Moments: Where Worlds Fall Apart

Charlie Westphal was back in New Orleans. He’d visited his friend Michael there last summer and left a piece of his heart in the city. Six months later Michael invited him to come find it during New Orleans’ famous holiday season, Mardi Gras. Michael picked up Charlie from the airport and dropped him off at his house, which sat just above Tulane University on a very busy section of South Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans’ White Teapot. Michael and his roommate Bryce, both law students at Tulane, had Friday classes left before the weekend could begin so Bryce’s large yellow Labrador named Ollie was the only one home to receive their guest. “Remember to watch Ollie whenever you open the door to enter or leave,” Michael warned as Charlie pulled his suitcase from the backseat. “He will run outside and has no conception of the fact that traffic can hurt him.” Charlie laughed, but he was careful as he crept inside and when he left that evening, and everything was fine.

Usually it was his father admonishing Charlie about safety. Living with parents at twenty-four is only tolerable if they’ve long ceased trying to parent you, and his dad’s paternal anxieties were so often exaggerated that Charlie felt unable to respond to his more reasonable ones with anything but annoyance. Forgetting to lock the front door, Charlie recognized, deserved a reminder. But his dad was obsessive about it. The first thing he did before leaving and after returning home was check every window and door in the house. “You need to stop leaving your bathroom window unlocked Charlie,” he’d say, convinced that someone in their small, crimeless Pennsylvania town was going to scale the sheer drop up to that second story window and burglar them.

If his dad was too anxious, it was also true that sometimes Charlie wasn’t anxious enough. It wasn’t that he didn’t know that accidents happen, but that, still outgrowing the invincibility of adolescence, he understood them as only happening to other people. That’s why he could answer his little brother Nicky, sitting next to him in the back seat as their parents drove Charlie to the airport, with the professorial certainty of someone discussing a topic which they’ve thoroughly studied but whose subject matter they’ve never experienced.

They were listening to an audiobook in the car when the narrator said the phrase “all of a sudden.” “Charlie,” Nicky asked, “what’s a sudden?” Charlie asked what he meant. “The book said it happened ‘all of a sudden.’ What is a sudden? Can anything happen in half of a sudden?” Charlie smiled and explained that ‘all of a sudden’ was just a phrase. “Anything that you weren’t expecting to happen, and that you didn’t realize was about to happen until it was too late to react, is something that happens all of a sudden. It’s kind of how life goes, really. One second things are one way and the next, they’re not. You can’t always see it coming even if you’re looking. That’s why we sometimes say accidents happen all of a sudden.”

Charlie had separate plans from Michael and Bryce that night. They’d be with their law school friends while Charlie had a date at the parades with Theo, a local pastry chef he met during his first stay in New Orleans last summer. Each parade during Mardi Gras is put on by a social club called a krewe, Theo informed Charlie, and each krewe usually has a signature throw. Throws are the beads, frisbees, cups, and other trinkets they toss to the gluttonous crowds. But a krewe’s signature throw is an item hand-decorated by each member, unique and in limited supply. The parade they went to see down on Magazine Street was for the krewe Nyx. A decorated purse was Nyx’s signature throw and half the reason Theo wanted to go. To get one it helps your chances to have a child on your shoulders or to know a krewe member personally, but even then they have to actually find you in the crowd. The odds are never in your favor. Theo never got one.

             The scene was as grand as Charlie expected. Trees along the street, like fenceposts and fire hydrants and any other available surface, were dressed in skirts of Mardi Gras beads. The floats were pink and blue and green, all two stories high, and each expertly designed to a different theme. The krewe rained beads and balls and frisbees and printed plastic cups down on the people and the ground like so much litter. It’s really a lot of waste, Charlie thought, and began to wonder if it was all worth it, but the thought was knocked from his head by the impact of a plastic cup and Theo’s laughter.

             After the last float passed, Charlie and Theo turned to leave in the direction it came from and noticed someone lying in the middle of the street fifteen yards away. A young woman – younger than Charlie – in jeans and a red zip-up sweatshirt was splayed out on the pavement, face-down with legs spread and arms at her sides, like she’d been punched in the jaw and fell forward unconscious. Charlie wondered aloud if that might’ve been what happened, but then he saw her back. The space where the bottom of her jacket should have met her jeans was nearly flat against the concrete like the trough of a grotesque valley. It felt like a whole minute had passed before someone finally yelled “Get the kids out! Keep your kids away!” When the paramedics arrived they couldn’t lift her body onto the stretcher lest it fold like an overstuffed wallet. She was internally severed, held together like two digits in a Chinese finger trap. For privacy the paramedics produced a massive white sheet and veiled themselves so the crowd couldn’t see. That’s when most people started to leave.

             They asked around and learned that the young woman had been chasing floats up and down the street to catch the more valuable throws. Theo even remembered seeing her run past them twice during the night. Apparently she tried to cross between two tandem floats – the very last of the parade – and tripped over the hitch connecting them and was run over. That explained the valley. She didn’t get a purse either.

             “She looked young,” said theo, breaking the silence as they walked to his car.

             “Yeah,” Charlie agreed. “Think of how her family is going to feel. Her friends. Over an accident that’s so, stupid. No purpose. Just because she tried to jump between a fucking float.” His tone suggested he was angry for the people who’d have to grieve her death, but he was actually nervous because he could imagine himself in a similar accident of his own making. Perhaps not that careless of one, but a careless one nonetheless which would end his life and weave suffering through the remaining days of those who loved him. It was on their behalf that he spoke.

             The next morning Charlie decided not to tell Michael or Bryce what happened. He’d thought maybe he ought to tell them; it was the kind of thing you told other people. But they’d probably hear about it anyway, and did they need to know he saw it? He wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t be because his head was too foggy to trust his own reasoning. He’d been remembering the woman and her lumbar valley since he woke up, so far without any real anxiety, and he was afraid that talking about it could lead his brain to uncontrollably fixate, creating the anxiety he’d so far avoided.

Since he was seventeen Charlie worried that there would always be something he’d anxiously obsess over. Always something about himself which might hurt other people. By age twenty he accepted it as an enduring feature of his life. But once in a while, when he noticed himself thinking too much about some new worry, he tried steer his thoughts away from it and avoid things that might cement the thoughts in his brain. He could never be sure what would become a new, long-term anxiety, so he was afraid that anything could. And he didn’t want a new fear. The old ones, despite their omnipresent weight, were at least familiar and expected. For this reason Charlie said nothing, reassuring himself that he could tell them at a later time if he wanted to.

They spent that afternoon with Michael and Bryce’s law school friends watching the Krewe of Muses parading down the magnificently wealthy St. Charles Avenue. Their group was large – the three of them were joined by Michael’s girlfriend May and a group of their friends whose names Charlie couldn’t keep straight.  At first Michael and Charlie bet to see who could collect more beads by the end of the day but they tired of it in the first hour and called a stalemate. It was like betting to see who could get the most wet during a hurricane. Instead they joined everyone else in guzzling cheap beer and cheering for the floats and the performers that separated them. At one point Charlie caught a drawstring bag and put away the few throws he actually expected to keep: A face mask, a frilly bookmark, zipper pouches, a pack of turquoise Muses napkins, and plastic cups printed with fancy high heels – the Muses’ signature throw.

He filled the bag and swung it over his shoulders at just the right moment to be of service. One of Michael’s friends named Allen, who he hadn’t noticed leaving, reappeared in the group with his little cousin, a tousle-haired blonde boy no older than five. Allen had a light beer in each hand and held them out in explanation as he asked Charlie if he could hold his little cousin on his shoulders so the boy could see. “Please?” asked the tousle-hair boy, looking up at Charlie from hip height. Charlie shrugged and put the boy up, finding that as surely as it gave the boy a better view it caused adults in front of them to move too, offering the boy a better position near the street. In this way they found themselves standing right on the curb, as close to the floats as they were allowed to go. Then Charlie noticed someone yelling almost inaudibly in his direction. A Muse on the passing float was pointing between him and the boy with her one hand and grasping a bedazzled high heel held in the other. “You!” she yelled, and when their eyes locked she threw. It almost fell out of the boy’s grasp but, holding the boy steady with one hand, Charlie reached up with the other and helped him catch it. The boy was excited to have caught something, thrilled at the congratulations from adults around him, but disappointed that it was a useless woman’s shoe. He frowned as he handed it down to Charlie, who had Allen put it in his bag. A little trophy to take back to South Claiborne Ave.

They all went back top Michael’s for a few hours of rest and by ten o’clock half of them were ready to go back out, the other half already at the bars waiting for the rest who still hadn’t left. Michael and Bryce went in the first uber but the second one for Charlie, Allen, Michael’s girlfriend May, and May’s friend Jenna was inexplicably late. They waited in the living room passing a joint around the circle formed by the couch on one side and two beanbag chairs in the center of the floor. Allen and Jenna were on the couch and Charlie was on one of the beanbags, Scratching Ollie’s ears until May stood up from the other chair and gave him the joint so that she could check if their Uber arrived.

The living room was in the front of the house where the street-facing wall is interrupted by two large glass doors that were used only as windows and provided a wide view outside. Between the house and South Claiborne Ave is a small front yard of grass and then a sidewalk. The highway itself was three lanes running in both directions, separated by a grassy strip of neutral ground, which Charlie called a median back in Pennsylvania. The front door was to the far right of the front wall.

No one registered what May was doing. She opened the front door just enough, for just a moment, and then the world turned more slowly. Ollie, seemingly asleep behind Charlie, saw the door open and bolted through it as if he’d been hurled by the hand of Zeus. May turned just in time to watch him pass her by.

And then she screamed.           

             “Ollie no!”

Charlie was sprinting toward the door in freeze frames. Ollie ran sideways across the window’s view. May disappeared after him, and then she screamed like a steaming kettle, burning with the dread of helpless knowing. “Oh my god no! Stop Ollie please!” Then came the inevitable thud.

Charlie reached the doorway in time to watch the once-massive dog moving through the air, curled and spinning on his side at hip height. He hit the ground and skidded to stop against the curb like a hockey puck on pavement. The car sped away. The first thing Charlie registered when he arrived at Ollie’s side was that he suddenly appeared to be only half his normal size. He stayed that way for the rest of his life, and Charlie would never find an adequate explanation for it.

May fled into the house. Allen ran to Charlie’s side. Ollie was still stiff and curled, taking unnaturally heavy breaths at unnaturally slow intervals. “Call Michael and Bryce,” Charlie said to Allen, who fumbled for his phone. “We need a vet hospital, find out where to take him.” Charlie was already reliving the scene as he knelt on the curb. He felt everything he imagined May must have felt. The terror, the instant regret, the undeniable responsibility. And then Ollie, lying there in the street confused and hurt, without the only person who could bring him any comfort. He was dying among strangers. It could have been him, Charlie understood. This was proof that his own inattention could –  which he took to mean it would – lead to the destruction of other people’s lives.

“Was that your dog?” Charlie looked up and saw a middle-aged woman standing fifteen feet down the street from them, next to a parked van. “Yes,” Charlie said. “He’s just been hit.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said, looking at them awkwardly, unsure of herself. “Did… Did you guys call an Uber?” Charlie and Allen stared blankly at her. “Don’t worry,” she assured them, “I’ll cancel the ride.”

It was a cloudy day in the dead of Summer and Charlie was standing in his bedroom, looking at the bedazzled high heel displayed on his bookshelf and wondering if it was all just dumb luck. He hadn’t told his parents about the finger trap woman or about Ollie, or how he was the one who drove Ollie to a vet hospital somewhere in New Orleans that Charlie couldn’t find again with a gun to his head. Charlie certainly didn’t say he’d relived those hours every day since with a vividness somewhere between memory and flashback, all the while brimming with fear that he could be May. Back home he began noting whenever the front door was left open, and secretly checking on Nicky whenever he and their dog Shiloh were outside. That only made him more afraid however, like reassuring himself inherently validated the underlying fear, and he would find that he had to then check again, and again, in case something were to happen at just the moment he removed his attention once again. He tried to resist it, the urge to go and see that Nicky was safe, but he usually felt helpless to do so.

Charlie sat on his bed to steady himself as the thought of Nicky’s safety entered his mind. He tried not to believe the cascade of thoughts, a string of cause and effects which he believed only he could prevent. He hated that he’d become compelled to furtively spy on his brother like some terrified parent. Hated even more that it felt out of his control. He felt like his dad, which bothered him too as he fought the urge to see where his brother was. But the potential cost of not checking…

 Charlie knew his brother was playing outside, but his mom was in the garden and his dad out at work. His mom might not be watching Nicky, and with kids all it took was a moment. That was proved by the woman with a valley in her back, and by May and Ollie. The door was only open for a moment, but worlds fall apart in moments. For all the reasons Charlie knew he didn’t want children, this was the reason he was afraid to.

Out in the driveway Charlie found Nicky playing catch with a baseball and a pitching trampoline, right where he was supposed to be. He’s okay, Charlie thought to himself as he turned toward the door, guilty from his lack of self-control. Then just as he reached the front door he heard the ball hit the ground, followed by Nicky’s soft but quick foot steps. Charlie turned as Nicky ran down the driveway after the ball and heard himself screaming “No Nicky no!” But Nicky was already stopping himself and let the ball roll out into the street as a small green pickup truck drove by.

“Calm down, jeez.” Said Nicky. “I know to look both ways.”

“You have to be careful!” Charlie chastised him through heavy breaths.

“Shut up, you can’t tell me what do,” said Nicky. “You’re not Dad.”