A policeman shambled over. His eyes glided across my face; he asked me clipped questions. How fast had I been going? Had I been drinking? (About forty, I guess, and No, no. Jesus, no.) Someone, perhaps a new EMS arrival, finally took charge. All right, folks — step back. He decided on the best way to transport Celine. The how of his plan escaped me, and still does. But an ambulance did wheel in and get Celine, finally and somehow, away from all the stopped cars. They took her to the hospital. And my passengers Mike and Jeff — twin friends who’d been in the backseat — also managed to get out of there. And then, after the traffic was unjammed; after the police told me I was “free to go”; and with a suddenness and ease out of sync with the scale of what was happening — it seemed a form of insanity to touch the car again — my dad just slipped into the driver’s seat. Dave took Dad’s car, I fell into mine beside my father, and we were off. I sat in the front passenger seat. A crack in the car’s windshield measured the length of the glass. Sunlight caught in tendrils that raked out from its sides.
My parents, after offering the quiet-voiced inevitables, told me not to beat myself up about it.
I don’t remember what Dave and I did the rest of that afternoon. I certainly didn’t phone Celine’s family. She and I hadn’t known each other — not well enough, or really much at all — and so I was too afraid to phone, or even to look up the Zilkes in the white pages.
“You should go to a movie,” my parents told me, trying their best.
A benign suggestion, maybe, but I didn’t want to be seen trying to enjoy myself. Judging by the EMS workers’ concerned brows, I was afraid Celine might actually die. She could already be dead. I didn’t want to appear capable of any emotion but remorse — so I traveled to a theater in some other town. I must have believed that keeping up a picture of constant remorse was the same, morally, as living in constant remorse. That night, Dave and I drove down near the county line to see Stand and Deliver.
Heading to the multiplex, the weirdness of being out, of not being under house arrest, settled on me like ash. (Shouldn’t I have at least considered visiting Celine’s hospital room?)
Before Stand and Deliver had even started, in the lobby I came across a guy from my town. (Why visit her hospital room, though? What could I offer?)
In one of those coincidences that life hands over more realistically than fiction can, the guy in the lobby was my good friend, Jim.
Jim jogged up to me on line at the ticket booth. “Heard what happened,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t see her until it was too late,” I apologized.
“Holy shit,” he said. Was there something off about his facial presentation? Where was the concern, or even a little solemnity? I sensed something weird in him right away — mockery nibbling there at the side of his mouth — and now he raised his hands, palms out. Next, a high-pitched “Ahhh!” Then: “Please! Don’t run me down!” And then more comic squeals, little darts tossed in the air.
Dave showed Jim an eloquent frown, quit it, quit it.
But next, an even nastier sound: Jim’s slashing laugh. He was cracking up at me.
Dave’s appalled stare, the shuffling feet of a conversation breaking down. Then Jim said, “No, you’re upset? Really? Come on, hey. Nothing wrong with a joke. What’s wrong with a joke?”
Everything. I felt panicky and bright and swollen: hugely sad, acutely seen. I slouched away, tucked myself into the theater’s dark, and had a sense of being extinguished.
The letup in perception, the no-input cluelessness — that’s the kind of shock everyone’s familiar with. But shock is not a one-time event. That system-junking you experience at the start goes away, of course. But then a lesser shock keeps showing up, to hurl a big muffling blanket over you. And when you push out of that, you feel it almost as a sudden blinking exposure to light. I’m talking about how your mind behaves after the broken circuit appears to be back up and running. I mean, why did I feel half-okay there in the multiplex parking lot, and why had I continued to feel that way until Jim’s cackle? The truth about shock, and about our bodies, is that they don’t want us to feel things deeply. We’re designed to act, react, forget; to be shallow. I knew I was normal — I had been a normal, normally embraced person twenty-four hours before. But would a normal person feel even halfway okay, as I seemed to feel now? Was it as if I’d somehow forgotten the accident?
Well, I remembered, of course. I remembered without end. In fact, one me kept remembering how another me from a second ago had just remembered the maybe life-destroying horror on West Shore Road (destroying, perhaps, two lives). And I’d remember how I’d just been enduring that a second ago — and catch myself remembering it. And then I’d remember her reflector scuttling up the windshield, the sensation of my working to swerve, the surprise of her being so close and detailed. It wasn’t really me feeling it at any one time — rather, I was remembering those other mes, and we each shared it together, and all of us were overly compassionate to one another.
And here’s a cruel truth: the more accurate thing is that I kept sort of remembering without end. My brain persisted — as any bodily organ would — in trying to heal what was in effect a bruise. The bruise was the memory. And to remain what I thought of as human, I had to keep fighting against my basic, animal, healing response. That’s what the first day was like. The sensation I was fighting is maybe close to denial. But it’s not exactly denial.
My fear now is that all of this sounds over-aestheticized, and vague. There were times when the size of what had happened felt like a kind of nauseated grin: I’d done something this incalculably big, and here I was, still alive. I was okay. I’d hit a girl with my car, but the way the world worked I wasn’t in jail, I wasn’t hurt; I was free to indulge in a movie. It was this thought that made me leave the movie before it ended. The part of the brain that isn’t automatic is an imagining machine, feeling all possibilities of feeling: it keeps pushing its way into this marshy, pleasant terrain. You struggle against that push, and start to feel your stomach protest. It’s not so much even a type of consciousness as it is a circumstance, into which you pass by slow degrees. I’ve never seen this sufficiently examined. It mutates into a less-unreal reality that still seems different, somehow, than being fully present. Self-hate is rarely unconditional. I don’t pretend it’s all right that I felt even half-okay.
At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things.
It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly. Or that I woke with a scooped-out pain in my gut. Or that I sat down in my underwear at my desk that had moonlight on it and I had the terrible sense one gets, after something irrevocable, of being in the wrong place — of having awakened into a new and cramped world. (This is the sense I would have, on many nights, later.) I ended up scouring through details of the day: those EMS guys talking about cardiac arrest, about loss of blood, about not liking her chances. I homed in on that word—“chances,” with its promise of upside — and not on how the paramedic’s voice had tightened, the odds seizing his throat.