Deathwish 010: Brian
“to just step out of the car at seventy miles an hour”
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I don’t think of my own impending death too often. By the way, it’s impending in the way that everyone’s death is, at least as far as I know.
But, when I do, it’s generally in the context of riding as a passenger in a vehicle traveling at high speed. I watch the pavement blur past out the window and imagine what it would look like if I opened the door and looked straight down at the ground. And then, I imagine what it would feel like to just step out of the car at seventy miles an hour.
I can get my imagination to lodge first person in that first split-second of experience, that immediacy of foot to pavement. In my mind’s eye now, I’m wearing light-gray Capezio shoes, like I did back in high school. Not sure why. But if I had to guess, it would be something about the soft leather hitting the uneven surface of the macadam at speed.
Once the immediacy of initial contact is past, my imagination of what would happen, as my fingers are ripped from the inside door handle, as my body tumbles out along the shoulder of the freeway, as bits of me are scuffed away in split-seconds of contact with the road, opening the wet reality of my inside to the erosion of the wet, physical world, it’s all in third person.
So much of my imagination of death happens in third person. Sympathy for the characters having their skulls crushed in a variety of movies. God, having your skull crushed has got to suck. The solidity of the thing, up against the reality of the world, which is always a harder thing, and who loses? Imagine that which houses who you really are, caved in upon itself, slicing through its charge.
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Brian was born in and lives in Portland, OR.