Chapter 1: Green Light

It was raining that evening. Fine rain, stubborn rain, nothing dramatic. Not the kind of rain that belongs to major life decisions. Just drizzle: a wet collar, heavy hair, and a sock that, after ten minutes, begins to feel like someone else's body.

I was thirty years old, my shoes were wet, and the shopping bag was cutting into my fingers because, of course, I hadn't taken my backpack. I had seen it that morning on the chair. I had even thought: take it, you'll be getting groceries after work. I ignored my own brain, which by then was an old habit.

The baguette stuck out sideways and was already cracked. Not broken beautifully, like in a bakery ad. Just collapsed, crushed under toilet paper and a packet of pasta. I had also bought tomato sauce, cheese, and plain yogurt, because sometimes I was seized by the absurd impulse to behave in a store like someone who took care of himself.

I used to imagine death sometimes, but always on stupid occasions. When I carried a knife from the kitchen to the sink, blade first. When I went down wet stairs and, for half a second, saw myself on the ground floor, more surprised than dead. When a bus braked too late and everyone inside made the same small movement with their bodies, as if they could help the brakes by tensing their necks.

At moments like that, a person thinks: yes, that would be about right for me.

After I paid, a message came from my mother.

Call when you can. Nothing urgent.

That "nothing urgent" always meant two things at once. That it really was nothing urgent. And that if I didn't call, tomorrow it would become a little urgent, because then there would also be the question of why I hadn't called when I could have.

I replied in my head.

In my head, I was a very good son. I called regularly, remembered birthdays, and patiently listened to stories about a neighbor I didn't know and never intended to know. In real life, I stood under the awning outside the shop, saw drops of water on the screen, and decided I would call back when I got home.

When I got home. A nice, calm phrase.

A productivity podcast was playing in my earbuds.

I don't know why I had put it on. Probably out of the same need that makes a person buy a notebook to transform their life, then write two parcel locker codes in it and nothing else. The host was saying it was worth ending the day with a brief summary and choosing three things for tomorrow.

Tomorrow, I was going to call my mother back. I was also going to answer my friend and tell him I was alive, because he had asked for the third time and it was starting to be less funny. Besides that: laundry, a bill, something to eat that wasn't made mostly of salt and guilt.

Small things, all postponed.

I wanted to live. I just didn't think about it that way.

If someone had asked me then what, specifically, I wanted to live for, I probably would have been annoyed. I didn't have some grand reason ready. I had pasta, a message from my mother, wet shoes, a show I had started three weeks earlier, and that stupid calm a person mistakes for certainty until someone takes it away. It didn't sound like an argument in a matter of life and death. And yet it was the whole argument I had.

I didn't love every day. I simply didn't agree to have all of them shut at once, without being asked, before I managed to fix even one stupid thing.

I reached the pedestrian crossing with my hood plastered to my forehead. One of the ads on the other side of the street flickered nervously, not quite broken, not quite working. At the bus stop a little farther down, someone smoked under a no-smoking sign. Two cars drove through a puddle and splashed the curb. The city was doing what cities do in the evening: pretending to be alive because of the lights, even though everyone in it looked tired.

There were a few people at the crossing. A woman with a stroller, a guy in a suit, two girls with one phone between them. Me.

That small accidental group that exists only because a red light lasts longer than patience.

I looked at my phone. Not to check anything. It was a reflex. My mother's message was still hanging on the screen as a notification. Under it was a message from my friend: Dude, seriously, are you alive?

That had been a joke too, at least at first. He had written once, then again, then a third time, because for several days I had been putting off an answer that required only two sentences. People can worry in a way that sounds like teasing. It makes it easier to pretend it doesn't matter.

I almost answered.

Really. My thumb was already over the keyboard. I was going to write: Yeah, all good, I'll get back to you tomorrow. Then the little green man on the other side of the street lit up with his artificial urgency, and I put the phone in my pocket.

Tomorrow.

I stepped forward.

Not first. I always waited that fraction of a second, even on green. Supposedly caution, supposedly habit, and partly a plain reluctance to be first at anything. I was closest to the edge on the side of the cars coming from the left. The guy in the suit moved on my right, half a step ahead of me, but slowed at once, adjusting his sleeve. The woman with the stroller stayed on the curb because one wheel caught on an uneven bit of sidewalk. One of the girls laughed in the way people laugh when the world still seems, for a long while yet, mostly something to comment on.

I took maybe three steps.

Three steps is an absurdly small amount of space in which to change a life. The first onto the wet white stripe. The second onto the asphalt between stripes. The third was no longer fully mine.

The asphalt was black and glossy. The white stripes looked gray, worn down by tires and winter. In the puddles lay stretched-out shop lights, red and yellow, torn apart by the rain. From the left I heard an engine. Low, calm, expensive. Not the kind that asks for attention. The kind that takes it.

I turned my head.

A black car entered the intersection.

On its side, the light was red. Short, wet, reflected in the kiosk window, but red.

It wasn't speeding like in a movie. I remembered that later with a kind of sick precision. There was no grand chase, no screaming, no skid across half the street. It was simply going too fast and too confidently. Enough.

Through the windshield, I saw the driver.

An old man. A heavy face, white hair at the temples, the dark clothes of a clergyman under an open coat. On his chest he wore something gold: a sign or an ornament. I saw it too briefly to give it an honest name. He was looking down. Not at the road. In his hand he had a phone, and the screen lit his chin with cold light.

I thought: but I have the green.

That was my last reasonable thought.

I wanted to step back, but my body didn't receive the instruction in time. Or received it and decided I was joking. The guy in the suit froze on my right, as if he had suddenly become a road sign. The woman with the stroller screamed. Maybe at me. Maybe at the child. Maybe at the driver, who hadn't yet seen her.

The car was already too close.

The headlights spilled across the wet asphalt. The grille at the front of the car became enormous, absurdly silver, too clean for weather like that. For a fraction of a second, I saw my own reflection in it, stretched and stupid: hood, open mouth, bag in hand.

Then something hit me.

The sound was worse than it should have been. Not louder. Worse precisely because it wasn't grand. Dull, short, almost blunt. As if someone had thrown a heavy sack onto the floor. Only after a moment did I understand that I was the sack.

The world turned sideways.

I don't remember whether I hit the hood first or went straight to the asphalt. I remember the hand that let go of the bag. I remember paper tearing with a dry crackle, strangely out of place in the rain. Groceries scattered across the crossing. The baguette rolled a little way off and stopped near the curb. The jar of sauce broke under someone's shoe or under a wheel. My left earbud was still working. Someone inside it was calmly explaining how to plan the next day.

For a second I smelled tomatoes and wet paper. It was so out of place that my brain tried to cling to it: groceries, not accident; dinner, not body on asphalt. As if naming things in a domestic way could put everything back on its proper track.

I was lying on my back.

Rain fell straight into my face.

I tried to blink and wasn't sure I managed it. I wanted to move my hand. Nothing. I wanted to take a deeper breath, and then the pain, which had apparently been waiting politely behind a door, came in all at once.

It wasn't sharp. Sharp pain has edges. This one didn't.

It was everywhere.

My chest wasn't working properly. Every breath sounded wet, though maybe I was the only one hearing it that way. My leg lay at a wrong angle. I saw it from the corner of my eye and immediately regretted it. My mouth tasted metallic, like I had bitten my tongue, only much worse. My teeth didn't fit together. It was a small thing, idiotic, but for a moment I mostly thought about how my teeth weren't where they should be.

Someone was screaming. Someone else was telling me not to move.

That was almost funny. In a very small, very mean way.

The woman with the stroller appeared over my face. Without the stroller, so the idiotic question of where she had left the child flashed through my mind. Her mascara was smeared under her eyes, and she kept repeating something I couldn't assemble into a sentence. Her hands hovered over me, uncertain, frightened by their own helplessness. She wanted to help and didn't know where one was allowed to touch a person who looked as if every place was wrong.

Behind her, the child only began to cry after a moment, as if the world needed time to arrive at the right reaction.

On the other side, someone was pulling out a phone. Someone was swearing. Someone else stood with his mouth open, just as helpless and probably just as terrified as I was.

"The ambulance is coming!" someone shouted.

I don't know how he could have known.

The car stood a few meters away.

The door opened slowly.

The clergyman got out carefully, maybe because he was old, maybe because wet asphalt can be treacherous. He still had the phone in his hand. For a moment he looked at me without expression. Not with hatred. Not even with fear.

Rather with something close to irritation.

Like a man whose meeting had just been moved.

It lasted briefly. Very briefly. Maybe I was the only one who saw it, because I was lying exactly where his gaze landed before he managed to lift it toward the witnesses.

Then he saw the people.

And then his face changed.

His brows rose, his mouth opened, his hand went to his chest. He dropped the phone onto the asphalt. The gesture was beautiful. Or well practiced. From my height, it was hard to tell one from the other.

"God have mercy," he said.

I heard it clearly, despite the shouting.

I wanted to answer him. I even had several versions in my head. One was short and unprintable. The second involved God, mercy, and traffic laws. The third was only a wet cough that came out of my mouth together with blood.

The woman beside me moaned.

That was probably the first time I was truly afraid.

Not when I saw the car. Not at the impact. Fear came only on the ground, when I discovered that my body was no longer asking my opinion. I lay in the middle of the city, on a crossing where I had every right to be, and I could do nothing. Not even turn my head away from the man who had killed me.

Yes, killed me.

I was still alive, but some part of me was already using the past tense.

Someone knelt by my leg and immediately recoiled. Someone told everyone to give me space, then stood so close himself that I could see the sole of his shoe. The girl with the phone was crying silently. The other held her by the sleeve and stared at the screen, as if the recording could tell her what to do now.

A siren wailed somewhere far away.

Or maybe it was a tram on a bend. Sounds tore apart and returned, like a radio in a car passing under an overpass. Rain dripped into my eyes. The streetlamp light spread into yellow stains. Someone covered me with a jacket, and I immediately felt short of breath.

"Breathe, please," the woman said.

I wanted to say I was trying.

I really was trying.

Breathing was now physical labor, harder than anything I had done in years. I took each inhale in pieces. The exhale fell out of me on its own with a wet wheeze. For a moment, with absurd anger, I thought that if I had actually gone running, the way I promised myself every other Monday, maybe my body would have handled this better.

That is what panic does. It looks for blame even where there is no point anymore.

I thought of my mother.

Not the way a person ought to think of his mother in a final moment. No beautiful scene, no forgiveness, no whole life flashing past in a second. I only thought that I hadn't called back. That I had read the message outside the shop, composed an answer in my head, and then, as usual, decided the matter was almost handled.

Almost.

The word should come with a warning label.

She probably hadn't written with any reproach. Maybe she had wanted to ask whether I remembered Sunday. Maybe she had wanted to say someone in the family had asked how I was. Maybe she had only wanted to hear my voice and make sure I was still somewhere on the other side of the city, adult in theory, reachable in practice. Nothing urgent. The cruelest things often begin by really not being urgent.

I thought of my apartment. Of the coffee mug in the sink. Of the laundry I was going to hang in the morning. Of the laptop left on the couch, the tabs still open, all the things so small and embarrassing that a person doesn't take them into account when thinking about his own death. Suddenly they were the whole proof that I had truly existed. Mug. Laundry. Computer password. Bill on the table.

Not now, I thought.

Not because of a guy with a phone.

Not on a green light.

The clergyman bent over me. Someone tried to stop him, but he said something in a tone that made people step back. Even here, they made room for him. Even while I lay in the street in my own blood, the order of the world still had time to function.

I smelled his coat. Rain, expensive fabric, something sweet underneath. Incense, or the perfume of a man who wanted to smell like incense even outside the church.

"My son," he said.

I wasn't his son.

He placed his fingers on my forehead. Gently. Publicly. It was a gesture for them, not for me. And in that second, despite the pain, despite the blood in my mouth, I understood with sudden certainty that he was already telling this story again from the beginning.

An unfortunate accident.

Difficult conditions.

The pedestrian appeared suddenly.

The driver in shock.

The light? In rain, things can look different.

I saw that version being born around me. Not in words, not yet. In looks. In the way people looked at the car, then at him, then at me, as if trying to establish the order of things. Who mattered more. Who had a voice people were used to falling silent before. Who lay on the ground and couldn't introduce himself.

There was no need to lie right away. It was enough to leave a few blank spaces in the story. Rain in one. Haste in another. My hood in a third. An empty space finds its own owner if beside it stands a man everyone would rather believe.

The woman with the stroller said:

"He had the green."

She said it quietly, more to herself than to the others. I wanted to thank her. If I could have, I would have grabbed her hand like a witness in court, like the last person in the world who had seen something simple and dared to name it.

Someone beside her answered:

"Maybe."

One word.

That was enough.

Maybe.

Rain fell, lights reflected in the asphalt, and cars in the next lane kept trying for a moment to skirt around the blockage before someone finally began waving his arms and stopping traffic. Maybe. The green might have been yellow. The red might have come on too late. The phone might have been after the fact. I might have stepped out too quickly, darted, rushed in, tripped, done anything that would fit a man lying on the ground better than a man in an expensive coat.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Or maybe I only imagined it. Maybe it was my body shaking, or the asphalt, or my heart, still trying to do its job despite the evident lack of prospects. For a second I was certain it was my mother. That she was calling after all. That on the other side of all this there existed an ordinary room, an ordinary woman, and the question of why I wasn't picking up.

I tried to catch his eye. I wanted him to see that I had seen. The phone. The red light. His first face.

He looked at me.

For one brief moment, he stopped pretending.

There was no remorse there.

That was how it seemed to me then: quick, cold calculation. Maybe the pain filled in the rest. Maybe not.

Then everything began to recede.

First the noise. The shouting flattened, as if it were coming from behind a wall. The siren was very close or very far away; I couldn't tell the difference. I couldn't hear the rain at all, though I could see the drops hanging in the light.

Then the body.

The pain didn't vanish. It only stopped being mine. It lay beside me, huge and unnecessary, and I drifted away from it with each shallow breath. There was something insulting in that. A person lives thirty years in one body, feeds it, washes it, is ashamed of it, takes it to the doctor too late, and at the end it slips away as if it had never truly belonged to him.

I didn't see my whole life.

I saw things.

My mother putting a period at the end of every message, as if a text were an official document.

Someone's voice from childhood: first left, then right, then left again, because people must not be trusted just because they have brakes.

My first phone, so ugly that today it would look like a museum prop.

The face of someone I hadn't seen in years, but still remembered the way she wrinkled her nose when she lied.

The smell of the stairwell in an apartment building where I hadn't wanted to live forever and had already lived too long.

Single things.

Not meaning.

Not a summary.

Mother.

Tomorrow.

Green light.

The pedestrian signal was still lit on the other side. The little green man kept walking calmly in place, as if nothing had happened. As if the rules still applied.

No one was crossing anymore.

Then the silence came.

Not the absence of sound. Something thicker. Rain stopped in the air. The woman's mouth froze halfway through a scream. The clergyman hung over me with his fingers at my forehead, perfectly still, like a man posed for someone else's photograph. A drop of blood, mine probably, hung above the white stripe and didn't fall.

Everything stopped.

Except one man.

He stood on the other side of the crossing, exactly where I had been trying to go. I hadn't seen where he came from. He wore a dark coat and had a face so calm it didn't belong with the intersection, the blood, or the suspended rain.

Water didn't settle on his shoulders.

He looked straight at me.

Not at the clergyman. Not at the car.

At me.

As if he had been waiting there from the beginning.

Then he smiled.

The last thing I saw was not the ambulance lights.

It was the smile of a man I had never met before.

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