In the videos it all works. Everything and every time. The bumper touches the test obstacle — the same immovable cube for all vehicles — and the bags deploy. Long before structural damage. Long before the crumpling of the frame dissipates and redirects the force of the impact. The dummies inside get tossed around. Sturdy back coils of spring in their necks wobble back and forth. Their fibreglass arms and legs extend, but you can tell they are going to be okay. If they were alive they would be okay. Everything behaves as it should. The touch on the bumper, the explosion of compressed gas inside the cabin. No hard surfaces left. No space at all. Nowhere to move. The vehicle becomes a solid mass. A wrecked exterior with a safe place at its core.
An electrical short, he figures. One circuit. A single wire that did not carry current the way it is supposed to. Failure of design or manufacture or installation. Everything is possible. Corrosion, perhaps. Not enough consideration made for the deteriorating affects of road salt. The back of the flatbed too high. Again, not standard. Higher than the test cube. The boy’s unbuckled seatbelt. Nothing anybody could have done about that. A flaw outside of everything else. Mentioned in all the reports. Passengers are rarely thrown from a moving vehicle when seatbelts are used properly. Cops and their cameras. Images of everything. Pictures you shouldn’t be allowed to take. A stranger’s finger pushing down on a button. Numbered evidence. Accident recreation teams. Investigations. Measuring tapes. Insurance people with their duplicate sets of forms. The length of skid marks. Indexed to tread wear. The angle of impact. Angle the car left the road. They work backwards with their calculations. Crumple zones. Vectors. Radius of broken glass. Distance from the car to the body in the field.
Twelve weeks in the hospital. Then twenty weeks of physio after that. The benefits covered everything and an officer at the Local made sure the paperwork moved along and the claims were filed on time. He had to learn to walk again, how to wiggle his toes, make his bowels churn on command. He lost almost half his weight and his hands callused against the railings. Messages sent from his brain and only slowly received. Twitching toes, half-bent knees, hips that took months before they remembered how to work right.
There was a moment to choose. An opening that wouldn’t last long they said. Everybody talking about the same things. The Big Three going down. For real this time. Bankrupt and bailed out. Negotiations and concessions. The new deal and its different terms. Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shifting value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the average person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered.
He wasn’t sure how it fit together, but when Essex Engine went down and the Foundry disappeared, he’d paid attention. When the fire in the Foundry went out for good — after burning for sixty years or whatever — that was important news. Ford guys told him that when they pulled the plug on the Foundry, even when they cut it off, the smelter burned hot for another week all by itself, with no external source of power, like a star, like the sun, generating its own heat and living on its own internal explosions. Then they went in with the heavy artillery and tore the whole thing down. You go to the Foundry now and it’s gone.
A visitor sitting in the chair in his hospital room said, If they could get rid of us all and start again, that’s what they’d do. You know that, right? That’s what I’d do anyway. If I was in their shoes? I’d blow up the whole goddamn operation and blank slate it. Get all younger people to come in for less and do more. A fucking mess is what it is. Big fucking mess.
He signed as quickly as he could. Scribbled his name on the line and wrote the date like it was yesterday. You wait till it happens to you and see which way you go. Only an idiot says no to a buyout. Need to consider the facts. The numbers the company will put down to make you go away. This much to come to work tomorrow and tomorrow like usual. Or this much to stay home. You add in the pension, the best in the business, the RRSP’s, the insurance, and the value of a big empty house. You get a figure. He read the statements, the digits and the commas spreading out beside his name. Couldn’t quite catch the full meaning. Everything, everywhere in the world is falling apart, but he is okay. It will be like the depression they say, 30 percent unemployment and food rations, but it never comes. He has more than enough, more than he will ever need. Money like a foreign language he used to know but doesn’t understand anymore.
After they cut his body out of the wreckage and lifted him away, he never touched the car again. The insurance company wrote the thing off as a totalled vehicle and he wondered what that meant. The total seemed like a raw number completely added up, the figure they reach for when they need to make something go away. He imagined the end of the van’s life. Thought about those compacted cubes of metal he’d seen on TV and about the conveyors and the cranes and the incinerators at Zalev Brothers. He’d looked through the fence there once and watched the smokestacks and the bulldozers moving their mountains of ore. An unmaking as systematic as manufacture. It scared him. Metal turned back into a ferrous dust and smoke. The remains of 12 million Magic Wagons absorbed into the ground, secreted into the river, or floating in the sky to become a microscopic coating of ash inside your lungs.
The same transformations for us, he thinks. A person is one thing and one thing and one thing. Then he is something else. There is a pivot, a before and an after, a shifting. The day he decided to take the buyout. That was it for him. Not the accident. Not the day he left the hospital or the week when his daughter went back to her own life. Not even today, the day she forgot. Everything else is second to the moment when he decided to really walk away, to move exclusively under his own power. Walk and never drive again. Walk and not even allow himself to be carried in another car or taxi or bus. This was the one connection he needed to break. His life fused to the internal combustion engine, almost since the beginning. He wanted them not to touch anymore.
It has been almost a year now and he thinks he has managed it well enough. The groceries and the doctor’s appointments and the bank. He leaves himself plenty of time and is never late. Follows a regular routine. A network of well-worn paths through his contracted orbit and a different way of understanding the city. He has his short cuts and his tangents, places he doesn’t go anymore. It has been doable so far, but this will be something different. The map says it is thirty miles.
Before he goes to bed, he packs his bag. A raincoat, just in case, and different layers for the way the temperature shifts during the day. A stack of six sandwiches and a water bottle. He sets the alarm for 5:30 and puts his head against the pillow. Then he gets up again and goes down to the kitchen. Digs out a flashlight and some extra batteries. It is going to be dark, he reminds himself. It will be dark at the beginning and the end.
University to Huron Church. Huron Church all the way out to the fork where the 401 begins and the Number Three branches off. Then follow the Number Three to the spot. He will know it when he gets there. The way is simple, a long diagonal cut. University to Huron Church to the Number Three. He repeats it as he falls asleep. It will take all day. Even if he starts early, it will take the full day, but he will get there. He will be where he needs to be.