Circle of Willis

At the same time my skull was shattering my driver-side window, a solar flare was spewing into space like a shaken soda 13 times the size of Earth. The billion-hydrogen-bombs-force explosion scorched recording satellites and equipment, so it can only be estimated at between 7 and 25 times more powerful than the largest recorded flare.

I survey footage of other flares from the sun during the Halloween Storms of 2003, including a NASA video dated October 29. This time-compressed clip is the closest I can come to replaying the car accident I was in that night, since the crash destroyed my internal record, as solar radiation did many spacecraft instruments. In the video, a tidal wave of flame roils from the chromosphere, while lightning snakes across the surface, unzipping fault lines. The sun turns to face the camera. An eye appears to leer beneath a droopy eyelid. Two white hot tonsils curdle inside a maw of nuclear fusion. The camera blinks as if punched, and the screen sizzles with static. I rewind the clip and watch again.

Although I do not remember the collision when my vehicle was T-boned at an intersection when I was 28, I recall my brother, who had died 16 months before, coming to my side. He sat beside me in the passenger seat, which in reality was crushed like an empty soda can, but I saw only my brother as he took my hand. My brain ejected everything else with the speed of a coronal flare. Faster than the console spewed a glitter of compact discs, the glare of headlights soared into the night, engines squealing like chainsaws burning through barbed wire.

Others heard the crash, but when I imagine it now, I think of the question my eighth-grade physics teacher posed about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one hears it. Underneath the shriek of brakes and the mash of metal, a tree was falling inside my body in total silence. The branch snap of my ankle, the dry leaf crunch of my elbow, the split seam of my skull and jawbone were inaudible to anyone else in South Denver, and I could not register them because every sensory aperture had turned inward to address the problem of staying alive. The voice I have heard since it cooed into being went quiet as a distant stellar storm.

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A decade after the accident, I fell in love with a man who asked about my arm, which was reconstructed with titanium. He held my elbow as if it were a dove in his palm while I told him what happened. When I finished, he recalled some lines from the poem “Could Have” by Wisława Szymborska:

What would have happened if . . .Within an inch, a hairsbreadth . . .One hole in the net and you slipped through?

It could have been raining, Szymborska suggests, or you might have been in luck because there was no tree. You were in luck because it didn’t happen earlier—when you had a passenger. You could have been destroyed the same instant that solar radiation torched the research satellite known as Midori-2. The ambulance could have taken you to the nearest hospital, instead of to the Level 1 Trauma Center where the neurosurgery team knew to wait, to delay the orthopedic team from operating, to let the brain address itself.

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“Not so long ago,” Katherine Anne Porter begins in her essay The Future Is Now, she was reading instructions in a popular 1950s magazine for “how to behave if and when we see that flash brighter than the sun which means that the atom bomb has arrived.” At first, she read the article with real interest in receiving some useful education, but by the end she was just relieved to have been told the truth: the only way to behave at such times is to be as far away as possible.

A siren draws her to the window as she reads. She watches a young man in the building next door polish a wooden table...