Or are you?
Car Crash
One day, when I was about nine, my best friend and I were playing catch at the park when we heard a loud crash. We threw out mitts to the ground, let the ball roll through the grass, and ran the two blocks up to the main road. We were the first ones to arrive, and what we saw was too horrible for our young minds to fathom. An SUV had t-boned a little sedan, and the driver of the little car had been pushed all the way into the back seat. We circled around the wreckage, too afraid to do anything. The people in the SUV were fine, but, like us, they were too afraid of what they’d find in the other car to do anything either, so they just sat curbside with tears in their eyes. Finally, a lady came out of her house and said an ambulance was on its way. We approached the car, keeping a little distance, eyes wide, searching. The driver of the sedan looked really bad, completely unconscious, and I wondered what it even meant to die. Then the ambulance and firemen arrived. The police arrived too. They started cutting at the car to get the driver out. I got a better look and saw the driver was a teenager, just a few years older than me. The way he was positioned in the back seat, you could see his head arched back, facing up. He hadn’t moved once during the five minutes we’d been there. Then he retched. Blood shot from his lips, smacking against the headliner, and dripped back down onto his face. Drip drip, drip drip, drip drip. They finally got him out and onto a stretcher, but they didn’t pump his heart or stop the bleeding, didn’t do anything except for maybe mime-check his pulse. They covered him in a white sheet and filled out some paperwork. They were in no rush. When they finished with the paperwork, they rolled him over to the ambulance, started loading him in. A lady pulled up then, got out of her car, just left it running in the middle of the road, and rushed over, hysterical, maniacal, screaming: Nooooooooooooo! My baaaaaaaaabyyyy! She looked about forty-five, makeup running down her face, blouse loose and blowing in the wind. She must have lived close by. Maybe she had a friend who saw the wreck on the way home from the grocery store and phoned her. Hey, doesn’t Jonathan drive a… Or maybe it was her maternal instinct that told her something was amiss. I’ll never know. But I still have dreams of the blood dripping onto his young dead face, his mother screaming into the wind and collapsing onto the asphalt. For a long time I wanted to be a paramedic. I wanted to learn all I could about emergency medicine. I told myself the next time this happened, next time a person tried to die in front of me, I’d know what to do. I’d save them from the final kingdom and bring them back to earth. I’d be there, tapping my foot, waiting for the blood to start back through their veins — I’d bring them back the very moment the light takes them.
Ghosts
I started seeing ghosts when I was sixteen or seventeen. Not really ghosts, it was the same ghost every time. I haven’t seen him since we moved out of that house, ten years ago, but I saw him a lot while we were there. He hasn’t come looking for me, and I haven’t invested any time trying to locate him, either. I’m okay with that. Little kid ghosts are scary as shit. Toddler ghosts, that takes the fucking cake. I thought I was hallucinating the first time, like, not in a good way, but having a mental break or something. My heart bounced against my ribs. I couldn’t breathe. What happened is I’d fallen asleep on the couch late that night. When I woke up, the TV was still on, and not three feet in front of me there was this kid looking at me, watching me sleep. I jumped up and turned on the lights. Nobody was there. I stayed awake for forty-eight hours straight, constantly looking over my shoulder and listening for the laughter of a child in all the empty rooms in the house.
An Influential History
When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.
Said Pindar.
Said David Markson.
The Way We Love
Sometimes you find out about things way too late. Seems unfair, but that’s the way it is sometimes. For instance, a good friend of mine started dating this girl his senior year of high school. She was a real good-looking girl, too. Had red hair and really pale, freckle-free skin, just luminous — one of the nicest people around. And my friend, he was an artsy kind of guy who didn’t shower regularly and had a dad with a flipper arm. Nice people all around, just two different classes coming to a head. She came from a more affluent neighborhood, so they’d spend most of the time they had together at her dad’s house. Well, nothing seemed amiss to my buddy, seemed like a normal family, aside the absence of her mother, who’d died when she was little, and her dad seemed to like him okay. Her older brother had even taken a liking to him. Just like that, it happened. My buddy and his girl were getting things revved up late one night in her bedroom. I mean, the way he tells it, they were going at it hard and heavy. Right when he’s about to come, the door flew open and the light flipped on. Daddy, she said, but her voice wasn’t angry or scared or even embarrassed. Not now, daddy, Kyle’s over. My friend, they were in missionary, had cranked around when the light flipped on. He said, You wouldn’t believe it. Her dad, he was standing there buck naked, and he was touching himself. Didn’t look mad, just disappointed. At first I just chalked it up to him being drunk off his ass or something, you know. But it happened again, a few months later. But it wasn’t her dad this time, it was her brother, same exact scenario. Totally fucked me up, man. After that, I talked her into moving in with me. And even still, sometimes she goes over there to spend the night. And I’m like, Are you fucking kidding me? And she’s like, Well, they’re my fucking family. They’re all I have.
Release
My brother was released from prison today. It took some convincing from my wife, but eventually I called him. I told him, Don’t hate me, but I’ve been writing about you. He said, Hate? That’s not even possible. I’m proud of you. I said, I love you, man. I’ve missed you. He said it back. And I felt it, it pushed on me. I held in my tears the entire two hours we talked. Even when I feel like I feel all this hate in me, I realize it’s just my love with nowhere to go.