I am in Brooklyn waiting for the bus the way most people wait for the bus: leaning dangerously over the curb, trying unsuccessfully to transform the white delivery truck in the distance into the B43. The two men driving the truck make their way down Graham Avenue, park next to me and start unpacking and eating sandwiches, while staring down the street past me.
Then, without warning, the two men stop eating, jump out of the truck and begin running toward me. An Oldsmobile drifts through my periphery and past the bus stop at exactly the speed a car moves when its driver loses consciousness and no longer has his foot on the brake. It's an unnerving speed; I finally understand why dogs hate people on Rollerblades. The driver, if you can call him that, is not moving, or blinking, or looking around dazedly — he's not doing anything.
Once they reach the car, which is still rolling placidly, one man reaches in, puts it in park and steps back, arms folded, uncertain, surveying the situation. I walk over, and they turn to me: "Oh, good. You're here," one of them says. He sounds annoyed, almost, as if I am late or forgot his birthday. "You got this, right?" I nod dumbly, and they are back at their truck and continue on with their sandwiches while I stare at the motionless old man in his now-motionless car.
Confidence leaks down my back in a thin stream, and I step through a series of actions absorbed from decades of watching procedural television. I call the man "Sir." I don't feel any breath under his nose. I tell him it's going to be all right, as if I believe it.
I am dialing with one hand, while the other prods about his face and shoulders searching for the spot on the neck where the artery (vein?) runs close enough to the surface to feel a pulse, and I can't tell if I'm inept or if blood is simply not moving. He almost seems to be cooling down as I touch him, as if some internal furnace has been shut off and he's becoming the temperature of the rest of the world.
"What's the nature of your emergency?" the woman from 911 asks.
"Is he breathing?" I don't think so.
"Does he have a pulse?" I explain about wandering around his neck and the heat being turned off, and she sighs as if the whole world is useless, tells me the emergency services are on their way and hangs up on me.
The fire truck arrives first.
The police car arrives second.
The ambulance third.
Then the second and third police cars arrive. They all park at odd angles to the street.
I stand there as the paramedics expertly maneuver the man onto the stretcher. The mask they put over his face is attached to a rubber bulb that reminds me of the squeezable end of my grandmother's perfume atomizer, which filled her bathroom with the scent of lavender. They force air into the man, expanding and contracting his chest like an air mattress failing to inflate.
They trundle him into the ambulance as a police officer asks me what I'm doing there, telling me to move along. He actually says, "Move along."
"But I called it in," I say, using TV vernacular. "I'm not supposed to leave the scene of an accident." The cop stares through me for a moment. "This isn't an accident," he says, and I half expect him to follow the procedural script and say, "This is a tragedy," but it's not even that; it's just someone dying, or possibly dying, or maybe he'll be fine. I'll never find out what happened to the man. I'm just an extra.
The cop climbs into his cruiser and is gone. Then the ambulance is gone. The fire truck. The delivery men finish their sandwiches, and the truck departs as well.
I look at my watch. It has been 25 minutes since someone's Oldsmobile rolled oddly to a halt. Now the set is clear, the city's clockwork restored.
There ought to be an indelible spot in the road marking the event. But if there were a mark for this one moment, there would be marks for all such moments, and the whole city would grow black with spots like the tarred chewing gum on subway platforms. And we would notice the marks as little as we do that gum. So there may as well be nothing.
I can't tell if this is sad or not. I think it's liberating.
The B43 comes, and I am gone as well.
B. C. Edwards is the author of a short-story collection, "The Aversive Clause," published by Black Lawrence Press.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
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