Archive for July 17th, 2008
The Locked Man
Nixon Burroughs shuffled down the street, a slight limp in his left leg pulling his pace back a step from the rest of the crowd. Eighteen months ago a car accident left his right leg broken in several places and now, in the late stages of his recovery, he still shuffled at a sloth’s pace. But that is not all. From time to time his mind would glaze over and wander back to the curious dread he felt when he lost control of his black Volkswagen GTi and relive the awful sound of screeching tires and grinding metal, the soft, stomach churning lift over the embankment and hanging like a magician’s handkerchief at the height of its mid-flight trajectory, the wait, and the emptiness that followed the long descent down to the point of impact. A hush. And the crunch of his skull on the windshield.
That is where his memories ended: a quarter of an inch before the windshield. It was at this point that time and motion melted down to a slow candle wax drip. The windshield elongating before his eyes, he saw it as a large sheet of blue ice hovering there before him, a wide, bright surface with mysterious things swimming just beyond it. And then it engulfed his whole world and he crashed through it. And submerged.
According to Sergeant MacClusky they found him four days later in a ditch about 25 miles from the crash site, somewhere just outside of Pittsfield, face down, bruised and scarred, with his green Army Surplus jacket on inside out and only one shoe on his left foot. They found the other one about eighteen meters from the crushed car. He saw the photos. Dark grainy pictures of the crushed hood and the shattered windshield with its web of white and blue lines and the shredded tires hanging like melted wax from the wheel wells. There were dents and scrapes over the whole thing. It reminded him of a piece of discarded tinfoil.
But no one could figure it out. how had he survived for four days without human contact and no food and water? According to reports, he had pulled himself out of the driver’s side window tearing great hunks of flesh out of his back and then crawled up through the bramble and stinger nettles to the main road where, with shards of glass still lodged in his face and blood oozing out of the large gashes behind his ears, and wrists, and legs, and the ones crisscrossing his chest, he wandered aimlessly without food or water in the general vicinity of Pittsfield, population fourteen thousand. And no one noticed him. For four whole days and no one saw a thing.
Nixon Burroughs couldn’t explain it either. So he had to trust what they told him. He dug around but nothing came up. While recovering in the hospital he’d read and re-read the news clippings from The Pittsfield Press, The Telegram, The Tribute straining to remember something, to read a comment or see a familiar detail in the background of some photo that would stir something in his mind. But nothing came of it. He followed up on the police investigation (for whatever that was worth) but was met with terse facts and polite brush-offs that he should “take it easy” and “get well soon.”
He shook his head to keep the memories back and crept up to the corner of Fifth and Davis and waited there with the others for the light to change. A faint gust of cold wind curled around him and he drew his used parka closer around his thin frame, trying to forget. When his memories overtook his waking life he would black out and there were times when he was submerged for a full ten, twenty, even thirty minutes–his longest so far was almost an hour–and once he swam back to consciousness, he would find himself a full block away from where the submerging started, other times he was in the same spot, barely registering the traffic and the stiff grumbles of people elbowing passed him on their way down the street.
Every time this happened, he awoke to blistering headaches. The screws holding his right leg together felt as if they were tightening deeper and deeper in his bones and ligaments and he would be immobilized with the pain. Lately, his ribs started to hurt as well and the pain seemed to be creeping back towards his spine, a part of his body that was almost permanently damaged in the accident.
So he had to keep moving, keep body limber and his mind distracted. Waiting there on the corner of Fifth and Davis he tuned into the noise across the street, taking in the faint voices and hammers drifting out from behind the barricaded construction site and turned to watch a large flatbed truck back up onto a ramp, beep beep beeping, and drop off a large load of rebar.
The light changed and the crowd surged forward leaving Nixon Burroughs alone at the curb. He joined the flow a half step behind and headed across the street towards the construction site which was surrounded by a protective ten foot high barricade. Finally on the other side of the street he ran his hands along the iron fence sometimes grazing the posters that were slapped up on the barricade, not really reading them just sort of absorbing them as he passed by. He winced as a horn blasted from inside the construction site. Men with yellow hardhats leapt from their trucks and headed off through the wide entrance, silver lunch pails swinging by their side. He was curious. Construction sites always made him feel that way and he wanted a peek inside. Just see what they were doing, take a guess at what was going up. He picked up his pace and headed towards the entrance, the wind snapping the posters’s dog-eared corners as he passed.
Just before the entrance, he stopped. Something was different. Out of place. He took one slow step backwards and shot a glance at a cluster of posters that hung at crooked angles. There amid the jumble was a single poster with a black and white photo on it. It was centered and perfectly squared as if it were hung in an art gallery.
He leaned in to get a better look and saw his own face staring back at him.
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