North by Northwestern

I’m not a morbid person. I can’t stand horror movies or most types of violence or gore. But I regularly have vivid thoughts of how I might come to extreme bodily harm while performing everyday errands. Often they’re bloody and somewhat absurd. They almost always seem to involve cars - I never imagine myself dying of cancer or in a hospital. I am fixated on a roadside death, the kind that happens so quickly there isn’t even time for medical attention. Pronounced dead at the scene. 

Walking through a crosswalk, I step in front of a semi truck. Unable to see me through the blinding light of the low winter sun, it careens into the crosswalk at what is surely a high enough speed to kill me. I bounce from grated bumper to asphalt with more force than I had imagined possible. It’s hitting the ground that kills you, not the car. There will be an unpleasant crunch of broken bones, a pool of blood beneath my head, leaking into the cracks in the street and spilling over into the persistent potholes the city never seems to fix. In my mind there’s a lot of blood, the color and consistency of still-liquid cherry Jell-O, like in a B-movie.

Driving home in my black 1998 Volvo that I’ve nicknamed Sven (because it’s Swedish, and it always seemed like a masculine machine to me), I come up behind two cyclists riding on the side of a back country road. As I try to move away to pass them, I fail to notice an oncoming car. At 60 miles per hour, we collide head on, the front ends of our cars crushing into one big death-trap mess. Metal on metal crunch. Airbags deploy, snapping my head back against the headrest, obscuring my vision, breaking my nose. We hit the bikers anyway and they are knocked like toy soldiers off the shoulder and into a ditch. Every time I pass spandexed bikers on the road, I give them wide berth, fearing I will inadvertently hit them: because after five years of driving I still have a bad sense of where my car begins and ends, because there’s a somewhat well-founded fear that they’re actually my parents, who are avid cyclers, and I will have killed not just anyone but most of my family. 

Leaning over a bridge that arches above a busy freeway, I lose my balance and tumble onto traffic below. The wind and the momentum of the speeding cars buffets my body as I bounce like a rag doll between cars. No one has time to stop; no one sees me coming from above. In my mind it’s like a giant moonbounce where I skip from roof to roof. I doubt this is how physics works. I would probably crush in the roof of a sedan like on television when people jump out of New York City high rises. At most I would maybe flip off onto the pavement to be run down by the car tailgating behind them, slumping limply in the road like a dead coyote. I’m afraid of heights. 

If, while walking across this parking lot with a lollipop in my mouth, a careless driver more intent on his Wendy’s than pedestrian safety runs into me, the grape Tootsie Pop will choke me to death, ramming into the back of my throat with the impact, which maybe wouldn’t have been so bad in itself. I am reminded of all of the elementary school teachers who told us not to run with suckers. I have this thought every time I eat a lollipop. I don’t want to die eating a Tootsie Pop, immortalized in such an infantilizing way, all because I have an uncontrollable sweet tooth. Death candy. 

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I’m overly cautious, and this kind of uncontrollable urge to imagine how my body might be mutilated at any moment by a daily occurrence is perhaps why. I’ve never even broken a bone. I fear future pain infinitely more than I dislike real pain. 

I fear humiliation in the already-somewhat-humiliating state of death, with its involuntary bowel movements and uncontrollable factors. In movies people are always laid out with some sort of dignity, even in brutal accidents. Like they’re just asleep, stretched out in bed or curled up around a pillow.

The only dead person I’ve ever seen was Vladimir Lenin, a waxy corpse preserved for 85 years. He was a doll, not a receptacle that once held life. The closest I’ve come to really understanding a lifeless body is the high volume of dead skunks I see driving around my hometown. Once I saw a motorcyclist sprawled across a freeway onramp, his bike a solid 100 yards away. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but motorcycle accidents don’t often turn out well for the guy on the bike. My father has a street bike, and my earliest memories of riding with him involve him warning me to wear long sleeves to protect me from road rash if I fell. I wonder if the violent daydreams started then, riding on the back of his motorcycle, wondering at which moment I might be thrown across the road, scraped along bumpy asphalt and sharp gravel, my helmet bouncing against the ground with a plastic clank. 

They’re not comforting thoughts. I wonder if they’re the sign of a deeply disturbed psyche, or some sort of desperate subconscious cry for therapy. But at least if I do die in a road accident, now I can say I told you so.