Tom knew that the car was going to hit him, but he could not move. He could not even breathe. The headlights grew larger, the distance between himself and the car halved and the headlights again doubled in size. An electrical coldness of which he was only barely conscious spread over and through Tom’s body. He could do nothing but watch the car come closer and closer until it hit him.
Then at last it did hit him, and a series of irrevocable events began happening to Tom Pasmore. Searing pain enfolded and enveloped him as the impact snapped his right leg and crushed his pelvis and hip socket. His skull fractured against the grille, and blood began pouring from his eyes and nose. Almost instantly unconscious, Tom’s body hugged the grille for a moment, then began to slide down the front of the car. A black rubber ornament shaped like a football held him up for the following two or three minutes as the car swerved through the confusion of felled bicycles and rearing horses. His right shoulder snapped, and the broken femur of his right leg sliced through muscle and skin like a jagged knife. Fifty feet down the road the car finally jerked to a stop as the nearest horses either settled down or galloped away. Tom flipped off the bumper ornament and slammed down on the roadbed.
His bladder and his bowels emptied into his clothing.
The driver of the car opened his door and jumped out. At some point during the next few moments, while the driver moved reluctantly toward the front of his car, another event, even more irrevocable than everything else that had occurred in the past sixty seconds, happened to Tom Pasmore. The accumulation of shock and pain stopped his heart, and he died.
PART TWO
EARLY SORROWS
Tom was aware of a feeling of great lightness and harmony, then that he no longer felt any pain. Some heavy force had held him down, and this force was desperately trying to haul him back into an enclosure too small for him. His sense of lightness, of freedom from gravity gently but relentlessly pulled him upward. The hooks and eyes and sticky fingers that wished to hold him back popped free one by one, until the last of these stretched out like a filament, wanting him back. The filament grew taut, and he nearly feared its snapping—he felt an uncomplicated wave of love for everything that wanted him back. The membrane released him with a final, soft, nearly impalpable pop and his love for all earthly things doubled and overflowed, and he knew, having lost the earth, that love was identical to grief and loss.
His tears washed his eyes, and he saw.
Down there beneath him was a man, then almost immediately another and another, bending over the body that had been his. Radiating out from the circle made by the leaning men and the prostrate boy was an expanding circle of chaos. Crumpled bicycles sprawled on the road like swatted insects, and overturned carts lay beside torn sacks of seed and cement. A horse struggled to right itself in front of an enormous white fan of spilled flour; another horse plunged through the stalled traffic and into an open stretch of road. Cars with running boards and cars with ornamental spare tire covers atop their trunks, cars with exhaust vents and ribbed chrome tubes and chrome latches, cars with statuettes of women stretching tiptoe like dancers on their hoods, stood in a disarranged confusion, pointing every which way as their headlights picked out the new arrivals working their way toward the damaged body he had just left and the other body, that of the man killed beneath the cart.
The world yearned toward invisibility, Tom saw, invisibility was the final condition toward which everything aspired.
He saw two teenage boys standing half-hidden in the crowd on the sidewalk. Running from them, he had felt mortal fear—how odd it was to remember that! They were not evil, not yet. Tom could not read their minds, but he saw that these two boys of fourteen, Nappy and Robbie, one so blubbery he had breasts and the other lean as a starved hound, lived at the periphery of a great cloud of error and confusion; and that they daily moved deeper into the cloud, and then he saw that they had made this cloud, produced it out of the choices they made, as a squid produces ink.…
If they had caught him, they would have pressed their knives against his chest, his throat; they would have enjoyed his terror but somewhere—even now—been shamed by it, and this shame would have formed another layer among a thousand layers that formed the inky cloud … and then Tom sensed or saw such ugliness that he turned away—
and saw that someone had covered him to the chest with an old green army blanket, and several of the men turned their heads to look out for the approach of an ambulance, which would be driven, Tom saw, by a chain-smoking elderly man named Esmond Walker. The ambulance was two-and-a-half miles away on Calle Bavaria, racing through the traffic with its siren whooping, and Tom heard the siren and knew that the sound would come to the waiting men in another eight minutes—
eight minutes
Tom looked down at the person he had been with some surprise, as well as with love and pity. His earthly self had been so new, so unformed and innocent. He had worked hard at his life with intent, innocent concentration, and his family would mourn him, his friends would miss him, there would for a time be a hole in the world that he had filled.
But the sense of lightness and harmony lifted him farther from the scene, and the patterns became clearer. At the epicenter of the confusion were two bodies, his own and that of the crushed man. Policemen in cars and policemen on bicycles had begun to arrive. Leading out from this crowded and unhappy scene with its flashing lights and calls for people to Step back! Let him breathe! was a gossamer trail only Tom could see.
This was the trail of what he would have done, where he would have gone, if he had lived. This trail of possibility was disappearing from the visible world, and what Tom saw was its disappearance.
He sees himself dodging through the traffic in a blare of horns and lights, sees himself running east, safe, on the other side of Calle Burleigh. Tom sees himself coming home to his enraged parents … and there his trail goes, glistening as it fades, from the steps of Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy of Dance where an older Tom stands beside a pretty girl named Sarah Spence and looks up, his face transfixed by a fleeting apprehension—that older Tom Pasmore looks up, his face almost melting with feelings he cannot understand, moves down the hard white steps outside Miss Ellinghausen’s Academy and vanishes long before he reaches the sidewalk. In a shabby room in the St. Alwyn Hotel, an even older Tom is reading a book called The Temptations of Invisibility, funny title, but he is not in the house on Eastern Shore Road, why is he in the St. Alwyn Hotel? Pain from an unlived future—what is that?
It had been three minutes since his death: the length of one of the songs on the radio to which his mother would listen with her head tilted, eyes half-closed, cigarette smoke curling up past her hair.
On Calle Burleigh a larger crowd packed the sidewalks, talking in a confused, ignorant way about what had caused all the trouble. A bike flipped right over, I saw it happen right there—one a’ them horses just got it into his head to go nuts, plain and simple—a boy ran out—somebody pushed a boy.
No, Tom protested, none of that was exactly right, you’re all wrong, it didn’t happen like that.
Music had begun playing some time ago, but Tom became aware of it only now: some song, he didn’t know what, saxophones and trumpets, and pretty soon the singer would rush on stage fiddling with his bow tie and plant himself before the mike and explain everything.…