The Crash (474 hits)
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Submitted by conrad <ball0395.at.rogers.com> (View user info) at 2004-05-03 19:59:42 EDT
"Where's my fucking tape?"
These were the words that heralded my return to consciousness, and with them, a return to a world of unprecedented pain. I was quite grateful, where I should have perhaps been concerned, that I could feel nothing below my shoulders, as when my left eye flickered tentatively open, scything, cacophonous light revealed my twisted limbs seeping dark fluids, limp as the limbs of the truly dead. A bone, clean and opaline like a shard of marble, protruded through my trouser leg, and my left forearm curved at such an unnatural parabola that I couldn't bear to look at it for more than a second. I stank of urine, and the rusty, meaty smell of blood was fresh in my nostrils. A cursory glance around the roof of the car revealed no tape, though a look at the stereo confirmed that it had indeed been jettisoned in the collision. I looked left at Rupert, also upside down, also held in situ by the rear seat belts that we had both had the unusual circumspection to wear: a sizeable chunk of his scalp had been sheared off, doubtless by some passing windscreen, and was hanging off by a few tenuous threads of viscera. I could see the brittle-looking dome beneath, and even the tessellations where the portions of skull had knit together.
"I can't see it Rupert, and frankly, I have larger matters to occupy me. For instance, I appear to be paraplegic, you are missing your scalp, and if you look at Mark you will see that he is almost certainly dead."
We both looked at Mark in the driver's seat, now jammed into my legs, the dashboard only a couple of feet away from where I sat. It was pretty obvious that Mark had been crushed beyond hope: he was deathly white, and his forehead appeared to have been flattened by the impact with the steering wheel. Something unspeakable seeped from his ear; it is horrifying to be confronted with our easy mortality, and to witness a complex existence snuffed out by a moment's congruence of motion and metal.
"Can you move your arms at all Rupert?"
"I think so," he said, flexing them like a newborn babe, delighted at the novelty of arm ownership.
"Well, can you reach Mark's neck, and check for a pulse please. I'm pretty sure that there's an artery in there somewhere - I saw it on CSI."
"Can't you do it? I can't stand blood"
"You're covered in the stuff, and I can't move."
He looked himself over and, visibly shaken, said "will do," and reached with great difficulty for the appropriate spot on Mark's neck. It's very difficult to orientate oneself when upside down, very much like doing things requiring coordination in a mirror. "In the meantime, can you continue to look for that tape: I only made it last night, and it took me an age. There's some really good stuff on there, some of which I had to borrow, and we hadn't even finished listening to it, if you recall. Yep, Mark's dead"
A new smell had overtaken the bodily ones of earlier: petrol was seeping into the cabin, and collecting on the ceiling. I was becoming light-headed, with not a little gratitude. I wonder if it's possible to drink petrol.
"Listen, Skull Boy, shut up about the fucking tape. There is nothing less important at the moment. Mark is dead, I'm disabled, and you're horribly disfigured - why in God's name must you keep on about that infernal tape?"
"On the contrary, Conrad: for all of the aforementioned reasons, there is nothing more important than looking for the fucking tape. Did you notice that time all but stopped when we hit that stag and the car went airborne? That the tendrils and tenebrae of the continuum crystallised entirely at that moment, and remained crystallised, until we started looking for that tape? Night has fallen now, and we have nothing to do but wait for rescue, in the unlikely event that we are to be rescued before morning. We have to have something to absorb us, hence the tape. There is nothing to see outside, and you are but inches away from Mark's crushed head: sooner or later the full horror of this situation will dawn on both of us, and we will feel that we would sooner die than spend another second in such close proximity to our mangled, dead friend. Then will our wounds torment us, the cold will gnaw, and a vision of horror will be all we see, whether we close our eyes or not. That is no way to live, and so, we shall die."
It was true, actually: I began to peer into darkened recesses of the car, and found that this absorbed my attentions very nicely. In the twisted metal of the body and shattered wood of the infrastructure lay the potential for an infinity of tapes, and thus, an infinity of diversions, an I-Spy for those who must fumble in darkness. We could, of course, have been looking for a pomegranate or a diamond ring, a casino chip or a semen-soaked tissue - that the tape actually existed seemed important at first, but became less and less so over the course of time, as in the darkness tapes would form themselves, doubtless assisted by petrol fumes, out of darkness and moonlight, spectres infinitely preferable to the grey, bloody pulp seeping from Mark's ear, my own mangled form, or the ghoulish mask of Rupert.
"I wonder what became of that stag?" said I, genuinely concerned. I liked stags: they seemed to me proud and stolid beasts, and our nemesis had proven no exception. He had simply stood his ground on the crest of the hump-backed bridge in the face of a hurtling chunk of metal. It occurred to me that the only difference between heroism and stupidity was intelligence; to stare, infrangible, into the face of death, fully connaissant of what it meant. To stare it down nonetheless was most noble, and I could have sworn that I saw intelligence in these animals.
"I'd say that he was pretty fucked," said Rupert with a snicker, gesturing with his flapping head towards the windscreen, where a great pair of testicles dangled sadly from a wiper. Beyond, in the field, picked out by the moon now at its apogee, lay what remained of the stag, his neck bent at an absurd angle, organs spilling from his belly like a rich cornucopia, his hindquarters a good fifty feet away only inches from where we sat. I went back to tape hunting. Fucked though the stag undoubtedly was, he had claimed one life and critically wounded two: I didn't have to look again at those great, pendulous testicles again to recognise who had proven himself the Man in this little conflict.
Time moved on as each inch of the car was surveyed in its minutiae: Rupert and I, now doubtless overcome by fumes, would point and laugh uncontrollably as tapes would spill from dark corners, harlequin coloured and pixellated, buzzing with light. Mark, mortality, our injuries and even great testicles had been forgotten, and unbeknown to us, the moon had begun to wane. Soon the farmer in whose field we had ended up would be rising, and rescue would be at hand. In the grey blue shroud of dawn, something caught my eye behind Mark's ear; behind the grey matter. It was the tape. The real one. Rupert spotted it at the same time, and grabbed it, holding at it aloft (or adown, as it was in this case) like a victorious gladiator. Hallucinations ceased, and everything solidified as in a fresco; time had slowed once more to a stop.
"We've got it! Do you think that the stereo will still work?"
"It's possible, I suppose - give it a go," I said, equally joyous. The moment felt like a new beginning, and I realised that the hunt for the tape had been paradigmatic of the hunt for us, and that it found, we would be found - the two things were clearly inextricable. Suddenly, a chill came over me:
"Erm, just a thought, but this car's full of petrol fumes - that stereo could spark, couldn't it, like turning on an electric light in the event of a gas leak?"
"I don't know," said Rupert, "but we have to do it. It got us through the night, after all, and the least we can do is listen to it. And I think we both know that there's more to this than just this physical tape; the thing is obviously linked to the space-time continuum in ways that we cannot possibly begin to understand. All I know is that we cannot disrupt the flow."
"You really are very high, aren't you?"
"Yes, but that's beside the point. You saw how time slowed down and sped up in relation to the tape, and our relation to it - it's obviously a tape of enormous gravity, and given the proliferation of Who and Led Zeppelin tracks, that's hardly surprising. I'm turning it on."
He flicked the stereo on...nothing.
"Oh, hold on a minute, I need to turn the ignition."
Nothing happened, then the stereo glowed, and music blared from the speakers - in the end, it turned out to be "Smoke on the Water". Suddenly, the windscreen wipers spasmed and flung the testicles across the field. We both laughed: perhaps it was the music, perhaps the company, perhaps the petrol, perhaps the tape's influence on the space-time continuum or perhaps even the testicles that the stag had so nobly given, but for the first time since the accident both felt comfortable, even relaxed, upside down in the mangled car. The future seemed bright, the past, a vague and distant memory, to be recalled at will and to be forgotten just as easily. There was a sensation of distinct kinship between the two for the first time, who had never quite been close, but always distantly so, a kinship of those who would dine together at fate's table whether they liked it or not, and thus, the strongest kinship of all, that of necessity. Both were lightheaded, perhaps through this knowledge, if knowledge it can be called, perhaps though experience, if experience can ever be called experience alone. Rupert fumbled in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a rumpled, but otherwise intact packet of cigarettes and a Zippo:
"Would you like one of these?"
"Yes please," said I.
User Reviews
Submitted by mystiamoon (user info) at 2004-05-22 01:18:12 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I'm sorry.
Nice writing tho.
Submitted by cat_head (user info) at 2004-05-04 08:01:41 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Well, I'm not so sure I believe you're serious when you suggest it's true!
But either way, I thought it was brilliant.
Submitted by coley (user info) at 2004-05-03 23:53:21 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Thanks for answering my question, and I'm sorry for your loss.
I know not everyone gets immediately hysterical when they lose someone close to them.
Sometimes you've just got that surreal dreaming/floating thing going on, and you're numb.
Submitted by conrad (user info) at 2004-05-03 23:46:16 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Yes, Mark really died - we were jammed into the back seats, upside down at the bottom of an embankment for 12 hours; horrid really. Doesn't really sit well in the short story format, or at least, the Uber very short story format, but I thought I'd give it a go. Cheers.
Submitted by coley (user info) at 2004-05-03 23:28:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Am I dumb, or did Mark really die?
This was well-written and deserves more reviews, and a higher rating.
I'd give it a bunch of +2s but I hate it when people do that.
Submitted by conrad (user info) at 2004-05-03 21:43:53 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
Someone -
This actually happened: I was the "Conrad" character, and what prompted me to make the thing into a little vignette was the temporary insanity/slowing of time/bizarre levity that followed the incident. Whether that made us weird or not I don't know - I suppose that I'd have to hear from other people who've been through such experiences. Thanks for the comments.
Submitted by JohnGalt (user info) at 2004-05-03 21:35:27 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
I liked this part "a kinship of those who would dine together at fate's table whether they liked it or not, and thus, the strongest kinship of all, that of necessity". Overall it was pretty good.
Submitted by someone (user info) at 2004-05-03 21:28:09 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
well written, but I hardly doubt anyone would stay as docile as the two passengers, especially considering a deceased friend lie in the same car. As a short story, I thought it was good.