where we meet faeries and an angel after a hit and run near death experience for a flamboyant man in the museum district

I almost died. Maybe I did. Maybe I am walking in a parallel world where the car missed. Maybe this is the mystery of the afterlife, a world where you keep on living. Is that heaven or hell?

In Houston we crossed the street of the Contemporary Art Museum to the Fine Arts. An old friend worked there. We would find out later that he had already left for the day. I was with my best friend, a girl, and this guy from Massachusetts. Two others from Salem, the town of Hawthorne, were in our group as well, but they were laid up in a hotel suffering from heat exhaustion. This was only the beginning months of the southland’s brutal summer. Another good friend called to make sure I would be at the Last Concert Café to meet him in a few hours. Since I was only in town for a short amount of time, three days, it was important that I made things happen quick and with efficiency. I was on the phone with him as I crossed the street.

I looked into the oncoming traffic, saw a large opening, and sauntered out into it with a languid Texas speed. The crosswalk was only the space of a median break away. In Salem, the town I had been living for the past two years, pedestrians always have the right of way, a habit that is detrimental to keep when carousing through the rest of America. I turned my attention to the cars on the other side of the road to finish the pass. Just as I turned my head, a spider sense tingled immediate caution. I jumped. A Nissan had sped up with the intention to hit me instead only grazing my foot on their sideboard. Thankfully it was not a head on impact. My adrenaline rushed. I teetered on the brick median for a second, the cell phone keeping my balance from tipping backward into traffic. I made it to the other museum across the street without any memory of it. My friends stood gawking at the event that just transpired. They walked to the crosswalk, waited for the signal, and came to meet me.

            “She sped up.”

            “Did she?”

            “Hell yeah. She wanted to hit you.”

            “It was a lady?”

            “I think so. She was holed up in a cubicle all day, angry at the world, and pissed that some hippie on a cell phone is crossing in her lane.”

I sat in the shade realizing that I could be dead right now. If I had stopped or hesitated for half a second, I could be laid up in a hospital with broken legs. Maybe even paralyzed or in a coma. My adrenaline began to subside. I could not focus on the exhibits. The art seemed fuzzy and without meaning. Someone suggested getting some water at the café in the Beck gallery across the way. An underground tunnel connects the two building. I took them down a few flights of stairs. At this point I had stopped talking all together. They followed, stopping to look at pieces of the modernist era. I kept moving. At the final flight of stairs I sat to wait for them. I put my head in my hands and cried dry tears. I covered my eyes. The girl rustled my hair when they all caught up. She asked if I was ready. I was. Here, things branch into the paranormal.

In an almost hallucinatory haze I finished the staircase in to the foyer of the tunnel. Damien Hurst’s infamous surgical equipment a la skeletons in a glass box grimly looked in opposite directions from each other. The glass reflected my image. One showed my bones. The other showed my muscles in bright blue, red, and yellow. In that parallel universe I saw the medical team loading me into the van. The doctors were operating with haste. They could not save me. My soul hung in the residual life that slowly expired beyond the measurement of their instruments. I entered the tunnel. A walkway surrounded by a dark blue light stretched into the opening between the two worlds of the past and present. It would eventually change subtly to red without anyone noticing had we stayed in it for an hour or more. We were walking purposefully slow, but it would not take that long. An usher, like an agent of the River Styx, stood in the middle of it, making sure that we passed in a timely fashion without much linger. After all, there were more souls behind us attempting to cross over the barrier as well. There were walls, but you could not touch them and you did not know how far away they were.

On the other side an animated video ran on a horizontal row of five flat screen high definition televisions. Flowers grew from the foreground of both ends and faded into the distant middle. It was serene. I faded with them. In the distance of the background behind trees were the obvious towers of a city skyline. The world moved further and further away. The sun set. Night took over quickly. Thorns grew on the vines. Severed heads on plant spikes became the flowers. Demon insects buzzed around the screen. The symmetrical order of things began to dissolve. I was either in hell or purgatory. I could not tell which. When the experience became nearly unbearable, a bright friendly faerie zipped across the screens, taking the red night away and replacing it with a powder blue clear sky. A rainbow crossed as she passed. I could only see the left portion of it for the moments it took to arc off screen and return to the horizon.

Flowers grew again. This time faerie creatures buzzed around it with butterflies and bees. It was serene again. The symmetry was not complete, which suited me just fine. It was a new paradise. It was supposed to symbolize global warning, but I received a different impression. The film ended. I ran to the restroom during the credits. I bent my head over a water fountain that sprayed me in the eye. This awakened me. I needed to be outside.

The whole incident hung over me for the day. The girl asked if I had learned something. I had. She expected me to say something like not crossing the street with a phone plugged into my ear or constant vigilance or blah blah blah. No. I had plenty enough time to cross. I had an appropriate amount of attention suitable to daily life movements across streets. I exercised my right as a pedestrian responsibly. This lady sped up with the intent of plowing me down for whatever her reasons. It would still have meant the death of a fellow human traveler. My lesson did not question her morality either. I could accept being upset about slowing your tempo for a nameless other. I cannot accept the taking of a life for something that inconsequential. My lesson involved the way I had been feeling since I returned to Houston the night before. Everyone wanted to talk to me. They all wanted a piece. I had been living like a shadow in a small town for the past couple of years. The change overwhelmed me. None of my friends could take my full attention. There was too much going on. So much so that I almost became run over. Many people were pulling me in many directions to my death.

Having realized this, I continued my day unfettered. I made it to the Last Concert Café, a fitting hang with my favorite long standing Houston musical act, the Hightailers, playing rhythm and blue southern rock grass roots jazz. I bought a round of drinks for my company: a local brewed St. Arnold’s Lawnmower, a Lone Star, a Negro Modelo with lime in the head, a cup of water, a margarita, and something fru-fru. They laughed at my terminology while ordering, but made it just the same. A girl standing next to me asked how I would carry all of these to my table. I told her I had no clue and asked if she would help. She acquiesced. I held the door open and asked her name.

“I am Angel.”

The other world nudged me again. They are among us.

We drank and danced. I spun a hula hoop. We told stories of our youth. In a serious moment I pondered my death aloud with the right amount of jokes interspersed to keep it lively and interesting. The people I knew filtered away. I was nearly alone and at peace. I had an Angel by my side. She did not stay too close, but I saw her watching over me. She had others there to protect. By Sunday she would need to go to Chicago for a new assignment. She was excited about this.

When I left the place with my best friend and the guy from Massachusetts, I told her we were going to swim in fountains. If she would like to come, she was welcome. We exchanged numbers. Although hers had fallen into a glass of wine the night previous, she took mine.

My best friend dropped the guy from Massachusetts and I off at the sister of the aforementioned girl’s house. A volatile Steve Grubbs joined us for our late night dip. We climbed to the top of a five story wooden frame for a townhouse under construction. He asked why we would do something so ridiculous. My first thought was to jump off. I had cheated death once that day. Maybe this would correct myself in the eyes of this game. This was hardly true at all. I knew better. Death kept me alive for a reason. My job has not been finished for the grand scheme of things in this universe. Thinking that were the case, I felt invincible and climbed faster over sections of the floor that were missing. Steve stopped, angrily screaming that he would not participate in this inanity. Then, he would continue positioned between me and the guy from Massachusetts. When we all made the apex of the skeleton I told him that I was closer to heaven earlier today. He did not understand. I also told him the reason for climbing this stupid thing was because I would rather exercise with adventure than be some damn hamster in a cage with a wheel. It was allegorical to those who go to the gym for their dose of fitness as opposed to a little adventure to get their mind and body flowing. Steve did not understand this either.

At the Medical Science Museum past the Children’s Museum we waited for the sister of the aforementioned girl. She brought her bowling teammate and the teammate brought her boyfriend. Half naked in swimsuits made out of underwear we splashed under the awning of the Butterfly Arboretum in an intricate sundial. The moon was nearly full and the planets aligned on the watery clock’s chart. noon it would light up a picture in the center of metal brads. It was, however, well past midnight reaching into 3 o’clock. My phone rang while I was drying my hands on a towel that we had enough foresight to take thanks to numerous warnings by a good friend of mine that does not know who I am. It was the Angel.

“Where are you?”

“I am in the fountain at the Museum of Natural Science in Hermanne park. Are you coming?”

“You are crazy.”

“Yes. I am, but do you know what?”

“What.”

“I am not dead.”