity—orange, battered, unexpectedly solid—and the rest of my mind, my self, my own name, my soul, was still floating somewhere out of reach. I thought I might climb the ladder up to where I could get my hands on them. And of course there was still the question of Fault to be resolved.
He’d been careless about the ladder. Hadn’t taken the time to fasten it down securely. Or else the mechanism that held it in place was worn, balky. Sooner or later it would have to be replaced, like everything else he owned: busted, coming apart, crapped out. That was his luck. But the ladder had always stayed in place just fine, right up until today, and besides, he had other things to worry about this morning. He was behind, off to a bad start. In arrears. Overdue. His late payments were late. This job he was on wasn’t going well. There had been complaints. Work always took longer than people wanted it to, nobody understood that. They rode your ass like it was a train. The truck’s engine balked when he tried to start it and he cursed it, but without real energy or im
agination.
Traffic was in his way. There were people on the roads who drove like old ladies, in fact a lot of them actually were old ladies now that he got a look at them. A whole herd of prissy women taking to the road in their Kias or Geos or Sunfires, cheapo cars that even they should be ashamed to drive. Riding the brake, clogging the passing lane. They had him hemmed in. His own escort of slow-assed old babes. The one in front of him drifted back to the scenic lane where she belonged and he finally got his speed up and a chance not to be any later than usual and that was when the racket of dragging metal started up, and the noise and the panic traveled up his back as if his spine itself was a ladder, and by the time he figured out what it was, the thing had detached itself entirely and bounced away.
He kept on going. It wasn’t really a decision, just inertia, maintaining speed. Motion took up the space that would have otherwise been occupied by dread. Then he thought about doubling back, driving a little ways on the opposite side of the freeway to see if anything had come of it, but he was already late and he didn’t want to know.
He did pull over when he reached his exit, went around back to see if his license plate or anything else identifiable had come loose, but it hadn’t, and he felt a coward’s relief at that, yes he was a damned coward and a lot of other names he could hang on himself. He would have to buy a new ladder but not right away, and not anywhere close by, in case the cops started making the rounds of Home Depots, checking out suspicious ladder purchases, now that was a genuine paranoid thought but he couldn’t shake it. His armpits were cold with sweat and he told himself to get it together, for Christ’s sake. He couldn’t show up at the job looking like he’d killed somebody even if he had.
I didn’t know his name any more than I knew my own. But I saw him clearly enough now. The clothes that he wore: you’d think there was no pride involved in their selection or care, but there was a kind of pride in how little thought or effort was devoted to them. Because he had more important things to worry about. He smoked, he’d always smoked, he didn’t give a rip what anybody else thought. If I get a notion to swim out in the ocean, ain’t nobody’s business. And he drank his share, but only after work and on weekends, and that too was nobody’s business. The rest of the time he worked his nuts off. What else did people expect of him? He wasn’t born rich and he’d made his own luck, and if the luck was usually bad, he got up the next morning and started in all over again. He’d like to see some of these smart guys with their cell phones and their Starbucks coffee spend even one day doing the work he did, year in and year out. Like to see them try.
So that if a ladder were to come loose on the highway and bust up somebody’s big-deal day, well, they probably had it coming. They were probably in too much of a hurry, they had an attitude about what the world owed them because life had been pretty good so far, hadn’t it? Huh, buddy? All those pissy little problems you squalled about, who cared? Like you had it so rough. You could have been born without some important component part, a mouth, or even less of a brain than you already have, or feet! What would you do without feet? What if you weren’t even human, but some large, patient animal beaten regularly with a stick, a water buffalo, for instance, with a ring through its nose, a beast of burden yoked to a plow, one slow foot ahead of the other all your life, until one day you sank down in the mud and didn’t get up? What if you were a bird in the wood, a fish in the flood, a gnat, a fly, a speck tossed by the wind, a thought, a kiss, a prayer? Would you still think that you had suffered insurable losses? Could you forgive the man who let the ladder fall, or the ladder itself for falling? Could you forgive the world for its suffering?
I opened my eyes. My wife was holding my hand. She had a brave look on her face. “How are you, honey? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said. I fell off the ladder and straight down into myself. “Oh boy.”
“Don’t try to talk, honey, just rest. You’re going to be fine. You’re going to be good as new.”
I was finer than fine. Newer than new. I was wheels up. I was paying complete attention.
Do Not Deny Me
Julia’s boyfriend had a cough he couldn’t shake, a wet laboring in his lungs that irritated her even as she exercised sympathy and concern. On nights they spent together she kept waking up to his convulsive racket. “Honey,” she said, attempting patience, “you really need to get to the doctor.” The boyfriend was not a big fan of doctors. He prided himself on his vitamins and his workouts. Still. The doctor diagnosed bronchitis. Unsurprising, since it was winter and there was the usual stew of viruses about. The antibiotics helped for a time, but he began to complain of soreness in his chest and back, shortness of breath, lightheadedness.
One night he spiked a fever of 102, and Julia drove him to the emergency room. “This sure is kicking my ass,” he said. Talking made him cough, and Julia told him to just rest. When he leaned against her she felt the fever pulsing through his skin. She thought that someday they might have a child, and the child would get sick and they would both worry about it, and this would be what it would feel like.
He was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and pulmonary edema and given oxygen, diuretics, IV antibiotics. It was alarming—they had surely thought he would be treated and sent home—but the ER doctor assured her that they had things under control. She decided to go home and get a few hours of sleep. First, she looked in on him to say good night. He was sleeping, or some exhausted, medically induced version of sleep, and his breathing had settled low in his chest. It sounded like underground snoring. She touched his face and thought it felt cooler.
When she came back the next morning, he was dead. A different doctor explained to her that there had been complications, perhaps an underlying heart condition. He talked about left and right ventricles, cardiomyopathy, the many and heroic interventions. Julia tried to argue with him, as if it was simply a matter of proving the doctor wrong. “He’s only twenty-seven years old.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the doctor said.
It was as if the hospital had snatched him away and refused to give him back. Alone, she had no sense of what to do with herself, with the shock of it all, and walked up and down the hallways for a while. Dead was the shut door that kept blocking her way. She had not thought to call anyone the night before. She didn’t know any of his family. They had only been together for four months. She didn’t even have a key to his apartment. A nurse retrieved his cell phone, and Julia used it to call one of his friends.
After that, events were taken out of her hands. The funeral was in his hometown in Pennsylvania. She knew some of the people attending, his friends and the people he worked with, but none of them belonged to her. They had not had time to develop mutual friends. She met his parents, although they were at a loss for things to say to one another. One of his old girlfriends was there and she did a lot of breaking down and sobbing. Julia was too embarrassed by her own presence to be anything other than polite. She studied the easel board and the pictures of him in different incarnations: as a baby, a kid playing football, a high school graduate. Death had turned him into a stranger with an ordinary history. The coffin was closed and draped with a spray of red roses. It filled her with queasy horror, thinking of him shut inside, still struggling to breathe. Should she even have come? There was no place for her here, the accidental girlfriend.
Later, at his parents’ house, one of his friends came up to Julia and said, “Nobody blames you. I’m sure you did everything you could have.” It was a statement that seemed to mean exactly the opposite. It implied that she had been careless, had not valued him sufficiently, that they had entrusted their loved one to an unreliable stranger.
Perhaps if she had not gone home that night. If she had kept watch in a chair by the side of his bed, so that the moment his heart stopped fluttering, she could have raised the alarm. If she had been more vigilant, or smarter, or kinder, or someone else entirely, she might have kept him alive.
If they’d had more ti
me together, she would have been more entitled to grieve. She’d loved him, at least she believed she had, but sorting through her memories made them feel shopworn and false, as if she was only building an affecting monument to herself, her devotion, her suffering. A kind of revulsion set in. In this way she lost everything.
Of course her friends tried to comfort her, but she could tell there were statutory limits in place for a short-term lover, and their sympathy was weighed out accordingly. The counselor she went to called it “incomplete mourning.” That came closest to what she felt, but finding a label was no real consolation. The counselor’s goal, as Julia understood it, was to allow her to “move on,” which made all the sense in the world except she didn’t want to. Why would you want to forget someone? Why would you want to be forgotten?
Two months passed. Half of the time they’d been together. This was the new calculus she used for measurements. By now it was March, and trying to be spring, but not trying very hard. In the city, seasons were perceptible mostly as configurations of sky. Julia was waiting for her bus home from work, wishing she had worn her heavier coat. The sun was out but a brisk wind took the warmth away. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the rush and racket of downtown traffic, the perfume of exhaust and chill air. She turned her face upward and let the sun fill it.
Someone touched her arm and her eyes flew open. The woman standing next to her said, “I’m sorry. I was afraid you might miss your bus.”
Julia focused on the street before her and the bus she wanted pulling away from the curb. “Always another one,” she said, then, “Was I standing here spaced out for, like, a really long time?”
“Pretty long,” the woman allowed.
“I wonder,” Julia said, “if people can tell when they’re in the middle of a nervous breakdown, or if after a while it just seems like normal life? Sorry,” she added. “I didn’t mean to sound so melodramatic.”
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