Waking UP

It was 4 p.m. when Edgar emerged from the apartment, walking down the stone steps with the feeling that he’d just walked into an oven. The summer hair hung heavy on the small birches along the street, and the sun seemed to intensify on his forehead and eyes. He blinked, overwhelmed. He knew he needed to get out of his cavern, his quarantine, his simulation, but the acclimatization was overwhelming. The sidewalk, a blinding ribbon of white, must have just been poured again. The fire hydrant, not its usual rusty green, dazzled a vibrant yellow. Edgar hesitated on the steps, rubbing his eyes, his face scrunched so the muscles were all drawn like a bowstring. He did not usually go outside at 4 p.m., especially when it was July. In the alleys between the apartments, air conditioner units, tacked on windows, dripped their cool excess of water on the shadowy pavement below—the perfect balm for the pigeons as they descended from their windowsills and gables. Construction workers sweated and hammered on a piece of bad road across the street. Flecks of bad road spattered the main part, where civics and CRVs and their phone absorbed drivers hurtled through, unseeing, disregarding the vexed figure standing on the apartment steps.

Edgar thought about retreating into the apartment. Working online now, he could attune the atmosphere into a womb of comfort: the blanket draped over the chair, laptop positioned on the standing desk, although he rarely stood, the air conditioner pumping eternally behind him. The humidifier made its plume of moisture every fifteen minutes, getting caught up with the current of a box fan and settling in equal distribution around the room. The kitchen sink held its usual repository. A pan with the egg still crusted on the bottom. Two plates smeared with peanut butter, another with marinara sauce. Spaghetti and PBJ. The routine dinners.  He brewed coffee in the mornings, and always made a cup too much for himself so the stuff made a black line of sediment in the pot, adding another stain on the glass, marking another day.

But he did not go back. He blinked again, holding on to the rail as he felt the ground darken and adjust in front of him, and then stepped onto the sidewalk. Cars lined each side of the road, packed like sardines. Like stuffed animals on display in a store window. Some were so precariously close that he wondered how on earth the driver was going to escape without scarring a bumper or two. The people were packed inside the houses too. Like the cars, close to one another, but never touching. There were not many families, he knew. Edgar was only twenty-six, a web developer and graphic designer, a liberal arts education under his belt, an Instagram to share his projects and his scones. There were many people like him on this street. They came out wearing sunglass and looking left and right with their golden doodles bounding against the leash, excited for its twenty minutes of measured freedom. They walked to shops or around the block, always with the head bent downward, a hand cradling the phone so the thumb could do its scrolling work, another on the leash—no attention applied to the avenue, the trees, the fire hydrant, the sweating workers.

Edgar walked until he reached the intersection. The cross traffic went unimpeded and he felt even more oppressed by the heat and the brightness. His attempt to be confronted radically by the real world wasn’t working. Not that he didn’t want it to work. He felt he lacked the ability to really see anything in front of him, drowned as he was in the thought, It is so freaking hot out here. The impulse to look at his phone was irresistible, but he had left it his den, along with the Air pods, Apple watch, and soy chips.

He put one foot forward into the road, stepped back quickly as an Altima jounced by, reverberating with Shakira. He tried again. A Ford truck was approaching conservatively to his left, so he made a break for it without considering his right.

Do you know what it is like to be hit by a car going thirty-seven miles an hour in a twenty-five zone? It is not enough to kill you but plenty enough to thrown you in the air like a saucer of pizza dough, a gymnast attempting a backflip but becoming a corpse in midair. That’s what Edgar felt like as he swooned at the apex of his propulsion–a conscious mind in a body that might as well have been a hunk of dough. He fell on his side on the opposite sidewalk, so if anything, he had succeeded in crossing the street. His body below his waist felt like it didn’t exist, as if he’d been shot up into space and shed the lower capsule, only to plunge back to earth as a disgrace to the mission for mars.

The car that had hit him, a Subaru Cross-trek, slowed down to thirty-one miles per hour and stopped at the following intersection, detained by an interminable red light. The three minutes it sat there, the whole vehicle seemed to stew in conflict and contemplation. The driver’s head was still, hands clenched and trembling on the wheel. She had killed the music and dropped her phone with her friend still on the line chattering about a Netflix binge. Edgar, meanwhile, rolled on his back and looked at the tree branches above him, as the pain from his broken legs started to catch up to his adrenaline. He could feel the pain, sure. It hurt like hell. Now it really did feel like a car had hit him. Like the sidewalk, white as a summer moon, the yellow fire hydrant reminding him of the taste of mustard, the sweating and hammering men getting down into the grit of the sidewalk, the pigeons bathing in air conditioner, all fomented and intensified on his forehead and eyes. On his whole body in overwhelming weight.

The Subaru drove away slowly, in brutal hesitation under the green light, in a city always telling its people to go, hurry, never stop, always buy, do not think. Protect the self in closed walls. But she dialed the number, absolved herself of the guilt. Her friend got off the line and she did not turn the music back on, surprised that the world kept going by outside her window.

The ambulance swerved the streets in urgency. The traffic divided and veered off the road in condolence and respect. A couple of the construction workers knelt next to Edgar, looking concerned through their sweating faces, trying to get through to him, telling him help was coming. Edgar was not thinking about his phone or the heat when they cradled him through the back doors. He thought he’d never seen a human face so clearly as the one telling him to hold on, and he did hold on—the nurse’s hand kept him connected to the single block of world he had walked through, been pummeled by, that he would return to.