Panorama City (26 page)

C: The doctors are doing their rounds.

O: I can hear them.

C: Dr. Singh won't be happy to hear you've been up all night.

O: He'll be stunned I'm still alive.

C: So dramatic.

O: You'll see,
mi amor,
it's a miracle I'm alive, he'll think so too.

 

There's more to the accident, there's more to what happened. Just before the terminus, before death, I must call it death, on the threshold of death, the scene of the accident is coming back to me, one second at a time, it is like someone is taking the dominoes and standing them back up in my head, I must tell you about it now, before I am gone.

 

I remember the day more clearly now, I was riding into town, I was riding my blue-flake three-speed Schwinn into Madera for the first time in a long while, I was enjoying being back on my bicycle. You see, Juan-George, your mother and I had been going into town together, we had been doing everything together, making up for lost time, as they say, and so I had spent most of the past months in the passenger seat of her Hyundai, not on the seat of a bicycle. I had talked with her about the possibility of a tandem bicycle, of talking to Wilfredo to see if we could get one, but she has never been a strong cyclist, her words, and it didn't seem safe to start trying now that you were growing inside her. So the other day when your mother was too tired to go into town, and we had run out of milk and a few other necessities, I decided to take my bicycle. The soft burring sound of tires on asphalt, the gentle breeze in my face, the world going by at the ideal speed. I thought, I remember thinking, I am a father-to-be, riding into town to get groceries for the mother of my child, I marveled at how much my life had changed. Then, in the distance, coming toward me down the road, I saw the Alvarez brothers' pickup truck.

 

As I mentioned, the Alvarez brothers, along with Greg Yerkovich, were the only people in Madera who still called me Mayor. I hadn't thought too much about it, Juan-George, and to tell you the truth it didn't bother me, I figured they just wanted to keep the name going, as a sort of reminder that we'd been friends for so long. But when I saw the Alvarez brothers' pickup truck cross that yellow line into my lane, I experienced the same sensation I'd felt upon rising from my bed that first day back in Madera, a sort of trench appeared in my thinking, we had been here before, the Alvarez brothers and I, we had done this before, many, many times. But while I had gone down to the so-called real world and experienced many experiences, they had not changed at all, they could not change, they would always be the Alvarez brothers, always driving down the same road, always pointing their pickup truck at me. I could see clearly what I had been unable to see before, which was that they were a fixture, a permanent fixture in Madera, the Alvarez brothers were like a statue in the center of town. And, I now saw, they wanted me to remain a fixture, too, so that the two fixtures could be locked in mutual orbit, so that they were always the people who drove at me on the road and I was always the person who rode his bicycle into the ditch.

 

Unless one of us swerved to the side a head-on collision was imminent, meaning of course unless I rode the bicycle into the ditch. All of this came to me in a flash, and I wondered something I had never wondered before, which was whether riding my bicycle into the ditch was my only choice. I asked myself, these were the words that came back to me this morning, from the accident, that allowed me to unspool and unpack all of these realizations, I asked myself how a man of the world, a true man of the world, should react to the Alvarez brothers' pickup truck speeding at him. I considered the situation from all sides, or from several sides, I imagined what a picture of this scene would look like, I wondered what I could say about this man on this bicycle, about this father-to-be, playing chicken with a pickup truck, I had started to consider the situation from all sides when my thinking was interrupted, or cut off abruptly, I should say, by the truck.

 

C: As soon as you are out of here, my Oppen, I am going to give Hector and Michael a piece of my mind, those two running you down like that, they're lucky I got rid of my gun.

O: You never told me about a gun.

C: A woman has to protect herself.

O: From what? From who?

C: It was a different life, Oppen, I don't want to talk about it, it's far away now.

[Tapping on glass.]

C: It's the doctor.

O: Dr. Singh is here.

C: Good morning, Doctor.

O: Oh, Juan-George, I wish you could see the look on his face right now.

Dr. Singh
[presumably]:
What is this now?

O: He's shocked to see me alive.

[Shuffling. Tape clicks.]

O [distorted]: Wrong button.

[Tape clicks.]

 

They are gone. I asked Dr. Singh how much longer I could expect to live, I asked him because I wanted to know what I should say to you next, whether I should begin my goodbyes or share with you more of my experience, I begged him to be honest with me. He said that the reason he looked surprised when he saw me just now was that he hadn't expected to find me talking into a tape recorder. Then he said that as long as I don't step out in front of any more moving vehicles, he didn't see why I shouldn't expect to live a long and healthy life. I told him he didn't have to spare my feelings, I'd already heard the nurses discussing my case, I could take it, I asked him to please be honest with me, it didn't make it easier not to know the truth. He shrugged and said he was speaking the truth, God's-honest.

 

I am a slow absorber, Juan-George.

 

The nurses, when I had heard the nurses talking before, I had attached their words to an idea already in my head, that I was dying, that I wasn't going to make it through the night, an idea that was like a vacuum cleaner in my head, sucking everything toward it, preventing me from seeing what was obvious, what should have been obvious, namely, that they were talking about my next-room neighbor Mr. Pierce, he was eighty-eight years old.

 

I laughed, my chest felt like it was on fire, but I had to laugh. Your mother shook her head and rolled her eyes. I told Dr. Singh I couldn't believe my luck, and he said he wouldn't go that far. I had come in with a collapsed lung, a broken hip, dozens of lacerations, a fractured forearm, and multiple fractures in my left leg. I had many weeks of immobility to look forward to, and pain management, followed by physical therapy, he wasn't going to lie to me, I was in for a grueling year, I was in for the greatest physical challenge of my life, people with my types of injuries likened it to climbing K2, his words. But you're not going to die, he said, or at least you're not going to die as a result of this accident. Which is the thing about the terminus, Juan-George, it can never be escaped, it can only be postponed, there is no more preposterous expression in the world than
saving lives,
Paul Renfro's words, because every life reaches its terminus eventually. The expression should be, the expression attached to firemen and doctors and other sorts of caregivers should be
postponing death.
I can assure you, Juan-George, that I am confident, that despite my not being able to predict future events I feel confident I will be able to climb K2, whatever that is, and recover fully, and leave this hospital behind, leave the Madera Community Hospital behind completely. Or almost completely, I should say, we'll be back, your mother and I will be coming back soon, not for any terminus but for your arrival. It will be your mother in this bed, and then your mother and you.

 

Part of my head I didn't know was shut down is coming on again, is coming alive again, I am letting myself imagine something I imagined many times before, I mean something I imagined after I found out you were on the way but before I ended up in this hospital. I imagined, I am imagining again, holding your hand, of course you'll have to learn to walk first, you won't be able to do this right away, I'm imagining holding your hand as we walk together down the dry bed of the Madera River, which is a wide river, you'll see, with hardly any water in it. I can picture clearly in my so-called mind's eye you and me walking together, our footsteps in the shallow sand, coming down one of the banks, down through a narrow opening in the brush, me behind you, me reaching forward over your head to push branches aside, until we reach the riverbed itself, marked with crisscrossing ribbons of tracks from bicycles and motorcycles and ATVs. I'll hold your hand, we'll walk and talk, father and son, you'll have lots of questions, being a relatively new arrival, you'll have questions about the dry bed of the Madera River, and I'll answer them for you, Juan-George, it'll be as simple as that, you and me, walking, talking, questions and answers. I'll show you how and where the water cuts into the land, I'll tell you about the seasons, about when the river is full, about the flowers and grasses and lizards and butterflies and birds, mating and growing, and dying and mating and growing again. Your grandfather used to take me down there, back when he was still going out, back when I was still a little boy. We held hands and we walked, I asked questions and he answered, for a long time I believed he knew all there was to know.

 

Everything repeats itself eventually, your grandfather used to say, the universe is a giant revolving door. Which reminds me of the bicycle crank, of the turning of the crank, feet on the pedals, the crank going round and round, like thoughts, as I've said before, and the wheels, for their part, going round and round too. Get a rock stuck in your tire and you'll hear the
tick-tick
of it as long as those wheels keep turning. But there is the other motion, too, the bicycle moving forward, covering ground, as they say, the bicycle moving forward over new ground relentlessly, nothing ever repeating exactly the same way, everything always different. Until, of course, you reach the terminus. But my point is that the world isn't either one way or the other, Juan-George, it's both. The crank turns and the bicycle moves forward. Both.

 

When I picture myself holding your hand, I realize I'm picturing myself holding your grandfather's hand. Only we've traded places, of course, I'm the big one now.

***

C: Oppen? Sweetheart?

O: Yes,
amor.

C: You are alive, you are going to live.

O: Yes.

C: Why are you still talking?

 

...
Gaal saw the people, he said to Zebul, Behold, there come people down from the top of the mountains. And Zebul said unto him, Thou seest the shadow of the mountains as if they were men...[Bible reading continues to end of tape.]

For their keen eyes and wise words I'm indebted to Eric Bennett, Jack Livings, Brigid Hughes, John Woodward, and Katie Arnoldi. For ushering Oppen through the vicissitudes of rude commerce, Anna Stein and Lauren Wein. For artistic lodestar navigation, James Alan McPherson. For diverting lines, GM Quinte. For everything else and more, I am eternally grateful to Chrissy Levinson Wilson, without whose love and encouragement I surely would have sunk into the mire, never to be heard from again.

 

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novel
The Interloper
and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is a contributing editor of A Public Space and lives and surfs in Los Angeles. Visit
www.antoinewilson.com
.