KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #051 Eric Angal The Accident

...and we come to a crossroads, almost (but not quite) literally, as I approach the double doors, and as my hand reaches out to grab a crashbar I stop...because, which one...? Which door should I open...? Or should I open both...? But no, that would be too dramatic an entrance (or exit, for that matter)...and now my hand is hovering over the crashbar and I’m cursing myself, no, I don’t have time for this, no...and yet I must make time...because this is important, this is an important decision, a decision which agonizes me, coats me in hot, sticky agony...an agony borne of my horrible compulsions...these compulsions being that I cannot help but visualize two distinct and separate futures resultant from the opening of one door over the other...that depending on which door I open, my world, through a series of incremental but accretive butterfly-effect style variations, will mutate, that the forces of chance will possibly conspire against me, activated as if by lever through the one door’s opening over the other, and that whatever happens as byproduct will perhaps culminate in my untimely demise, or God forbid another ACCIDENT...I can very clearly visualize these changes (one door will shield me from the wind...the other door will not, and the wind will muss up my hair...I will reach up to adjust my hair with my right hand...in doing so, my wristwatch will refract sunlight directly into the eye of an oncoming semitruck driver...he will cry out and swerve directly into the sidewalk, killing me) and when I visualize them, when I visualize myself in them, I am always visualizing myself as I was before THE ACCIDENT, and why...? Why is that...? I don’t know...probably something to do with my psychology. I can’t think about that, though, because I have to pick a door. My hand is hovering over the crashbar and I am looking out into the crowded traffic, the crowded daytime traffic like somehow dimmed, somehow muted by the tint on these double-doors, somehow made distant even though I’m a finger away, I’m one finger away from her, can see her through the steely glarefree glass, see her marred by my reflection, and sweat is forming on my hands, specifically on my palms, and I need to make a decision: do I take the right door, or the left, or both...? But no, I already decided I wouldn’t open both doors, no, that would look very silly...downright stupid, even...I would look like a fucking idiot if I opened both doors, no matter how I did it...if I swung them open with bravado, or if I meagerly opened both, perhaps one at a time, my hands positioned low on the crashbars as if I were cupping a wide ass...which, come to think of it, I couldn’t open both doors if I wanted to, holding these coffees...so no, I would look foolish either way, opening both doors is out of the question...and I have to be back home by nine p.m., because I need to feed Frederick, he’s low on water and food and he asked me, he asked me when I left, practically begged me to come home as fast as I could and regale him with stories of my date, and so I need to be punctual, I need to get my shit together, as it were, and also I don’t want her to, like, see me standing here with my hand tentatively reaching for a crashbar as if I were frozen in time...no, I don’t want that...and so, by means of some unconscious ideomotor effect, my fingers twitch, they twitch in the direction of the righthand door...the righthand door through which she is obscured to me...if I am square with the doorframe she does not appear within its borders at all, no, possibly symbolizing something, maybe something of portent, indicating to me that perhaps if I want things to go well then it would be best if I were to open the lefthand door...and that the righthand door, if I were to appear through it, might take me to a world wherein she does not exist...perhaps immediately, perhaps right away, as in I’ll open the door and she will be gone, disappeared off the face of the earth...and maybe this wouldn’t be altogether a bad thing, as I don’t think the date will go well, due to my appearance, which has been irreversibly altered as a result of complications during my recovery following THE ACCIDENT (that, and I look nothing like my pictures, which were all taken a long time ago). But I do want things to go well...and I well I didn’t come here just to walk through a door and find that the whole reason for my coming here, the whole purpose of my visit, had disappeared right off the face of the earth...either immediately, as in right when I open the door, or, more realistically, through a series of those tiny little changes that I mentioned before...a slow, accretive, incremental disappearance, pieces of her disappearing in slow motion before my eyes...one finger a day, perhaps, a toe, half her neck, her lower jaw...although this would make us, I think, more commensurately attractive, this half-disappeared girl and I, due to my aforementioned disfigurements...disfigurements which, for better or worse, occupy my thoughts almost constantly, the way I look...the way I look, no...the way it looks when I see myself, no, perhaps a half-disappeared girl is better than the full, uh, girl, the genuine article...because the person I’m looking at right now has got a beautiful face, she’s got full breasts, one might say heaving breasts which, hmm, hang there suspended off her slim figure, and she’s got cherryred cheeks, and she’s blonde, and with those legs, to boot...! ...and what would it be like, to be seen by her...? To be really seen...? Like, seen as in how I see Frederick...? I don’t know, maybe it’s not possible...and that’s the problem, really, is that these dates, they never quite end up going to a place where that sort of seeing can be done...as in, the dates do not recur...it would take some several thousand dates, I think, to get to the point where any sort of seeing about another person could really actually be done...and at that point I doubt we would be particularly interested in seeing each other anymore...I am sure it would be like how it is with Frederick and I, we will be looking past each other...like the way Frederick looks through me, it’s immediately clear he’s not really seeing much of anything at all...he’s looking past me, to a light...a light only he can see...and he tells me, as he so often does, says that light is getting closer, as if I’m supposed to know what that means...and I ask him, as I so often do, do you want a way out...? And I nudge the Smith & Wesson closer to him, and he takes it and holds it up to his chin and nuzzles the trigger...saying, as he so often does, the first half of this trigger is the last thing I’ll hear...and he’ll fiddle with the trigger, put just the lightest pressure on it until the safety disengages...and I see him...I see past his empty shell and into that part of him I’m not sure even he is aware of...and that took me thousands of hours, to get to that point...thousands of hours, and four different pairs of Klein needlenose pliers... ...so maybe I take the lefthand door...but the lefthand door puts me directly into sunlight...and direct exposure to sunlight will only accentuate the surfeit of deep crags and jutting scars which cover my face...not a good note to start on, especially with a woman as sexy as this one...but perhaps it is the correct note...there is some nobility to it...to starting in the sunlight, which is to say, starting honestly...without shame for my appearance...no hiding to speak of...she will be able to see me as I am, a bold move, if I do say so myself...but, on the other hand, I can very easily see the lefthand door leading to my immediate death...I can sense it, I don’t know how, but I can...there’s something not so stochastic or variable about a certain death, coiled, tensed, and waiting for me, right there on the other side of that door...something about the way it is, the lefthand door, some barely discernable minutiae only recognizable to an unconscious part of me, or, well, I don’t know...I just know it in my bones that if I walk through that door then I am, at the very least, entertaining the idea of my immediate death...maybe it’s got something to do with the aforementioned sunlight, maybe something to do with the fact that she is so clearly visible through the lefthand door, I don’t know, but it calls to me, the door does, death does, calls to me as if in succor, as if I could help it, death, the door, I don’t know...and although the self-conscious methodology I employ when I get into this compulsive headspace would seem to imply that I care a lot about death, about avoiding death, in particular, I think that my constant mental proximity to my own death prevents me from looking at death as a bad thing in its entirety...sure, my death will mean the cessation of my life, my life which has been nothing but sunshine and roses, my hella good life, oh no...and of course I can act laissez-faire about it, but I don’t want to die, not even Frederick wants to die, no, I don’t want to die, even though since THE ACCIDENT I’ve been living in abject misery, have been struggling to find any reason to live at all, and have been completely and totally obsessed with my death, which has only ever seemed to grow closer since, you know...and Frederick, he says that death is like a kiss, he says that death is like a lover, he says, says he can hear death moaning in his ear, and it says things like: I am so wet for you, Frederick...here, put your hand here, feel this, this wetness...and Frederick does, and no, it’s dry, he’s holding the Smith & Wesson, he’s playing with the trigger again, and I have to remind him: no, the trigger isn’t the last thing you’ll hear—you’ll hear all sorts of things, you’ll hear the sounding of your heartbeat in your temples, you’ll hear the gunbarrel against your teeth, you’ll hear your breath, the room air, all that will be heard by you—more accurately, the trigger will be the last thing you feel, is a better way of putting it, and even then—who can say...? And also it’s cliche to say that death is a lover, no, you’re being very gauche, I tell him, you’re being very extra, death isn’t a lover, or a friend, or your father, stop anthropomorphizing it, it’s simply a state wherein one has ceased to be...which is, of course, true, or at least according to most people it’s true, the popular conception of death is simply that you’re no longer living, whatever you become after it happens or whatever you don’t become, if this is really all there is, then that’s that, at least there’s no agony in it, no compulsive agony, no...or maybe there is, I don’t know, who can say...? We don’t know anything, we know less than the bare minimum required to say anything about anything, we can hardly even see anything, which is what it’s like, how it feels when I’m with Frederick—to be alone with him, I can see maybe the barest smallest sliver of something inside him...something unfurling against the awful blackness of his innards, shifting around inside him, falling deeper and deeper into the mereological abyss of him, and soon there won’t be needlenose pliers small enough to get at it, is what I’m worried about... Sir...? Are you alright, there, sir...? Oh...and of course...she’s talking to me...the barista, to whom my back is turned, has no doubt noticed that I’ve been standing here, frozen in place, in excess of two minutes, or perhaps longer...considering I am one of just a handful of scattered customers on the premises, it doesn’t surprise me that she’s noticed my rather erratic behavior...also, due to my appearance, it would be hard not to follow my activity throughout the shop, as people tend to inherently distrust the hideous, it’s true, they do...they cannot fathom that something could exist looking the way I do, cannot help but connect my appearance to something more sinister, as though evil itself has manifested upon my face...as though my ugliness were rendered as some Batesian parody to ward off my fellow man...as though, as though my face gives shape to evil, as though it physically embodies evil in a world where said embodiment would otherwise not exist, and in that way my face is a sort of portal, I suppose, which takes people somewhere else, a bit like death, I guess, in that I don’t know where that somewhere else is. I have some ideas, though, which I would gladly share with the barista, with my date, and with Frederick, hell, with the world, if they’d all just let me. Even Frederick, who thinks he helps, thinks he isn’t just standing directly where the light is, getting in the way of the light, in the way of the truth, blocking me from it—he can’t help me, can only further obscure the source, the answer to all this, which is, I believe, something simple, maybe just a single word, a word which hasn’t been invented yet...but, nonetheless, a singular word, a noun, or maybe an adjective...a word like panacea, or alkahest, or father...yes, a word like one of those, something universal...something radical, something all-encompassing, which ties its related concepts into itself with a neat little bow, a word like a present, but only the one word, because there’s only one answer, there’s no paraconsistency involved, not here, no... ...but, speaking of, maybe I take both doors, then, maybe I do it, maybe it’s the only way...and yes, that makes sense...the only way to save both of our lives, my date’s life and my own, is if I burst through both doors, accepting the unintended consequences of their collusion, the mix between the doors acting to quell their individual effects, although perhaps simultaneously amplifying strange and new effects which cannot be foreseen...maybe if I just, if I just open them both, precisely at the same time, which I would have to do with my hips or ass, if I open both at the exact same time, like threading a needle, and walk through the doorframe backwards, then all will be well...or, as well as well can be, I guess...I will be turned away from my date, so she will not have to suffer my face... and I will be able, then, to walk bravely backwards into the future...which is a term Frederick coined, hinting at the great darkness, the great onset darkness looming like a well before him, that he has only just begun to fall into...which is part of my theory...that it will be like falling, but not into darkness—it will be like falling into, or onto, a veranda on a sunny day with a beautiful woman, outside a quaint coffee shop...that it will be like saying hello...in a world where your face...where your face is unmolested, where the intentions therein are expressed without interference from a glut of keloidal scarring...where, maybe, you can look into your reflection and see the you that’s really there...where the light, perhaps, shines brighter, and as consequence, what we seek is made less elusive, can finally be found...we can get there...I can prove it...because I am heading there now...And hello.

***_____  Eric Angal is a writer from Seattle. 6 June 2026