The man on the sidewalk

Have you ever seen a dead person when you weren’t expecting it?

If you have, what was it like? Please respond to this email, if you feel like sharing.

If you haven’t, what makes you so sure?

I ask because I think saw a dead person today, and I wasn’t expecting it. I was biking back from the park, brain activity flattened by the late summer heat. As I crossed an intersection, I saw a crowd of people on the adjacent corner, but I didn’t think much of it. Then I saw a motorbike, smashed and crinkled, lifeless on its side and surrounded by shattered glass and other metal bits. I didn’t feel anything, mostly because my mind was not actively processing the visual information it was receiving, and I continued to look around. There was a person, face down, helmet cracked, limbs splayed not in a grotesque way but not in a way that they should’ve been. Someone is not supposed to be facedown on a street corner surrounded by glass and onlookers and a frantic woman on the phone with paramedics. My stomach dropped.

It clicked suddenly, that I had entered a story in media res, and my brain quickly reverse-engineered the horrific story. A man on a motorbike hadn’t seen an oncoming car, getting sideswiped when trying to hang a left, the collision hurtling him off the bike and his body meeting the unforgiving pavement. Or maybe he had made a miscalculation, hitting a bump too fast at a wrong angle and finding himself in a demented, unwinnable fight with physics. No matter.

The wind around me stilled, time froze, and I biked past what felt like a painting. No blood, no gore, but all the elements of some dark art. Twisted emotion stretched across faces. Objects not where should be. A life hanging in the balance.

There was no reason for me to stop, there were already some double-digits of onlookers. There was already someone knelt down trying to talk to the person, feeling for a pulse, grasping at the rudimentary lifeguarding skills they had memorized as a 15-year-old with a summer job, feeling helpless and pathetic. There was already someone shakily trying to communicate with an operator what was laid out before them, clinging to some hope that that phone call might just turn everything around.

And then there was me, biking by, alongside cars who would not have a clue what was happening if they were keeping their eyes on the road ahead of them. And passengers of those cars buried in their phones and blissfully unaware of this random and terrible thing. And tenants in surrounding buildings that might’ve woken up from an afternoon nap from the sound of the crash, but not gone to the window to investigate further.

I was a block away now when it struck me— there was no guarantee that that person was still alive.

How interesting of me to have seen all of that, only to instantly assume that they were going to be fine, that my day and his day and everyone else’s day would continue in their own inconsequential ways.

How wild to have been waiting at a traffic light a mere block before that scene, taking a selfie in front of my friends’ apartment to send to them and wondering what I was going to do for the next few hours before dinner.

And how perverse that the event would cause that person’s loved ones a lifetime of indescribable torment, while I might forget about it by this time next week.