Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

Her foot did her thinking for her, stamping hard down on the gas pedal as she raced through the narrowing gap between the slab-sided trailer and the ditch. From behind her, she heard what sounded like a large chest of drawers tumbling down a flight of stone steps, the jarring whoosh of jake brakes, and then the pretty simpering of violins. She brought the Spider to a stop in the grass at the top of the hill. The clock on the dash said 9:21.

Walking back to where the semi was slewed diagonally across the road, she felt lacking in reality, more air than flesh. The Christmassy scent of pine needles mixed with the sinus-stinging reek of gasoline and brake dust. Squeezing around the front of the truck, she saw that its entire face had gone, exposing a welter of naked machinery. Ahead of her, a man stood in the middle of the road, open hand raised above his head, impersonating a traffic cop.

“Stop!” he called, in a voice of tiresome masculine authority. “It could go up at any moment.”

A woman stood behind him, yelling into a cell phone. A man in blue-jean overalls sat on the tarmac, holding his head in his hands. Then Lucy saw the silver car, nose down in the ditch, and for a second she thought the magic trick had really worked, for it looked showroom new, the name “Infiniti” spelled out in relief lettering on the trunk. But beyond its immaculately waxed hindquarters, it stopped being a car and turned into a puzzle of scrambled components. A wheel was where a window ought to be, the engine block stuck out through the crumpled tinfoil of the roof, and a wedge-shaped flange, hanging at an odd angle from the front of the mess, resolved itself into the mutilated remains of a door. From inside the woods came the keening fee-bee, fee-bee of a chickadee.

A man in navy sweats jogged up the centerline of the road from one of the several cars now drawn up on the shoulder. The traffic-cop guy turned on him and shouted “Stop!”

There was a brief standoff between these two alpha take-control types, then the man in sweats, addressing Lucy, said, “I’m trained in CPR,” and walked over to the ruins of the Infiniti. She saw him staring at the wreckage, trying to figure it out like a brainteaser. He got down on his knees, thrust his head inside a jagged hole, then pulled it out and vomited. He came groggily away, head slowly wagging, face squinched, smelling of puke, yellow speckles of it on his T-shirt.

Then everyone, including the man in overalls and the woman who’d been talking on her cell phone, stared at Lucy. Feeling unreasonably accused, she realized she was the only person in this impromptu circle who had no visible role: she wasn’t the truck driver, hadn’t dialed 911, wasn’t conducting nonexistent traffic, and wasn’t trained in CPR.

“I am an eye…” She meant to say “witness” but saw the ever-tricky “w” coming, and swerved to avoid it. “I saw it happen. I was…” As she spoke, she found her notebook in her hand. It had been on the passenger seat. She had no memory of picking it up when she left the car.

“Ah,” the traffic-cop guy said. “You’re the Dodge. Blue pickup.”

“No, I’m the…” She pointed past the truck, but saw that the Spider was hidden behind the brow of the hill. “Green convertible.”

“So where’s the Dodge?”

“I didn’t see a Dodge.”

“There was a Dodge.” There was a totally unnecessary note of exasperation in his voice. “It was making a right. The Infiniti was trying to pass.”

Lucy now saw that beyond the faceless truck was a muddy, fir-enshrouded driveway or logging road that she must have walked past without noticing. Of course the accident would make more sense if—

The man who’d been sick said, “Two people. I think it’s only two. First, when I looked, I thought there was a kid in there as well, but…”

Her memory of the crash seemed already old, like a photograph from another summer. She inspected it. There was no pickup in the picture — just a car drifting across the yellow line and the semi materializing over the crest to join it, in a moment of freakish mechanical ballet. It was a pas de deux, with no one else on stage. But that couldn’t be right. Somehow, somewhere, she’d mislaid the essential third vehicle.

Her search was interrupted by the noise of whooping sirens, like the horns and trumpets of a few minutes before, and what had begun as a weirdly intimate and shameful scene suddenly became a lavish public happening, like a county fair, with two fire trucks, three squad cars, an ambulance, and two tow trucks with cranes. Men and women in uniform, many of them armed, were filling the road, and the annoying man who’d been playing cop was now taking charge of the real police.

When Lucy’s turn to be spoken to arrived, the young cop suggested that she sit with him in the car, where police voices boomed importantly from the radio. Deaf to the cacophony of his job, he turned the volume down only when Lucy, shouting, begged him to. The overheated car smelled of sweat and trouble.

As soon as he had hold of her driver’s license, the cop was first-naming her, in a soothing parental manner that went badly with his acne. His high-schooler’s face was blotted all over with little pink crusts of dried calamine.

“You a reporter, Lucy?”

“No. I mean not exactly. I just…” The notebook required an explanation, but she couldn’t for the life of her begin to provide one.

The cop wrote on his own pad in slow-forming irregular block capitals. Lucy saw the trouble he was having with BENGSTROM, and spelled it out for him.

“So tell me what you saw, Lucy. In your own words.”

Whose else? There was little enough to tell, but she found herself skirting cautiously around the magic of the flying car as if she had something serious to hide, and wondered if the boy cop was smart enough to notice. Distracted by the sound of her own voice, coming back to her a fraction of a second out of sync, as if on a bad long-distance line, she jammed on the word “median.”

“That’s okay, Lucy. Take your time.”

People always said that, and it always made her stutter worse. Her head jerked sideways. Chin locked against her shoulder, she fought through the block to get the word out.

The boy showed his embarrassment by gazing through the windshield as if he’d spotted a bank holdup somewhere in the middle distance. Without looking at her, he said, “Relax, Lucy.”

And fuck you, she thought, you pompous asshole. The flare of anger released the word from its trap.

“Median,” she said. “The truck was swinging right across it like a closing gate. I just floored the gas pedal and squeaked through. When I looked back, the truck was sprawled over the entire road like it is now…but everything sort of happened in the same instant — it was all like, simultaneous, you know?”

She’d lost him. But he continued to blacken the page with twiggy, runelike lettering, his lips moving slightly as he wrote. “Erratic,” he said suddenly: “You’d say they were driving erratic?”

“No, just very slowly. Like I said, twenty to twenty-five. I was crawling behind in second gear, looking for a chance to pass. So when I put my foot down…” She stopped, thinking it foolish to explain how lucky she was to have had the surge of acceleration that had carried her clear of the truck, with the tachometer needle going deep into the red zone.

An older officer, who’d been with the ambulance team, came over to the squad car and the boy stepped out. The two talked in ceremoniously low voices, and when the boy came back his face looked physically bigger, enlarged by the weight of the grave news that had been entrusted to him. He looked years too young for his holstered gun.