Roadkill
On the way to Changsha, the bus slowed a bit, swerved right and just missed the puddle of blood surrounding the dead man. He lay exactly in the middle of the two-lane road, on his side, bent at the waist, still. A thick beige coat covered his hefty torso. His tousled black hair was combed over the dome of his head. Blood spilled out his mouth.
A dozen or so people stood beside the road, somber looks on their faces. Two bouquets of yellow flowers lay near them. A police car, red and blue sirens flashing, sat nearby. Blue dumptrucks and minibikes and busses slowed momentarily, blared their horns, swerved left or right, and carried on at breakneck pace once past the obstacle. It was 7:15 in the morning. It wouldn’t be until after rush hour, I suppose, that there would be an opening long enough to clear him away.
We arrived at the Changsha campus at 7:35. My friend Helen, a law professor who was seated next to me on the bus, said, “Daniel, let’s get breakfast.” I declined.
I will never know who was this man or how he died. I imagine he was crossing the street and fell victim to an overzealous dumptruck or taxicab, and I imagine that the driver sped away into anonymity, in a rush to get wherever was next on his agenda. I imagine the man who died was a common man, and that he leaves behind a family that relied on him emotionally and financially. And I imagine that his death will bring his family no justice, little if any compensation, just emptiness and uncertainty.
I had a strong emotional reaction to the sight of the man lying dead, but a stronger reaction to the lack of a reaction of those around me. A bus loaded with fellow college teachers passed him without so much as a sigh, and, twenty minutes later, my colleagues rushed to the campus canteen for some steamed buns. The road remained open, trafficked, and vehicles sped by, honking their horns as if annoyed. It wouldn’t shock me if he was run over again.
This is not the first dead man I encountered, and not the first time I was shocked by the lack of reaction of those around me. One morning in New York City, I got off a subway at Times Square and, four feet in front of me, sitting on a bench, was a homeless man frozen to death, his face the color of his gray jacket. And the people who streamed out the subway doors with me passed him without a pause. It was rush hour, and they had places to be. No time to mourn, or even acknowledge, a dead man in front of them.
I told a cop. “How you know he’s dead – you a doctor or something?” he asked. And he badgered me further: did I poke him to see if he’d move? What business was it of mine? What’s my name and phone number? Do I have an ID to show him? And he asked me where was the man, and told me I best be on my way, annoyed.
Maybe those around me have it right: leave the clean-up, and the mourning, to those who knew the dead man. Maybe I get too emotionally involved in the lives, and untimely deaths, of strangers. Maybe the modern world moves too quickly, and maybe those around me would expect the same lack of reaction if they were to meet their doom on a Changsha highway or at a Time Square subway station.
Somehow, though, it occurs to me that human life and human death deserve a bit more of a reaction. Not necessarily any grand gesture, just a pause, a prayer, a recognition that what I see before me makes me cherish my own life and the lives of those people whom I love, and that, if I were to meet the same fate, I would deserve the same recognition, even though I’m a stranger and even though the modern world moves at breakneck pace and I happened to die during rush hour.
