“Look what happened!” Ingrid was saying to the driver.
“Stand back, stand back,” someone else was saying.
Hugh moved slightly, though probably not. I was crying fairly hard by now and the world trembled before me like so much jelly on a spoon.
“Oh look,” said Ingrid, in the voice of a mother showing her child a nest of newborn sparrows. The driver of the van had stopped his advance toward the body. He was shaking his head and glaring at Hugh’s body, wondering, I suppose, how that alien sack of blood could have been dropped before his wheels, exploding in the center of his consciousness, threatening his job, taking food off his family’s table.
“Don’t touch him, don’t touch him,” someone was saying. I turned around. A tall bearded black man wearing a sailor’s cap was pushing his way through the crowd. “Make way, goddamnit, make way.” He looked terribly competent, relaxed, trustworthy—perhaps someone who’d learned first aid in the Navy, or the mysteries of ancient healing on a distant island. The black man placed his hands on my shoulders and gently moved me out of his way. He pointed to Ingrid and said, “You got to give him room to breathe, darling.”
Ingrid shook her head and smiled at the man. “How can I?” she said. She indicated Hugh’s body with a shrug and now for the first time I looked closely at what it had endured. The length of it was covered in blood; it looked more like a casualty of war than an auto accident. In the center of his body, Hugh’s clothes seemed to float, like leaves in a stream. His arms were thrown over his head in angles that unbroken bones could never have described. The darkest strip of blood was right at his throat; it seemed that the wheels had run over his neck, and if we were to try to lift him we’d risk separating his head from his body.
The black man trod workman-like through the blood and crouched at Hugh’s corpse. Ingrid held onto this stranger’s arm, half to keep him away from Hugh, half to connect herself to something living.
“He’s dead,” the driver of the van said. He was standing next to me.
“He was dead when you hit him,” I said. “A cab hit him first.”
The driver of the van nodded.
“He’s breathing,” the black man said, looking up with a radiant smile. It had never even occurred to me, until that moment, that he was out of his mind. “Does anyone here have a silver dollar? Or anything that’s unalloyed silver?” He thrust his long bony hand out. “Give me silver,” he said in an entirely reasonable voice.
Ingrid got up slowly. Her eyes were half-lidded and her lips were parted: a combination of shock and nausea.
“This man is alive and I can save him,” the black man said.
Ingrid shuffled away, shaking her head. When she turned to face the black man again, she was standing next to me. Sweat was pouring off her; her breath wheezed at the back of her throat.
“Be careful,” I said. “That guy seems crazy.”
“That man,” she said, pointing to Hugh. “That man is my husband.” She closed her eyes and I took her arm.
“Life is eternal,” the black man was saying. “It cannot be terminated. It dies from neglect because we are ignorant. The spark of life is an electrical charge that can be rejuvenated over and over if we act with God’s speed.” He was kneeling in Hugh’s blood, supporting himself with one hand resting on Hugh’s hip bone, and emptying out his own pockets. “I have no silver coins. I’ll use three dimes.” He placed a dime on both of Hugh’s eyes and a third dime in the center of Hugh’s forehead. Though the top part of Hugh’s face was unmarked, he was bleeding from the skull and his honey-colored hair was growing dark, from the center out, like those flowers that are stained most vividly at the stamen.
In fifteen minutes it was over. An ambulance finally arrived and took Hugh’s body to a hospital where it could be pronounced dead officially. Newspaper photographers arrived and took pictures. There were a couple of reporters from a radio station, a TV station. Two cops arrived on scooters. The driver of the taxi—who hadn’t ventured out of his cab yet—and the driver of the van were both put into the back seat of a police car, though I couldn’t tell if they were being arrested or simply questioned. Ingrid rode with Hugh in the ambulance. Passers-by were asking the original witnesses to fill them in on what had happened. Someone in a baggy suit was marking off in chalk the area on 57th Street where Hugh had lain. Within a minute car wheels were rolling right through Hugh’s blood. It was a busy time of the day and there wasn’t time to clean it up.
I heard what the witnesses were telling the police and there wasn’t anything I could say that made any more sense. The person to worry about was that fellow driving the cab, but everyone said that Hugh bolted out into the street and it was clear that the cab driver wasn’t going to be blamed.
One of the cops asked if any of us had a statement to make, if we’d like to step forward as witnesses. One woman wanted to talk about the black man who’d put the dimes on Hugh, but that poor fellow had disappeared when the sirens were upon us and the police weren’t interested in him. Someone else wanted to complain about how long it had taken either a squad car or an ambulance to arrive. I was shaking quite a bit. I don’t know if tears were on my face but my eyes were full enough with them to make it hard to see. When the cop looked in my direction I glanced down and as subtly as I could turned around so that my back would be to him, as if I was looking for a friend or a public clock.
I set myself adrift through the crowd of onlookers and then into the stream of people walking up 57th Street who hadn’t seen Hugh lying on the street and who had other things on their mind: I joined the incurious who had better things to think about than those squad cars and their flashing lights.
There was nowhere to sit down. If I tried to stand still and catch my breath I’d be hit from behind, walked over. I was walking west; there were too many people for me to see what was in the shop windows.
I wondered if he’d said anything to Ingrid before setting off after me. Had he said, “There’s David Axelrod”? She hadn’t even looked at me; she didn’t seem to know who I was.
I had, I suppose, already decided to keep my part in Hugh’s death a secret; I hadn’t worked out any of the details. I wasn’t even thinking about it directly. My only calculation concerned Ingrid: I was a stranger to her and she hadn’t really looked directly into my face. Even if we were to meet at some future time, there was, I thought, every reason for me to hope that she would never be able to retrieve the image of me standing on that corner as all the life drained out of Hugh.
I was walking down the Avenue of the Americas. I stepped off the curb and raised my arm for a taxi. It was five thirty. I was going to call Ann in half an hour.
12
“Am I calling too early?” I asked, as soon as Ann picked up the phone.
I had the air conditioning running in my room and I was under the bed covers with my clothes on.
“No,” Ann said. “I’m glad for an excuse to stop. What’s wrong? You sound strange.”
“I fell asleep,” I said. “I’m just getting up.”
“Well, you sound dead. Why don’t you ring back when you’ve finished waking?”
“I’m up,” I said.
“Believe me, you’re not. I’m going to smoke a joint and listen to one side of my Erik Satie record. That gives you twenty minutes to take a cold shower or do some calisthenics. How long were you asleep?”