The car seemed to keep spinning for hours and hours with a steady motion like a cheap carnival ride. I clearly remember having entire thoughts pass through my mind while the car kept doing its deadpan circles in the middle of the foggy highway. I thought of an old friend who had been in a serious accident himself. His name was Mark something. We had been briefly and intensely close in high school, but when we went away to our separate universities they were at opposite corners of the country and we gradually lost touch with each other. He always stiffened up a bit at the shoulders if you brought his accident up then smiled without really looking at you, as if you were trying to understand something that was inherently incomprehensible. The accident killed his father, and left him and his twin brother with a broken leg each. I had always wondered what it had been like for the two brothers before anyone else arrived on the scene, what it was like being alone with the white and motionless father laying there like a mannequin. Presumably there was blood splashed all over the interior of the car and smeared on the father’s face, neck, arms. Maybe some had splattered on the brothers as well. Did they speak to each other before medics arrived? What could they have said to each other? Did they try to do anything for their father, perhaps some hopeless first aid measure on the mangled body that was clearly no longer in any shape to draw another breath into its lungs? Would they even stay in the car? Maybe they would walk out of it and stroll about on the highway, walking the perimeter of the sinister scene with a smile of disbelief on their faces to match the sullen, distant look in their eyes; a look that suggested they were far away from the torn pieces of metal and shattered glass, far away from the bloody mess of their father, far away even from themselves.

  Of course this was all just my imagination filling in the holes left from movie shots and formal news reports of the inhumane but all-too-common tragedy of a high-speed, head-on highway collision. I mean, neither brother would have been able to walk around the scene with a broken leg, even if they were in a state of shock that blocked out the devouring pain of dragging their limp limbs around behind them.

  I thought that maybe if I got a hold of Mark now we could share this experience together, that he wouldn’t be so reticent about the trauma because it was something I could directly relate to so it was almost like I had been there with him. But at the same time I wanted it to be the same unspeakable event for me that it was for him. I wanted people to try to draw the facts out of me with subtle questions that I would reply to with sparse and strange details, not satisfying their curiosity at all but only intensifying their hunger to know what it was like.

  My thoughts had been lucid and organized enough to sort all this out while the car was still completing its dizzying circles. It seemed to be defying all laws of physics. I couldn’t understand how it kept spinning so long when this wasn’t the motion it was naturally built for. Then it stopped almost as abruptly as it had begun.

  The car came to a rest spanning the length of both lanes. The hectic cacophony of the crash was followed by such a profound silence that I had to smile at the stillness. The sky was filled with the melancholy shades of blue that come along with the later stages of dusk. A thick fog rested peacefully and ominously in the air. I knew we were in a precarious position, as the darkness, and even more-so the fog, would make it impossible for on-coming traffic from either direction to see Raina’s sleek, compact car stretched across that barren stretch of highway like an oblong and disastrous obstruction.

  Raina. I had met her in my psychology class about two months before this foggy night. She had long black hair she kept tucked behind her ears and pretty green eyes that shone like a cat’s in low light. She almost always had the hood of her black sweater drawn up over her head, and at the start of each day she looked up at me with the dry expression of an insomniac who has failed to find sleep for the fifth consecutive night. I liked her, and I could make her laugh. She was the type of girl that stood out in a class of 250 students already full of stunningly beautiful girls in their early 20’s. When I told her that I had accepted a student job as a reporter in a small town, she clasped her hands together as she told me the town was only ten minutes away from her hometown, and that she would come visit me as much as she could.

  I now looked at Raina from the backseat of her car. I could only see about half of her face, but even in the descending darkness that was beginning to completely and thoroughly fill out the car I could tell she was too still. I leaned forward and gently stroked her face.

  “Raina,” I breathed out. The word echoed out of the car and into the serenity of the premature night.

   She didn’t reply.

   I felt something warm trickle across my wrist, so I pulled her face towards me. Her jaw dropped open as I did so, and the thin stream of blood that was trickling through her barely parted lips now came gushing out in an unrestrained torrent. Her eyes, still open and distant, reflected the final spark from the sunset with their characteristic, ingratiating gleam, but it was obvious they were no longer alive. They didn’t dance anymore. Instead of the piercing, green radiance I had seen in them before, there was only an absent, dull luster. I felt sad for the first time and almost started to cry. The impulse soon left me, and Raina’s face took on a clownish hilarity with its mingled colors of bright red, bright green, and solemn black.

  Raina’s friend Jen, whom I had just met that night, sat directly ahead of me in the passenger’s seat. I have a natural habit of falling into a stubborn silence when in a moving vehicle, and this tendency seemed to not only irritate Jen but actually enrage her. She had been talking loudly with Raina the whole trip about mutual friends, laughing raucously at inside jokes and trying to show off her exuberant personality. More than once she had swirled around in her seat in agitation and cried out in exasperation “I forgot you were back there! Why are you so quite?”

  Now, I have had to deal with this question my whole life, and find it gets more difficult, and more purposeless, to answer with each passing year. When Jen posed the question to me I had to tear myself away from my own thoughts and turn away from the hypnotic landscape sweeping past the backseat window.

  “I don‘t know English very well,” I would say, or maybe “I can’t speak unless there’s a full moon.” Sometimes I would feel guilty and try to start a conversation with her. But other times I would say nothing at all, only shrug my shoulders impatiently after glancing at her shortly, hoping she would see I wanted to be left alone for a while.

  It’s so nice being alone in a backseat, such a peaceful relief to not worry about where you’re going or how you’re getting there. I do my best thinking back there, and it’s always the type of unforced thoughts that flow freely from one subject to another clearly and lucidly. The most poignant and sensual feelings seem to come to me particularly in backseat highway driving. The world rushes by so quickly and I watch it from a perpetual stand-still, ecstatically pressed up to the window with my eyes darting from one sight to the next, or stretched out in a happy languor, feeling the complexities and hurried strife of modern life turn unimportant by the majestic beauty of backseat peace. Why, why did Jen and everyone have this need for incessant chatter? There always seemed to be someone pulling me away from myself, wanting to engage me relentlessly and everlong with the world. I just wanted some peace, some quiet. I wasn’t stopping her or anyone else from the constant flow of conversation, I barely even noticed it anymore. What did they all want from me? Why was I in their way?

  Jen was silent now, and I believe she had found a peace that I have yet to experience. I knew she was dead. I could feel the lack of life in the car and some jealous stirring of spirits every time I exhaled. I tried to twist my head around to get a look at her, but a sharp pain shot through my neck then traveled down my spine. It occurred to me for the first time to check myself for injuries, and I was a little surprised to find that I had no visible cuts or anything alarmingly wrong. The front of the car had been twisted and crunched like a tin can but the back was relatively unscathed. I was aware of a stealthy rigidity creeping up from my shoulders and into my neck. I supposed it was from the incredible impact, but I didn’t give it too much thought.

  This time I just reached forward and shook Jen a little bit, careful not to disturb the stony silence I had shortly before wanted so badly. There was no reaction from her. I put my hand on the top of her head and immediately drew it back. The hair all over her head was matted down into wispy curls by pools of blood. I don’t know where it was coming from, but I was suddenly aware of a sickly smell being emitted by the two dead girls, a smell that had the musty scent of an attic as well as the sour smell of a neglected basement. I brought my hand, covered in Jen’s blood, to my face and was overcome by the smell. It pervaded the whole car, this rancid smell of death, though we had only been sitting there five, ten, twenty minutes, maybe half an hour (I had lost the ability to gauge the passing of time). Then the smell drove me out of the car. I collapsed onto the side of the highway and painfully wretched into the ditch.

  I felt very relieved and alone afterwards, and rolled onto my back. The fog was beginning to lift, and it was actually turning out to be a beautiful night. The stars were strewn across the sky like faint eyes, and I could see them subtly hinting at their brilliance through the steady mist of the dissipating fog. I kind of wished Raina was still alive so she could experience this moment with me, lie next to me on this desolate road and watch the fog die off and the sky come alive in its incomprehensible vastness. I lifted my head and looked towards the car, half expecting her bedraggled figure to crawl out from the metal heap and come towards me. After observing the stillness and quiet death-peace of the car, I accepted that the solitude of the stars was mine and mine alone. There was nothing else to do, so I stretched out in the grass next to the road and watched the night sky blossom into a million fragments of disjointed yet somehow united beauty. It was not long, maybe half an hour, before I heard a far-off engine chortling and choking its way towards me, accompanied by two headlights piercing through the clear night. Once again I thought of Raina’s eyes and their casual way of glowing supernaturally. I sat up and waited for the driver to encounter this horrific scene, interested to see what his reaction would be.

  It was an old battered Ford, a pickup from the 70’s or 80’s. It had never been going very fast, and as it came nearer to Raina’s incapacitated car it slowed to a very gradual and quiet stop. The driver opened the door and stepped out, leaving the sputtering engine of the Ford on to struggle to stay alive. I couldn’t see his face, but he looked to be an old man with a baseball cap resting high on his head. I could hear him breathing heavily twenty feet away from me as he cautiously limped over to where I was sitting near the shoulder of the road. He cupped his hands over his eyes as if to dim a blinding light, even though the only light being shed on the highway were the tepid rays of the crescent moon hanging somewhere in the sky.

  “Hey, you there?” he called out stupidly.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I calmly answered. “There’s been an accident.”
 
 “Jesus, has there ever. Are you okay?”

  He was now standing directly in front of me. There was a strong, husky smell clinging to him that reminded me of my own grandfather who had passed away five years ago. His face was withered and, at the moment, contorted into an expression of incredulous curiosity and impending apprehension. A thin, grey moustache lined his upper lip and he wore a pair of old-fashioned glasses. He was handling a cigarette in his left hand, habitually making the motion to ash it out though he still hadn’t lit it.

  “My neck’s really sore,” I told him. It was; I could scarcely turn my head in either direction without having my whole upper-body become enflamed with a fierce pain. “Raina is dead. So is her friend.”

  “Dead? Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure,” I replied flatly.

  “Dead?” he repeated, then looked at me and pointed to the mangled car with his thumb. His face had a questioning expression I could barely make out through the darkness.

  “Yep. They’re still in the car.”

  “What about the truck?”

  “What truck?” I asked irritably, beginning to get sick of his questions to what seemed a basically self-explanatory situation.

  “The truck, the truck,” he said, nodding his head towards the overturned truck laying in the ditch.

  The truck. I had completely forgotten about it. I had been sitting there for half an hour and never thought of looking to my left to where the upside down truck was laying about 50 feet away from me. The moon’s grey light was glinting off its bright blue paint. It looked so much more powerful and tragic than Raina’s small car, but somehow it had suffered an even worse fate. I’m not sure how it ended up rolling over since I didn’t know how or why the accident happened, but I supposed it had somehow ramped off of Raina’s car. They probably had less of a chance than we did.

  The old man was talking excitedly into his cell phone now, trying frantically to give directions to where we were. The tone of his voice suggested that the gravity of the situation had set in. He had obviously called an ambulance, and I realized my experience was all but over and I still didn’t have any answers to the questions I had about Mark, his brother, and their accident. Nothing had changed, I had had no revelation, no profound enlightenment or hellish denial of the deaths I’d just seen, nothing. Then I realized that gave me all the answers I needed.

  Guilt began to settle all around me as I realized that whoever was in the truck was most likely dead by now, and if I had immediately checked for survivors maybe I could have done something for them. They quite possibly died because of my own childish and monomaniacal greed. I knew I would never get blamed for it, that everyone would attribute my absent-mindedness to shock, but really I had been very lucid and aware. I hadn’t checked on them because I was focused on my experience, too caught up in seeking answers to questions that now seemed irrelevant as the blaring lights of the ambulance pulled up to the scene and emptied five or six medics who all sprinted towards the demolished cars. Then I thought of Raina’s jaw dropping open and the unending river of blood that flowed out from it, and thought: Maybe I am in shock.

  The old man was still standing next to me, nervously chewing at his fingernails.

  “What are you doing out here anyway?” I asked him.

  He nodded behind him towards what looked to be a big empty field.

  “That’s my crop back there,” he said huskily, his voice clearly starting to fail him. “My house is a five minutes’ drive from here. Listen kid, you should get into that ambulance, get yourself to a hospital and checked out.”

  I did get into the ambulance, and closed my eyes until some medics came to look at me and I could feel them driving away from the unreal scene. It would have been a peaceful ride, in the back of that ambulance, but the medics kept pushing at my body and asking me bizarre questions that did not seem to relate at all to what had just happened. I kept telling them to leave me alone, that this could all wait another ten minutes when we would be in town, that I usually liked car rides and they were ruining it for me, but they wouldn’t even respond to these remarks. Again, I couldn’t find the evasive peace of the backseat. There was always something or someone fussing over me when it wasn’t necessary, robbing me of something I felt everyone should be entitled to.

  It turns out there was a survivor from the blue truck. His name was Andy and he aspired to be an actor. I found this out later at the hospital when they carted him into my room, covered up to his shoulders in a starched sheet. His eyes were empty and white, his hair greasily slicked back and drenched in sweat. We had a brief conversation that was strained and at times accusing. I felt like we were natural rivals being forced to pretend we were friends. Neither of us broached the subject of the accident until their was a lull in the conversation and he suddenly asked “Were you guys drunk?”

  “No,” I said truthfully. “Were you?”

  “No,” he said. It sounded like he was lying but I didn’t really care.

  “What were you doing in the truck for so long after it rolled? You didn’t even call for help.”

  “I’m not sure, I think I was shocked.” He paused for a moment. “I saw you sitting beside the highway. Why didn’t you come check on us?”

  “I don’t know, I think I was shocked too.” Another pause. “I had always wanted to experience something like that.”

  He looked at me long and hard when I said that, with a look I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out. It wasn’t exactly hate, but a sour look mingled with disbelief, horror, and a tragic exhaustion. Then, without a word, he got up and closed the partitioning curtain that hung between our beds.

  Andy never spoke to me again, and I think he asked to be taken to a different room, because the next morning he was wheeled out of his curtained room, covered by the same white sheet he was rolled in under, and never returned.

  They made me stay at the hospital for two days. Doctors put me in a neck-brace, and every couple of hours a nurse came in and asked me the same questions over and over again - How are you feeling? Is the pain any worse? Any better? Do you need anything? She was a grotesque nurse, black as night with crossed eyes that bulged out of her head. The whites of her eyes, particularly the left, rolled around so sickly and purposelessly I ended up giving her the most expedient answers just to make her leave again. But she was nice. She always gave me an attempt at a warm smile that revealed gnarled teeth which looked out of place and painful.

  When I was released my sister insisted I come stay with her for a couple of days. I decided to go, since my boss at the newspaper had said I should take some time off to rest and I had nothing else to do in the small town I had just moved to.

  My sister Dawn was a stay-at-home mom who constantly doted on her five-year-old son who had been given the oddly feminine name of Spring. He had ashen hair that was naturally unruly, and walked around with his usually dirty face twisted into a petulant scowl. I did not care much for my nephew, but tried to act the fun-loving uncle role because I loved my sister and felt sorry for her. I suspected the fervent shower of praise she gave Spring came from the unconscious knowledge that he was nowhere near worth it. She seemed to have lost something since she had given birth to him, as if she was being oppressed by something she refused to let anyone else know about and it was slowly driving her soul out of her body. We were never that close, so I didn’t get the chance to ask her about her lonely struggle, but I did have a tender sympathy for her.

  Spring spent most of his days evading his mother’s call to let her clean him up by ducking into the backyard and getting himself dirtier. He wouldn’t even do things that children traditionally found fun. He would saunter into their scant garden with a disapproving look, then set himself into the soil and simply dig holes in it, muddying his fingernails and clothes, and streaking his fat, childish face with dirt. He seemed to be doing the arduous digging not for the activity itself but just to make himself filthy, as if making life on Dawn as hard as possible for her was his form of play. If he wasn’t occupied in the garden, chances are he would be downstairs in their cool basement, escaping the languishing summer heat, propped up in front of a 48” big screen television playing an NHL hockey video game. This was where I would try to come play with him, not only to escape my own boredom but to try and give Dawn a break from him. It was also a way to suggest to her that I could put up with him and that he was not quite as monstrous as he seemed.

  On the third day I was there I heard his mutters coming from the basement. He was playing his video game and accusing the opposition of being “stupid”. I was in the kitchen with Dawn as she was preparing his lunch for him, stopping every few minutes without realizing it to rub her temples and vaguely stare out the window above the sink. I sighed and went down to the basement.