Car-accident

"You the driver?" It's a police-officer.

"I'm something or something else which is worse because something is this thing with thing qualities that are distinct and thing-like and endless and off-putting and painful because."

"The Honda? You were in the Honda?"

"Drivers probably. Something." I'm very tired.

"What's your name?"

"Something."

"I need your name for the hospital records and insurance. How old are you? Where were you born?"
"I think I'm me I think I'm something." I move my head and my head hurts in a sharp and exact way, but distant somehow, as though my head's a thing and I'm a thing and these things are different things with different nervous-systems. My eyes see another gurney and another human and the other human is very red and black and crusted and hairless and maybe not enough skin so I think about skin and how much skin's enough skin and I think about my skin and how much skin I have and where this skin is and what if I were to lose this skin, where then would this skin be? and could I regenerate the skin somehow? I'm looking up at the police-officer who's very grim and solid and whose hat is tilted slightly and blue and bloody. There are lights behind him. "I'm sorry," I say.

"Because you're the driver?"

"Something else."

"If you're the driver you should tell me because it'll make you feel better and at peace with yourself, I know because if I were the driver I'd feel guilty maybe and need to confess and confession's good, not that I'm saying you committed a crime or that you must confess, I mean it wasn't your fault, probably, if you're indeed the driver, which I'm not implying you were, but if you were and theoretically if you caused the accident you might feel like a murderer if theoretically mostly everyone was dead and you were the sole or maybe one of two or three survivors."

I realize that we're in a hospital and that my bed's rolling and I'm aware of humans pushing my bed which has railings and to which I'm strapped. "I'm the hospital," I say. "The hospital is here."

"Yes." Someone else speaking through a mask.

"You're mask is awful," I say.

"Just relax a while."

"Something happened I think something happened what happened?" I try to raise my head but my head doesn't raise and I wonder what my head's doing if it's not raising when my brain tells it to raise. I want to touch my eyes. I itch. I want to scratch my eyes. My eyes itch, are itchy. "Scratch my eyes please," I say. "My eyes could be scratched, if you could scratch them, which you don't have to but it'd be nice."

"Could you count please, backwards from one-hundred?"

"I could probably." I could count. I won't count but I could count if I wanted to count. "You're mask is really awful you know."

Something happens.

"Could you count please?"

"You're mask is really awful," I say. It is. It's really awful.

"How are you?" It's Samantha.

I'm in the backseat.

I shiver slightly and hug myself.

There's a car and the car I'm in and another car, and as I sit in the backseat with my head rested softly against the cold window, the car, the other car, and the car I'm in converge in slow-motion and from my seat which is firm and in which I'm firmly belted I map the paths of each car and mentally place myself in the point of convergence and imagine the moment when all three cars meet. From my seat I can see the other people in the other cars and they're old and wrinkled and their hairs are gray and long or short but combed neatly and styled with gel or hairspray and I wish my hair were as neat and styled so I might seem complete and comfortable when each car intersects every other car. And in my car there are people with hair which is styled and combed or not combed but braided and pulled back, hanging loose over shoulders, curly. I don't know.

"Now," I say.

"It," Samantha says.

The cars converge.

Later, there's an ambulance. And gurneys, I think. Or beds.

"What?" I say to someone. "What?" I say to someone else.