Near-Life Experience

During one of the evening hours on a day just before Halloween I was turning onto my street. Traffic was thick in the oncoming direction but some cooperative soul had paused to let me pass, as people in Chicago are wont to do. I put my foot on the gas and gracefully guided my vehicle left through the gap, relieved of the fact that the days distractions were over. It had been a long, tiring day. I was a mere sixty feet from the alley and just that much closer to being home, that much closer to taking off my shoes, putting on some music, maybe cleaning something, maybe jerking off, watching the news, having an orange... whatever it is people do when they get home.

Then, mid-turn, I saw a girl and a bike, a girl on a bike, a girl on a bike moving really fast, a girl on a bike moving really fast right for me! A girl on a bike about to slam her head right fucking hard into the side of my car!

Reflex, most experts agree, is how quickly a person reacts to a sudden stimulus, but I've come to believe in a different definition. Reflex is the ability to quickly predict where something is going to be and to do so with little time to be wrong. Imagine a wine cork rolling off a table. Good reflexes does not mean reaching for the cork. Good reflexes means placing your hand where the cork is going to fall, catching it and returning it safely to the table and then reveling in the admiring stares of those around you.

Good reflexes means getting your car out of the path of the speeding girl. My foot slammed on the gas. In response the engine snarled like a woke dog but the old beast just didn't have the oomph she once did. She's old, loyal and hard-working but her quick-sprint days are in the past. The car leapt forward just enough that I was able to avoid the worst, which was having her head penetrate one of the passenger side windows of my car, or worse: having her head NOT penetrate one of those windows, the way a paintball hurts more when it doesn't break.

Every nerve in my body was suddenly on alert as blood raced through sleeping capillaries, driven by a frantic heart. A gentle click-tap near the back bumper pulsed through the car. For a moment it seemed as if nothing had occurred, the click-tap was so gentle, so subtle that maybe I had imagined it. But the rear view mirror was a widescreen shot of a girl with black hair somersaulting off a turquoise bike. I pulled over. The engine returned to calm but my heart did not. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.... I've got band-aids. I've got water... Oh shit... I could drive off. I can't. I couldn't. Could I? No, fuck, I can't. I have to help her.

I hit the blinkers and stepped out of the car, uncertain where the days twist had taken me or to which hospital I'd be accompanying her or of what awkward conversations I'd be having with her parents. The girl and her bike lay on the ground. A round, ethnic woman in a purple coat approached with obvious concern, but she quickly made herself scarce once she realized I had purchased ownership of the situation. She was a caring raisin but she obviously had other vines to worry about.

The girl stood up, dazed and brave. "Are you ok?" was all I could stammer out. "I am so sorry. I saw you before it was too late."

"No. I -- I'm okay, " she said with detectable uncertainty. I looked her over and have never been more relieved NOT to see bones protruding through a person's torn skin. She actually looked ok.

"Lets go over here," I said, grabbing her bike off the ground and guiding her to a nearby curb. Behind us traffic ebbed and flowed. One car after another passed the scene, a bike, a guy, a girl. Gas and brake, gas and brake -- feet controlled by tired minds, each one full of shit and sunshine.

"I'm gonna sit. I need a cigarette," she said. I kneeled down next to her, still processing the raw data of the previous two minutes, my neurons conducting an orchestra of bolts from each out-stretched dendrite. These were two minutes I wouldn't easily forget.

Her knee had been skinned a little, tearing further the hole in her pants. She had thick dark hair, white skin and a modest piercing just above her lip. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three years old, one of those hipsters that populate various neighborhoods in Chicago, the more hurried ones transporting themselves on vintage ten-speeds. I offered her water and bandaids -- even neosporin -- but she refused. All in all she had come through in good shape, a little shaken up, a skinned knee and a tear in already torn jeans. Even her bike escaped injury. I put the chain back on and spun the wheels. No wobbles. It was good to go.

She told me her Dad had bought her that bike several years ago. It was old and he had fixed it up. She spoke of it as something cared for and needed, something she loved her father not for providing but because it was a piece of love from him. I was glad it still had some miles left in it, that my impatience wasn't the weapon to remove it (or her) from existence.

I sat with her until she finished her cigarette. We chatted. I tried to be funny. Her name was Liz. She had a plastic bag of make-up she had just purchased, which she'd planned to use to turn herself into a zombie for a party later that night. Even the jeans she was wearing were to be a part of the costume because of its pre-existing holes. Always the optimist, I commented that she would be a great zombie because now she had a sore knee, a large hole in her jeans and a great story about how she nearly escaped death on the streets of Chicago. She seemed to agree, although a part of me suspected that she probably would rather just be a regular zombie, one without the near-death experience.

Picky, picky.