Jen could not account for the next twenty-four hours, not even directly after they'd elapsed. She knew there had to have been two legs of a commute, and seven or so hours of sleep, and sweaty, messy attempts at dinner and then breakfast and lunch; there had to have been conference calls and emails; there had to have been bolts to the bathroom; there had to have been some kind of frantic pitch session in Karina's office wherein Jen marketed her friend Pam as a LIFt-worthy package of strength, vulnerability, creativity, tragedy, and good
optics.
She knew she had welcomed Pam into the LIFt offices, ushered her into the soundproof video studio, introduced her to Donna, and coaxed her to submit to the makeup artist's entreaties, “just for a touch-up.” But Jen could never have sourced a single specific freeze-frame or intertitle from these twenty-four hours. In her memory's telling, she hung up the phone with Pam and looked up and Pam was standing in front of her desk.
“What the fuck?” Pam said in a stage whisper. Her eyes, framed with heavy mascara and liner, glittered with fury; a horrified smile strained her features. She had turned a deep red, burning through the heavy pancake makeup up to her hairline. Large-eyed and large-mouthed and painted, breathless and zipped up in one of her Champion sweatshirts, her hair raked back in a makeshift knot, she summoned in Jen's addled mind a ballerina who'd been pushed offstage to a skidding stop, still spinning with emotion and adrenaline after a truncated, tumultuous performance.
“What the fuck was that?” Pam was asking. Hissing.
“What's wrong? What happened?” Jen stood, started to reach for Pam's arm, then thought better of it. She sensed Daisy to her left rising from her cubicle and slipping quietly away.
“I just got interrogated on camera about how God himself sent the angel Gabriel down to earth to personally pulverize my bones with his divine truck and teach me an important lesson about owning my power.
The fuck,
Jen?”
“You know, this is my own fault. I thought I was going to be talking about fucking health-insurance deductibles and protected bike lanes. I should have known it would be this faux-Buddhist libertarian bullshit.”
“Zen Rand,” Jen said, almost to herself.
“I can't even imagine, Pam. I'm sorry.”
“I'm perfectly calm.” Pam did sound perfectly calm. The red was fading. “You're either too stupid not to know this would happen, or you did this with malice. I have never known you to be stupid, so that leaves malice.”
“I don't need you to explain. I'm leaving now. I can find my own way out.”
Jen turned and watched helplessly as Pam walked across the office floor and vanished through the glass doors to the elevator bank. Jen locked eyes with Jules the intern, who had swiveled around in her chair and was scrunching her face into a shoulder-squeeze of sympathy. Jen did not react, and turned and took her seat again. She folded her hands on her desk. She was comfortably seated in a still pocket of time, no turbulence, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, pH balance of seven. This pocket of time would expire in ten to fifteen minutes. The pocket of time walled itself off from dread about the moment of its expiration, the moment that the pocket of time would run out of oxygen; her amygdala would remain sound asleep until then, until the alarm rang. Jen could peer wonderingly at her steady hands with dry eyes and no apprehension. Even the pain in her lower abdomen, which had been building all afternoon, receded a bit. She heard Daisy reinstall herself in her cubicle.
As the raw video began, Pam was rubbing her teeth with one finger, unaccustomed as she was to lipstick. The makeup artist had already performed a rhinoplasty of contouring. The hairdresser had straightened Pam's hair, which Jen knew must have taken at least an hour or more. Pam was wearing a ruffled tangerine blouse that Jen had never seen beforeâJen assumed it was borrowed from Leora's ad-hoc clothing-storage space, which Daisy had stumbled upon one day while searching for padded envelopes and which Petra had then started using instead of the handicapped stall to pump breast milk. The ruffled tangerine blouse was further embellished by a chunky, brassy necklace that Jen recognized from Leora's Opening Statement!
â¢
jewelry line. Off-camera, Donna was asking Pam if she was ready to begin. Jen could hear Donna taking off her bracelets.
All right, good, let's start. So, Pam. It's been nearly a year and a half now. Can you tell us what happened?
Sureâand thanks for having me here today, Donna, and thanks to, um, the foundation. So, let's see, I was riding my bicycle to a gallery on a Saturday afternoon. I was making a turn at an intersection, and, as far as I can piece it together, a van was speeding to make the light, hit me from behind, and threw me from the bike. I'll probably never know exactly what happened, because the van drove away and the cops never really followed up on it.
What were your injuries?
Well, my left leg was shattered. Just wrecked. I had a compound fracture of the femur and a smashed tibia, and my ankle was beyondâI mean, the pedal had slashed clean through it. It was pretty gross. I also dislocated my shoulder and cracked a couple of ribsâbut on my right side. So my injuries were ambidextrous, you could say.
Aha, so you had found a new equilibrium!
Ha, yes, you could say that. But it was my leg that was the big problem.
What do you remember of the first days after the accident?
I remember coming in and out of this bluey consciousnessâeverything seemed underwater and tinted blue, with tinges of red at the edges, like, um, like the curling of fingers, or seaweed. And I remember pain, just excruciating pain, like every cell in my body was being crushed over and over again. The pain was so bad I was surprised I was alive. It was so bad I was sort of in awe of it, you know? Like I could behold it from a slight distance, and I guess I got that distance because of the medication they were giving me. If I had been inside that pain, I would have gone crazy.
But you made it, Pam. You made it. Tell us about your road to recovery.
Well, I don't know how much detail you want me to go into, but they basically had to reassemble my leg, which took a lot of time and operations and then recovery time between the operations. That was, in a way, the most dispiriting partâevery time I'd have recovered enough from an operation to start to sort of feel like myself again, another operation would come around the bend. And then I basically had to learn to walk again, with a leg that felt uncomfortably new and unfamiliar, but also old and over itâover
life,
you know? My leg was depressed, which was depressing to me. My leg and I had to get to know each other again. And my two different legs had to learn to get along.
And now?
Things are pretty good. My leg gives me trouble when it's cold, or when it rains. This past winter was hard at times, going up stairs and stuff. And I have a lot of scars on my leg, but I kind of like them now. They've healed and smoothed over, and they're sort of cool-looking. They're a story.
Battle scars.
Something like that. I don't really think of it as a battle. I'm sad that I can't really run like I used to anymore. Maybe someday. I could ride a bike, but I don't want to.
A fear you need to conquer.
Yeah, maybeâwell, I don't know about that. I don't know that I need to conquer it, actually. I mean, why would anyone want to get back on a bike after what happened?
What did you learn about yourself during the months you spent recovering?
Well, it's interesting. One thing I didn't know is that the femur is the only bone in the human thigh. Isn't that weird to think about? We've got fourteen bones in our face, twenty-nine bones in our skull, and just that one lonely bone accounting for about a quarter of our height. So, anyway, with a femoral fracture, what happens isâ
Pam, I'm going to stop you thereâI meant more on a personal level, a spiritual level. What did you learn about yourself during this time?
Oh, okay. Let's see. I don't really know.
We've talked a lot about the physical. What about the metaphysical, the spiritual?
I don'tâI don't believe in God, soâ
We don't necessarily have to be talking about a god. Let me put it another way: When this accident happened, what did you think the universe was trying to tell you?
I don't know. I don'tâit's sort of hard for me to think in those terms. Sorry, I know you need stuff for the interview. Umâhuh, I don't know. It was just the thing that happened. I don't think it was, like, a
sign.
Or like a divine message. Is that what you mean?
Maybe you were the message, and this event was the messenger.
Yeah, I don't know.
Because you do have a message, don't you?
Yes, I do. First of all, I want people in their twenties and thirties who don't have health insurance to make sure they have it. The only reason I had health insurance when this happened was because I was at a party one time and I mentioned I didn't have health insuranceâit was almost like a brag, like a bit of bravado. Bravada? And this woman I'd just met turned to me and told me about her brother, who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of twenty-six. If he hadn't had health insurance, she said, he would have bankrupted their entire family and their lives never would have been the same. She told me that story and I got health insurance the next day. It wasn't great insurance and it was really expensive and it had a high deductible, but it was something. This accident happened just over a year after that. I want to sort of be like that woman's brother for people who think they can squeeze by without insurance.
The second important issue here is that I think if a pedestrian or cyclist gets hit by a car in the city where I live, or any city, there should be a police investigation, always, without exception. Because in my caseâin my caseâ
âYou put your life into the hands of the justice system, and you felt the justice system let you down.
Well, no, it didn't even get as far as the courts. I thought I would be in court saying, “This driver was negligent, and the burden is on me to prove it, and I think I can prove it, but it's up to the justice system to decide.” But the police were the gatekeepers to the justice system, and they closed the gate. They had multiple witnesses, tire tracks all over the place, even most of the license plate, and they might have even had security-camera footage, but we'll never know because they didn't follow up, they didn't even find out if the footage existed. They probably would have investigated properly if I had diedâand isn't that crazy, that
that's
the threshold for an investigation? Death? But instead it was like, “Well, whoops, it was an accident, sucks for you, but what can we do?”
Hey, you know what, Donna, could I do that part over again? I think I can do it more concisely and be more articulate. I shouldn't say “sucks”!
Well, actually, Pam, I was going to stop you anyway, becauseâkeep in mind that we are aiming for a very diverse nationwide audience, so we may not want to drill down so much into specifics on these points, which are very, well, specialized. Police matters and so forth. It might be fruitful to paint with a broader brush. Not so local, you see?
I think so. Yeah, no, you're right, I can boil it down to talking points. I should be better at thisâI watched so many cable-TV talk shows in the hospital.
Okay, let's regroup and start again.
Sounds good.
Pam, what was the message this accident was sending you?
The message I have isâoh, wait, that wasn't your question. Sorry.
Let's try again. You're doing really well. Okay. Pam, what was the higher purpose of this accident? Why did it happen?
I don'tâI don't understand the question, I'm sorry.
Well, do you think the accident happened for a reason?
N-no. No, I don't think the accident happened for a reason. I think I've tried to make some good come out of the accident, but it didn't happen for a reason.
But the accident taught you something. So in a sense, couldn't you say that it happened for a reason? That, in a way, it had a purpose?
No. No, the accident did not have a purpose. Two different things happened: The accident happened, and then I did things in response to it. That's not the same thing as saying that the accident was purposefulâI mean, we keep saying “the accident,” but we're talking about an enormous amount of suffering and pain, a year of my life in a sense lost to this, part of my body literally destroyed. So much pain. So it's hard to talk about it like it was a cloud with a silver lining.
What did the pain teach you, Pam?
The painâthe pain didn't teach me anything. Pain is pain. I don'tâ¦yeah.
What I'm hearing from you is that bitterness was consuming you.
Huh. I don'tâyou know, Iâit's weird, because at first Iâumâat first IâI didn't have much room for emotions. IâI was in pain all the time, for a long time, or else out of my mind on drugs. There's a kind ofâderanging effect of that, like I said before. And yeah, soâyeah, once the pain starts turning into just plain old severe discomfort and inconvenience, then the emotions start having room to move in, and you do feel angry, because someone did something terrible to you and there were no consequences.
You wanted revenge?
No, no. No, of course not. I'm not a vengefulâno. I wantedâlook, imagine, this terrible thing has happened and no one is helping you make it better. I mean, that's not true, your friends and family are helping and doctors and nurses and physical therapists are helping, and most of those people are being really awesome, but the person responsible for this isn't helping, and he's not being held responsible, and no one seems interested in holding him responsible. It's likeâme and my doctors and family and friends were held responsible for a crime we didn't commit. That's it, that's it.
Because you discovered that you are responsible for your own life, and sometimes that's a terrible burden, isn't it?
Well, no, nobody is responsible for her own life, not entirely. You can imagine that you are, but then a truck comes out of nowhere and mows you down! That's actually exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. I didn't invite this into my life.
But you were responsible for your response to the situation.
Well, sure, to a certain point, but I was lucky. I know that's a weird thing to say, given what happened, but it was. I had health insurance. I had love and support. I didn't have a head injuryâthat right there, that was
fantastic
luck, life-changing luck. Sure, I was wearing a helmet, but nothing I did right then determined whether or not I received a head injuryâyou could be wearing a helmet and a truck could still come along and crush your skull.
You asked a minute ago if I was consumed with bitterness. I think what I was really consumed with was an obsession to tell people what I'd learned and make them act on it. I wanted young, healthy people to know that they needed health insurance. I wanted cyclists to wear helmets, always. I wanted my representative in Congress and my local police precinct to know that a crime had occurred, a real crime, not just an accidentâbecause an accident can be a crime, and vice versaâand that resulted in gross bodily harm to me and emotional distress to my parents and my boyfriend and my friends. I wanted these powerful people to know that the police, who are entrusted to serve and protect, did not, in my opinion, serve and protect me. I wanted health-insurance companies to know how much completely unnecessary stress and tedium and frustration and worry they put their customers through when their customers are already depleted physically and emotionallyâthat it amounts to a form of abuse, truly. And I wanted drivers to know how much power they had to hurt people, and to feel sort ofâto feel chagrined by that power. To feel the literal shape and weight of that power.
So you felt that the accident had made you a teacher, a leader.
No. I never felt that.
Everything you just said sounds like the words of a teacher and a leader. A teacher and a leader doesn't have to be some wise old man on a mountaintop. What we're talking about is simply the power of sharing our experience so that others can learn from it.
Well, I think itâit gave me a useful anecdote, I'd say.
But not everyone might have seen it that way. Some people might have just closed in on themselves, felt sorry for themselves. They wouldn't have seen it as a teachable moment.
Well, I wouldn't judge them for that. Believe me, I did plenty of feeling sorry for myself during that time.
You invoked the word
power
a moment ago. What I'm hearing is that you felt powerless, and you seized this chance to own your power.
I don'tâyeah, I don't know.
Well, can we explore that idea together for a moment, Pam? That idea of empowering yourself in a moment of powerlessness.
I mean, yeah, sure, it gave me something to think about; it gave me an intellectual focus.
So that's what the accident was there to teach youâthat you had power, how you could use your power.
I justâthis thing happenedâand I thinkâI think the accident gave me the opportunityânoâI think the accident created an occasion for me to say, “This happened to me, and here's what could have been better, and here's what could have been worse, and here's how it could have been prevented.” And saying that has involved me talking to people with a certain degree of power: congressmen, community representatives, police representatives. And it still does, because I want change to happen. I want laws to change.
That amazing moment when you realize again that everything happens for a reason.
Okay. Fine. Sure. Yeah.
Do you see that journey we just went on together, Pam? Only a few minutes ago you were saying that this accident had no purpose. But we've realized together that it had a great purpose for you.