If you were driving down the street, you would have seen the people trying to help.
That special kind of huddle that forms around a tragedy. A body on the ground. You would have seen the people standing around the body wondering if they could help and already knowing there was no help to give. Then there’s the feet, maybe. An arm. You would have known something was wrong. He knew something was wrong. From the safety of his car, he saw the mass, and then heard sirens. They hit like a jolt. He pulled away. His apartment is on the East Side. He had plans that evening. A dinner. A nice dinner. Meeting friends. He didn’t even see the face of the person lying on the ground. It never occurred to him to stop. To get out of the car. To assume he could help. He couldn’t help, right? What kind of help could he offer? He was still part owner of the restaurant back then. This was before he got bought out, and lived off that money for two years while he lived in California telling himself all the sun didn’t bother him. The point is that he was no doctor or nurse or EMT or any kind of person who can do anything about a body lying on the ground.
How does a body get on the ground?
How?
This was years ago.
He went to dinner that night. His friend had made vegan tacos and there was pot smoking and somebody put on Bowie and two of the guests had a fight out on the street about something political and he sat in the bathroom refreshing all the local news websites for information that never came.
How could that be?
How could there be no information?
A body was lying on the ground in downtown Providence.
It was a Friday night, but not much else appeared to be happening. And those people. All those people standing around, thinking they could help. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t help. He drove on. He went home. He got ready. He put on cologne. He showed up to his friend’s house with a bottle of wine. He gave out hugs. He laughed at a joke that wasn’t funny. He went outside in the middle of the argument about politics and interrupted the two debaters to tell them he saw a body on the ground and he couldn’t stop thinking about it and why wasn’t there any news on it and the two people fighting told him that he was just high and he knew that wasn’t it, and a month later he’d be in California, and someone would break into the building where he lived, and things were stolen, and all his neighbors were very concerned, and he was still thinking about the body on the ground in Providence.
On another Friday night, I was driving home in the rain when two cars off in the distance appeared to be coming at me at a speed that was hard to register until one of the cars hit a barrier and the impact sent the car flying up in the air, spinning it around so that for one brief moment, it was directly over my car, before coming down on its roof only a few feet away from me.
I remember thinking that I wasn’t watching what I was watching. That it was a movie. That people don’t race cars in the rain, and they don’t get into accidents when they do, and they don’t fly up in the air so high it looks like they’re in flight, and they don’t seem suspended for half a second, and they don’t come crashing down with a sound so loud that later one of your roommates asks you if you heard that explosion.
It sounded like an explosion.
As all that was happening, I kept driving. I kept my hands on the wheel. I didn’t think to hit the brakes. Had I hit the brakes and the car came down any sooner, it could have landed on my car.
Or maybe all this is inaccurate, because how could you ever accurately remember something like that?
But I know the car landed upside down.
I know I slowed down as I looked in the rearview mirror and saw it there.
That was when I noticed a car on the right side of me. The driver was looking exactly where I was. At the upside down vehicle in the other lane.
Then he looked at me.
He sped away.
I thought–
I’m a minute away from home.
I can call 9-1-1.
Why didn’t I call from my cell phone?
Why didn’t I stay there?
Why didn’t I try to help?
Could I have helped?
Does it matter?
Years later, a man is back home after leaving his friend’s friend. He’s stopped checking for news about a body he saw downtown, but he can’t sleep. He needs to get outside. He needs to go for a walk. But he feels vulnerable. He wants to stay in. But he feels claustrophobic. He needs to get out. He needs to know who the person on the ground was. It’s Providence. Everybody knows everybody. Could he know the person on the ground? At the very least, he must know someone who knows the person who was lying on the ground. He checks social media. Nothing. An entire state full of people who can’t mind their own business. Who can’t help but post things like, “Anybody know what’s up with those helicopters over Warwick?” and the one time you need the busybodies to clue you in–
Nothing.
By the time I got home and called 9-1-1, they’d already gotten three other calls and were sending someone out to the accident.
I checked the newspaper the next day.
And the day after that.
Nothing.
I thought anytime somebody died in any way that isn’t natural there’d be a story about it, but that’s not true. We don’t know everything and we don’t have the means to know everything unless we really want to know, and while I did want to know, I worried about what it would mean if I was too interested. Looking back, it doesn’t make any sense for me to be anything less than heavily interested, but at the time, it seemed like I shouldn’t care so much.
I witnessed an accident.
That’s what I told myself.
I witnessed an accident just like thousands of people do every day, and I drove away, because I didn’t know why I would have stayed, what I could have done, what good I would have been had I gotten out of my car and–and–
And what?
Pulled people from the vehicle?
You can’t pull people from a vehicle after an accident. Everybody knows that.
You can’t do something for someone who’s lying on the ground when they’ve already got 10 other people standing around them.
But what does it say about the person who sees something like that and goes home to get ready to go out on a Saturday night like it’s any other day?
What does it say if you go home and fall asleep the way I did? A little rattled, sure, but still tired from the day and certain I did everything I could, no matter how little it was.
He did end up going for a walk that night.
Down College Hill, into the city, past Haven Bros. and City Hall and up past the Hilton and into the West Side.
It wasn’t terribly late, but it wasn’t early, and he felt like he’d been sent out to find something without being told what it was.
He walked back to the spot where the body had been.
Nothing.
He wasn’t sure what he thought he would find there, but there wasn’t anything to find.
Every night after that accident, on my way home, I would look at the spot where the car hit the barrier and try to picture it again.
The impact.
The flip.
The suspension.
It all felt like I was outside of the experience. Watching it from some other vantage point. Was I adding things? Was I editing them out?
A month or so later, I would tell someone about the accident, and they would tell me they thought they heard about something like that happening. Two cars racing, stupid kids, feeling invincible, driving that fast in weather that bad.
Do you know if anybody died?
I think everybody in the car that flipped over did.
Oh.
Three or four people. The driver, the passenger–
Oh.
Maybe two in the backseat?
Oh.
But it might not be the one you’re talking about.
Yeah.
It might be something else.
If you want to go out into the world, there are things you have to see and then unsee.
Accidents, crimes, disasters–
This started out as a Man About Town column.
It was going to be in the spirit of Truman Capote and Dorothy Parker and metropolitan charm — art galleries and restaurant openings.
But all of that exists around lives and events that are jarring and forceful. Even Truman Capote, in between enjoying cocktails in penthouses, wrote about murder in cold blood.
How do you hold those two experiences in one hand while you write with the other?
And how do you choose which to write about?
One day, we will get back to recreation.
Theaters and concerts and dining out in restaurants where people are packed in on every side will return, and when they do, there will be a part of us that wants to celebrate.
And though we may tell ourselves we’re celebrating in spite of the catastrophic loss that’s surrounded us this past year, there is a primitive part of us that celebrates because we are here and others are not. Because we believe it says something about who we are that we’re not the one on the ground or in the upside down car.
That they were somehow unlucky, made a bad decision, did something we would never do.
We tell ourselves we’ll be the ones driving away from the brink and that we were never going to get close enough to go over it.
I won’t lie and say there won’t come a time when you’ll hear me describe in detail my relief at being able to go to a party again or hug a friend I ran into on the street or dance in the middle of 100 people.
It’s just that when I think about all of that, I think about the numbers that go up every day.
And the numbers that connect to those numbers.
How they stretch out and expand and rise.
Always rise.
And I think about that car.
Suspended over my head.
Hands on the wheel.
Holding my breath.
Wondering who could be in that car.
Confident it would never be me.
If you live in a city like Providence, you see bits and pieces of lives that can interest you so much you write a weekly column about them.
And you can see parts that you never want to write about, because people write about loss to make loss make sense when there is no making sense of it.
It’s something you drive by on your way to somewhere else.
You can stop if you want to.
But then what?
Then what?
Lately, it’s getting harder and harder to even ask people–
To stop.
Disclaimer: The In Providence column is a slice of life in Providence based on true stories. Each column may include elements of creative non-fiction. See our story on that concept here:https://motifri.com/in-providence-creative-writing-taking-on-the-burden-of-the-truth/
