The Red Convertible

I was flipping through the channels when some news footage from the local traffic helicopter caught my attention. I saw myself, driving down the highway in my white car in the middle of rush hour traffic. The camera panned back to focus on a red convertible sports car that was speeding along, weaving from lane to lane, whipping around all the other cars like they were standing still. The camera tracked this red convertible until it came flying up behind my car, nearly hitting me. The car swooped around me into an opening in the lane to the left of me, and then it shot back into the lane in front of me in the narrowing gap between the front of my car and the rear end of a car in the lane ahead of it. It was only by grace of the fact that I slammed on my brakes that the car was able to get in front of me without taking out a huge chunk of my fender.

The news footage highlighted this encounter. They showed it again in slow motion, this time freezing on the moment that the car slipped in front of me and drawing a big circle on the monitor at the point where our cars nearly collided. A pair of commentators discussed this event as though it were the game winning touchdown. One of them drew an arrow on the monitor pointing to my brake lights, rightly giving me credit for preventing the accident. I remembered this incident. At the time it had just been a passing annoyance, forgotten five minutes after it happened. But now, having seen a broader view of the incident, having seen what a general menace the red convertible had been to everyone on the road, and not just me, and also just feeling generally impressed that the news had considered the incident important enough to commit an entire prime time segment to it, I felt much more righteously outraged about the whole thing.

I felt the need to vent this outrage somehow. Whenever anyone came over, I tried to show them the footage. But they would get fidgety and say that they had to leave. I took the TV with me when I went to visit friends. But as soon as I went to plug it in, they would start making excuses. They had to get up in the morning. They weren’t feeling well. Someone had to walk the dog. And so on. No one cared about seeing the footage. They didn’t care that this reckless maniac was still out there. They didn’t care that I had almost gotten into an accident. They didn’t even care that the event had been convered by the news! I was just left holding the plug, watching as a series of increasingly indifferent people left the room.

The frustration of not being able to show anyone this footage started to wear me down. I let myself go. I stopped showering. I stopped trimming my hair and my beard. I lost my job. I got kicked out of my home. I started to spend all my time riding the city bus with the TV in my lap. Whenever someone sat across from me, I would tap on the blank screen of the unplugged TV, grumbling and mumbling, “See there? He didn’t even care that he almost hit me! He didn’t even slow down.” Eventually, the person across from me would nod, look this way and that, and then get up and find another seat. I would just hug the TV close and go on mumbling to it.

One day at dusk, I was down at the dump, picking through the trash heaps there, looking for scraps of food or for something I could sell or salvage. I had my TV with me, tucked under one arm, and I sorted through the garbage with my free hand. I saw some birds circling in the darkening sky a few heaps away. I figured that they must have found something good. I started to make my way over there, climbing to the top of the heap that I had been picking through. I was just about to scramble over the top when the loose cord of the TV caught on a wooden pallet that was lying on the heap. The stuck cord jerked me back and it yanked the TV out from under my arm. I tried to grab it, but it tumbled down the heap and hit the ground with a hard punch, shattering into pieces.

My heart gripped. My mouth and jaw worked without sound for a moment as I looked down at the wreckage. And then a terrible sick moan issued from the pit of my stomach and filled the dumping grounds. I clambered down, scooping up the broken pieces of glass and metal in my gnarled hands. I just kept crying, “No! No!” as I tried to cram the TV back into being by grinding the pieces between my fists. But then I looked up at the birds, still circling. A tear cooled on my cheek. I began to laugh and laugh. It was over! I was free.