Nixon Burroughs shuffled down the street, a slight limp in his left leg pulling his pace back a step from the rest of the crowd. Eighteen months ago a car accident left his right leg broken in several places and now, in the late stages of his recovery, he still scraped along at a sloth’s pace. But there was more damage. From time to time his mind would glaze over and wander back to the curious dread he felt when he lost control of his black Honda Civic and relive the awful sound of screeching tires and grinding metal, the soft, stomach churning lift over the embankment and hanging like a magician’s handkerchief at the height of its mid-flight trajectory, the wait, and the emptiness that followed the long descent down to the point of impact. A hush. And the crunch of his skull on the windshield.
That is where his memories ended: a quarter of an inch before the windshield. It was at this point that time and motion melted down to a slow candle wax drip and with the windshield elongating before his eyes, he saw it as a large sheet of blue ice hovering there before him, a wide, bright surface with mysterious things swimming just beyond it. Sprung from its trap, time would speed up again, hit hyper-drive, and the windshield would engulf his whole world and he crashed through it. And submerged.
According to Sergeant MacClusky they found him four days later in a ditch about 25 miles from the crash site, somewhere just outside of Pittsfield, face down, bruised and scarred, with his green Army Surplus jacket on inside out and only one shoe on his left foot. They found the other one about eighteen meters from the crushed car. He saw the photos. Dark grainy pictures of the crushed hood and the shattered windshield with its web of white and blue lines and the shredded tires hanging like melted wax from the wheel wells. There were dents and scrapes over the whole thing. It reminded him of a piece of discarded tinfoil.
But no one could figure it out. How had he survived for four days without human contact and no food and water? According to reports, he had pulled himself out of the driver’s side window tearing great hunks of flesh out of his back and then crawled up through the bramble and stinger nettles to the main road where, with shards of glass still lodged in his face and blood oozing out of the large gashes behind his ears, and wrists, and legs, and the ones crisscrossing his chest, he wandered aimlessly without food or water in the general vicinity of Pittsfield, population fourteen thousand. And no one noticed him.
Nixon Burroughs couldn’t explain it either, so he had to trust what they told him. He dug around a bit but nothing came up. While recovering in the hospital he’d read and re-read the news clippings from The Pittsfield Press, The Telegram, The Tribute straining to remember something, to read a comment or see a familiar detail in the background of some photo that would stir something in his mind, but nothing came of it and he decided to follow up on the police investigations. That too turned up nothing. He was met with terse facts and polite brush-offs that he should “get well soon” and “take it easy.”
He shook his head to keep the memories back and crept up to the corner of Fifth and Davis and waited there with the others for the light to change. A faint gust of cold wind curled around him and he drew his used parka closer around his thin frame, trying to forget. When his memories overtook his waking life he would black out and there were times when he was submerged for a full ten, twenty, even thirty minutes--his longest so far was almost an hour--and once he swam back to consciousness, he would find himself a full block away from where the descent started, other times he was in the same spot, barely registering the traffic and the stiff grumbles of people elbowing passed him on their way down the street.
He never brought anything back. It would start with a thin whistle in the back of his head and in seconds it would grow and overtake him, the windshield would be there before him, growing, taking him over and the whistle would snap off and he would be there just before it, his nose almost touching it, and break through....
There were times when he thought he could see things or faces or shapes just behind the windshield, but they were indistinct and vague. What he did in this state he didn't know. Every time he submerged, he awoke to blistering headaches, the screws holding his right leg felt nailed in tighter and deeper and ripping through his bones and ligaments and he would be immobilized with the pain. Lately, his ribs started to hurt as well and the icy tendrils of pain were slowly creeping back towards his spine, a part of his body that was almost permanently damaged in the accident.
So he had to keep moving, keep body limber and his mind distracted. Waiting there on the corner of Fifth and Davis he tuned into the noise across the street, taking in the faint voices and hammers drifting out from behind the barricaded construction site and turned to watch a large flatbed truck back up onto a ramp, beep beep beeping, and drop off a large load of rebar.
The light changed and the crowd surged forward leaving Nixon Burroughs alone at the curb. He joined the flow a half step behind and headed across the street towards the construction site which was surrounded by a protective ten foot high barricade. Finally on the other side of the street he ran his hands along the iron fence sometimes grazing the posters that were slapped up on the barricade, not really reading them just sort of absorbing them as he passed by. He winced as a horn blasted from inside the construction site. Men with yellow hardhats leapt from their trucks and headed off through the wide entrance, silver lunch pails swinging by their side. He was curious. Construction sites always made him feel that way and he wanted a peek inside. Just see what they were doing, take a guess at what was going up. He picked up his pace and headed towards the entrance, the wind snapping the posters’s dog-eared corners as he passed.
Just before the entrance, he stopped. Something was different. Out of place. He took one slow step backwards and shot a glance at a cluster of posters that hung at crooked angles. There amid the jumble was a single poster with a black and white photo on it. It was centered and perfectly squared as if it were hung in an art gallery. He leaned in to get a better look and saw his own face staring back at him.
The surface details of life the around him surged and rippled. The road wobbled and the trees sagged, the sidewalk buckled and bent. He felt the air grow thick around him and he thought he felt the sting of a million malignant germs, tiny but with a billion teeth. He staggered back and crashed into the fence then slumped to the ground. He squeezed his eyes shut trying to control the nausea but a display of fireworks shot off behind his eyelids and this made him feel dizzy. He focused instead on the the rhythmic tap of the footsteps flowing passed him and this calmed him down. With a slow reptilian grace, he opened his eyes and stared at a pebble. After a few minutes of this, he looked up and over his shoulder at the black and white poster. It seemed to be staring back at him.
He peered back at the eyes on the poster and they seemed to life right off of the page and tear through him. Is that me? He ran his hands over his face feeling the contours of his nose and cheek bones in order to reassure himself that he was still really there, to anchor himself into his self.
A sudden yoke of anxiety broke him. He jumped up from the ground and scanned the neighborhood expecting to see someone watching him. He looked at the windows in a row of hunched brownstones searching for a flash of light from the reflection of a pair of binoculars, a man in a black trench coat, a…a…a what? He turned in circles looking back down the street, up ahead, at the far corner but nothing struck him as unusual. It was Fifth and Davis draped with the typical Saturday afternoon activity: people in suits held briefcases while waiting for the walk signal, a mother hunched over a stroller snapping the plastic cover down in order to protect her child from the from the biting wind, a jogger in black spandex running on the spot, finger to neck taking her pulse. A delivery truck rumbled by. Trees whispered secrets to the wind.
He headed around the construction site looking for a duplicate. There had to be another one; this was a prank or something. There had to be an explanation for it. But after covering the gated area for a full hour, he found nothing but the usual announcements for the events happening around town: the Cirque de Soliel Halloween special, bands playing at The Mixture, reminders that there were only three days left for the Picasso exhibit at the Arts and Culture Center. He went back to the original and tore it down. He stuffed it in his parka and headed down Davis, occasionally peering over his shoulder as he slid along. Four blocks later he reached Burrard Street where he spotted a cafe among a row of undistinguished buildings. The Mug Shot was wedged between a stationary shop and a butcher’s market. It was a run down shop with a clever window display of two grim looking coffee cups standing in a police line with the caption How You Seen This Mug? written in black letters and forming a circle around the sinister coffee mugs. It looked like a good enough place where he could sit and regroup.
It was busy but quiet. A group of university students sat in a booth laughing and chatting over a table scattered with novels and notebooks, at another table a couple hunched forward and talked in hushed tones; a man sat in the front window, a ray of sunshine slanting across his table while he read the newspaper. He shuffled passed a couple who were paying at the cash register and towards the back of the cafe. The store was lined with old black and white mug shots of John Dilinger, Ted Kaczynski and a young and defiant Al Capone number C28169. He slid in a booth overlooked by Lee Harvey Oswald. A waitress came. She was dressed in a prison orange shirt and a black skirt. According to the stenciling over her left breast her name was Eva and her number was Nf7533061. She laid a paper place mat with a sedated Jimi Hendrix after his Toronto bust, a wild eyed and frizzy haired Nick Nolte, and Anna Nicole Smith front of him. “What can I get ya?”
“I’ll have a cup of coffee. Two cream, one sugar,” he said lighting a cigarette.
“That be all?”
He nodded and she sped of into the kitchen. Burroughs took the poster out and spread it on the table. It was a typical, nondescript and slightly yellowed 81/2 by 10 inch poster. The picture had a grainy quality. The coal black pits where his eyes were supposed to be made him think of the sinister gaze of biblical prophets, Charles Manson, Rasputin. The jaw was chiseled and the chin more pronounced, nut even with these subtle gradations of of light and dark, there was no mistaking it. It was him. Or was it?
His coffee arrived. The waitress left. He sipped his drink and decided to call the waitress back. He put the poster on the edge of the table in order for her to see it. Maybe she would say something; give him the objective verification he needed that it was–or wasn’t–him. But he had no idea what he would say if said it was him. Who carries around a poster of themselves? He figured he’d just pass it off as art or something. The bigger problem was if she said she recognized the person in the poster; that was her roommate from college or her brother’s friend. How would he react to that? He waved her over.
“Yeah?”
“You guys sell bagels?” he asked, dropping his eyes to the poster in the hope that hers would follow.
“Yeah,” she said without looking down.
“Okay,” he said trying to stall. He needed her to see it. It just had to seem natural. He didn’t want to ask her directly. Who asks if a picture of themselves is really them? “I’ll have one then.”
“Cream cheese?”
“Got garlic and chives?”
“Uh-huh.” She left and he crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. He felt stupid and shoved the poster back in his parka. A new plan struck him. He crumbled the place mat and tossed it under the booth’s long seat. He put the poster in its place. She would have to notice it there.
She returned. “Here’s your ba-”
The plate hung over the table top and she shot a look at the poster. For a split second a thought crumpled her face but it disappeared almost as soon as it came. Burroughs looked at her trying to read her but she flashed him a friendly smile and laid the plate down.
“Bagel,” she finished and dashed off.
He finished his bagel and coffee in silence, left five bucks on the table and slid back into the city.
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