IN NO TIME
The afternoon he arrives in Central Ohio for Gram’s funeral, Ezekiel Leger is stuck in a van heading east on I-70 amid heavy snow. Snow falls lightly over Manhattan. Snow inundates Ohio. Zeke walks out of the Columbus airport to the rental car place, only to discover that the rental car has been rented elsewhere. He will have to take a shuttle van to Mt. Izmir, where later in the day he will have access to the same car.
“You’ll be able to pick a sedan up there in no time,” the man at the counter says. He is not apologetic.
Zeke walks back curbside to await his shuttle. He stands under a concrete overhang. Snow blows sideways in chunks the size and glint of airborne mica. Wafers bearing the body of someone’s Lord. Not Zeke’s Lord. Zeke does not himself yet believe in the Lord Almighty.
The shuttle arrives, and six departing passengers board it. By the time it reaches State Route 36 heading northeast into the rural hinterland, snow has piled on asphalt. Snow falls and keeps falling. Cows lie in fields upon their forelegs as if at worship. Singular barns flake red paint. Roofs sag long past childbearing, silos and wet green fields of wilted long-dead soy and corn. Zeke leans forward to talk to the woman in the seat in front of him. She does not respond, pretends as if he is not there to begin with. He texts his two old college friends who will be at the funeral, waits for the gray ellipses of acknowledgment to appear on his screen, but they do not appear.
While he is looking down, the van lurches across the double yellow lines.
The driver crosses one arm over the other to turn the van fierce right. It judders back left. The van’s wheels touch the rut next to the road. It flips. Luggage tumbles and dumps from overhead racks. Trees appear to upturn through snowy windows. Inside the van all is chaos—bodies slam windows, plastic water bottles crink as they hit ceiling and floor. For just a glimpse before his head smacks window, Zeke feels the prick of glass against his cheek and nose; the van lands, rolls across snowy grass, then soy. There is nothing to see above but field horizoned by sky. Zeke loses consciousness. He is confronted by endless vast nothing.
* * *
Zeke comes to seconds later. He is briefly alone in the gelid white of this otherwise unoccupied white van. The window is shattered. His face is sensationless against cold wet Ohio grass. A head pops in from what had previously been a driver-side rear window.
“You’re gonna be OK, son, we’ve got paramedics right on their way,” the man says. He is grandfather-aged, reddish goatee and an Ohio state trooper’s hat, a look that conjures the undergraduate paranoia of being out on the highway drunken and stony. Zeke says he is fine. He pulls himself out of the van. Snow drops in cakes from the sky. It blows against his face, but he feels no cold. He wonders if this is how Gram felt when he took his life, just before his car left the road—then pushes the thought away. It is an obsessive thought, reflexive, one of many he’s been unable to control since learning Gram killed himself, moving himself into Gram’s head, then quickly out. Under a nearby tree the woman from in front of him sits with a cowl draped across her shoulders. It is taking on a light white rime from the falling snow.
“Why don’t you just have a seat over here,” the cop says.
The cop says his name is Paul, a last name. Zeke says he’s fine, but he puts his hand to his face and feels blood tacky on his cheek. Fire pipes from the skin around his right eye when he touches it. Now he doesn’t feel cold, but hot, and he begins to feel more but again pushes it down. Down. He decides Paul is right. He accepts a glass of water. Soon there is a wash of red lights from an arriving ambulance, then another. It is as if the day has turned from the hard white of cold to the hard red hot of night. His ambulance heads north the twenty miles to the Mt. Vernon Hospital, just ten miles from his Airbnb, where he’s set to stay through to the weekend. And bid Gram farewell.
Copyright © 2022 by Daniel Torday