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NEW YORK STORIES

"The Accident" by Tom Birner



I learned my grandmother died in the middle of a fantastic omelet, which itself interrupted a fine hangover. My brother left the message, in a respectful deadpan I also would have used had I been the one to break the news. I listened with one eye on the omelet, knowing that I wasn’t supposed to finish it and that I would, because unlike my grandmother, it still remained.

Two days later I flew to Buffalo for the funeral, where I met a wonderful girl named Natalie, and stayed two weeks later than I had planned. The city is marked by dreadful weather, recessions and familial fruitlessness—and will never be the same. The nights are as joyful as the days are dreadful: mingling with my extended family stirs my envy for grandma, sleeping in the corner.

On my first night back I’m randomly contacted by Brigid, a friend of a friend’s ex-girlfriend who just moved here from Vermont. I expected only to blab about the recent contrast of love and death the past few weeks. And love is dead in this fine city, perhaps because it is too fine, indeed, and no one’s desperate enough to seek it.

I leave at just after 11 in a steady mist of rain. I’m meeting her for no other reason but to gauge whether she is a viable social option. I don’t need a girlfriend, yet I call only to cross it off my list of things, not women, to do.

Despite occasional sirens, garbage trucks and garbage music, my neighborhood in Astoria (a handy euphemism for Queens) probably was louder when the natives lived here. There’s some sort of sweatshop that creaks and hisses faintly on Thursday nights. There are occasional muttering miscreants, and howling hounds and shrieking cats. But tonight it’s just the pleasant rhythm of rain, which quickens as I approach Crescent Street to hail a cab. My new jacket and the glistening dangles about my forehead are the only reasons I’m going out.

When four headlights emerge from the fog, I step into the street and recall Natalie’s wet eyes and sweet velvet. Natalie transcends time by both quickening and slowing it. She’s kind and beautiful and patient and precise, and doesn’t rely on controversy for her worth. For the first time I want to grow old and be normal and monotonous, as long as it’s with her. For years I have lamented my dearth of romantic sufferings that build one’s character and give one faith, spirituality and hope against their sorrow (not to mention those war stories that come out late at night). Before I didn’t look out for death: now I look both ways.

The first car is a silver Nissan, which halts at the red light in the lane before me. From 30 yards I realize the second car is a cab, which sees me and pulls into the same lane in which I now stand behind the Nissan. It slows down somewhat, but the time between my realizing it hasn’t slowed enough and the shrill cataclysm of screaming metal and breaking teeth and bending fates is but two seconds.

At once two thoughts cross my mind: these people might be dead, and, man, their night is fucked. Quickly and rather eagerly, the former sentiment springs me to action and I bolt to the passenger door, where there sits a wide-eyed woman in her late 20s. I tear open the door.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah,” she replies dazedly. Her driver, a curly haired gentleman whose glasses have found the dashboard, echoes her response. After confirming that the cabdriver’s also unhurt, I leave the ruined machines smoldering in the rain before trembling a block to the next light.

A few minutes pass before two cars again slow down only slightly, each expecting the light to turn green. One is a cab, which sees me and swerves into the right lane, crushing the other, idle car.
Everyone’s OK, including me, who once more had to leap back to avoid taking a headlight in the kidney. While I walk to the next block I call Brigid.

“You’re not going to believe this, but—”

“OK, so I was just washing dishes and I sliced my hand open really badly. And it’s, like, bleeding everywhere, and I
think I nicked an artery or something. So now we’re going to the emergency room, so…”

So I think I’ll call Natalie from under the covers. Here’s to love over death.


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