The Traffic Light

In just a moment of life, just an instant, one can live a lifetime – several, if he has lived them already.

The power of the mind, the strength of the soul, the ability of the heart.

Yet the body remains weak. The body fails and dies; it cannot continue.

I am sitting at the traffic light, holding the wheel, dreaming.

The light won’t go green. It will not do anything.

Cars whiz by in either direction, not restricted by time or space. They are but entities – meaningless, shapeless, indistinct: blurs my eyes cannot track.

I am exhausted. My body is dragging, my eyelids are heavy like lead. Flesh hangs like wash on a line, weary and loose and boneless. The steering wheel holds my hands, and not the other way around. The seat trembles beneath my dead weight.

In this moment of time, nothing matters to me but the light.

Why won’t it change?

Why won’t it change?

I want to go, I want to run. I want to shed the weary skin I wear and sprint through the driving rain, naked and formless and alive.

A horn, perhaps several, perhaps more. Behind me, in front of me – it doesn’t matter: it is all–encompassing, it is inside me. My senses are bleeding together: I can feel and hear and taste the shrill scream all at the same time, and it consumes me.

The car vibrates with the swelling explosion of noise, enraged.

As a boy I might have been intrigued. I might have run my fingers over the trembling polyester seats and relished the tingling sensation that travelled almost painfully up my spine, jumping like an electric current. I might have found some aspect of pleasure within this sensual phenomenon: the carnal, investigatory spirit of youth would have had me thrilled and terrified.

Now, although I cannot ignore the growing rumble, I can only wonder.

What is happening? Why won’t the light change? Why won’t it go green?

The flashes of life, the flashes of color. Explosive senses. Visions, scenes, glamour.

And then I suddenly remember that I don’t have time – that I’m going to be late. Panic makes me grip the wheel, an inexplicable rush of adrenaline that motivates me, sets my heart pounding with anxiety. I need to move, move, move, move, move –

But I cannot. The light has not gone green.

It glares at me, angry and red and swollen.

And so I wait. I am powerless to do anything else.

I frown slowly, tracking the lightning fast cars as they crisscross before me, wondering what exactly is so important – wondering where I was going, why I was even rushing in the first place. This sudden amnesia is complete and debilitating, terrifying.

I am… what?

Whom?

Where?

And why the fuck won’t the light change? Why won’t it go green?

Had I the strength, I might have pounded on the wheel, blown the horn, cursed at the passersby. But I have no energy, I essentially have no being. I exist on a substandard plane – below physical capacity, yet possessed of sound mind and rational thought.

But neither functions.

The powerlessness to act and to move is the most terrifying thing. The sense of utter dependency on fate produces a fear like I have never felt. Like punching under water, like running in dreams: nothing.

Helpless.

“No,” I mutter.

- - -

“Honey, when are you going to fix the light?”

“When I feel like it,” I reply, allowing the minor aggravation I feel to mix with the feigned annoyance.

In a voice full of mock–anger: “Well, I feel like it, so that should be enough.”

This is my wife: beautiful, loving, tender. Taller than me, smarter and stronger – at least on the emotional plane – Italian, but without the accent or tendencies. She is a phenomenal cook and loving mother to our son and daughter. She tolerates my love of tinkering, my wasted afternoons in front of the TV. Her only vice is chocolate, her only fault that she is too trusting.

But who is she? I cannot remember her name, only her face.

- - -

Tears on my face, in my eyes: hot on my cheeks, distorting the angry red traffic light.

What is wrong with me?

- - -

“Dad, can you help me with my homework?”

This is my son: taller than his older sister, skinny and intelligent. Tolerates the bullying of the jocks without complaint. He is more mature than I was at his age, perhaps not my intellectual equal, but certainly better prepared for the world. He is obsessed with videogames, knows more about electronics and calculus than I ever will, is closer with his sister than I ever was with my siblings.

“Sure,” I say. “What do you need help with?”

“An essay.” He sits in the armchair across from me, clearing his throat to read from his textbook.

“He wants you to write it for him,” his sister taunts, somewhere behind me.

This is my daughter: nineteen, single, beautiful like her mother. Stubborn but obedient, compassionate, carefree. A second mother to her brother, mature and witty. She lives at home, attending community college, working towards a degree in interior decorating.

Beautiful eyes.

And yet, their names have slipped my mind. Despite the years, despite our closeness.

Despite the circumstances dictating our lives.

Who are they?

- - -

Who am I? Certainly not their father, not a husband. How can I be? I am not home, I am not with them. I have no recollection, no thought, no nothing but a sense of wrong and a wish to be whole.

Was I searching? Was I working? Was I travelling?

What would I find? Would I ever go home?

The car is still trembling. The road seems to be moving – crawling and alive – although the vehicle remains put. The sky boils with clouds, heavy and dark, hanging low over the town.

The wipers scrape the windshield, squealing in half–hearted protest.

The light is still red.

And in the rearview mirror –

- - -

My eyelids flutter.

- - -

This was my father: a man of ambition, always working, always angry. Not with me, not with my mother, but unhappy despite our best efforts. We love him; he loves us. But none of us show it exceptionally well. We are together but alone. We are one but many.

I am ten. I am alive and moving – swimming in the creek behind our old Victorian house in Connecticut. The dark water is cold: it is early fall, and the season promises to be exceptionally cold.

I swim because I love it. I love to feel fluid and weightless. I feel alive.

Dive.

I am beneath the world, I am on top of it. The murky water is cold around me, but my youthful heart is strong and powerful in my chest. I open my eyes, relishing the chill of the water inside my head, as if it had physically travelled through my pupils to my brain.

Something slimy, ropy. Around my ankle.

My heart stops.

Frantic, I look down, see the weeds ensnaring me, composed of steel and resolution. They have caught me, a prey they do not want. But they will not let go.

And I am powerless. I am suddenly exhausted, and I have no energy to fight. My body is dragging, my eyelids are heavy like lead. Flesh hangs like wash on a line, weary and loose and boneless. The water holds me imprisoned, frozen in fluid medium.

All goes dark.

And then: a hand, rough and warm on my back.

And then: the air on my face, blessedly fresh and bitingly cold – colder by far than the water. The ground beneath my knees and hands is hard and firm, strong enough to support me. My weak fingers tighten around fistfuls of grass, and I inhale the earth – the scent of cold, autumn soil.

I open my eyes.

A shadow hovers anxiously over me.

“Are you fucking stupid?!” my father demands, enraged, shaking me painfully. But he is crying, and his eyes are terrified. His rugged face is white.

He almost lost me, and he knows it.

Despite the fact that I am almost as tall as him, despite the fact that his arthritic back has ever given him trouble, he picks me up in arms protective and firm. Holding me tight, carrying my naked body as though it weighs nothing, he sprints for the big old house on the hill –

- - -

Life has a funny way of being unbelievably ironic. History has this strange knack for repeating itself. Death has this odd power to be terrifying but beautiful at the same time.

To some, these things are one and the same, parts of a whole.

To others, they are a lure.

To some, a mystery.

To me, they are gifts and experience, temporarily permanent.

- - -

My son is just born, he is barely minutes old.

“It’s a boy,” the doctor tells us, and I can see the smile in his eyes despite the fact that a mask covers his mouth. His voice is enthusiastic, tinged by relief that all has gone well. “It’s a boy,” he repeats, for the benefit of my shock.

A boy. A son.

Mine.

The nurse holds him up, and I snip the umbilical cord with the doctor’s aid, unable to take my eyes from the tiny face, the tiny fingers curling and opening, the tiny mouth wide with the first cries of childhood.

As the doctors work to clean him, I return to my wife’s side. I grip her feverish hand with both of my own, literally bouncing with excitement. She is too weary to show the same ecstatic joy, too weak, but I can see the life in her teary, bloodshot eyes. She smiles at me, and I cannot help but burst into joyful tears as I grin foolishly in return.

We have given life, we have created.

A son.

Would that my father was still alive – to see his grandson, to take joy in this miracle work of God.

And in the next moment, there is a scream, a bloodcurdling screech of terror –

– as my son, slick with blood and fluids from the womb, slips from the nurse’s hands and falls towards the floor, a pink roll of flesh, life, and potential –

The blood on the linoleum is not only my wife’s.

Powerless, I cannot move, I cannot think, I cannot breathe.

My wife is screaming, sitting upright and fighting to go to our son, but she has no strength left in her body to rise, to pull herself from the bed.

I don’t remember letting go of her hand, I don’t remember pushing the doctor away. But now I am on the floor, crashing to my knees and scooping up my broken son, cradling his broken head and screaming broken sounds with no words –

The doctor is pulling me away as the nurse takes the limp body from my arms and scrambles from the room, shouting to the others –

– and the responsible nurse slumps against the wall, slides to the floor, almost as lifeless as my son, staring blankly at the bloody mess on the linoleum.

“We’re going to save him!” the doctor shouts in my ear.

I am fighting him, I am fighting for my son whom I just met, who does not even have a name.

Yet. Yet.

He holds me tightly, shouting over my protests: “We will save your son –”

- - -

“Your daughter is okay, she’s fine – she’s fine. She’s going to be alright.”

I hold my wife by the shoulders, fighting to keep her from following the gurney as the doctors whisk it down the hall towards the ER, shouting for the men and women in the hallway to move aside.

The blood droplets on the floor are our daughter’s life.

Leaking away.

“What happened?” I demand, drawing my sobbing wife into an embrace. “What happened?”

“Accident,” my wife gasps, grabbing fistfuls of my shirt and burying her face in my chest. “Head–on.”

My daughter has only had her license for two months – barely enough time to practice, barely enough time to learn. She has no experience, and now maybe she never will –

I watch with inexplicable fury as a nurse wearing latex gloves and a mask wipes up the blood from the floor, using antiseptic to eliminate the germs –

I want to scoop up that blood in a jar, save every last drop for my sweetheart – to return it to her. This man has no idea how much she means to me – he does not care that drops of my daughter are wasted. To him, those lost droplets can be replaced, recreated. They are expendable, and it is part of life.

But to me, they are priceless.

- - -

They both lived. We all lived. I cannot remember details, I cannot remember complications.

But they lived.

Fate: the controlling factor, a force of God, an extension of reality.

My daughter has never driven since the accident. She has no left breast, and four of her ribs are artificial. My son has always had a speech impediment, has never had full use of his left arm, has a permanent lazy eye.

But we were fortunate. Our family survived. Through the suffering, we grew stronger.

We are strong.

But who are they?

- - -

And who am I?

- - -

The mystery goes unanswered.

Back in my car, I trace my eyes over the dashboard and the passenger side of the car. The haze of the afternoon storm clouds my eyes. I see my father, my mother, friends long–forgotten, all sitting next to me, behind me, with me.

Smiling, waving, greeting me.

But they have all been dead – for years, long and painful years.

- - -

And suddenly, it makes sense. Although I cannot remember, although I have no sense of self, the predicament has a meaning and a purpose.

I am stopped at death’s door. I am waiting – waiting for the green light.

Waiting to go.

Suddenly, gasping, I realize that the red light is the only thing keeping me here, the only thing that sustains my breaking lungs and failing heart and bids them carry on. The blood pumping from my veins is a time keeper: slowing, slowing, crawling, stopping, freezing.

All as the moment nears.

“Noooo!”

It takes every ounce of my strength to pull the handle and push the door open. The seatbelt keeps me from escaping. I fight it, finding the clasp and releasing it, so that I fall heavily from the cab to the asphalt. The pain in my hands and elbows is muted, distant.

The rain is icy, but the blood on my face is hot.

Is it mine?

I crawl, towards the sidewalk where all those faceless people stand. Several are coming towards me, maybe to help, screaming and shouting without meaning. Sound, not words. Noise, but not music.

What is wrong with me? Do they know?

Maybe I’m going crazy. Maybe I’m already crazy.

Hands are pulling me towards the curb: I can’t do it alone. The rain is pouring in my head and on my skin. Everything is going dark – inside and out. My head rolls side to side without the strength of my muscles to hold it upright. I see the sky, the faceless people, the flashing blue and red, the lightning –

“No…”

My nameless family, my beloved wife and children. Why aren’t they here? Where was I going – why was I ever leaving them? How can I bear to be away from the three people I love so much, who love me despite my flaws, despite the separation?

Am I going to die alone?

Reality is cruel, a soulless mistress who hears no pleas: only reason.

And I have no reason. I have no answers.

But I have a heart, and I have names. Remembrance, blissful and cooling fills my brain.

Cindy: my wife.

Grace: my daughter.

John: my son.

Tom: my father.

And I…? I am nothing.

And just before I fall into darkness, my eyes focus for one last moment, past the steaming wreckage of my car and the twisted hulk of the truck that hit me from behind, through the sheets of falling rain –

– and the light goes green.

END