There’s something unsettling about that calm-before-the-storm feeling, especially when you’ve felt the storms life is capable of creating. I remember feeling that eerie calm this past summer, like standing in a big open space right before a thunderstorm, the air hanging thick with magnetism—warning you that the sky is about to split wide open. Limbically it feels more like a strange, tangible emptiness around you. Almost like the air is numb and it’s numbing you from the lungs out, preemptively anesthetizing you for a horribly painful situation.
I had this feeling driving home one day. I remember leaving work and being instantly engulfed in the soupy June heat. I was getting off at noon during the hottest part of the day—my head already swimming in the disorienting sobriety induced by a full shift of work in a fluorescently lit hotel kitchen that felt about as hospitable as an operating room. I still had a few errands to run before I retreated into a quiet weekend of smoking and day drinking by my apartment pool. After picking up some weed and gin I made my way to Ball Photo to drop off a roll of film from the previous weekend’s beach trip.
Driving home from the film store is when that vacuum-like emptiness began to feel like an envelope all around my head. Things were too calm. I passed a fire truck in the tunnel that separates the residential part of town where I live from the grocery stores and auto body shops. The lights were all flashing and they barreled by me at an appropriately urgent speed, but there was no noise, no sirens, just the vacuum of whooshing air that lightly shook my compact car as the truck passed. As I exited the tunnel I felt a gentle sense of relief at the thought of being closer to home with my bong and lack of obligations.
I turned onto my street and in an instant the storm was right over my head. Suddenly there was a sick, earsplitting explosion. I heard crunching sheet metal and breaking glass, a sound so unfortunately familiar to me. My windshield shattered abruptly, the fingers of breaking glass splitting out from a central position, creating a spiderweb pattern around a depression the diameter of a human skull. I felt that instantaneous preservative numbness flower inside of me like a black hole in my chest where all sensation folds in on itself and leaves the body. I thought of the accident I had a little over a year prior. The gruesome, fracturing sound, how hard an impact had to be to crunch up a car in a matter of seconds.
Thankfully, my threshold for cold rationality is pretty low. I grabbed the baggy of weed I just bought, ran around to the trunk, and threw it under the spare tire. As I was getting back around to the crumpled body that lay groaning in front of my car an officer arrived, already asking rapid fire questions before he was fully out of the vehicle. He happened to be behind me coming towards downtown. The pedestrian was folded up, pitiful and still. Across the street at the State Farm office a younger blond lady looked timorously at the body, then up at me making hesitant eye contact. There was a new look in her eyes, one I had never seen, one that reflected an unfathomable disturbance at the sight of someone bleeding out in the middle of the street. Blood bloomed in slow motion onto the pavement, the thick red stuff coalescing with the hot asphalt.
I didn’t see the man until he was rolling off my hood, which is what I told the officer who arrived there first. The officer asked if the man was in the crosswalk. He wasn’t. Recounting what I had seen while watching the blood insidiously pool around the man’s now convulsing body felt much more bureaucratic than I would’ve expected it to. I honestly didn’t feel much of anything, let alone have any idea where to start feeling.
The next half hour passed in chaos, unpleasantly warped by tragedy, while the heat waves settled into our foreheads and cheeks, sweat pilling up along my hairline. I kept thinking about how hot the man must be lying on the pavement. Realistically he probably felt nothing. Two other police cars arrived, one of them with two black women who came over and began asking me for identification; a middle aged, white, male officer stepped out of the other one and asked me if I was okay. I wasn’t. A silent fire truck arrived like the one I saw in the tunnel; one of the men that stepped out handed me a bottle of water. Then another cruiser arrived with a younger, much smaller male officer with sleeves of tattoos who was very stoic. Another sheriff, officer Derrick, began talking to the officer who arrived first. I just stood there in front of my car in the middle of it all for a while.
An ambulance arrived; a horde of EMS workers efficiently and militantly kneeled next to the body, which was no longer convulsing–or moving at all. I asked them with a flat affect if he would be okay knowing full well he would be dead before they could get him to the hospital. They looked up briefly at me with blank stares, then back at the man. I watched six or eight of them systematically roll his limp body onto his back and sit him upright, which is when I saw his face for the first time. It was unclear which part of his skull hit the windshield first, but his face and entire anterior was covered in blood. The thick cadmium red plasma was sickening, obscuring all his gaunt features in a veil of viscous horror. His eyes were closed. Blood dripped from his disfigured face into his open mouth as I stared, empty and perturbed at the sight of shattered bone and liquified brain sloughing from the back of his skull. He had all but bled out right there in front of me when Officer Derrick herded me away from the scene and said it would be best if I didn’t watch. I was captivated by the EMS team hoisting the man’s sloppy, dead weight onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. Then he was gone.
I didn’t actually get confirmation that I killed the guy until three days later; it took three more months after that to get his name. David Joseph Vanderhorst. A short while after they took the body a crime scene investigator showed up and took photos of the accident site. It was like a movie. They put out little yellow number markers to determine the angle and speed and whether or not I was at fault. Then a tow truck arrived to haul my car to an evidence warehouse. I sat on the curb and watched a grim looking man with a cigarette half hanging out of his mouth hook my Honda up to his truck and drive away. Through the trees an elderly black couple huddled together on their patio and watched the whole devastation play out. No one actually saw the impact; passerbyers watched like an important sports match was nearing the end. I thought a lot about that. Curiosity was the only emotion in their eyes, not concern or sadness.
A few days later I was allowed to retrieve the items from my car, which was in a shop with a bunch of other cars damaged in unsettling ways. The windshield still had flesh embedded into the cracked glass. There were several drops of dried blood on the hood still, and a small dent where the man’s body had hit. I tried desperately to feel anything other than a cold urgency to get away from that car. A couple days after that my car was towed to a shop in Hendersonville where it sat for the next two months. Apparently the man working on my car died shortly after they took it in.
For the rest of the month of June and all of July I stayed home as much as possible. Whenever I did go out it was mostly to get drunk. I painted for hours every day, trying to avoid letting the horrorshow of the accident play out in my head. When that sticky molasses sadness started seeping into my mind I eradicated it with copious amounts of alcohol and weed. I thought about that calm feeling a lot, though–I still do.
