An Accident

On Fifth Avenue, he surged along with the tourists, past the narrow chocolate shop and the NBA store ablaze with colourful team jerseys and video monitors. A few tourists paused to take photographs; busy-looking business people swerved around them, shouting into cellphones. Taxis idled at the intersection, billowing exhaust fumes. Cars and people and noise, and whirling flashes of yellow and black and grey. The air was refreshingly cool. Henry loosened his scarf and tie, unfastened the top button of his shirt.

Engulfed by crowds, he knew there was something else he needed to do, somewhere he was supposed to be, but there was a stronger impulse, to walk, to breathe. He would have run if his old legs could have carried him away from the people, out of gravity; he'd have liked to jump, to soar above the pedestrian bustle. Then the light changed, and people rushed forward, surging around him, and for an instant it was all too much, the dizzying yellowness and skeltering people, flashes of light and asphalt, here a bike messenger, there a blur of legs and shoes and boots, black and blue shapes. A car hooted, then the world went watery and flickered and he heard a sound like birdsong in his head, glimpsed a quiver of sky, then a sudden quiet, like when you switch off a radio, only not quite silent, and he felt something like a great wave pound him, and he crumpled. The wave pulled him down into the misty greyness of the street. A moment of blackness, the street hissed, blinked, the sidewalk tilted. Car doors floated by, a rush of trousers and shoes, another belt of the horn, as a taxi driver, a lanky Indian man, leaned out of his window and shouted, "Asshole motherfucker," before pulling back into the traffic.

Henry found himself sitting on the pavement of Fifth Avenue, between the gutter and passing cars. Up close, the road was more grey than black. Rubber-threaded asphalt, a foil cigarette wrapper. A taxi passed close enough for him to read the decal on the yellow door: $2.50 initial charge. His hip throbbed, and his heart was pounding. The street blinked. Everything was suspended, everything waxy and slow. He had the sensation of swimming, of rising up through water, the light diffused and murky, surfacing through shadows and echoes, as the volume rose again, blare and blur, and the street swam into focus - busy, spangled - a bus, potholes, a hot dog vendor, a big glass doorway. Someone was helping him, tugging him upright.

 "You all right?" A young man's voice.

Excerpted from A Quiet Kind of Courage by Anthony Schneider (Penguin)