The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [68]
Weird, huh.
You close your eyes.
You breathe.
You are not sorry yet for what you have done.
You are simply an incarcerated woman.
Remorse, she came later. Lemme throw it into reverse.
Let me tell you who I hit.
Collision as Metaphor
THE PERSON I HIT IN MY HEAD-ON COLLISION WAS A 5’ tall brown skinned woman.
In the moment, this did not upset me. In the moment, I was drunk as a monkey, and so the entire scene that night looked a little like things were in slow motion and smeared over with Vaseline. And at a tremendous distance from my heart and whatever it might have said. Addicts have a problem comprehending gravitas. Everything just looks blurry.
My airbags deployed. Pow. If you have never had that experience, it’s quite something. It’s loud. Like gunshot loud. And everything smells like dynamite. If you were holding the steering wheel with both hands, your arms get heat and friction burns on the insides. Your head, because it didn’t hit the windshield, smashes face first into the Michelin Man surface of the airbag; then your head jets back and knocks your noggin against the headrest. Afterwards, you just sort of sit there and wait for the dust to settle and your brains to recollect themselves. It helps to close your eyes and wait for everything to stop moving.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned woman who had no English.
I know that she had no English because, after I sat there trying to feel whether or not anything was broken or searing me with pain - which it wasn’t, particularly since I had anesthetized myself with the bottle of scotch - I opened my car door and looked around. My car, a red Toyota Corolla, was weirdly angled and had its face smashed in. Her car, a white … I’m not sure - it looked something like those old Gremlins - her car was smashed in on the left side all the way up to the windshield. Something warm and metallic filled my mouth. I’d bitten my tongue. I saw the woman sitting on the guard rail, crying, saying things I didn’t understand. Her hair was more black than the night around us. She had a lump the size of a golf ball on her forehead. No airbag. Her skirt was white and billowed out at times.
The person I hit in my head-on collision was a 5’ tall brown skinned pregnant woman who had no English.
How I knew the woman carried life in her gut is that her belly had the unmistakable mound of a child. Six, possibly seven months of child mound. At the time, this did not alarm me; as I said, I had the sensitivity of a drunk. Though I did feel a prickle of something far far inside my abdomen. I sat down next to her. She began to wail and hold her belly. I said, “Are you in pain?” She did not look at me or answer. Dumbly, I put my arm around her shoulders. I have no idea why she let me do that. She rocked. Inconsolably.
I didn’t feel anything. No, literally. I couldn’t feel my hands, my feet, my ass. I couldn’t feel my own face.
The woman fumbled in her skirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone. I thought perhaps she was fingering 911, but she was not. I could see she was trying to dial a number. Someone she knew. Someone to help. I couldn’t manage my own cell phone. I looked at it in my hand. I couldn’t see any numbers, or how to activate the thing. It sat like a dead rodent. I noticed I smelled faintly of piss.
I don’t know how long we sat there. The sound of cars whizzing by comforted me. After a while three cop cars and an ambulance showed up. I remember the sound of sirens trying to out-do one another. The cops blocked off the bit of road we were on - the overpass between north and southbound lanes. I cupped my ears with my hands. I remember the red white and blue lights flashing all around us. Something