A Taiwanese Accident

Like a monster from childhood, he snuck up on us.  There was no time to react, no time to contemplate myths and legends.

Click.  Sometimes a moment in life crystallizes in a gravid moment.  Where the hidden force lines of fate align, where human prediction becomes accurate and real.  You just know that shit is going to happen. It was unavoidable.  Like gravity and taxes.

He, on the scooter was coming towards us.  We, in the taxi, were talking of Michaelangelo.

Click. The twain did meet, head-on, a juicy T-bone in the middle of an intersection, in the middle of Taipei, in the Middle Country.

He hit us, dead-on, still alive, whisper-quiet, the jolt that passed through the taxi tame in comparison to the shock of seeing a prophecy come true.  Of seeing physics proven, F=ma, Newton smiling benevolently over us.  The brain making calculations; if the scooter keeps going and the taxi is here and then the scooter and the taxi will be in the same place, there.

The inevitable, as it is wont to do, happened.

Sluggishly the Taxi Driver (reduced to his pure Platonian form, for his wits had momentarily departed him) sat still for a heartbeat then logically backed up the taxi a foot or two, naturally pinning the scooter and its rider under the car.  The Taxi Driver had become a caricature of himself, wrapped in an egg roll of strangeness.  He seemed to recede in himself, a lost piece of meat in a boiling bowl of soup.

After the crash, as the strands of physics and fate loosened, the chaos of possibility, that comfortable dark uncertain future, became ascendant again.  No longer had we the certainty of an accident.  More mundane forces reasserted themselves, like cowardice.  Clicking away, I snapped photos while thinking:

Should I help move him, but I’m deaf and can’t communicate with the people helping him so I’d probably just cause more damage for all I know I would move him and his head would fall off because I didn’t help support his neck like I was told to in perfect Mandarin Chinese but I don’t know Mandarin and can’t hear besides but of course they know that because I’m white and white right now means white and deaf and besides I’m fulfilling the photojournalistic duty of someone with a Big Camera so I am taking pictures of this tragic event so that pictures exist he is moving now and seems to be alright but look at his scooter he is lucky to be alive wow those cars are passing by us pretty fast we’d better get out of the street before someone hits us too last thing we need is Two Deaflympians Killed in Car Accident headlines

Pinned under the taxi, the rider (click) was frozen in a rictus of twisted pain, left arm held tight by the tire, legs under the scooter, body heaving from shock.  Volunteers moved the scooter, while the rider struggled up, and walked away.  Force, mass, and acceleration do not care if you live or die—only that you obey its laws.

And obey we did in that timeless space, in that instant of collision where our masses and our bodies all occupied the same space, potential energy to the kinetic.  We all walked away from that changed—some bloodier, some bloodless.