Part Three

These are the ingredients for war: damage, guilt and suffering. At the time I didn’t know I was beginning a war; I thought I had made a simple decision to do something different with my life. I should have known that my war had begun since my new life, my path to being a superhero began with a car slamming into me at thirty miles an hour.
I stepped off the curb looking behind me at my little postit flapping in the breeze on the door of my former employer. I’m not the kind of guy who generally steps into the street without looking, but everyone does it at least once in his life, and it’s blind luck when he does it as a car is coming. The driver also was not paying attention. He later said that he was tuning his radio when he heard the loud thump against the side of his car. I stepped off the curb and turned my attention toward the street just as the car was veering too close to the sidewalk. The sun glinted on the windshield. A flock of starlings sprang suddenly from the bushes. In that split second of suddenly realizing what was happening, every detail crystallized. My body flexed and spun, but not enough, and the bumper of the car caught me under the left knee and forced the spinning of my body into a whirling, sending me into an inverted, backward twisting arch over the passenger window and down over the trunk. I landed face down, my palms slapping the pavement with a singular clap, the two hands separately making known the mysterious sounds of one hand clapping.
The driver who hit me slammed on his brakes. The woman behind him who almost hit me slammed on her brakes. I passed out in the midst of the fumes from the exhaust of the car before, and the warm breath of the engine from the car behind.
I felt no pain. I remember being surprised that I could feel no pain. I woke quite suddenly in the back of the ambulance, realized where I was, and immediately began wondering why I was in an ambulance. I wasn’t sure that anything permanently damaging had happened. The long siren wail was a piercing noise, but I was comforted by it. I glanced at the paramedic’s face as he sat looking forward, away from me, and was comforted by the trepidation in his brow. I was going to say something like “Are you sure I’m hurt” but the interior of the ambulance started spinning, twisting and turning like one of those crazy training things they put astronauts through, and I could not think of what I wanted to say. But I felt warm and comfortable. I clutched my pad of postits to my chest and watched the whirling lights and the spinning cavalcade and the twisting carnival of night flying by and holding on to this thought: spinning, spinning, turning, turning, at an end of a day a turn becomes a revolution.