currently reading: Timekeepers by Simon Garfield
books bought
Subtraction by Mary Robison
Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time by Simon Garfield
Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman
Not All Dead White Men: Misogyny and Classics in the Digital Age by Donna Zuckerberg
books received
Loudermilk; Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World by Lucy Ives (e-galley, out 5/7)
books finished
Subtraction by Mary Robison
Hey you,
I didn't forget about you. In fact I think about you all the time. Still, the thing is that I can go for weeks and weeks or even months and months at a time without saying or thinking anything even kind of interesting. You would be amazed.
But I just got hit by a car, like an hour and a half ago, and that's sort of interesting.
I didn't see it coming, or really feel it either. I was in the crosswalk and then I heard someone really nearby screaming, which scared me, which made me scream, and after a second or two I realized the first scream was mine and I was on the ground and there was a car and it hadn't stopped, it wasn't stopping.
I thought, I suppose, that such phrases were figures of speech: I didn't know what hit me. Or: it was over before I knew what was happening. But it all happened so fast. I was on the ground well before I knew I was even hit. "Well," of course, being relative; it was just a second, maybe two.
It was this awful scream from deep in my chest, not the high-pitched kind from horror movies but something much more guttural. I screamed and screamed and screamed. Screaming and screaming and screaming takes only a few seconds. I got up and instead of walking to the sidewalk I stayed in the middle of the road, looked at the driver, bared my teeth.ThenI got onto the sidewalk.
It was raining, obviously, and I had been carrying soup, obviously, and I was just drenched.
The man got out of his car and said all the things you or I would say if we'd just hit someone with our car: Oh my god I'm so sorry oh my god I didn't see you it's so dark out it's raining so hard I'm so sorry oh my god are you okay are you okay are you okay? A woman appeared from nowhere and she was lovely, an angel maybe, said, Did you hit your head? Can you wiggle your toes? How about your fingers? Can you bend your knees? Do you need a ride somewhere? and the man the whole time was saying are you okay? are you okay? are you okay? He had his hands on my shoulders which I didn't realize right away, or maybe I did realize it but didn't mind it for a second. He was holding on so tight, like he was scared I would float away if it wasn't for him. After a second I minded, I wanted his hands off me, I wanted him to leave. I didn't take his information; my thought in the moment was I would be so scared if that happened to me, I wouldn't want someone to report me to the police if that happened to me, meaning "if I had just hit someone with my car," which sounds for a moment like empathy but is really, I think, just alarming self-centeredness, and also demonstrates a child's understanding of karma or how the world should work. Also, again, I really wanted him to leave.
Probably you are thinking,Why are you telling me this? (I'm sorry I'm always putting words in your mouth.) After I got home a bit ago I thought, hang on, didn't I just read about this? From the first chapter of Simon Garfield's book Timekeepers:
...we weaved our bikes through the throngs on the Fulham Road. My youngest son Jake was 24, full of energy, slightly ahead of me along Exhibition Road and past the Albert Hall. The nice thing about Hyde Park is the modern division of the pavement, half for cyclists, half for pedestrians, and you glide past the Serpentine Gallery, a show by an artist I'd never heard of, and then suddenly I had blood pouring from my face, a pulsing gash just above my eye, my sunglasses smashed, my bike in the road, a heavy numb pain around my right elbow, a lot of concerned people, the sort of frowns on their faces that suggested to me that my head wound must be serious. Someone was calling an ambulance and another was giving me paper towels to clutch to my head, and the towels were turning crimson.
I was skimming the book at that point, trying to decide if I wanted to buy it, and I missed the accident at first. There was something about a gallery and then, wait a second, an ambulance? I had to go back and reread the page. Getting hit by a car was a lot like that: the same feeling of "wait, what?" Does that make any sense?
And it's almost funny because Simon (I know I should use his last name but it's my right as an American to refuse to call a man "Garfield") writes of this accident in the next paragraph, "It was just as people had said: time did indeed seem to slow down." I feel the opposite, I feel like time sped up, or more accurately that time stayed at exactly the same speed but that I missed a few seconds of it. I am piecing together what exactly happened based on the pain and the bruises. It's not that I blacked out, but that it all happened in the instant. The bruise on my left hip is almost on my front; the car came from behind me on my left; I must've been crossing the street at an angle. My right knee hurts worse than my left knee and my jeans are torn worse on the right than the left; I must've landed on my right knee first, my left knee a moment later.
I really am fine, except for the bruise blossoming near my hip and for the bruises and the scrapes on my knees. I didn't scrape my palms and I can't figure out how that's possible. I am very thankful I'm young and healthy and able-bodied enough to be able to walk away from a nasty fall in the first place; I'm very grateful it wasn't worse.
Still, I can't stop shaking, which maybe is shock but shock is actually a sort of medical condition, isn't it, and maybe it's just the normal kind of fear after something scary happens to you. I am thinking the thoughts that you think: If I had taken my break a little earlier, if I had decided to ask for utensils at Panera, if I had stopped to hold the door for that lady, if if if. Simon had it too:
I was back in a cradle where time was no longer my own, and it made me wonder to what extent it had ever been. Was everything chance or was everything fixed? Had we lost control of something we had created? If we'd left just a half-minute earlier, or pedalled just that bit harder, one wheel rotation more, or if the traffic lights by the Royal Albert Hall hadn't slowed us down...
There's the scarier if, too: if he hadn't stopped when he did... Getting hit, actually hit, that was fast, painless, easy. (Which is not to say I'd recommend it.) But after I realized I was on the ground, after I realized I had just been hit by a car, there was a moment of clarity: you are on the ground, you have just been hit by a car, and the car is still coming at you. It kept going for a second or two, maybe less, which is all the time it needed to imprint it in my memory forever and ever.
I did call the police after I got home, twenty minutes or so later. But they said they couldn't send a cop to my house or take a statement over the phone, so I'd have to come into the station if I wanted them to take a report, and I understand that completely, because this is the year 1927.
Do feel free to send me some frozen peas that I can use to ice my knees, or, failing that, books or book recommendations to distract me from the knowledge that the world can get you anywhere, anytime. I could've died!
Stay safe out there!
Your friend,
Smalls