I sat and strummed my fingers on the wheel of my car at the red while the ambulance glided down the road which bordered the hospital. The red and blue lights above the rear doors were flashing but no siren sounded because it was late and people were trying to sleep. It was half past ten on a Friday night. The hospital sat on a hill just down from a complex of rambling houses that hugged the headland off into the distance. The sky, like a big dilated pupil, seemed intent on consuming everything and the only ones who resisting it, that is, those who stayed out for what ever reason, seemed to consciously resist in their every movement.
I thought of all the people who were asleep at the hospital, and whether they were asleep because they were tired of because they had been drugged. Then I thought of a character in one of my friend's short stories, Champ, who thought the only way to resist death was to drive away from it as fast as he could. He was one of the more likable characters my friend created--most of them were spiteful and cruel. Champ had a lot of faith in the goodness of people so he was a recurrent and necessary foil in my friend's writing. My friend, J. found he had trouble developing stories without Champ because the characters he'd paint would never reveal their characters through gestures, instead affecting courtesy and deference at all times, with only the most minor lapses. Champ would be oblivious to all the cues and bywords and subterfuges and would just smile and frown and give himself away. He was a model of vulturability, and unwittingly so. He was always tragically credulous, and the people whom he trusted and loved all secretly delighted at his folly.
The light went green eventually and I stepped on the gas pedal slowly. I was low on petrol and popped it into neutral as I hit the crests of hills. I had thought much of J.'s stories in the past, but sitting in my car, looking up at that stolid old grey building full of death and disease and little alters for the Gen X's, I felt inexplicably sorry for Champ, the quixotic dunce.
There was something so heart retching about a man attempting to evade death with his car. His girlfriend would always be in the passenger seat because she didn't have her own car nor much to do with her time. She would yawn and tell him he didn't know which direction death was chasing him from and that because she loved him, because she knew death (her father had died when she was young) and because she was the best girlfriend in the world she would direct him to safety. Champ had this strange way of agreeing with every crazy thing she proposed without a thought like she was the delphic oracle crossed with a GPS, when really she was just bored and got a kick out of scaring Champ into loving her.
In spite of Champ's ridiculous belief in his girlfriend's supernatural ability to evade death he was by no means stupid. He was an extremely bright man. He had all the trappings of an intellectual, with dirty long hair, glasses and a backpack full of books of widely differing themes. He was a devout atheist, but would rarely talk about his beliefs, or most anything for that matter, but instead would let his eyes dart from place to place, constantly surveying and empiricising. His unmistakable brilliance was precisely what made his religious devotion to his girlfriend so remarkable and so tragic. It wasn't so much that he believed in her capacity to anticipate death as he believed in her, period. Having analysed the entire world and discovery too many flaws, both structural and superficial, to speak of, he sought refuge from evaluation in her. She was something he could bring himself to believe in wholly and without discrimination.
I pulled into the driveway and took my iPod out of the fm tuner. I realized that I hadn't listened to any music on the drive home which is rare. I got wrapped up in thinking about ambulances and Champ.
