The Body Autumnal

149 The Body Autumnal Lisa Wells Like anything, it begins with a collision. Two hours south of Portland, Oregon, in the belly of that tar-black leviathan, I-5. Spring has been quietly replaced by a heat that draws reflective mirage from the empty road ahead. Lewis and Clark loom from a 3-D painting on a roadside historical marker, the single point of interest in twenty miles. Their gaze is of hope and invention and falls upon a gas station where, this humid morning, a van and its human contents have stalled. A young man crouches outside the station store, smoking a B&H and eying the attendant. He spits small wet drops to the left of his feet between drags and lifts his head toward the road. The attendant waves a slip of paper at the boy and the boy nods, stubs his cigarette in the pool of saliva, and follows him inside. A minute later he is adjusting the rearview and shifting his ass in the plastic bucket seat. He considers a sandwich, a bath, and turns the key. Empty Coke cans, small collections of ash, and torn-open cigarette packs litter the unoccupied passenger seat. The boy lifts two fingers at the attendant as he pulls away but the man does not see. Soon the highway has collected a steady stream of cars. The day has stretched into a flat heat, the sun just drawn to half-mast; he is thick in thought. When the steering fails the boy wakes from his stupor and looks wildly around. He pulls on the wheel firmly, first right, then left and curses. It won’t work. He pulls again both right and left, and sounds an awful moan, a caged moan. It’s no use. He’s moving too fast. The van glides into the right lane smoothly, clipping a Camry at the nose. He says, “Shit,” as if to rescue his heavy body from sleep, grabs back hold of the wheel, commits the frantic correction. In a trance, other drivers have fixed on the vehicle’s swerving, they pull onto the shoulder. One man believes that he’s made eye contact with the boy: the face of horror he will never not-see again, and a collective gasp between them as the van first flips into the median 150 Ecotone: reimagining place sending clumps of earth and grass soaring above. Each subsequent flip incites the scream, the turning away of spectators at a circus, the spectacle and its swelled physical comedy. The van and the earth are drawn together magnetically before them, and then bounce— repulsion. They exit their vehicles and gather in a cluster, already touching, already deep in the meaning of it. They move as a unit toward the flame and the smoke, issue orders, move with cohesion. The scene of the crash plays as Miss Eva Stark prepares for sleep. In the anxious dark of her bedroom, in the heat of the bed and her tossing, corpses parade past her lidded eyes, but his is largest. His obstructs the center, cracks in the legs and the ribs and folds over itself backward. She calls,“Charles,”tothedarkofherroomand,“Charles,”tothatotherplace. He didn’t die in the road. He was wheeled to a white room made appropriate for dying. It goes on and on like this automatically. The Funeral Eva is tired at the funeral. She does not slow for not sleeping; she quickens . Her heart speeds and her fingers won’t stop moving. The cadaver is in its box like a metal rod, cold and conductive. She joins her hand with the iron pew of his palm, a simple thing with lines and weight, while the funeral director watches from the corner, calm as a ceramic saint in his pure black rag. Charles is bloated, at least ten pounds richer in liquid and not calm exactly, more like ever-so-slightly surprised. You’re dead, thinks Eva. Never again, she thinks, and imagines ribs exploding from the torso, moaning, rolling on the concrete, pleading for his mother or help-God, or just please. He appears as wax but is much worse than that; inside he is steel and, in one...