You could be watching from a position outside the frame. The rain has stopped. Steam rises from the tarmac. The pines drip. A 1993 blue Ford truck towing a camper comes round the bend. In the fullness of the corner, the front left tire on the Ford blows. The force of the implosion drags the truck left across the central divide so fast it defies logic. The Ford connects hard with a white Golf travelling in the opposite direction. At impact, it is as though both cars sit motionless, stuck, and then they pirouette away from each other, sending out a spray of glass and metal. You don’t hear anything. The volume’s turned right down. The Ford lands upside down in the ditch. The front wheels keep on spinning after the rear wheels have stopped. The camper is still on the road, lying on its side like a felled horse. The Golf crumples into a tree. The volume comes back up. The distorted metal shudders and tries to return to its original shape, to undo what has happened. Shards of glass drop from the shattered windscreen, little pings against the tarmac. A spaniel climbs out of the empty back window of the camper. He stands in the middle of the road, his tail between his legs.
It didn’t hurt. Blood came out of your mouth. Red and rich, sticky as ore. Your arms were pinned against the seat by something that shouldn’t have been there.
“Are you okay?”
The question came from behind, and you tried to turn to your head. Someone somewhere was crying. You could see the last of the mist burning off the pines. The sun trying to push through the clouds.
“We’re going to get you out.”
You wanted to nod, but you couldn’t remember how. The Jaws of Life cutter tore into the roof. The lights of the ambulance turned the trees red, blue, red, blue. You lay on the stretcher and smelled chlorinated pools and the car park of the fast-food restaurant you worked in as a teenager. The air full of chemicals and grease. Sirens squealed into life as though they had only now been alerted to the urgency.
The ambulance drives away. A man sprays sand over the oil spill and sweeps the debris to the side of the road. Glass lies in the ditch and sparkles, a sudden seam of diamonds. It grows dark, and the tow truck comes. Men in orange safety vests truss up the camper. They hook the Golf to the tow truck, bumper first, and it rises out of the ditch. The tow truck drives away, the Golf swinging uselessly behind it like an arm in a sling.
You are alone now. Somewhere above and behind you, the wind moves through the pines. You want to sit up, but you have no sense of your own body, you’re simply consciousness. It’s like being on Ketamine. You are just in things. Right now you are in the asphalt. You can feel it cooling, the slight variations in temperature down through the bitumen to the sand and gravel base.
“I’ve been in an accident,” you say to yourself. “I’m in shock. This is going to pass.”
Water seeps into alligator cracks on the hard shoulder. You sense the crystalline bonds forming as water turns to ice and expands against the edges of the cracks. It reminds you of an allergic reaction, your tongue too big for your mouth. You vibrate with the rumble of tires. Stop, you want to say to the BMW as it rolls over you. The blonde girl driving is singing to Aimee Mann. You catch the chorus of Wise Up, and you can almost smell the car interior, cherry lip balm and body odour, but mostly you feel how the tires wear off the sharp edges of aggregates in the asphalt, stripping the bitumous film.
It must be late, after midnight; you’d left Penticton at 6 PM, and it’s been hours since then. There’s hardly any traffic on the highway now, but you can still sense the road unfurling. You feel the push and pull of it. You listen to the pines moving. You want to take deep meditative breaths, but you have nothing to breathe with. You must be hallucinating, probably on a high dosage of morphine. You’re in the Fraser Canyon hospital in Hope, or perhaps you have been airlifted to Vancouver. Saul has been notified. He’s beside your bed, or he has just gone out into the hallway to get coffee. You will open your eyes, and he will say, “You scared everyone stupid.”
He will say, “You’re fine, you big baby.”
He will say, “This means the ICBC premiums have quadrupled, and you owe me one white Golf, but I’ll accept a donkey in lieu if you’ve got one.”
You try to picture Saul’s face, visualize it in so much detail that it becomes real. His pale skin, translucent as a gecko, his hair and thin beard, the colour of custard. You don’t love him, not in the cosmic way that romantic comedies say you should. Instead, you’ve made do with each other. He suggested once that you should probably get divorced, but you never got round to it. It’s the worst kind of bad relationship because it’s functional. You’re as used to each other as you are to the pink pinstriped wallpaper in the living room that you’ve been meaning to strip off for years. You’ve both faded into the background. Funny then that you should think of no one else but him now.
You remember how once, angry and a little drunk on a beach in Mexico, you told him the art gallery meant more to you than he did. You never took that back. You just went to breakfast the next morning in your sunglasses and pretended it never happened. Besides, at the time you meant it.
But if you’re thinking about only him now, perhaps it is love. Maybe that’s what love is. He’s solid, predictable, normal, and right now all you want is to go back to normal. But he never made the hairs on your arms stand up. Maybe thinking of Saul isn’t working precisely because you don’t love him, so you think of Zulu instead. Zulu who climbs into bed with you, puts his wet nose on your cheek, whose warm body presses against you. Please, open your eyes.
You must be in a coma. You always thought a coma would be gentler. You imagined a whiteout, a spa visit for your brain. No thinking, just sensing without judgment, the same state your yoga instructor exhorts you to get into during savasana. The sun rises, and on the hard shoulder, the ice melts in the alligator cracks; it tickles. An overloaded eighteen-wheeler grinds the tarmac and displaces the gravel base so that the surface of the road bows a little under the tires. You feel a rut beginning like a twinge in the knee or ankle.
You try to do what you’ve always done. Make the best of it. Take the long view. Get interested, take mental notes, and when you wake up, you’ll write a best seller and end up on CBC with Shelagh Rogers.
You seem to be moving away from the road. Instead of feeling the buzz of tires on the grey Honda sedan, you compress and rarefy, crest the wave of sound as the car passes you by.
Maybe you’re dying. This stops you. For a few moments, you just are, and you’re indistinguishable from the air. You rise up with the heat coming off the asphalt, and you expand as you drift towards the pines, cool air below nudging you along.
Why did this happen to you? You remember being twenty-five and lying in your roommate Cassie’s arms, crying over yet another breakup.
“Oh, honey, you’re going to meet the right man.” Cassie tucked her long brown hair behind her ears, and her silver bracelets ran backwards down her arm, tinkling. “Everything happens for a reason.”
The thought that some divine power engineered events in your favour comforted you. Years later when Saul was laid off in the dot-com bust and he sat at the kitchen table wearing yesterday’s clothes, staring morosely out the window, you told him, “Things will work out, everything happens for a reason.”
He turned and gave you a withering look. “You’re conflating reason with purpose. Every event is not leading up to some inevitable positive goal. Things happen because of your past actions and the laws of nature. I wasn’t laid off so in the future I can get my dream job. I was laid off because the company’s stock was overvalued.”
“How can you live in a world like that?” you asked. “There’s no sense to anything.”
“There’s no purpose, but the world still makes sense, it’s just that nothing’s in our control.”
“I refuse to believe that.” You opened the fridge. “Do you want pork chops for dinner?”
Saul just stared at you.
There’s only a purpose, you realize now, if something happens after. If this is the end, then everything is meaningless to you. You are dying because of a Ford front tire. For something as simple as the incorrect pressure. Too soft, and so the sidewall flexed and split. Or perhaps that morning, the driver hit a curb when he stopped to get gas, and the layers of tire separated and air got between them and a bubble formed. You want to blame someone. You blame the Ford driver for his carelessness, for not carrying out thorough vehicle maintenance. You hope he’s dying too. You’ve never checked the tire pressure on the Golf, but that’s not the point; you didn’t know. You would now. There should be more car maintenance awareness. Ad campaigns.
You cool, drift down again towards the earth. At the base of a pine tree, you crinkle through fallen leaves and twigs and sink into the humus, comforted by the soil, cradled by its warmth. You hear the low gurgle of a burrowing earthworm. You remember your grandfather in his garden holding out a handful of dirt and saying, “A good farmer is always a worm farmer.” Without worms, there would be no soil; without soil, there are no crops; without crops—everything connected.
Were you so precariously balanced that this could have happened to you at any moment? Was life always like this? The thought startles you. You have not lived that way. Dying happened to other people. You think of those evenings in university, up late in the communal kitchen in the dorms, discussing what you would do if you learned you had only a year to live. Give up school, go to Peru, do acid, spend your savings. Mario, the exchange student from Italy with the curly brown hair, had said sagely, “You should do what you want right now because you might only have a year.” And you had all agreed with him. But you didn’t believe that, not really. You believed in continuity; you believed in the permanence of your own life.
You didn’t go to Peru. You graduated with a degree in art history. You became a receptionist in a fine art gallery. You wore long white blouses, kitten heels, red flowers in your hair. You worked your way up the ladder; you went to parties and laughed at the right moments. You got married. You paid back your student loan just in time to get a mortgage. If you had known it would end here, on a curve in the road on Highway 3, you think you would have been different, you would have worried less, savoured the moment.
Drawn down through dark soil, where clumps and root hairs brush against you like the silvery threads of a cobweb, you struggle against whatever pulls you. Certain you are dying now, you’re afraid of where you might be going. You want to be in the air again, with the road. You bargain. Let me live. I’ll give up all my petty concerns. I won’t obsess about being four pounds over my ideal weight. I won’t covet my neighbour’s Beachcomber 750 hot tub. I won’t complain about Saul leaving his dirty socks in the living room. I get it now. I get it.
Your father took you to the Treasures of the Tomb of Tutankhamen exhibit when you were eleven. Inside the glass display case, you saw the funerary goods: a collection of pottery bowls, combs, gold bracelets and terracotta shabti—little figurines believed to wake and slave away in the Fields of Yalu for Tutankhamen in the afterlife.
“Why did the Egyptians think they could take all this with them?” you asked, your hand resting on the cuff of your father’s anorak. There would be no need to brush your hair or roast a chicken after death. Your father, a professor of biochemistry, lived his life by the scientific method. He had impressed upon you a thirst for proof.
He leaned down to your level. The individual hairs that made up his beard became distinguishable.
“Honey,” he said. “The Egyptians found it too scary to accept that death was final. Life was easier this way.”
“That’s dumb,” you said. “What a waste of time making everything in the first place.” And you went to look at the Golden Mask.
You were a collector. Desk drawers full of ticket stubs. Handbags you didn’t use any more but couldn’t bear to give away. Shoeboxes in the basement stuffed with vacation snaps. Close-ups of sweaty faces, out of focus, red and peeling. Overexposed sunsets. Saul saw clutter as clogging the arteries of the house. He wanted ruthless practicality.
“Why don’t we just throw it all away?” he said. “You don’t even know what you’ve got. You’d never miss it.”
But you wouldn’t throw anything away because in the future you would arrange the photos in albums, in the future you would sit down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and peruse them. You could have a slide show and invite your friends over for dinner and a viewing. Of course, you never did. You too thought you could take everything with you, all your treasures burial goods, talismans that promised an everlasting life.
You tangle in a root hair. It reminds you of swimming in the ocean, the kelp slapping against your legs. You never liked being in the water alone. Around you molecules pass through the root hairs’ semi-permeable surfaces, and they sweep you along with them into the cytoplasm. You are liquid now, and the process hurts less. As you cross through the cortex cell walls and into the xylem vessels, you understand for the first time what it is like to be easy-going.
On the walk home from the Tutankhamen exhibit, your father caught your arm and stopped you on the sidewalk under a big elm tree. “The Egyptians didn’t bury their dead that way just because they were scared. A good man spent his spare time making his own burial goods. He liked to do it. It brought him joy.”
Rising up through the xylem, like a milkshake inside a straw, you’re effervescent. You see now you wouldn’t have lived anything differently. You couldn’t have.
Up above, low pressure in the leaves draws new water molecules towards the stomata from the xylem vessels. As these water molecules move, they tug on others behind them, the pull transmitted from one water molecule to the next. You embrace the pull now, you lean in, you flow up. As you cross out of the xylem, you feel curiously like celebrating. You’re going to miss the Earth, everything: running to catch a bus, drinking coffee in the starkness of a museum cafeteria, the colour of the sky in the fall, that far-off sort of blue.
“Yes,” you say. “I accept it all. I accept.”
You evaporate out of a spongy mesophyll cell into the space between, and in the intercellular gap, you can’t remember your name. The leaf’s stomata open, and you’re transpired into the air. Now that this has happened, you’re not ready. You don’t accept anything. You rage against it. No, no, no. I don’t want to go. You try to hold on to the narrative of yourself, but you’re diffusing.
“I am…” you say, but nothing comes. Instead you catch glimpses: the skin on the inside of your mother’s wrists, the taste of your own mouth in the morning, the sensation of laughing. Particles collide. You—