Have you ever seen something that you weren’t supposed to look at, that you know you shouldn’t look at, something that will make you wish you hadn’t looked, but you look anyway?
I was riding an ordinary bus home, on an ordinary night after an ordinary day at work. The driver was driving like a suicide bomber, so I knew I would get home earlier than usual. A few minutes before my stop, the bus stopped, stuck in traffic. But there were no cars ahead of us. A line of cars in the right lane were stopped and had their hazard lights on. Not far in front of the bus in the middle of the road, a group of men were gathered. A fight? It’s not uncommon for the odd car horn to send someone off in this city. The bus made a move to the left lane, slowly trying to inch its way around. Slowly, people began to move curiously toward the front of the bus. With the bus at an angle, I looked out the window and saw what the delay was. There was a man lying crumpled on the road. The men around him were looking at him, touching him, trying to revive him. Suddenly, they began yelling and gesticulating at the traffic pausing to gawk at the situation. The bus driver swung further to the left to steer clear of the crowd. He drove very, very slowly past the group of men. As we crept nearer, I saw the men were no longer trying to revive the fallen man. They were now concerned with keeping the traffic moving past. As our bus, with gawking passengers flat against the window, slowly crept past the grim scene, I looked at the crumpled man lying in the road, although I knew I shouldn’t have.
The back of his coat was ripped and shredded in places from being dragged along the pavement, and his arm was horribly bent, obviously broken in several places. His wrist was twisted so it was even with his forearm. Then I looked at his head on the pavement, his gaping mouth and the fresh, black blood pooling slowly around his head with the hotel sign and car lamp lights reflected in it, and I gasped involuntarily at the naked realness of this horrible accident. I didn’t stop feeling faint until I got home.
I’d never seen anyone dead before, until now. Even if you don’t want to look, sometimes you have to see.
