Eschaton
On that particular road was a curve preceded by a long stretch of narrow pavement. Two single lanes passing each other by at forty-five miles per hour. At one side tree-topped hills and at the other a reclining meadow. The overhang of the trees shaded the lane to his left, but that early morning it was freshly watered from the drizzle of the night and the day before it. The gleam of what little light there was mottling the blacktop. Rain. Not a hard downpour but a constant and incessant mist that seemed a malaise personified; the kind that makes you prefer the adrenaline of an electrical storm, that seeps into your pores with a musty stench drawing earthworms out onto the sidewalk. Gray skies and gray fog like the clouds pulled down from the overcast, thick enough to need your headlights on at 8:00 AM. It was an ordinary morning, as identical in its features as so many that had yet weathered the road more innumerable to imagine in the fifty-odd years since the asphalt was poured and set and painted, when the surrounding areas were still claimed by acres of wilderness that prepared unwittingly for the civilization that would soon tear in. Beneath it a perfect algorithm was forming. Its integers shifting into place as tectonic plates, as gears clicking together and beginning to turn.
Only one ticket garnered in his life, one black mark on a record otherwise spotless for not noticing the police cruiser in his rearview while he happened to be doing 70 in a 55 zone. Siren and red and blue beckon putting the fear in him. And the money he had to fork out of his own waning collegiate pocket and the time divested on dull safety seminars. It was fear he had. Not caution or respect as much as they could be distinguished. But he was a good driver by any authoritative measure and from this one and final wreck there would be no lesson accrued about any wheelside error or misjudgment save that he should've just been somewhere, anywhere else. The vehicle was his father's SUV hatchback, gray and dinged and almost two decades old already. It was given in preparation of the coming winter weather, for the ice sheaves on the roads that the four-wheel drive would assuage. For safety. Where it languished in the junkyard its front bumper was crumpled and caved and moist from the coolant that had leaked out of its radiator. Liquid pooled splotchy on the metal. Still wafting faintly about its vacated windshield was white smoke that had obscured from the paramedics the last gusts of his breath in the brisk air.
An unopened case of beer was in his passenger seat. It rested untouched and unopened and would remain so until the day's schedule was complete and he was back home. He'd bought it the night before after a roofing job uptown. Long, arduous work that had earned him some carnal reward he reasoned. Just a taste to relax before bed. And anyway, it was light beer. And it was unopened. He made that point as clear as he was able to the officers, and he freely cooperated with their sobriety tests and unwarranted searches. If he could pride himself on anything it was this: he was not a liar, and always he took responsibility for what he did. No matter how calamitous his actions, he never denied them. It seemed the only principle ever taught that managed to penetrate through his thick skull and remain there. It was there when as a child he picked a fight with the wrong kid that left his jaw broken such that he'd speak for the rest of his life impeded out of one side of his mouth. There when he took an eager swan dive into a quagmire of partying and illicit substances and, of course, the drink that like a warm blanket wrapped around him and protected from any doubt or stutter and he could be forthright and charming and handsome. It was love to him, what love felt like, its substance. Somehow, in some particulars he couldn't quite recall, a daughter was brought into the world that he never met, first out of his own shame and guilt and later from angry reprimand. Wages entrusted to strangers. His twenties into his thirties were a blur, a field of landmines he couldn't avoid. What principles he held didn't abate any of his failures, his bad penchants, his dumbass tendencies. That was his true weakness: to be aware of his flaws yet unable to fix them. Unable or unwilling. But he was on the upswing this time. Standing against the risen tide and walking; legs strengthening slowly, slowly. This job was the first he'd been able to hold in years. Construction. Finally building something up instead of breaking it down. He drove with his monstrous battering ram of a pickup truck stocked full with concrete bags and cinder blocks.
It was a long road, yes, and vacant at that time in the morning. He chose a shortcut he had often used to bypass a few lights and the buildup of coagulated traffic behind them. On the way to his dad's place of business for some voluntary work. It was these days the only time he got to see him. A divorce as bitter and cold as any war, travailing from open hostility to shallow reconciliation and back again. After the last treaty had been declared he became a young man of two countries, crossing the border a free agent whose fealty was to both parties but to peacemaking most of all. The patient negotiator, the stand-in likeness of a father to his siblings. His growing up had been swift, sudden, and quiet. Growing tall in spite of his shouldered yoke like a pillar upholding a canopy to keep some hard truth from falling on those below him. Perhaps his absence would bring them together in such a way he was never able to in life, or perhaps it would be a definitive sledgehammer against any and all surviving bonds of affection and there would be venom and desolation personified to take his place. It wouldn't be his responsibility anymore.
The SUV was too old to have an auxiliary port and the CD player he had judged an antique relic that might as well have not been there. So he was left with the radio, and he had developed a proclivity for fidgeting with it nearly at all times behind the wheel. The search for the right song ongoing; the scrolling through every preset forwards and backwards and through to the stations unlisted, left hand twiddling the dial and the buttons and his attention flickering between the road and the stereo screen. Pressing his luck for split-seconds at a time, looking away. A few miles ahead coming down the other way was the man driving a truck tagged with emblems of his company, name and slogan and phone number. His mind was drifting elsewhere; numb at such an early hour, early for him anyway. Never could get a handle on the whole early bird concept, try as he might. The late night hours seemed always to invite him in, to welcome him into some kind of belonging. But that was not the shape of the prosperous man's life, the happy man's. It was the reflection he chased, the carrot at the end of the stick. He rolled himself like a boulder off of his mattress and into the shower and out the door and there he was driving, too tired to remember how he got there. Such the weary and frustrated marathon runner. The needle on his speedometer lilted upward incrementally, in the glacial and circumspect way one acquires a habit or an addiction or a holistic way of being. Unnoticed. 45 to 50 to 55. Unchecked. He pinched his first cigarette of the day from the pack in his shirt pocket and he reached down to press the car lighter.
The boy at the same moment turned the knob on the radio to some random coordinate he'd never stopped on before and a song he'd never heard nor especially liked began pouring from the speakers. His finger was still there when he looked up and saw it. A frame of time frozen crystalline and precise, its every detail glaring all at once. The black pickup truck already swerving around the bend and the exact distance it had to travel to him measured by the shimmer from the headlights on the gossamer pavement and the deer caught cross between them gliding mid-gallop through individual beads of precipitation, its meticulous rack of antlers pointing forward and purposeful. The man had seen it too late, standing austere on the treeline then barreling down onto the blacktop sheen. Tires screeching, spinning out as the backside of his heavy cargo bed swung into the lane opposite. His fingernails concaved into the steering wheel as claws desperate to maintain any control. Were it any different road, any different time, surely he would. If he had hit the snooze button once more, had gotten caught by another red light, had perhaps never fallen behind in his life and had now to play a belated and Sisyphean game of catch-up. But this was a convergence unavoidable. An intersection foreordained by a sum totality of choices made conscious and unconscious by him and the child and parties beyond neither present nor ever aware of their repercussions. It could only have happened here, now. This moment made for this and only this.
The impact of the initial collision broke a spiderweb pattern into the windshield and a constellation of glass shards perforated his cheek and into his right eye socket. They don't break all at once like in movies. This one thought flared momentarily across his mind like a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, one among a hundred others showering in successful flashes. Moisture suddenly on his face, his knuckles. Spinning and tumbling. No time to hit the brakes, no time at all. His spine, his neck absorbing the full potency of what a truck of that caliber could do at such a speed. His forehead at some point had struck the steering wheel and blood was running down and his vision was hampered and fading. The SUV was old, overdue for maintenance, and its airbags were nowhere to be found. A hand-me-down aggregate of parts now failing. The front axle snapped and the chassis deformed and cracked as it spiraled and toppled over and finally stopped in the meadow obstructed by the road, rolled on the driver's side as a wounded animal breathing its last. He lay with his skull resting on the glass sandwiched between the concrete and his neck, broken, suspended on the taut choking seatbelt that could have saved him if the vertebra had been an inch lower against it. The one eye still lucid, still clear gazed out toward the field. There in the vacant grassland was the deer, watching silently. A pilgrim that had wandered far to be there, the instrument perhaps of some divine orchestration as heartless at least as those crafted by the master potter of Calvin's theology. Standing indifferent, inscrutable. The dark eyes he saw round as dollops of obsidian blinking and peering. He stared into their reflection as the cape unfurled over his body and there was black and black staring back at him.
The truck had stopped after making a full revolution and now it faced the other way it had come, straddling the two solid yellow traffic lines. The driver saw the SUV bounce and pirouette off of him. It lay now in his side mirror off the road, on its side. He was breathing heavily, close to hyperventilating, and shaking. Endorphins surged through his bloodstream while everything outside was still, silent. There was no pain or injury he could detect. He only felt afraid. Afraid of stepping out of his vehicle, of walking over and seeing what awaited him. The alternative option came to him and he did consider it for long enough to be ashamed. So easy just to speed away across the state line; into the next timezone, the next hemisphere. Of what good were his principles if they all lead to this? He stepped out. The side of the cargo bed was cratered and the rear tire was bent inward. Not getting away on that. He was almost relieved, to be rid of the temptation. There was detritus of glass, mirror, metal, and plastic undercarriage strewn about the way in an assemblage that made a scattered trail to the crash. He hesitated, dialed 911. Approaching labored, stunted like a toddler learning to walk. That smell of burnt rubber. A canned warble from still-functioning speakers. He tried to call out but his jaw was locked shut and his teeth were chattering inside. He went closer, closer until he could see the back of the head and its auburn hair. Not moving, not speaking. An ashen pallor over the scene, the stillness of the road. The moisture gauzy on it like a laminate perfectly preserved. He sat on the curb and put his face in his hands and tried to gather what remained of himself before they arrived.
They were cutting him from the vehicle when his mother pulled up and leapt from her minivan. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. A sound that echoed out to the serpentine of stalled cars that had formed behind where they blocked the street off. They wouldn't let her through and did not disclose the truth of the situation as they shucked him from the SUV and rushed him on the gurney to the ambulance and sped away. Rote formalities. The countenance of the paramedics told the real story. There would be no thank you's uttered to the Almighty this day. No place for gratitude when things end in true, abject catastrophe, when there are no silver linings with which to reach up and grasp and pull yourself from the pit of ruin. It might be that to thank Him is to curse Him too, to curse for every time He isn't thanked, if every outcome proceeds by His own arbitration. The man sensed a bitter injustice to it, and he suspected the policemen did as well. That a boy of nineteen, starting out on the path wide open before him, was cut down in favor of a used-up slab of meat whose best surely was behind him. The cruelty of it, not even granting him the consolation of blame. It would eventually be ruled a misdemeanor. He would pay out a sizable fine, for him, then be let back into the wild to return to a framework that would never be set right again. The rest of his days with that question his passenger, asking it over and over and not hearing an answer. Why him? Why me? He went through the familiar procedure the cops ran by him. Not his first rodeo, they both knew, yet nothing like this. He put his wrists up to be cuffed before they even asked him and he slid smoothly, readily into the cruiser. From the car window he caught a glimpse of the stag still in the field beyond, catching in the armature of its crown the warm glow of the belated sunrise through the gray. A doe was accompanying it now, and a fawn that teetered on little spindled legs.
When he awoke that morning the boy went through his usual routine. Took a shower, brushed his teeth, made breakfast for himself and his two younger siblings. At the kitchen table, sleepy and demure. Tension walked in with his mother, and there was negotiation with regards to what he'd be doing that day. He'd become skilled in the delicate intricacies of communicating with her, as all children are with their parents. Reading their face and the tone of their body language. Measuring exactly how much to say, how much not to. It was tiresome, annoying, frustrating in a way that felt like a fist clenched in the middle of his chest. He didn't want to talk. No, he longed for the road. To be away from her, away from the appetites of his brother and sister and away also from his father and the same mediation he'd have to engage with him. Hands on the steering wheel. Right foot alternating. Face forward. The autonomous trance of driving; the command over a vehicle, a machine. On the road he felt freedom, mitigated though it was by the rules of law. He could go anywhere, it seemed, do anything. It was the best part of his day, and he cherished every moment spent there. Where his purpose was evident and in his solitude his thoughts could collate themselves and digest. The openness of it, every turn another trajectory to set himself on. How effortless to take one unplanned and escape. Just one taken and followed through to its conclusion, wherever it lead. And perhaps he would have, had it been any other time. But he didn't. He chose of his own granted volition the path of adherence, accepting implicitly its destination, and toward it he sped off and far and away.
Only one ticket garnered in his life, one black mark on a record otherwise spotless for not noticing the police cruiser in his rearview while he happened to be doing 70 in a 55 zone. Siren and red and blue beckon putting the fear in him. And the money he had to fork out of his own waning collegiate pocket and the time divested on dull safety seminars. It was fear he had. Not caution or respect as much as they could be distinguished. But he was a good driver by any authoritative measure and from this one and final wreck there would be no lesson accrued about any wheelside error or misjudgment save that he should've just been somewhere, anywhere else. The vehicle was his father's SUV hatchback, gray and dinged and almost two decades old already. It was given in preparation of the coming winter weather, for the ice sheaves on the roads that the four-wheel drive would assuage. For safety. Where it languished in the junkyard its front bumper was crumpled and caved and moist from the coolant that had leaked out of its radiator. Liquid pooled splotchy on the metal. Still wafting faintly about its vacated windshield was white smoke that had obscured from the paramedics the last gusts of his breath in the brisk air.
An unopened case of beer was in his passenger seat. It rested untouched and unopened and would remain so until the day's schedule was complete and he was back home. He'd bought it the night before after a roofing job uptown. Long, arduous work that had earned him some carnal reward he reasoned. Just a taste to relax before bed. And anyway, it was light beer. And it was unopened. He made that point as clear as he was able to the officers, and he freely cooperated with their sobriety tests and unwarranted searches. If he could pride himself on anything it was this: he was not a liar, and always he took responsibility for what he did. No matter how calamitous his actions, he never denied them. It seemed the only principle ever taught that managed to penetrate through his thick skull and remain there. It was there when as a child he picked a fight with the wrong kid that left his jaw broken such that he'd speak for the rest of his life impeded out of one side of his mouth. There when he took an eager swan dive into a quagmire of partying and illicit substances and, of course, the drink that like a warm blanket wrapped around him and protected from any doubt or stutter and he could be forthright and charming and handsome. It was love to him, what love felt like, its substance. Somehow, in some particulars he couldn't quite recall, a daughter was brought into the world that he never met, first out of his own shame and guilt and later from angry reprimand. Wages entrusted to strangers. His twenties into his thirties were a blur, a field of landmines he couldn't avoid. What principles he held didn't abate any of his failures, his bad penchants, his dumbass tendencies. That was his true weakness: to be aware of his flaws yet unable to fix them. Unable or unwilling. But he was on the upswing this time. Standing against the risen tide and walking; legs strengthening slowly, slowly. This job was the first he'd been able to hold in years. Construction. Finally building something up instead of breaking it down. He drove with his monstrous battering ram of a pickup truck stocked full with concrete bags and cinder blocks.
It was a long road, yes, and vacant at that time in the morning. He chose a shortcut he had often used to bypass a few lights and the buildup of coagulated traffic behind them. On the way to his dad's place of business for some voluntary work. It was these days the only time he got to see him. A divorce as bitter and cold as any war, travailing from open hostility to shallow reconciliation and back again. After the last treaty had been declared he became a young man of two countries, crossing the border a free agent whose fealty was to both parties but to peacemaking most of all. The patient negotiator, the stand-in likeness of a father to his siblings. His growing up had been swift, sudden, and quiet. Growing tall in spite of his shouldered yoke like a pillar upholding a canopy to keep some hard truth from falling on those below him. Perhaps his absence would bring them together in such a way he was never able to in life, or perhaps it would be a definitive sledgehammer against any and all surviving bonds of affection and there would be venom and desolation personified to take his place. It wouldn't be his responsibility anymore.
The SUV was too old to have an auxiliary port and the CD player he had judged an antique relic that might as well have not been there. So he was left with the radio, and he had developed a proclivity for fidgeting with it nearly at all times behind the wheel. The search for the right song ongoing; the scrolling through every preset forwards and backwards and through to the stations unlisted, left hand twiddling the dial and the buttons and his attention flickering between the road and the stereo screen. Pressing his luck for split-seconds at a time, looking away. A few miles ahead coming down the other way was the man driving a truck tagged with emblems of his company, name and slogan and phone number. His mind was drifting elsewhere; numb at such an early hour, early for him anyway. Never could get a handle on the whole early bird concept, try as he might. The late night hours seemed always to invite him in, to welcome him into some kind of belonging. But that was not the shape of the prosperous man's life, the happy man's. It was the reflection he chased, the carrot at the end of the stick. He rolled himself like a boulder off of his mattress and into the shower and out the door and there he was driving, too tired to remember how he got there. Such the weary and frustrated marathon runner. The needle on his speedometer lilted upward incrementally, in the glacial and circumspect way one acquires a habit or an addiction or a holistic way of being. Unnoticed. 45 to 50 to 55. Unchecked. He pinched his first cigarette of the day from the pack in his shirt pocket and he reached down to press the car lighter.
The boy at the same moment turned the knob on the radio to some random coordinate he'd never stopped on before and a song he'd never heard nor especially liked began pouring from the speakers. His finger was still there when he looked up and saw it. A frame of time frozen crystalline and precise, its every detail glaring all at once. The black pickup truck already swerving around the bend and the exact distance it had to travel to him measured by the shimmer from the headlights on the gossamer pavement and the deer caught cross between them gliding mid-gallop through individual beads of precipitation, its meticulous rack of antlers pointing forward and purposeful. The man had seen it too late, standing austere on the treeline then barreling down onto the blacktop sheen. Tires screeching, spinning out as the backside of his heavy cargo bed swung into the lane opposite. His fingernails concaved into the steering wheel as claws desperate to maintain any control. Were it any different road, any different time, surely he would. If he had hit the snooze button once more, had gotten caught by another red light, had perhaps never fallen behind in his life and had now to play a belated and Sisyphean game of catch-up. But this was a convergence unavoidable. An intersection foreordained by a sum totality of choices made conscious and unconscious by him and the child and parties beyond neither present nor ever aware of their repercussions. It could only have happened here, now. This moment made for this and only this.
The impact of the initial collision broke a spiderweb pattern into the windshield and a constellation of glass shards perforated his cheek and into his right eye socket. They don't break all at once like in movies. This one thought flared momentarily across his mind like a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, one among a hundred others showering in successful flashes. Moisture suddenly on his face, his knuckles. Spinning and tumbling. No time to hit the brakes, no time at all. His spine, his neck absorbing the full potency of what a truck of that caliber could do at such a speed. His forehead at some point had struck the steering wheel and blood was running down and his vision was hampered and fading. The SUV was old, overdue for maintenance, and its airbags were nowhere to be found. A hand-me-down aggregate of parts now failing. The front axle snapped and the chassis deformed and cracked as it spiraled and toppled over and finally stopped in the meadow obstructed by the road, rolled on the driver's side as a wounded animal breathing its last. He lay with his skull resting on the glass sandwiched between the concrete and his neck, broken, suspended on the taut choking seatbelt that could have saved him if the vertebra had been an inch lower against it. The one eye still lucid, still clear gazed out toward the field. There in the vacant grassland was the deer, watching silently. A pilgrim that had wandered far to be there, the instrument perhaps of some divine orchestration as heartless at least as those crafted by the master potter of Calvin's theology. Standing indifferent, inscrutable. The dark eyes he saw round as dollops of obsidian blinking and peering. He stared into their reflection as the cape unfurled over his body and there was black and black staring back at him.
The truck had stopped after making a full revolution and now it faced the other way it had come, straddling the two solid yellow traffic lines. The driver saw the SUV bounce and pirouette off of him. It lay now in his side mirror off the road, on its side. He was breathing heavily, close to hyperventilating, and shaking. Endorphins surged through his bloodstream while everything outside was still, silent. There was no pain or injury he could detect. He only felt afraid. Afraid of stepping out of his vehicle, of walking over and seeing what awaited him. The alternative option came to him and he did consider it for long enough to be ashamed. So easy just to speed away across the state line; into the next timezone, the next hemisphere. Of what good were his principles if they all lead to this? He stepped out. The side of the cargo bed was cratered and the rear tire was bent inward. Not getting away on that. He was almost relieved, to be rid of the temptation. There was detritus of glass, mirror, metal, and plastic undercarriage strewn about the way in an assemblage that made a scattered trail to the crash. He hesitated, dialed 911. Approaching labored, stunted like a toddler learning to walk. That smell of burnt rubber. A canned warble from still-functioning speakers. He tried to call out but his jaw was locked shut and his teeth were chattering inside. He went closer, closer until he could see the back of the head and its auburn hair. Not moving, not speaking. An ashen pallor over the scene, the stillness of the road. The moisture gauzy on it like a laminate perfectly preserved. He sat on the curb and put his face in his hands and tried to gather what remained of himself before they arrived.
They were cutting him from the vehicle when his mother pulled up and leapt from her minivan. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. A sound that echoed out to the serpentine of stalled cars that had formed behind where they blocked the street off. They wouldn't let her through and did not disclose the truth of the situation as they shucked him from the SUV and rushed him on the gurney to the ambulance and sped away. Rote formalities. The countenance of the paramedics told the real story. There would be no thank you's uttered to the Almighty this day. No place for gratitude when things end in true, abject catastrophe, when there are no silver linings with which to reach up and grasp and pull yourself from the pit of ruin. It might be that to thank Him is to curse Him too, to curse for every time He isn't thanked, if every outcome proceeds by His own arbitration. The man sensed a bitter injustice to it, and he suspected the policemen did as well. That a boy of nineteen, starting out on the path wide open before him, was cut down in favor of a used-up slab of meat whose best surely was behind him. The cruelty of it, not even granting him the consolation of blame. It would eventually be ruled a misdemeanor. He would pay out a sizable fine, for him, then be let back into the wild to return to a framework that would never be set right again. The rest of his days with that question his passenger, asking it over and over and not hearing an answer. Why him? Why me? He went through the familiar procedure the cops ran by him. Not his first rodeo, they both knew, yet nothing like this. He put his wrists up to be cuffed before they even asked him and he slid smoothly, readily into the cruiser. From the car window he caught a glimpse of the stag still in the field beyond, catching in the armature of its crown the warm glow of the belated sunrise through the gray. A doe was accompanying it now, and a fawn that teetered on little spindled legs.
When he awoke that morning the boy went through his usual routine. Took a shower, brushed his teeth, made breakfast for himself and his two younger siblings. At the kitchen table, sleepy and demure. Tension walked in with his mother, and there was negotiation with regards to what he'd be doing that day. He'd become skilled in the delicate intricacies of communicating with her, as all children are with their parents. Reading their face and the tone of their body language. Measuring exactly how much to say, how much not to. It was tiresome, annoying, frustrating in a way that felt like a fist clenched in the middle of his chest. He didn't want to talk. No, he longed for the road. To be away from her, away from the appetites of his brother and sister and away also from his father and the same mediation he'd have to engage with him. Hands on the steering wheel. Right foot alternating. Face forward. The autonomous trance of driving; the command over a vehicle, a machine. On the road he felt freedom, mitigated though it was by the rules of law. He could go anywhere, it seemed, do anything. It was the best part of his day, and he cherished every moment spent there. Where his purpose was evident and in his solitude his thoughts could collate themselves and digest. The openness of it, every turn another trajectory to set himself on. How effortless to take one unplanned and escape. Just one taken and followed through to its conclusion, wherever it lead. And perhaps he would have, had it been any other time. But he didn't. He chose of his own granted volition the path of adherence, accepting implicitly its destination, and toward it he sped off and far and away.
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