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It was blood. His eyes had been pasted shut with dried blood that was now washing away in the rain. And there in front of him, crumpled against a tree, was the ruin of a metallic green Nissan Cube.
And that’s when it all came back to him. Homer. Starbucks. The accident.
He turned sharply to see Homer Gibbon standing behind him. The killer stood there in the howling wind and pouring rain, bare-chested, wide-legged, with a monstrous grin of red delight on his face as the lightning burned the sky behind him.
“Don’t you go die on me,” he said with a wicked chuckle. “Not until I want you to.”
Traffic splashed by on both sides of the median, but the Cube was almost invisible in the copse of trees into which it had plowed. Goat looked at the car. It was totaled. Smoke curled up from the wheel wells and one tire had exploded.
“Never liked that faggoty little piece of shit,” grumbled Homer. “Now we need to shop for something better.” He pointed a finger at Goat. “Stay.”
He said it the way people do to dogs. Homer chuckled to himself and began walking toward the highway.
Goat stayed.
Then Goat realized that for some reason the traffic was completely stalled over there. Cars and trucks sat bumper to bumper under the pounding rain. The line stretched all the way to the west, far out of sight. On the other side of the road there was nothing. He tried to make sense of it, but his head was too sore and none of his thoughts worked the way they should.
You have a concussion, he told himself, but he couldn’t remember hitting his head. Could an airbag concuss a person? He thought he should know the answer to that, but couldn’t find it in the messy closets of his brain.
Homer was almost to the line of stalled cars now.
Run, jackass!
Goat tried to run. He had that much pride, that much clarity of thought left. But when he took his first step toward the opposite side of the highway, his left leg buckled and he went down hard into the mud. Like an old tape player slowly catching up to speed, Goat’s mind replayed the events of the crash. He remembered seeing the tree suddenly filling the view beyond the windshield, and then the windshield itself bursting inward in ten thousands pieces of gummed safety glass. He remembered the white balloon of the airbag and the numb shock as the dashboard seemed to reach in toward his knees, hitting one, missing the other.
Then blood and darkness and nothing.
He propped himself up on his elbows, spitting bloody water and mud from his mouth. How long had he been unconscious in the car? Long enough for the blood to dry to dense mud in his eyes.
For a moment—just a moment—Goat wished that the crash had been a little harder. Or that the blocky little Cube had been built with less care for the safety of its passengers.
It is a weird and dreadful thing to realize that death was far more desirable than being alive. Goat had never suffered through depression, never rode the Prozac and lithium highway. Never held a razor next to his wrists and wondered if the pain of the cut was worse than the pain of the next hour or next day. Never looked into the future and saw a world where he was absent. He was in love with life. With living it. With women and sex. With film and the complexities of filmmaking. With the tides and currents of social media. With being him.
But now …
Behind him he heard Homer calling out to the people in the cars.
“L’il help! L’il help now.”
Goat thought he heard a car door open. Then a man’s voice asked if Homer was hurt, if everyone was okay.
And then screams.
Such high, shrill, awful screams.
Goat closed his eyes and stared into the future and prayed, begged, pleaded for him not to be any part of what was happening or what was to come.
Like all of his prayers over the last twenty-four hours, it went unanswered.
And then suddenly the sky seemed to open and against all sanity and logic the morning sun rose in the middle of the night. Goat gaped at it, at the gorgeous, impossibly huge burning eye of morning.
“Oh … my … God…” he breathed and despite all of his lifelong agnosticism and cynical disapproval of organized religion, he believed that he beheld the fiery glory of a god revealing himself to His people at the moment of their greatest need.
He began to cry. He covered his head with his hands and wept, apologizing for everything he had ever done wrong, promising—swearing—that he would be a better man, that he would hone the grace of this moment. A part of his bruised mind could hear the shrill, hysterical note in his voice, but he didn’t care.
He was saved.
This is what people believed would happen. In the dark night of the soul. At the end of all hope.
