A New York down below

A cabby does a U-turn in front of my building. A motorcyclist hits him broadside and goes flying over the hood. I don't know this happens until I go to the window to see if the street is wet from rain. Then I see the bike, the fire truck, the ambulance, and the cabby, holding his head in his hands and crying, knowing that he has to find a new way to live.

All this transpires just 50 feet from where I live, but I don't hear any of it. I'm on the fourth floor, out of a line of sight with the street unless I'm next to the windows, yet close enough to hear every car that hits a manhole cover. When it's hot and I have the air conditioner running, the street noise is subdued and distorted by the low wheeze of the Panasonic fan. When the windows are open, the street below sounds like a stamping factory, where machine carcasses are cut like sugar cookies from massive slabs of steel, where gears grind and cooling systems hiss like bus brakes and alarms ring like ambulance sirens every time a piece of carcass moves down the line. Just like the guy at the stamping machine can't hear it anymore, not because he's deaf, but because he's used to it, I don't hear the street. If I let it intrude I'd go mad.

Five burly firemen are trying to roll the bike backwards out of traffic when I finally look out the window. There are yellow chalk markings on the pavement, not in the shape of a body like one would expect from too many cop shows, but just a few straight lines indicating where the bike landed. The Yellow Cab double parked across the street has a bashed-in front tire panel.

I am getting ready for my run in Central Park. My preoccupation with my negligible progress on the course is momentarily displaced by the situation on the ground below. Within a fragment of time too short to be consciously registered, lives have unalterably changed. The U-turn was illegal. The cabby will never drive in New York again. Maybe he has a family. Maybe he has to go home and tell a wife and children he no longer has an income.

Downstairs, I ask Luis the doorman if the biker had on a helmet. "Yeah," he says, "and it's the only reason he's alive, but he's still in a bad way."

I know what he means. I've seen bodies hit asphalt before. Asphalt doesn't give. I watched a biker broadside a utility vehicle a few years ago. His bones looked the teeth of a zipper. The guy that hit the cab is most likely on his way to a lifetime of setting off metal detectors with all the pins and bolts that will be necessary to hold his body together. Somewhere, his loved ones are probably making a frantic dash to the hospital without thinking to look up his preferred provider number.

The ambulance is gone when I walk out of the lobby and the fire truck is pulling away. The cabby is no longer crying, but his shoulders are slumped and his head hangs very low, as if he has finally absorbed his sudden shift of fate. I look around but don't see who might have been the fare. The person who set off the life-altering chain of events by raising their hand is the person who could've most easily walked away and denied any part of this tragedy, and thus become the one most vulnerable to injury after all.

Monday, August 30, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.