The Best American Essays 2016 (27 page)

When the truck’s front bumper hit him, there was an explosion of pink, his body, or some part of it, bursting like a water balloon. As the truck rolled over him, he was struck by first one set of wheels, then another, then another, causing him to careen and tumble along under the chassis. The amount of time between my first noticing him and seeing his body battered under the truck was probably two seconds, too short of an interval to put into words any of my quick succession of thoughts, but when my brain finally caught up with what was happening, I gasped, “
Oh, my God!
”

Lifting my foot from the accelerator, I swerved as far to the left as I could to avoid hitting the man myself. Mindful of the heavy traffic on the road, I was trying to slow as quickly as possible, to signal to the vehicles behind me that something had happened, but not so quickly that I got rammed by an inattentive driver. My next thought was to get beyond the scene before I pulled over, to not stop until I was out of range of its gruesomeness.

As our vehicle neared the body lying in the road, I spoke forcefully to Elizabeth: “Don’t look!” I think I even put a hand in front of her face. She immediately covered her eyes, which created a strange moment of solitude between myself and whatever I was about to see. I felt like a child who’d stumbled into some scary place—a spiderweb-filled basement or a dark cave—and realized he was going to face the terror alone.

There seemed no possibility the man had survived, but I wanted to assess whether or not he could be helped. My eyes found his body on the asphalt. He lay on his stomach, unmoving, his feet toward the roadside ditch. For some reason I could see his back and shoulders but not his head. Getting closer, I saw that his head was gone. A few feet farther down the road lay pieces of his shattered skull.

About a hundred yards beyond the body, the big rig was coming to a stop in the right-hand lane. I pulled in front of it and cut the engine. Hoping to spare Elizabeth any further horror, particularly the sight of the man’s headless and shattered body, I gave her another firm directive: “Stay here! Do not get out of this car!”

Her face white with shock, she nodded.

I climbed out and ran back up the highway toward the truck. As I reached it my dominant thought was that I did not want to see again—or see better—what I had just seen. If someone wanted me to go beyond the truck, they would have to be armed or strong enough to physically force me. Even then, if they wanted me to look again at the pieces of the man’s body, they would have to pry my eyelids open.

When I reached the driver, he was standing in front of his vehicle, talking on his cell phone. He too, I noticed, had taken up a spot that kept his truck between himself and the gore back up the road. I speak Spanish, and initially the bits of conversation I overheard made me think he was describing the accident to the police, but it eventually became clear he was talking to someone at the company he worked for—a dispatcher or possibly his boss. His eyes were pegged open, and he spoke as though in a trance—head still, mouth opening and closing robotically. When he hung up, I started to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but my voice broke. I placed a hand on his shoulder; the hand, I noticed, was trembling. He said nothing, his eyes refusing to meet mine.

A school bus pulled up next to us in the left lane and stopped. A dozen girls, all about fifteen, sat in the first few rows behind the driver, all in some state of shock, many crying into cell phones. Without getting out of his seat, the bus driver opened the door and gave the truck driver some simple directions: don’t move the truck, wait for the police, ask the witnesses to stay here. Despite his clear-minded directives, the bus driver was ashen, his voice rising and falling in pitch as he spoke. “
Estará bien
,” he said a few times. Then he drove his devastated passengers away.

At this point I looked back down the road, making sure I’d parked my vehicle in such a way that the bus could get around it, and saw Elizabeth. She’d gotten out of the SUV and was standing on the side of the highway, shaking and crying. I ran to her.

As I wrapped her in my arms and tried to comfort her, I noticed, across the highway, a middle-aged woman in shorts and a dark shirt who’d come out of her house to see what was happening. She waved us over. I led Elizabeth across the asphalt, and the woman, without a word, took Elizabeth by the hand and led her to a covered patio that fronted her house. I started back up the hill toward the truck but was met by a different woman, this one younger, maybe thirty or so, walking quickly toward me holding a pen and a pad of paper. She wasn’t wearing any kind of uniform, but she comported herself professionally, like a medic or a police officer. She told me I needed to give a statement, that the truck driver might be in serious legal trouble if I didn’t. Working to stay calm and speak in coherent Spanish, I told her that I would definitely give a statement, but I also explained that I was an American, that this was my last day in Costa Rica, that my girlfriend was upset and I didn’t want to keep her here any longer than I had to.

She nodded. “
Sí. Pero dame su información.
”

I carefully wrote out my name and email address, along with the name of the hotel in Alajuela where we’d be staying the night.

“
Lo vio usted?
” she asked.

“
Sí. El hombre
”—I didn’t know the word for “dove,” so I said “threw himself”—“
se tiro en frente del camion. No fue la culpa del camionero.
”

Concurring with my version of what had happened, she nodded and went back up the road.

At this point the son of the woman who was tending to Elizabeth emerged from the house. He was skinny, about seventeen, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, half hopping and half walking across the lawn as he struggled to fit a pair of flip-flops on his feet. “What happened?” he asked me, in Spanish.

“A man got hit by a truck.”

“Is he dead?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“
Perdio su cabeza,
” I said, miming the act of lifting my head from my shoulders.

His eyes grew wider and he tore off up the hill, his mother yelling after him to be careful.

Stepping onto the patio to check on Elizabeth, I saw she’d been given a seat at a table and was taking sips from a glass of water. I patted her back and stroked her shoulder.

“
Qué lástima,
” the mother said to me.

A minute later the son came running back, his eyes wide and face pale. His expression unequivocally conveyed the same message my brain had been shouting since I’d exited the SUV:
DO NOT GO PAST THE TRUCK
! “
Ohhh,
” he shuddered. “
Es malo
.” Taking his cue from the woman who’d come down the road, he found a pencil and a piece of paper and handed them to me. I again wrote out my information.

When I finished, the mother pointed to the SUV. “Is that your car?”

The SUV, I now remembered, was still parked in the right-hand lane of the highway. Its windows were open and Elizabeth’s and my suitcases (which contained all of our credit cards, our passports, and most of our remaining cash) were sitting in plain view on the back seat. Before getting out and running up the road toward the truck, I’d had the thought that Elizabeth might need to move the SUV to make way for emergency vehicles, so I’d left the keys in the ignition. The backup of traffic behind the accident included taxis, buses, and other passenger-carrying vehicles that wouldn’t be going anywhere for a long time, and dozens of people had decided to get out and make their way on foot. In groups of two and three, they were streaming down the highway. The mother had noticed a couple of young men standing at the open windows of the SUV, peering inside.

At this point I made a decision that I’m not proud of. I knew the right thing was to stay and wait for the police, to give an official statement and convey, in person, my conviction that the dead man had dived in front of the truck on purpose. But my stress overruled my sense of duty. The truck driver, by way of the competent woman with the notepad, had my information, and now so did the mother and her son. If anybody wanted to reach me, they could. But I wasn’t hanging around any longer.

“Let’s go,” I said to Elizabeth.

The mother appeared to sympathize. She nodded and helped me get Elizabeth to her feet.

I walked Elizabeth back across the highway to the SUV, our approach sending the two suspicious men on their way. I put Elizabeth into the passenger seat and then hustled around to the driver’s side and climbed in. Taking a deep breath, I started the engine and carefully—very, very carefully—drove away.

For weeks after the events in Costa Rica, Elizabeth had little appetite, suffered nightmares, and struggled to enjoy anything. At random unguarded moments she broke into tears. Before our trip, she had spent months completing applications to grad school—gathering letters of recommendation, slaving over her statement of purpose, devoting hundreds and hundreds of hours to studying for the general and subject-specific GRE tests—but now the whole enterprise seemed rather meaningless to her.

My own symptoms were similar but worse. Previous to the accident, my sensitivity to violence on TV or in movies was about average—I’d never been one for cartoonish horror-flick splatter, but neither was I much bothered by the “realistic” violence in films like
The Godfather
or
No Country for Old Men
. Following the accident, however, I was deeply disturbed by just about any violence. One night, on a sketch-comedy show on TV, a mannequin dressed as one of the characters was tossed into the street and run over by a car. I nearly vomited, turned off the TV, and left the room.

I was also hounded by a pervasive sense of fear. I couldn’t help thinking it could have been
my
vehicle the man selected and repeatedly imagined making eye contact with him as his head dropped below the horizon of the SUV’s hood. As bad as my trauma was at having simply
witnessed
his death, I couldn’t imagine the pain of having been the agent of it. I was sure that on some future road I would kill someone. Aside from never getting behind the wheel again, there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about this. (My fear ramped up considerably when, a few days after Elizabeth and I arrived back in California, a distraught man killed himself by jumping into traffic during the morning commute on Highway 1, less than a mile from where we live.)

But my deepest and most unrelenting symptom was a profound obsession with death itself. Before Costa Rica I had not spent much time thinking about it, but afterward I not only replayed and dwelled on the images I’d seen out there on the tropically heated asphalt, I thought about death throughout history—particularly gruesome, violent death. I imagined the accidents and calamities that must have struck ancient humans trying to bring down mastodons and rhinos with rocks and spears. I pictured hunters and gatherers being taken by tigers, wolves, and other apex predators. My mental re-creations spared no details: razor-sharp teeth and claws shredding flesh, powerful jaws crushing bone, people crying out in agony, their mouths filling with blood.

I thought too of the violence that humans have perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) against other humans. Lines from Homer that I’d read years before kept running through my mind: “Agamemnon stabbed straight at his face as he came on in fury with the sharp spear . . . [and] the spearhead passed through this and the bone, and the inward brain was all spattered forth.”
¹
As an avid reader of history, I knew that from ancient times through the Dark and Middle Ages and on up to the modern era, just about every civilization has condoned, under some circumstance or another, the savaging of human bodies. The Romans fed slaves to lions. Nordic peoples broke open rib cages so lungs and other vital organs could be removed while the victims were still alive. European Christians put heretics on Catherine wheels and beat them to death with clubs. Muslims buried people up to their necks and pummeled them with rocks until their skulls were lumps of bone and meat. Here in the modern civilized West we killed people by shooting them, hanging them, or sizzling their lungs with poison gas. In addition to these “intimate” kinds of death, we killed each other by the thousands and millions during periods of mass slaughter. The American Civil War: 600,000 killed; World War I: 16 million killed; World War II: 60 million killed.
²
I thought about the genocides in Rwanda and Serbia, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and the lesser-known but no less gruesome battles in places often neglected by the Western media: Eritrea, Chad, Congo. The attendant human savagery of these conflicts—the pain and blood and suffering, the raw carnage—suddenly weighed on me as never before.

It also occurred to me that for as long as humans have been suffering gruesome deaths, other humans have been witnessing them. (Indeed, the ancient and medieval killing rituals I mention above were usually witnessed by large crowds, with audience members often encouraged to take part in the savagery.) During prehistoric times, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone lived a natural life without being present while some member of his tribe, clan, or family was mauled by a bear or eaten by a puma—or speared or bludgeoned or thrown from a cliff. Shifting to more recent history, I wondered what it must have been like to survive Columbine, to have been one of the firefighters who on September 11 witnessed bodies impacting the ground from eighty-six floors above. Or to have seen friends and fellow soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not surprise me to learn that, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 20 percent of the soldiers who’ve returned from fighting in those countries are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
³
Other statistics are even more telling: though Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans make up far less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 20 percent of its suicides.
⁴
In 2010, on average, twenty-two veterans committed suicide
every day
.
⁵