There were so many responses available to me.
The light governing north-south traffic was still green. I cut through the crowd and crossed 57th Street, heading toward the fragrant green blur of Central Park. Though I knew, essentially, it wasn’t so, I told myself that Hugh hadn’t seen me and that I’d be doing us both a favor if I got out of his way. I moved with my head down and I moved quickly. I was almost running.
Hugh bolted after me, cutting diagonally across Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, coming at me like an arrow. Ingrid shouted out to him, as she would tell us later: “Hugh! What are you doing?”
And here comes the taxi cab, gunning ahead to make it through the yellow light, because cab drivers are always in an acute hurry. That’s how they make a living.
I glanced back once to see if Hugh was following me. He was, of course, and I tried to make myself stop but I couldn’t. My legs were committed to cowardice. I told myself not to look back again, just to keep going straight and fast. The sidewalk was crowded; it was like a Christmas crowd.
Everything was noisy and dense but the sound of those brakes couldn’t have been more penetrating if I’d heard them in a concert hall. I stopped in my tracks and turned around and saw Hugh just the moment after the taxi struck him.
He was in the air, sailing backwards in a northwesterly direction. It looked like a stunt. The taxi cab was going up an inch, back an inch, starting and stopping and bobbing up and down as if in seizure. No one was saying anything and Hugh was in the air.
Then he was on his back, but still moving, shooting along as if he were on a sled. His arms were spread at his side and his tan jacket was riding up and bunching at the shoulders. He was turning over, in a broken, graceless motion—now, for the first moment, it looked serious and out of control. He turned on his right shoulder but his head didn’t move and his legs were going in two different directions. It looked like he might break into pieces. And now another car was slamming on its brakes and another and another. For the first moments after the cab hit Hugh, his body had been skidding in its own lane, between the east-west traffic on 57th Street, but now that was no longer the case.
It probably didn’t matter. The taxi that hit him was going fast and it hit him direct. Hugh was probably already dead, or on his way toward death. But a green florist’s van hit him a second time. It wasn’t even a hit. The little truck rolled over Hugh and ruined the top part of his lifeless body.
Did the sky turn red? Did the sun even hesitate in its stiff rounds? The world, even along the dense strip of Manhattan, seemed utterly calm. People turned slowly, quietly; faces wore that perplexed, slightly absent expression you see in the lobby after an avant garde play. This is it? You tell me what it means. It was as if we needed a second look to confirm what had happened. And then the image of that man being tossed like a sack of meal by that cab completed its frantic loop through our senses and we did see it again. The long moments of waiting were over, the synaptic reprieve canceled, and now the first screams, the first shouts, the first hands clapped over unwilling eyes—we were suddenly a terror-struck herd staggering toward the street, stepping on each other’s heels, elbowing each other, afraid to look too carefully at any stranger, and each of us hoping that someone would know what to do.
But no one knew what to do. No one ever does. We were just moving toward the point of impact. Then I saw Hugh get up, but that didn’t happen. Someone in front of me dropped a pretzel, one of those big brain-sized New York pretzels, and I stepped on it accidentally. Someone else dropped a newspaper. People were dropping things.
“Oh Jesus,” I heard someone say, “don’t look. Please, sweetheart. Don’t look.”
I was half on the curb, half in the street. All traffic was stopped. Five blocks down, cars were blowing their horns. There were dozens and dozens of people in front of me. No one was screaming “I’m a doctor!” No one was asking us to make a path. It was all right just to be standing around like a total idiot.
I felt for a moment as if I might lose consciousness and I could imagine in that instant what it would be like to be beneath the feet of the crowd. I thought of a high heel in my throat’s hollow.
It was not even Hugh anymore. Hugh had passed out of that ruined body and…he was standing next to me. No, but the man standing to my side, leaning into and not feeling me, wearing one of those straw hats you expect to see only at racetracks and a yachtsman’s blazer, had a bit of Hugh in him, it seemed to me. An earnestness in the sea green eyes, an impassiveness that allowed you to project your most heroic fantasies. Maybe Hugh’s spirit was everywhere around us, floating through the air like debris after an explosion, and we were all absorbing parts of it. But that’s what you always want to think when someone dies.
I moved closer. No one put up much resistance. Those who were closer than I to Hugh’s body had no will to defend their position.
From the other side of the street, Ingrid Ochester was making her way. “He’s mine,” she said, in a voice far behind her grief—the tone was declarative, slightly embarrassed. She seemed to be apologizing for her connection to the disturbance, like a babysitter whose ward has toppled a department store display. “He’s mine,” she said over and over. She was waving her large hands in front of her, slapping abstractly at anyone who didn’t make way for her. She looked like someone in a garden who is being attacked by a swarm of black flies. As she staggered over the curb and was almost upon Hugh’s body, Ingrid’s knees gave way and, making no effort to stop her fall, she landed on her palms and knees. She was planted five or ten feet from Hugh, though by now the pool of blood beneath him had spread out and she was on its rim, staring down into it as if to see her reflection. I was standing on Hugh’s other side, ten or so feet from his body. Three other strangers had also made it through the crowd and we existed now within that dazed sphere of onlookers, as if caught in some ritual dance, surrounded by faces.
“Don’t touch him,” a voice said to Ingrid. But when I turned to look at the cop who’d made it through the crowd and was now taking control, I saw nothing but pedestrians, and when I turned back to Ingrid she was kneeling in Hugh’s blood, stroking his hair back from his eyes. Her loosely braided red hair dangled in front of her and her denim skirt was red and wet with Hugh’s blood and now her hands were red too and her face when she touched it. She was saying something—to Hugh, to me, to everyone—but I don’t know what. I was watching Hugh run after me. I was Hugh. The cab hit me in the chest and I fell forward onto the hood, but the cab kept coming and the velocity threw me backward. I went flying and when I hit the street I kept moving. The bones in my chest were broken, and when my head hit the street a piece of it fell away, like a chunk of an old jack-o’-lantern. But the worst part was the skidding backward, the tearing of my skin: it was the most familiar pain, the stupidest and the most ordinary. It was like rolling in hot shattered glass, though I don’t actually know what that would be, and I knew this, this pain that filled the last instants of my life like a fierce hideous chord at the end of a symphony.
The driver of the florist’s van that had run over Hugh got out of his truck. He was a huge fellow, a muscle man, in a white undershirt and tapered black pants and an Elvis Presley hair cut. He pressed a handkerchief onto his forehead, blotting at the little pinpoints of blood that seeped through the scrape he’d suffered when his large head knocked into the windshield. He was stopped a full hundred feet beyond Hugh; it had taken that long to stop after running him over. The driver walked in an odd mincing gait, as if he were wearing his little brother’s shoes. He was looking at Hugh and shaking his head: it seemed so inconceivable to him that he’d suddenly been thrust at the center of a man’s death.