Death on the Mississippi

I remember the last throes.  

That strange flurry of motion, muscles in spasm, nerves firing wildly.  I remember that frantic dance and the stillness that followed.  Even as a small child the finality of this moment was clear to me.  Nevertheless, my parents packed the bird into a shoebox, loaded the kids into the car, and drove the corpse to an animal shelter where it could be pronounced DOA by a professional, suitably trained and certified proficient at identifying dead animals.  The excursion seemed baffling to me at the time.  But now, looking back, it’s painfully obvious that this was theatre for the sake of us children.  They went through the motions so that we could believe that they had done all they could.  I wonder if they taught this lesson with their own final days in mind.

That bird’s final burst of motion stayed with me for years.

It would be nearly three decades before I saw this dance again.

The man, 60 years old, maybe 70, lay on a road verge near the banks of the Mississippi river, the twisted frame of his bicycle knotted between his legs.  He wore an unkempt beard, threadbare corduroy trousers.  He wore a knit toque and wool socks under his sandals.  I dismounted my own bike and stood alongside a dozen strangers, watched his last flurry of motion, waited with the uncomfortable stillness until the tension was broken by the whine of the ambulance siren.

The driver who hit him didn’t stop, didn’t even slow down.

And that afternoon I spent hours learning what I could about the dead man.  I made a list of everything I knew about him.  He had converted to Judaism late in life.  He was on his way home from synagogue when he was struck and killed.  He was a retired engineer with a crackpot interest in theoretical physics; a surprisingly common hobby amongst older men with that educational background.  At the time I didn’t quite understand why I was doing this.  But now, looking back, it’s clear.  I was looking for patterns, building a catalogue of what we had in common, what set us apart.  I wanted a reason why this man should have been 2 meters ahead of me on that path when our positions might have easily been interchanged.  After all: I was the stronger rider, I could have easily overtaken him if I’d wanted to.

In my research I learned that he wasn’t pronounced dead until long after he had arrived in hospital.  The official time of death was hours after I’d watched him expire.  Like the dead bird in the shoebox, it seems that there’s something comforting about having death certified by an expert.  Authority lends meaning to the pronouncement.

This was the year when the sun always seemed to be in my eyes.

The glare of the sun followed me everywhere, no matter where I turned my head it was there, refracted off some shiny object: broken glass, the window of a passing car, the churning waters of the Mississippi.  This was the year I ate organ meats, heart, liver, tripe, under the influence of a man with a beautiful mind who remains, to this day, the most brilliant person I’ve ever met.  This was the year I spent lost in equations, at the blackboard, the skin on my hands dry and cracking from the chalk.  This was the year I lived in the office, under florescent lights, produced my most important contributions to mathematics, published countless theorems and calculations in obscure journals.  

My mentor, the man with the beautiful mind, died of stomach cancer that year.  

I stopped eating animals, lived off hummus and carrots.

I rode that path along the Mississippi three hundred times that year, maybe more.  I rode that path in the dead heat of summer, squinting against the sun.  I rode that path home from the bar late at night, still drunk, fall rain misting my glasses, headlights of passing cars dancing in the droplets.  In time someone painted an old bicycle white, adorned it with plastic flowers, chained it to the street lamp where the man died.  I started to notice similar memorial bikes scattered around the city.  When the winter came I let the air out of the tires, wrapped a scarf around my face, and rode that path along the Mississippi through the falling snow.

The car that killed him was found abandoned in a parking lot on the north-eastern end of town, plates stripped, serial number filed off.

The sun was always in my eyes that year.

In time I threw out almost everything I owned, rented a car, drove north for two days straight, waited in the long queue at the border, lied to the customs agent, came back home.