Collapse

It’s a disturbing sensation to cause collapse. The crush of a cockroach beneath your foot, felt as a two-stage failure first of popping exoskeleton and then the slower squash of yellow insides. Like a punch that breaks a nose. It’s the sickening feeling that an extension of you, expecting resistance, caused something else to give way and sink. To soften. It’s no less disturbing, as it turns out, when you feel it through the car you’re driving.

The road was snow-packed that night, and it was still falling in big, weightless chunks. The entire event happened in perfect winter silence. The driver, taking a turn onto Church Street, in sight of Harvard Square, turned the steering wheel hard to the right, but the car ignored this. Unconcerned with the hard pressed brakes, the car began to slide. The driver’s tall body reacted, instinctively growing taut. The man in the headlights against the brick half-wall, though, had less time. His eyes could only grow wide and his arms pull upward in defense. It was reflexive and useless, and then came the sickening feeling.

The car, angled upward by the curb, hit and softened into the human shell. The breaking nose. The doomed cockroach. With just enough energy to kill, the car stopped at the red brick. All damage was organic. The expression of dread on the driver’s face was nearly as profound as the man he’d hit. The victim tilted back against the brick for a frozen moment, then slumped forward. With no lungs to gasp, he collapsed.

Although it had all happened in silence, audible word began to travel through the shops nearby. A description of the accident and the victim circulated, and soon a blonde woman hurried out to see. Someone had put the car in reverse, freeing the body to lay on the ground. Blood filled his brown flannel coat. She knelt beside him. Big, beautiful, snowflakes fell on both of them. Those that touched him turned red. He had been on his way to visit her.

The driver’s name was Eliot. In truth, he hadn’t even meant to drive into the square that night. This element of bad luck only made him feel the guilt more deeply later. He had been uncomfortable living in the city and had only recently begun feeling that he could belong. In casual speech, he’d only just started calling it, rather than Ohio, “home”. The slowly earned comfort was quickly depleted that snowy night. Soon after, Eliot began to withdraw from the city and into himself. He retreated from a life that his family had suggested was bigger than him anyway. There were two voices in Eliot and the bold one, quite wrong to be, surrendered forever to the cautious. He moved back to a place where a car that briefly loses control stands no chance of hitting anything more than a fence post on a state farm route.

The woman looking down on the fallen man was named Darcy. Before this moment, she had optimistically seen the holiday season approaching. She could do that. Grab a calendar date, start looking forward and hold a smile. It was easy for her. She could see the next job that she’d land after the retail work she did in the square. She could see the next thing. The future made her happy. Still, though, she was smart. Smart enough not to place optimism just anywhere. She had, for example, a bad feeling about Jeremy, the good looking but odd boy that she had met through the computer service. The next time that she saw him, she fully intended to end things. It would be done carefully, but unquestionably. Then she would begin again. Meticulously and swiftly scanning the sky for the next sparkle to watch. She’d hold her eyes on it, smile and wait. The present was no match for what was to come.

Jeremy, who had broken then fallen against the red brick, wore his heavy brown coat that night. Leaving his apartment moments earlier, the air had felt cleaner than his body pulling it in. The young man lived like a person balancing. First, he’d place a toe. Then try a step. His arms were held out, pushing the air. Next, another step. Any feeling could tug or pull him, and although he always tried to counter it, his arms reached out to nothing. It seemed as though life enjoyed carelessly bumping him. Occasionally he even toppled. When he did, the respondent anger usually dwarfed the cause.

He could barely remember once standing dizzy over a crumpled co-worker, blood trickling through the man's blonde hair as Jeremy's anger, like the blood, slowly ebbed. Luckily, the man had only been dented and hadn't given way. Consequently, in the secure hospital, they taught him that he had “control”. Still, though, they weren’t being asked to do the balancing. He would always be tugged by life and steadied by medication. (And what about love?) When he left the apartment that night, he was unknowingly teetering. The medication on the edge of the bathroom sink hadn’t been touched in three days. It had been three days since he’d met Darcy. Three days without medication was a very long time. His subtle chemical mixes and electrical systems were always needing. Needing, of course, to balance. Maybe the next time that his arms flailed into the air, instead of nothing, they’d find Darcy. Maybe she’d keep him from falling.

Eliot, who’d sat behind the wheel, took a class at the Cambridge School of Continuing Education the previous summer. It was a poetry class and Darcy was in the classroom just above his, learning about Socrates. They had passed on Massachusetts Ave. eleven times. They had a mutual friend, but he had never introduced the two. Eliot had once been to a party in Somerville. Darcy was there, but spent most of her time in the back rooms of the house. That would be the closest that they’d ever come to meeting. If they had met, it would have felt right.

Jeremy, five years before he tilted then fell, had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital roughly forty-five minutes from Eliot’s home town in Ohio. One of the orderlies at the hospital had been in Eliot’s high school class. This was the only connection that existed between Jeremy and Eliot. They had never come close to meeting in person. The first time that they met was in the last seconds of Jeremy's life, with a car between them. In any other circumstance, they still would have collided.

The police took photographs of the scene of the incident. It wasn’t the first one at this intersection, although they talked about the eerie nature of it well into the spring. The fact that there was no damage to the wall, or even to the car, made it a rare “perfect kill”. Still, it was so perfect given the road conditions that no one trying to do it could have succeeded so well. That, and the fact that the car’s tires were still turned in a sharp right as it rested against the wall closed the case. The accident could only be just that. Involuntary Vehicular Homicide. Eliot lost his license and was required to return to Boston from Ohio for a court date in April. His lawyer said it was only a formality.

The police, as part of procedure, visited the victim’s apartment. They saw nothing in Jeremy’s home that was out of the ordinary. The next day, Jeremy’s family cleaned the apartment in silence. They packed his sweaters. His father managed to throw away the unusual pornography he’d found, without the mother noticing. She also didn’t notice, as she cleaned the bathroom, that each of the four prescription bottles was three tablets too heavy.

Darcy went to the funeral and returned home in guilt and confusion. In memory, she managed to like Jeremy much more. The past was not as steady as the future. She wondered if her plan to let him go had been the right one after all, and then felt bad for the fact that she would never know. In three weeks, though, she would regain a bit of optimism and by spring she would have the better job she always knew she’d get. Present into future. Things passed.

Eliot packed boxes and loaded them into a creaky white van that his older, dependable brother drove back to Ohio. As if home from a fight at school, in tow of his older brother, he sat in the passenger seat, humiliated. Eventually he forgave his luck, but he would never really drive faster than a crawl in snowy weather again. In time he found that refocusing his dreams on his hometown could wear into something like happiness. Inner voices finally became muted or smugly affirmed.

Prior to meeting on the internet, Darcy and Jeremy had passed each other once near the Starbucks and once near the CVS in Harvard Square, but they hadn’t noticed each other. Later he saw her dating profile online and then contacted her. They were, coincidentally, distant relatives, although seven generations ago, and in Norway. If Eliot hadn’t met Jeremy for that sickening second on that white-aired evening, against red brick, Darcy and Jeremy would have gone for a drink and then back to her place. While sitting in separate chairs, she would have told Jeremy that she liked him, but that it was over. He, not surprisingly, wouldn't have understood. Getting up from his chair, still dizzy, the next thing that he would have felt would have been the sickening feeling that one gets from causing collapse.

~ Matt Muresan