I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me.
I gasp and take a quick step back onto the sidewalk. One of my heels doesn’t clear the curb, so I grip the pole of a No Parking sign to steady myself.
The man was in front of me a matter of seconds ago. We were standing in a crowd of people waiting for the crosswalk light to illuminate when he stepped into the street prematurely, resulting in a run-in with a truck. I lunged forward in an attempt to stop him—grasping at nothing as he went down. I closed my eyes before his head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a champagne bottle.
He was in the wrong, looking casually down at his phone, probably a side effect of crossing the same street without incident many times before. Death by routine.
People gasp, but no one screams. The passenger of the offending vehicle jumps out of the truck and is immediately on his knees near the man’s body. I back away from the scene as several people rush forward to help. I don’t have to look at the man under the tire to know he didn’t survive that. I only have to look down at my once-white shirt—at the blood now splattered across it—to know that a hearse would serve him better than an ambulance.
I spin around to move away from the accident—to find a place to take a breath—but the crosswalk sign now says walk and the thick crowd takes heed, making it impossible for me to swim upstream in this Manhattan river. Some don’t even look up from their cell phones as they pass right by the accident. I stop trying to move, and wait for the crowd to thin. I glance back toward the accident, careful not to look directly at the man. The driver of the truck is now at the rear of the vehicle, wide-eyed, on a cell phone. Three, maybe four, people are assisting them. A few are led by their morbid curiosities, filming the gruesome scene with their phones.
If I were still living in Virginia, this would play out in a completely different manner. Everyone around would stop. Panic would ensue, people would be screaming, a news crew would be on scene in a matter of minutes. But here in Manhattan, a pedestrian struck by a vehicle happens so often, it’s not much more than an inconvenience. A delay in traffic for some, a ruined wardrobe for others. This probably happens so often, it won’t even end up in print.
As much as the indifference in some of the people here disturbs me, it’s exactly why I moved to this city ten years ago. People like me belong in overpopulated cities. The state of my life is irrelevant in a place this size. There are far more people here with stories much more pitiful than mine.
Here, I’m invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to give a shit about me, and I love her for it.
“Are you hurt?”
I look up at a man as he touches my arm and scans my shirt. Deep concern is embedded in his expression as he looks me up and down, assessing me for injuries. I can tell by his reaction that he isn’t one of the more hardened New Yorkers. He might live here now, but wherever he’s from, it’s a place that didn’t completely beat the empathy out of him.
“Are you hurt?” the stranger repeats, looking me in the eye this time.
“No. It’s not my blood. I was standing near him when…” I stop speaking. I just saw a man die. I was so close to him, his blood is on me.
I moved to this city to be invisible, but I am certainly not impenetrable. It’s something I’ve been working on—attempting to become as hardened as the concrete beneath my feet. It hasn’t been working out so well. I can feel everything I just witnessed settling in my stomach.