3 Jolts Awake In a Battery-Powered Car

You wake up like the beating of a war drum announcing the bliss and pity of the day; like the ponderous sky self reflectively questions its own existence; as a gray seal gasps for air after a hunt; like a child who attempts to prove they are worthy of the next karate belt in every damn class; like a jet streams anger builds toward every self-righteous American airline's platinum member whose ever complained as if their money should be able to bend the weathers very well to their schedule; like someone who has just exposed the false prophet stability crys out to break free. 

You used to wake up when you were young. What are you so afraid of now? 

The air smelled sour as he jolted upright. It was a mix of salt and blood and an over-honeyed black tea which he had been drinking while the other hand gripped the wheel. His body pulsed as if drawn to a nearby force that he couldn't name. The world was black save illuminated shadows that danced beneath his eyelids which let him know that his heart was beating and that the world was still there. This concerned him because for as long as he could remember those those eyes were filled with images. His eyelids fluttered but the salt water and sweat and blood had all but sewn them shut. After a moment he stopped trying, fearing his fate if his eyelids opened only to reveal a darker blackness. One filled not with the reflections of illuminated promise but instead with the unforgettable emotional decimation that comes with the loss of something you didn't know you could lose in the first place. 

In his newfound blindness, he sat paralyzed for what felt like hours. He focused on his breathing shallow and insincere, until it was the only thing he could hear. At peace for a moment in the conch shell of his own making, a question, the remnant of a dream, reached upward from the depths of his throat. It choked him with a grip of iron until he spit it out with the seawater obstructing his breath.

 “What are you afraid of” he tried to speak, coughing on the words as they swelled from his diaphragm.

As he strained to speak them the nape of his neck brushed up against something cool and metallic. Something which shocked the senses and forced a question; which a moment before had been so pressing, back down into its hollow waiting area; ready to be spoken again when called upon. 

Waves lapped at his feet waking him a second time. He was bound by an entangled spider's web of mostly insulated electrical wire. The noose in which his head hung originated from the steering wheel. To a slightly more sadistic observer, of which there were none, he may have looked, in some odd way, as though he was supposed to be there on the bank of that salty river at the mouth of the ocean. As though the man's position, innervated by electrical subterfuge might have been intentional; a cunning design which did nothing more than make the man a part of something he could touch. Something he could know was meaningful by the stabbing, tingling pain he would feel before the darkness set in again if he moved the wrong way. 

Yet- he was not supposed to be there. 

He was supposed to be at his own “surprise” party, that his wife and two wonderful daughters were throwing for him that night upon his expected arrival from work. This thought set him back to the task at hand. 

Each thought was exhaustive and each movement toward a door that had broken off at the hinge was a painful reminder of the current state of his situation. 

The car slipped further down the side of the muddy red clay embankment and his mouth slipped beneath the waves. An escaping air bubble brought the forgotten words in his throat back to the surface of his memory and he spoke them in the silence of the water.

“What are you afraid of.”

They were the words of a man he once knew. A man of passion, and song, and longing. Longing for a world beyond checks and balances, beyond the authority of faceless structures and nameless power. A man who knew that a moment could be graced without the lurking shadow of time. A man who might have yearned for the chance to feel the electricity of a battery-powered car as it slipped further down the bank of a brine-filled river, whose name was unknown to the man even though he had driven over it daily for the past 20 years on his way to work. 

He pushed the thought back down. His body writhed and danced beautifully as he continued to coach himself through the process of disentanglement. The wires were mostly insulated he kept reminding himself as he slipped the lacey noose off of his neck. This task was made even more frightening by the uncertainty his blindness posed and he couldn't be sure that he might not fray as he swam to the surface. His fear grew as he struggled for breath and his movement, before a calculated choreography, was now an erratic battle. As his fear grew so did the question which he was trying so desperately to escape. This time it was posed with the fervor of his younger self; the younger self that sent him catapulting off of precipices both literal and academic; the younger self that spit fire at the antiquated rhetoric of professors; which hungered for a broken bed at the edge of a broken world. He was brazen, and angry, and alive then. 

But he was the same rhetoric-spewing, archaically spoken, tweed-dressing professor now. He lectured on the apathy which had overtaken the world. He spoke of the facelessness of communication and of his research surrounding how those in the late stages of life feel about lost potential. 

In that moment he found himself longing for the electrical noose he had just spent so much energy untying. Those feelings were easily replaced with the evolutionary need to breathe and he kicked his legs in kind. As the last wire loosed itself from his legs his mind rushed with both relief and sorrow for the loss of the electrical stimulation he was leaving behind; a feeling of life he hadn't felt since he was young.

He wheezed for breath as he clawed at the surface of the water. His eyelids fluttered in biological retaliation as his hands reached out in order to find the sides of the car. He dragged himself along the steely edge and up onto the muddy red clay embankment of the brine-filled river at the mouth of the ocean. Now he wiped his eyes of their salty blood and watched as the car slipped from its last stronghold of a muddy anthill and began to descend beneath the waves. 

The sand and rocks and starlight above were duller than they should have been for a man who had just escaped death. 

A part of him was descending beneath the waves. The part of him that he would try so fervently to forget when he woke up next to his incredible wife who was still waiting for him at a now belated surprise party probably expecting his call. 

As he considered that part of him, now at least 15 ft below the surface, his momentum quietly urged him forward. He asked the water's surface to allow him to pursue what he lost below its frothing gates. The car slipped quickly now down an undulating cliff and he feared he might be too late. He swam deeper, exhausting the last of his breath to propel one last effort to reach the car interior. His fingers wrapped around the wheel and he knew he was home. No contemplation was necessary. As the car fell from the submerged cliff and tumbled into the dark abyss below, a bright flash of light and life burst forth in momentary explosion and the man found what he had forgotten so long ago. He was finally awake.