Some Petty Autocrat

Screaming interrupted road screeches. A woman was in half, pen in her hand, dripping red onto paper. Another woman was standing over her. 

“Is anyone here a doctor!?” — that was what she was saying.

I was.

There had been a car. It had jumped a red at sixty just around the corner from them, had come careening fast around it, had come and sliced the woman into two. People had gathered round immediately. It was quite a mess. She had no chance of making it, of course. I think we drew some reassurance from seeing inevitability play itself out. It was, however, interesting how long her upper half had kept moving. The head had grunted out a request for pen and paper, and the hand had managed to scribble for a good five minutes before giving up the ghost, its script becoming illegible. “Oh dear.” “What a pity.” A very English scene, all in all. The driver had smashed into a shopfront some twenty feet away. Some cokehead. Everyone was far less interested in him.

Alas I was a doctor of literature, and so unable to help the grieving woman put her companion back together. She tried anyway. I was, however, able to assess the quality of the poem that now stuck to the floor. Overly emotional. Too overwrought. Things that should have only been alluded to had been splayed out for all to see. It pained me to say so, but it wasn’t very good. All this I explained to her companion, pink ropes in her hands, and she dully nodded her head. Before I left I folded the page in half and slipped it into my pocket. It was, after all, my paper.

For the rest of my walk a dull humidity quieted the air, and my ears seemed to ring with a just-repressed cacophony.

The next day I passed by a children’s Go-Kart track. Round and around and around and around they went. The captured power made me stop. I decided to stay watching, seated on a commemorative bench behind an oak tree.

Vummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm————

I stayed because I wanted to see one crash. I wanted to see one flip off the slick-slip surface and come spinning through the air towards me. The child-driver would be cast skywards, body aping pathetically the path the spirit would later try to make. The machine would smash to the ground before me. It would smell of gas, and young sweat. Then I would write a poem about it.

Vummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm————

None of this happened. They just kept going. Around and around and around and around. Sometimes they would change. A parent shuffled their oaf away and another shuffled theirs inwards. I sank ever more into my seat. It was dedicated to some petty autocrat from a foreign polity I had never heard of. Apparently he had loved motorsports. I fingered the folded notepad paper in my pocket. No one saw me.

I note that my daily walks are very important to me. I am seen by many people, though I never take the same route. Thus I know that when someone sees me twice they must conclude that I really exist —  that I exist, not as an automaton, but as a real agent, choosing quite precisely to be wherever I am at that moment. Few people see me twice, I think. Perhaps I should walk with greater stature.

Vummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm————

Tomorrow I returned to the Go–Karts. A stranger was there already. Not willing to give up my spot I sat beside him. Green eyes. Gaunt face. His hands were fixed inside his trouser pockets.

He said, after quite some polite silence, that he had known the man the bench was dedicated to. He had gone to school with him in Switzerland. I asked him what he’d thought of the place. He said he hated it. Once a group of European boys had tied the two of them to goalposts in the school-field and kicked footballs at them until the teachers intervened hours later. He asked me what I thought about children’s motorsport. I said I wanted to see them crash. He nodded his head. The children kept going around in circles. Around and around and around.

Back at my flat I was reading the dead woman’s poetry over in my hand. I was trying to work out where she had been heading. She, of course, had been trying to work out the same thing. Neither of us had come to a good answer.

After a few minutes the man from the bench asked me what I was looking at. I handed it over to him, but made it clear I wanted it back. Meaningless lines criss-crossed atop the script — the blood had dried into a patchwork crisp.

“It’s quite good,” he said. 

“Mmm?”

“Did you write it?”

“No. No.”

“Ah.”

His chest was flecked with the memories of ancient bruises. Propping himself up, he told me how his old friend had loved poetry; almost as much as he had loved motorsports. In Switzerland, a piece of his about the goalposts had won a prize. When the US troops and their allies burst into his compound, many years later, they had found him writing a poem there too. Then they shot him in the head. Apparently it had been quite beautiful, but the man from the bench had never seen it.

“I’d never heard of him before I read that plaque,” I said.

“Ah.”

He left some hours later, with some books I lent him, hair slicked back with shower water.

Sleep. Dreams. A shower. And then the Go-Kart course — but no one was there. On the streets the dead woman’s face peered out from the fronts of newspapers. Seeing her then for the second time, I bought every one, but found that none made any mention of her friend. No, no mention of her at all. No mention of me, either. Or the poem. Reflexively I reached into my pocket for the notepad paper. It was gone.

From above I saw myself walking through the shaded streets, streets shaded by both shackled trees and tower blocks, lit by the dull morning sun made diffuse by clouds rolled out by currents whirling, high up, where the air was thin.

Then I came deliberately to the crossing I had before been at by chance. The tarmac had been cleaned. People milled about incessantly. Lots was going on, but nothing was really happening (no one said “oh dear”). I propped myself against the traffic light as my pen moved aimlessly across my notepad.

Vummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm————

It wasn’t working. Certainly the words were the same, but the effect the hand bestowed was different. I tried walking back and forth across the tarmac, keeping my head from turning left or right. People were looking at me now, people I had seen before. I smiled back. Eventually, in the middle of the road, my legs tired. No one tried to move me.

Vummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm————

The car sped out around the corner, tires dead-on with my midriff. Green eyes and gaunt face at the wheel. Pen pressed hard against thick paper. Behind my ears a woman screamed.