It’s strange how your mind can alter the elsewhere highly disciplined passage of time. Joy seems to disappear in an instant, while moments of “oh god, this is going to hurt” stretch out forever. Three years back, I remember the two seconds between the moment I decided to hop out of the way of the tall cactus I was felling and the moment I heard my vertebrae crunch through my spinal column rather than my ears. Two seconds at most by the clock, but an eternity as the cactus and I both fell.
I had the same feeling this morning as I stepped on the brake and my car started to slide, decelerating at a rate that didn’t seem likely to avoid ramming into the car just ahead that was decelerating even more rapidly. The road was slick with a light pre-dawn drizzle and the raindrops were caught in a slow motion fall between the bright white of my headlights and the steady red glare of tail-lights before me. That car was braking hard and unexpectedly, thirty-five to a sliding halt for no reason I could see.
My foot on the brake and my knuckles white on the wheel, damn, damn, damn, I thought, this is going to be really bad. I was about to break the face of my sweet little gold Prius and possibly my own, and I do happen to like both of them to stay unbroken.
It was reflex that made my foot pump the brake, but my decision to turn the wheel slightly was a fully conscious one. If I wasn’t going to stop in time, if it was unavoidable that I hit something, I decided in a split second to try to hit the mailbox on the side of the road rather than the car in front of me. My stomach dropped as my slowing car slid onward, now angled slightly, my door approaching the back of the other car. Maybe not such a good maneuver.
Slide.
Tick. Tick. Tick…
Tick.
And the car came to a stop - inches from the back of the other car, inches from the mailbox. I almost laughed. (Of course, that was a natural reaction after almost peeing myself.)
My heart pounding in my ears, okay, I breathed.
No harm. No foul. Most excellent near miss.
Things hardly ever work out that way.
The tail lights of the other car continued to blare red in my face and I imagined much the same thoughts going through the other driver’s head - for just a moment. Then the lights went off and the car leapt forward. As the dented silver Lexus sped away, a hand popped out of the passenger window, middle finger extended.
It took me a few minutes to compose myself, turn my car back onto the road, and start moving again. It took a few more for me to register what had actually happened.
The driver of an extremely expensive car with signs of existing damage had executed a completely unwarranted full on braking stop in front of me on an extremely slippery road and then acted extremely oddly when I managed to avoid colliding with it.
It seemed like he was pissed at me.
Pissed at me?
He was pissed that I hadn’t hit him.
But why would anyone be angry not to be in a car wreck?
Because he had wanted me to hit him.
But why would anyone want you to hit them?
He was driving a pre-dented expensive car he didn’t care about and trying to get someone to run into it. He’d even brought along a witness to corroborate the story that he was the victim of a reckless driver who’d barreled into him when he braked understandably to miss hitting a poor (imaginary) dog in the rain, as he would tell the tale to the police officer making out the required police report - a report that would state conclusively that my driving negligence had caused the major damage to his beloved pristine Lexus and caused both him and his passenger painful whiplash injuries.
I’d just narrowly missed being scammed for insurance money.
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