I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches
me.
I gasp and take a quick step back onto the sidewalk. One of my
heels doesn’t clear the curb, so I grip the pole of a No Parking sign
to steady myself.
The man was in front of me a matter of seconds ago. We were
standing in a crowd of people waiting for the crosswalk light to
illuminate when he stepped into the street prematurely, resulting in
a run-in with a truck. I lunged forward in an attempt to stop him—
grasping at nothing as he went down. I closed my eyes before his
head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a
champagne bottle.
He was in the wrong, looking casually down at his phone,
probably a side effect of crossing the same street without incident
many times before. Death by routine.
People gasp, but no one screams. The passenger of the
offending vehicle jumps out of the truck and is immediately on his
knees near the man’s body. I back away from the scene as several
people rush forward to help. I don’t have to look at the man under
the tire to know he didn’t survive that. I only have to look down at
my once-white shirt—at the blood now splattered across it—to know
that a hearse would serve him better than an ambulance.
I spin around to move away from the accident—to find a place to
take a breath—but the crosswalk sign now says walk and the thick
crowd takes heed, making it impossible for me to swim upstream in
this Manhattan river. Some don’t even look up from their cell phones
as they pass right by the accident. I stop trying to move, and wait
for the crowd to thin. I glance back toward the accident, careful not
to look directly at the man. The driver of the truck is now at the rear
of the vehicle, wide-eyed, on a cell phone. Three, maybe four,
people are assisting them. A few are led by their morbid curiosities,
filming the gruesome scene with their phones.
If I were still living in Virginia, this would play out in a completely
different manner. Everyone around would stop. Panic would ensue,
people would be screaming, a news crew would be on scene in a
matter of minutes. But here in Manhattan, a pedestrian struck by a
vehicle happens so often, it’s not much more than an inconvenience.
A delay in traffic for some, a ruined wardrobe for others. This
probably happens so often, it won’t even end up in print.
As much as the indifference in some of the people here disturbs
me, it’s exactly why I moved to this city ten years ago. People like
me belong in overpopulated cities. The state of my life is irrelevant
in a place this size. There are far more people here with stories
much more pitiful than mine.
Here, I’m invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to
give a shit about me, and I love her for it.
“Are you hurt?”
I look up at a man as he touches my arm and scans my shirt.
Deep concern is embedded in his expression as he looks me up and
down, assessing me for injuries. I can tell by his reaction that he
isn’t one of the more hardened New Yorkers. He might live here
now, but wherever he’s from, it’s a place that didn’t completely beat
the empathy out of him.
“Are you hurt?” the stranger repeats, looking me in the eye this
time.
“No. It’s not my blood. I was standing near him when…” I stop
speaking. I just saw a man die. I was so close to him, his blood is on
me.
I
moved to this city to be invisible, but I am certainly not
impenetrable. It’s something I’ve been working on—attempting to
become as hardened as the concrete beneath my feet. It hasn’t
been working out so well. I can feel everything I just witnessed
settling in my stomach.
I cover my mouth with my hand, but pull it away quickly when I
feel something sticky on my lips. More blood. I look down at my
shirt. So much blood, none of it mine. I pinch at my shirt and pull it
away from my chest, but it sticks to my skin in spots where the
blood splatters are beginning to dry.
I think I need water. I’m starting to feel light-headed, and I want
to rub my forehead, pinch my nose, but I’m scared to touch myself. I
look up at the man still gripping my arm.
“Is it on my face?” I ask him.
He presses his lips together and then darts his eyes away,
scanning the street around us. He gestures toward a coffee shop a
few doors down.
“They’ll have a bathroom,” he says, pressing his hand against the
small of my back as he leads me in that direction.
I
look across the street at the Pantem Press building I was
headed to before the accident. I was so close. Fifteen—maybe
twenty—feet away from a meeting I desperately need to be in.
I
wonder how close the man who just died was to his
destination.
The stranger holds the door open for me when we reach the
coffee shop. A woman carrying a coffee in each hand attempts to
squeeze past me through the doorway until she sees my shirt. She
scurries backward to get away from me, allowing us both to enter
the building. I move toward the women’s restroom, but the door is
locked. The man pushes open the door to the men’s restroom and
motions for me to follow him.
He doesn’t lock the door behind us as he walks to the sink and
turns on the water. I look in the mirror, relieved to see it isn’t as bad
as I’d feared. There are a few spatters of blood on my cheeks that
are beginning to darken and dry, and a spray above my eyebrows.
But luckily, the shirt took the brunt of it.
The man hands me wet paper towels, and I wipe at my face
while he wets another handful. I can smell the blood now. The
tanginess in the air sends my mind whirling back to when I was ten.
The smell of blood was strong enough to remember it all these years
later.
I attempt to hold my breath at the onset of more nausea. I don’t
want to puke. But I want this shirt off me. Now.
I unbutton it with trembling fingers, then pull it off and place it
under the faucet. I let the water do its job while I take the other wet
paper towels from the stranger and begin wiping the blood off my
chest.
He heads for the door, but instead of giving me privacy while I
stand here in my least attractive bra, he locks us inside the
bathroom so no one will walk in on me while I’m shirtless. It’s
disturbingly chivalrous and leaves me feeling uneasy. I’m tense as I
watch him through the reflection in the mirror.
Someone knocks.
“Be right out,” he says.
I relax a little, comforted by the thought that someone outside
this door would hear me scream if I needed to.
I focus on the blood until I’m certain I’ve washed it all off my
neck and chest. I inspect my hair next, turning left to right in the
mirror, but find only an inch of dark roots above fading caramel.
“Here,” the man says, fingering the last button on his crisp white
shirt. “Put this on.”
He’s already removed his suit jacket, which is now hanging from
the doorknob. He frees himself of his button-up shirt, revealing a
white undershirt beneath it. He’s muscular, taller than me. His shirt
will swallow me. I can’t wear this into my meeting, but I have no
other option. I take the shirt when he hands it to me. I grab a few
more dry paper towels and pat at my skin, then pull it on and begin
buttoning it. It looks ridiculous, but at least it wasn’t my skull that
exploded on someone else’s shirt. Silver lining.
I take my wet shirt out of the sink and accept there’s no saving
it. I toss it in the trash can, and then I grip the sink and stare at my
reflection. Two tired, empty eyes stare back at me. The horror of
what they’ve just witnessed has darkened the hazel to a murky
brown. I rub my cheeks with the heels of my hands to inspire color,
to no avail. I look like death.
I lean against the wall, turning away from the mirror. The man is
wadding up his tie. He shoves it in the pocket of his suit and
assesses me for a moment. “I can’t tell if you’re calm or in a state of
shock.”
I’m not in shock, but I don’t know that I’m calm, either. “I’m not
sure,” I admit. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve seen worse, unfortunately.”
I tilt my head as I attempt to dissect the layers of his cryptic
reply. He breaks eye contact, and it only makes me stare even
harder, wondering what he’s seen that tops a man’s head being
crushed beneath a truck. Maybe he is a native New Yorker. Or
maybe he works in a hospital. He has an air of competence that
often accompanies people who are in charge of other people.
“Are you a doctor?”
He shakes his head. “I’m in real estate. Used to be, anyway.” He
steps forward and reaches for my shoulder, brushing something
away from my shirt. His shirt. When he drops his arm, he regards
my face for a moment before taking a step back.
His eyes match the tie he just shoved in his pocket. Chartreuse.
He’s handsome, but there’s something about him that makes me
think he wishes he weren’t. Almost as if his looks might be an
inconvenience to him. A part of him he doesn’t want anyone to
notice. He wants to be invisible in this city. Just like me.
Most people come to New York to be discovered. The rest of us
come here to hide.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Lowen.”
There’s a pause in him after I say my name, but it only lasts a
couple seconds.
“Jeremy,” he says. He moves to the sink and runs the water
again, and begins washing his hands. I continue to stare at him,
unable to mute my curiosity. What did he mean when he said he’s
seen worse than the accident we just witnessed? He said he used to
be in real estate, but even the worst day on the job as a Realtor
wouldn’t fill someone with the kind of gloom that’s filling this man.
“What happened to you?” I ask.
He looks at me in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
“You said you’ve seen worse. What have you seen?”
He turns off the water and dries his hands, then faces me. “You
actually want to know?”
I nod.
He tosses the paper towel into the trash can and then shoves his
hands in his pockets. His demeanor takes an even more sullen dive.
He’s looking me in the eye, but there’s a disconnect between him
and this moment. “I pulled my eight-year-old daughter’s body out of
a lake five months ago.”
I suck in a rush of air and bring my hand to the base of my
throat. It wasn’t gloom at all in his expression. It was despair. “I’m
so sorry,” I whisper. And I am. Sorry about his daughter. Sorry for
being curious.
“What about you?” he asks. He leans against the counter like this
is a conversation he’s ready for. A conversation he’s been waiting for.
Someone to come along and make his tragedies seem less tragic.
It’s what you do when you’ve experienced the worst of the worst.
You seek out people like you…people worse off than you…and you
use them to make yourself feel better about the terrible things that
have happened to you.
I
swallow before I speak, because my tragedies are nothing
compared to his. I think of the most recent one, embarrassed to
speak it out loud because it seems so insignificant compared to his.
“My mother died last week.”
He doesn’t react to my tragedy like I reacted to his. He doesn’t
react at all, and I wonder if it’s because he was hoping mine was
worse. It isn’t. He wins.
“How did she die?”
“Cancer. I’ve been caring for her in my apartment for the past
year.” He’s the first person I’ve said that to out loud. I can feel my
pulse throbbing in my wrist, so I clasp my other hand around it.
“Today is the first time I’ve stepped outside in weeks.”
We stare at each other for a moment longer. I want to say
something else, but I’ve never been involved in such a heavy
conversation with a complete stranger before. I kind of want it to
end, because where does the conversation even go from here?
It doesn’t. It just stops