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. Maybe this is heaven. Perpetual life. Maybe this is hell.
I crossed the street of the Houston Contemporary Art Museum to the Glassell Sculpture Gardens. From the gardens I crossed without a crosswalk to the Fine Arts. I should have remembered the Houston driver ettiquette toward pedestrians crossing the street, or lack of it, but I had lived in an East Coast town that leaned in the favor of walker right of way.
I was with my best friend, a girl, and this guy from that town in Massachusetts. An old friend worked at the building we were ambling toward. We would find out later that he had already left for the day.
Two others from Salem, the town of Hawthorne, were in our group as well. 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 later 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. We were on the phone discussing the future as I crossed the street.
I looked into the oncoming traffic before I leapt. I saw a large opening, and sauntered out into it with a languid Texas speed, happily renewed from the bustle of the North Eastern American seaboard. The crosswalk was only the space of a median break away. The car sped up. She must have sped up.
In Salem, the town I had been living their are laws that develop habits, habits that are evidently detrimental to keep when carousing through the cattycorner of America, the Southwest. I turned my attention to the cars on the other side of the road to finish the pass in one motion. Just as I turned my head, a spider sense tingled immediate caution. I jumped onto the grassy knoll. A Nissan had sped up with the intention to hit me, only grazing my foot on their sideboard instead. Thankfully it was not a head on impact. It winged my sole, spinning me around into a wild tumble. My adrenaline rushed. I immediately uprighted myself in a roll across the grass and teetered on the brick curb on the other side for a second. The cell phone kept my balance from tipping forward into the oncoming traffic on the other side. I stepped backward to regain my balance, then sprinted to the sidewalk in front of our destination. I made it to the front doors of the other museum across the street without any memory of it. My friends stood gawking at the event that just transpired.
They took the longer walk 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."
They started theorizing her state of mind.
"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 the temporal and fragile nature of my own mortality. If I had stopped or hesitated for half a second, I could be laid up in a hospital with broken legs. Maybe paralyzed or in a coma. Or even dead. My adrenaline subsided to nauseus distraction. I could focus on none of the exhibits. A dizzy fog from the sudden chemical explosion of the nearly fatal incident crept into my peripherals. The landscape art seemed fuzzy and without meaning, hanging like windows to empty worlds I had never seen, but felt like I had been there before in a previous incarnation of myself. They looked familiar, yet mundane. The lofty ceilings and off white sterility of the rooms screamed of afterlife, a juncture that only my soul could know. This was purgatory. This was where I was to be judged for my actions in life.
Someone suggested getting some water at the café in the Beck gallery next door. I took them down a flight of stairs where an underworld tunnel connects the two buildings. They followed, stopping to look at pieces of the modernist era. At this point I had ceased talking all together. In this realm there were no need for words. I kept moving. At the final flight of stairs I sat to wait for my friends. I did not want to go on to the next scary world all alone. I put my head in my hands and cried dry tears. I covered my eyes.
The girl whose name I forgot rustled my hair when they all caught up. She asked if I was ready. I was. I had a friend with me.
In that hallucinatory haze I finished the staircase into 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. I was given a last glimpse of my fading life in a parallel universe. The medical team loaded me into the van. The doctors were operating with haste, making no mistakes. Still, they could not save me. My mind hung in the residual life that slowly expired beyond the measurement of their instruments as my soul waited to collect it from above.
The friend took my hand. I entered the tunnel. A walkway surrounded by a dark blue light stretched into the opening between the two worlds of past and present. It would subtly change to red over the course of an hour without anyone noticing except the usher, an agent of the River Styx, standing in the middle of it, making sure that we passed through in a timely fashion without much linger. We were walking purposefully slow. The usher only made sure that we were continuously moving. He would not allow time to stop for us. There were, after all, more souls behind us attempting to cross the barrier as well.
The tunnel had walls, but you could not touch them. They were far away pools rippling into each other. In the brilliant shadows of each convalescence faces swirled of everyone I had ever changed and those that had changed me. They were one and the same. I could not recognize the smallest ones. They were one time happenstances of minute exchange. Some were larger although still unrecognizable. A burble of single phrases I might have said or were said to me echoed through the chamber. The words were abstract as were the replay of the actions dropping into the stream like light rainfall. The emotion and effect of them flooded the dam. It pushed me along.
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 dissolved.
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.
The flowers grew again. I was being reborn. This time faerie creatures buzzed around it with butterflies and bees. It was serenity once again. I knew it would not last. The symmetry was not complete, which suited me just fine. It was a new paradise. The film ended.
I bent my head over a water fountain next to the restrooms. It sprayed me in the eye. It awakened me. I needed to be outside. I was alive. I needed to live life rather than merely watch interpretations of it.
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. The tunnel showed me that you reap from life the intent you put into it.
My lesson did not question that driver's morality. I neither justified it nor disregarded it. I could accept being upset about slowing your tempo for a nameless other. I could not 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 the Angel we were going to swim in fountains. If she would like to come, she was welcome. We exchanged numbers. Her phone had fallen into a glass of wine the night previous. She took mine.
My best friend dropped me and the guy from Massachusetts off at the house of the sister of the girl whose name I forgot. A volatile St. Grubbsity 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 this day. Could I do it again? Maybe this would correct myself in the eyes of the great game. This was hardly true at all. I knew better. Death kept me alive for a reason. Death gave me common sense enough to continue being alive. I would not jump. My job has not yet been finished for the grand scheme of things in this universe. Knowing that were the case, I felt invincible and climbed faster over sections of the floor that were missing. St. Grubbsity 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 whimsically that I was closer to heaven earlier today. He did not understand. I 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. St. Grubbsity did not understand this either.
At the Medical Science Museum past the Children’s Museum we waited for the sister of the girl whose name I forgot. She brought her bowling teammate and the teammate brought her boyfriend. Half naked in swimsuits made 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. At 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.
I answered. 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.”
