A brutally serendipitous thing occurred yesterday. I was an hour late grabbing the bus down to Sifu Clark’s PMMA facility for our Saturday session. As I stood waiting for the bus a coworker pulled over and offered me a lift.
Instead of the normal bus route through Whitetrashistan I was treated to a highway cruise. As we hit the long winding high-speed stretch of asphalt headed down into Dundalk we noticed a wholesale food trailer stopped on the side, with a white van parked diagonally behind it. A cop car was pulled up behind that and a body lay at the feet of the three men gathered over it as one covered it with a sheet. Beneath the wheels of the 80,000 pound rig [which was loaded based on its origin and destination] was the remains of a motorcycle designed for highway cruising; one of the big ones that older guys use for day trips and rallies. There was not a piece of that bike remaining that was bigger than an arm or leg. It looked like a plastic model that had been stomped by angry booted rednecks.
My driver said, “Oh man, that dude never had a chance.”
I wondered if he was sucked in, having been in small cars that were pulled closer to such massive rigs. As a writer it is my job to hang on to that feeling of terrible sympathy for the unknown man—and of the guilt being experienced by the driver—and recycling that into fiction.
I have a character who is a Native American time traveler from the 16th Century, who cannot let go of the notion that vehicles are the living mechanical [magical] slaves of the Whiteman. In his mind such accidents are incidents of rebellious mechanical outbursts against the Whiteman’s enslavement. Three-Rivers calls cars and trucks thunderbeasts, airplanes thunderbirds, and motorcycles thunderhorses.
The chill that I felt upon realizing that the one time I have been driven to this session I have happened by this terrible end of a life becomes my key for writing a scene from Three-Rivers’ perspective. He will, of course, see a metaphysical hand in the fictional recreation of this anonymous death. If I were writing non-fiction, particularly self-help for motorists for instance, it would be my duty as a writer to find out the identity and back story of the motorcyclist, to try and interview survivors perhaps, so that I might be able to reconstruct the accident. My task as a fiction writer is to wonder from a perspective of self-imposed ignorance, in a search within for some form of enlightenment, some aspect of this nasty crushed death that might be turned into a useful mediation on the human condition. The fiction writer is necessarily something of a psychological ghoul prowling the cemetery of our minds.
This is one example of how any one thing, event, or person, can be used as source material for fiction and nonfiction, perhaps even written simultaneously along two departing pathways. If done well, these paths will not part, but run parallel, generating a ‘truth’ for reader and writer that occupy’s the space between. This is one case in which I will intentionally not pursue a nonfiction aspect of the incident, will not research it, in order to preserve that painful sense of wonder for the fictional page. With something more interactive—a mugging for instance—I might use it as a Harm City piece and a Randy Bracken episode in The Sunset Saga. But with this, I needed to go one way or the other, and since I have no nonfiction category in which I write to slot it as a news or self-help article, I am preserving it as a source-note for fiction.
I hope it was as quick—and not nearly as painful as—it looked.
Rest in Peace.
