Everything Changes

depressing mediocrity of the evening.
    I don’t remember leaving the casino. There are small chunks of time in there that are missing. It was around two a.m., and I know we stopped for gas and to stock up on Drake’s Cakes and extra-large coffees for the ride home. I remember how the white powder from the doughnuts formed a thin Clark Gable mustache on Rael as he sang along to the Ramones, driving down the Garden State Parkway, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching his 7-Eleven coffee cup. I even remember the song, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” A few months later that same song came over the radio in my office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon shaking and crying in the corner bathroom stall.
    But that’s all I remember, which means either I fell asleep in the passenger seat or else I’ve blocked it out. The next thing I can recall is the screaming of the BMW’s tires chewing up the grassy embankment at high speed, the crumpling steel, so much louder than I ever would have imagined, the imploding windows showering us with glass, and the engine roaring like a wounded bear as the car corkscrewed into the forest that lined the parkway.
    When I came to, we were upside-down.
    Rael was unconscious, and appeared to be sitting in the backseat, except that didn’t make any sense, since his head was hanging just inches from the steering wheel. He also seemed to be hanging in more of a reclining position, while I was hanging in a perfect, seated position.
    “Rael,” I said. It came out as a hoarse rasp, and my entire chest hurt from the effort. The seat belt was digging painfully into my chest and thighs, and I couldn’t move at all. “Rael,” I tried again. This time my voice came out stronger, but my ribs convulsed and I thought I might vomit. The silence in the car seemed starkly wrong after the deafening noise of the crash, but other than the occasional sound of a car speeding by on the parkway below us, and the odd, hissing sigh from the destroyed engine, I heard nothing at all. I realized that our accident might have actually gone unobserved, since the parkway was basically deserted at that hour, and that our wreckage might not be visible from the road. I craned my neck to get a better look at Rael. It was pretty dark, but the geometry of his body, and the car, for that matter, didn’t look right to me. It was like the car had swallowed him, and I was seeing way too much cracked dashboard and not nearly enough Rael.
    Then, with a jolt, he came to life, coughing and spitting out a horrifying amount of blood. “Zack,” he gasped, the sound forcing itself through the liquid in his throat.
    “Yeah,” I said, my voice cracking with relief.
    “I’m fucked up, man.”
    “I know. Me too.”
    “I can’t really breathe.”
    “Just take it easy, man. Don’t panic.”
    “It’s hard,” he wheezed.
    “I can’t find my cell phone,” I said. “Where’s yours?”
    “On my belt.”
    “Do you think you can pass it to me?”
    A strained, wet sob. “Zack.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I can’t move my arms.”
    “It’s okay,” I said idiotically. “I’ll try to reach it.”
    “I can’t move my fucking arms, Zack. I’m fucking paralyzed.”
    “You’re not paralyzed,” I said, feeling around for the release on my seat belt. “You’re just pinned by the car.”
    “I can’t feel a fucking thing!” he shouted, his head writhing from side to side. “I can’t feel my legs! I can’t fucking move.” He started to scream, but he was coughing up gobs of blood and the sound kept getting forced back down his throat and he started to bang his head against the steering wheel.
    “Rael!” I screamed, my torso trembling in agony as the wind from my voice brushed past the raw edges of a thousand wounded muscles. “Calm down!” But by then he’d passed out again.
    I don’t know how long it took for me to get out of my seat belt. It might have been five minutes, it might have been a half hour. When I finally hit the clasp right, I fell headfirst onto the car roof, and when I rolled over, I vomited. As I lay there, involuntarily contorted into a ball, gagging on the stench of my own vomit, the temptation to go to sleep and let someone else sort out this mess was so great that I actually closed my eyes and took a little nap. Someone would find us, and take us out properly, on stretchers, with those yellow boards to immobilize our necks, and say comforting things to us in the ambulance as they hooked up our