***************
December 7, 2006
He had no earthly idea why they let him drive today. Well, he had a guess, but it wasn't a really good one. He thought that they might have just been lazy, just not wanted to take him to karate, but... maybe they thought he was ready to actually get his license. He'd been begging them to let him take the test for several weeks, but they had yet to make him an appointment. He was driving illegally.
He was careful though, because it was his first time driving alone. He never let himself get above 48 in a 45 - he thought that gave him relative deniability if he were to be pulled over by the police.
"Officer, the needle was awfully close to 45 - I swear I thought I was going the limit!"
"Son - you have a digital spedometer. There's the exact speed you were going in big neon green letters right under your face. Want to try another excuse?"
He wasn't pulled over, though. Well, not then, at least.
***
He left karate in a hurry - he didn't want to be out too late. It was winter, so it been dark for several hours by the time he got out to his car. He went the normal way home, skipping the shortcut becasue the hill he went over was hard on his transmission. He had a strong inclination to go visit his grandmother, she lived right down the side road. He resisted it, though, and kept going straight.
...straight into trouble. For, as he went down the road, he noticed flashing blue lights at the place his shortcut would have come out if he had taken it. There was a line of cars, maybe five or six cars back from the blue lights. He wanted to turn around, to flee - but he knew that that was as good as a confession and would add a charge of "Resisting Arrest" to the "Underage Driving" he was sure to get if they checked his car.
All the blood left his face. He reached down, shifted the car into park, and reached for his cellphone. He called home, and, when no one picked up, left a message that went something like this: "Hey... this is your son... if I'm not home in a few minutes, I got arrested and need bail money. There's a checkpoint here and I don't have my liscense yet... they're... gonna get me. Anyway, bye!"
He then tried to think of a way out of it... he was still wearing his gi, which didn't have any pockets in it. He'd changed out of his street clothes before class, and they were still in his duffel bag. The line hadn't moved yet, so he took advantage of the opportunity to move the bag from back seat to the front one, so he could pull his wallet out of his pants.
It wasn't there.
The realization of this hit him like sweet poison. On the one hand, he didn't have any identification at all proving he was a driver. On the other hand, he also had no incriminating evidence that he was driving alone on a learner's permit. He might be able to get away with it... "My wallet fell out of my pants [and it had, he reminded himself] and my liscense is locked in the dojo..." That would probably work...
The cars in front of him started moving, and he realized that there wasn't a checkpoint there at all. He could see the two cars, both of them having their front end bashed in... they had hung a white sheet over the window of the car coming in the same direction he was... he stared straight ahead, driving as slowly as possible by the cop, while also trying not to look too guilty...
...he didn't remember the rest of the journey after he left the police until he was already at the driveway of his house.
***
December 7, 2007
He probably should have gone to karate, he thought, as he sped down the highway. He shouldn't have skipped to hang out with her, should have gone instead of doing nothing productive at all.
Well, he'd hoped to do something "productive," but the funny thing about hoping is that it often ends up with you dashed into the ground, stomped, crushed, and twisted into a thin powder, then lit on fire. With gasoline.
He knew he was going too fast, much too fast, but he didn't care. His music was too loud too, it was drowning out the roar of the engine as he raced down the street.
He had to get away from there, away from her. He thought she might have cared about him, might have... loved him...
She was giving all the signs. Well, he didn't know what all the signs were, but, if he had to guess, he'd have said she was giving all the signs. Which is all love is, anyway, he though, a big guess. He kept thinking about something one of his teachers had said in class:
"Situations which are defined as real are real in their consequences."
He thought it was real, thought he had been done with games and false feelings and hypocrites. She seemed real, seemed genuine, seemed... honest... he thought he needed honesty, thought, if she was honest, he could be too...
He tried to kiss her... "and what a bloody shambles that was!"
He smiled to himself as his foot pressed down harder...
It was like... a fish. A dead fish, to be more precise. There wasn't any feeling behind her, any warmth... well, that was partially his fault, he had been too aggressive with it, too... forward.
He thought of Prufrock, of the imagined rebuke he got. "That is not it, at all. That is not what I meant at all."
Excpet he had done what Prufrock couldn't. He'd jumped off the cliff, pulled on the ripcord...
"I love you," he had said...
She just closed the door in his face.
He almost missed the turn, and his tires screeched as he jerked the wheel to make up for his delayed reaction. He seriously considered slowing down... but it felt so good to speed. He lost himself at the edge of his nerves; when he was going that fast he couldn't think of anything else, couldn't dwell. On anything.
He found himself screaming along with the radio. Naturally, the radio in his car was absolutely horrible, and wouldn't pick up anything half-decent. That night, it was on 33.3 FM... which really shouldn't be possible, and yet there it was... He wasn't really screaming along with the static, more like... random profanities that were almost in sync with the song...
He really did slow down... one of the streetlights looked funny. The light was reflecting off of some fog; it gave the air around the light a sense of incandescense. The stars, too, were visible, despite the fact that he was close to a light. He always thought the stars were washed out when the lights were on on this road, but they were clear tonight. He felt like, though the light, he could see heaven. He felt that he'd never been closer to God then in this moment... he stopped the car, pointing straight at the light. All the hate he'd felt, all the pain of today just melted, like ice under the light. He felt like there was someone there, too, with him in that moment...
He never saw the car that crossed the middle line and hit him dead-on.
***
The investigating officers blocked off the road while they tried to clean up the mess. The driver of the pickup truck had been drunk out of his mind, thought he was completely competent to drive, then found out the hard way that he wasn't. He was in the ambulance, but only because the impact had broken his legs. They weren't done getting the other's body out of his car.
After about fifteen minutes, there were five or six cars lined up trying to get through. The officer gave up trying to move the car and threw a sheet over the window to cover the body. He started to direct traffic around the now unidentifiable car (which looked more like a tin can someone had stomped on). After most of the cars had moved on, he got back in the cruiser.
His partner asked, "Did you see the kid drive by? He couldn't have been more then fifteen! He looked scared out of his mind too, he'd gone all pale and he had a death grip on the steering wheel!" (at this point, he had put down the papers and began imitating what a death grip on a steering wheel would look like) "Why didn't you stop him? That would've been an easy ticket, there's no way that kid wasn't up to something."
The investigator didn't reply to this. He knew, though, why he had hesitatated about arresting the boy. He'd seen the body in the now-pile of aluminum - and, though he couldn't be sure, he would have sworn, would have gambled, even, that the boy that drove by and the boy that would never drive again looked almost exactly the same...
...he didn't notice until after the crime scene photographs had been developed what that difference was. Even in death, the dead boy looked more peaceful, more at ease, then when he was alive. That was the only difference between them. Peace. It wasn't the type of peace that goes away when someone is nervous, wasn't the type of peace that meant no one was shooting at you - it was a deeper peace, one that transcended the soul and left a mark on the body, even after the soul had left it.
Share This
Email
Facebook
Twitter
Read Request
My Library
Subscribe
Flag Writing