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I ran over a Bible with my car.
It was early in the morning, out on the county highway, somewhere between the tractor plant and the boarded up waterpark off the intestate.
It sounded like I hit a possum: hollow, almost far away. Like conga drums on a cassette tape.
I was already late for my open shift at the suburban grocery store. It was 4:23 A.M.
For a moment in my rearview, I saw the red light bleeding out, forming a pool around the Bible. “It’s probably just your tail lights,” I said to the steering wheel. Later, on my way back home, the Bible was gone. Someone must have come and scraped it all up.
I didn’t tell the only woman that I’ve ever loved about my accident. The collision. In a few hours time, I’d already started dividing my life up like that: B.C.: BEFORE COLLISION.
On the phone, I never managed to say much in my nightly report. She worked in another town, and stayed there during the week. A friend who was getting divorced let her sleep on a couch in her basement. I called every night to assure her that I’d filled the bird feeders, that the cats were still alive.
According to various surveys and other modern indicators, we were living the American Dream.
A.D.
The thing I lacked the most, B.C., was intention. I had come to believe that entropy was just a piece of computer coding language I knew nothing about. I was rough with my indifference, haphazardly handling my one wild and precious life. I hadn’t had a dream in eleven years.
I tried to fall asleep that night, but began to doubt that it was ever a Bible at all. Against a setting sun, I dressed for the day, again. I went out and lined up three books in the alley behind the garage. First up was a World Book Encyclopedia from the 70s.
Then there was last year’s Gun Trader’s Guide which was gifted to me by my uncle, who according to his will, was to be burned into dust and placed into cartridges, loaded into an array of firearms, and shot at life-like targets of a wide range of cultural enemies. I bet you can guess the ones.
The Bible in the alley held every holy word that Jesus ever said printed in red. The cover said that it had been translated with “Young Adults” in mind. I was almost as old as Jesus himself had made it. Under different circumstances, we might have been classmates.
A young girl with a bicycle beneath her watched me from where the alley met the road. The bike was too small for her, and she’d grown too old to be placing things in the plastic basket attached to the front of the handlebars, which curved around her in a winding U-shape.
She lived in the house across the alley with a big dog and, presumably, adults. The big dog was always tied to the clothesline where I never saw any clothes hanging. Based on the home movies that survived, she looked just like the only woman that I’ve ever loved, back when she was young and still rode a bike around her neighborhood.
Most nights she ripped laps around our block, talking at whatever she saw. I talked back, under my breath, from our backyard to this girl on her bike while she pedaled around. I pretended that the only woman that I’ve ever loved could hear me, wherever she was at.
“What’s that?” the little girl said.
She was looking everywhere at once. I wanted to be specific.
“This?” I asked, opening my palms towards the alley, the books, the car. I think the rest of the town and the surrounding county got captured in that gesture, too. I thought of them as collateral damage.
“That.” she said. She zeroed in on the Bible.
She’d never spoken directly to me before. I wanted to get it right.
“It’s a test.” I said. “I’m listening for something.”
She watched as I got in my car and backed up. I straightened it out in the direction of the large volumes and floored it, driving without music, taking each book at highway speed. 10 and 2 is where I kept my hands.
The encyclopedia sounded like I’d hit a mole. The Gun Trader Guide rang once with a tight, tinny clap.
After I finally hit the Bible and brought the car to a stop, she rode up next to me.
“The last one sounded like you smacked a possum,” she said, and rode off on another lap.
I said. “Yeah. I know.”
But she couldn’t hear me. We had returned back to our original arrangement.
#
After the test, my dreams took on an increasingly violent and sexual tone. Dead bodies stuffed in freezers that usually held frozen pizzas. Heads of broccoli, gyrating beneath their sensual rubber bands. Fillets of salmon that eventually reformed themselves into some kind of fish golem. It stalked me down the health and beauty aisle.
It was carrying my box cutter.
Behind the checkout line, I began receiving more religious pamphlets left behind at my register. Harmless Jesus ephemera mostly. There was one group that left anti-abortion screeds that were printed to look like counterfeit money all over the bathrooms. Hundreds of fake dollars tucked into the baby changing stations. I took a few home, for posterity.
I kept them with several of the same small pocket size tri-folds I had received from a woman who never told me her name. The pamphlet had a picture of her son’s smiling face on the front of it, a photo that might have been from his last good Picture Day. He’d died from some sort of incurable affliction. Old timers on the shift said that they recognized him from coming into the store with his mom. Said that Cinnamon Squares was his favorite cereal.
On the front, above his picture, it said “Daniel’s Wish.” Before he died, his mother had taken Daniel somewhere professional to record some of his favorite passages from the Bible. The pamphlet had reprinted those select verses, along with a hyperlink where, if you typed it in somewhere that could take you there, you would hear Daniel reading them.
Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t know because I never went and typed that link in, never travelled to that mourning site. Those that had all came back to the store and said, “Don’t do it, man. Unless you want to hear a dying kid read from the Bible.”
I kept a few of the Daniel pamphlets in the glovebox of my car.
#
One morning, I flashed my own Picture Day smile into the bathroom mirror.
“I need to start fixing my heart,” I said, as if cameras were around.
It never crossed my mind to open up the Bible first.
After my shifts at the grocery store, I started delivering for the food pantry, mostly to shut-ins and whoever else signed up to receive them. Some of the food that I unloaded from pallets at my job eventually wound up in the back of my car. I waved to the things that I recognized, poking out from the top of the banana boxes. The bagels and the corn puffs and the strawberries. They were old friends.
I usually just left the boxes, but whenever someone answered the door, it was usually an old woman. In their faces, I started seeing the only woman that I’ve ever loved, living her last days alone. Each one of them kept thanking me, or smiled genuinely as I brought them a box full of expired food. Sometimes, I cried on the interstate back home, thinking about those apartments. Thinking about dead little Daniel.
I began attending visitations at the funeral home up the street. I didn’t know any of the people who’d died, or their families, but I hugged every person who stood in front of those bodies. I could see their grief and their joy and their confusion as they tried to place me. Out in the folding chairs, nobody ever asked who I was. I was given unfettered access to the casseroles and the dry brownies.
To date, my greatest achievement is that I can still be nearly anybody’s cousin.
#
“WWJD?” I began asking the cats when I got back home each night from the deliveries and the visitations. Where else? I turned to the television.
I started watching COPS Reloaded: LIVE, The Extended Clip Edition. Hours and hours and hours of it. It was on demand, and I watched so much of it that I learned the names of the different officers and the streets of their cities. I even began to recognize some of the same offenders, all of whom were innocent until proven otherwise, the fact of which we were reminded of often.
Most of the people captured on COPS Reloaded: LIVE, The Extended Clip Edition were having mental health crises, driven by generational poverty, regional weather patterns, geographic location, and the relative strength of the American dollar. The hosts didn’t say anything about that, though. They were all former cops in tight-fitting jewel tone polo shirts.
I began paying specific attention when they cut to coverage of Nye County, Nevada. I told the only woman that I have ever loved that everyone out there in Nye County were conquered by the desert. Overcooked. Especially the cops. People walked along abandoned highways, seeing visions, imbued with the holy spirit. Usually, they got arrested for trespassing.
They picked up one guy, who was totally naked, taking a shit out in the desert. They blurred it out as it emerged, and landed in the sand, but they showed us his bare ass on live T.V. They got him on indecent exposure, but he was way out there. I couldn’t imagine who he’d exposed himself to.
Turns out that over the last century, nearly a thousand nuclear bomb tests have been conducted in Nye County, Nevada alone. I looked it up. No wonder the cops there couldn’t ever deliver the suspects their Miranda rights. Whenever they cuffed someone, they pulled out a little laminated card from a pocket on their hip. Their jaws loosened. And they recited what they found there.
#
During the last episode I was watching, the sirens and the flashing lights were louder, brighter than they’d been all the nights before. I thought the show had been given a larger production budget. Then I muted it, looked around and realized that everything was coming instead through the windows and walls.
I hurried upstairs and lifted up the blinds to find that the neighborhood girl’s house was on fire. The one who’d watched me run over the Bible. Her bike was leaned up against the clothesline.
Like always, the rest of the town gathered around quickly and watched from the sidewalk and the alley, from out of their windshields and car windows out on the street. I watched along until the volunteer fire department finally arrived. They weren’t in a hurry. There wasn’t much left to save. Everyone must have been accounted for, standing somewhere out in the crowd. I wondered what the little girl was saying while she watched her house burning down.
I went back downstairs just as another arrest was getting started.
“You’d be right to remain silent,” I heard the officer say.
Sand and wind brushed across his face.
The whole house was ablaze with blue and red lights. For the smallest moment, it all vacillated in unison. What was happening outside, what was on the screen.
“Shit. Hold on,” the officer said.
With his free hand, he reached down towards his hip and pulled something out. He let go of the suspect and held the little laminated card at its wrinkled edge, close up to his face.
“Let me get this thing right.”
