Storm-time

I decided to turn off the car light and stay in the shadows. I don't want to draw any more attention. I was told they would come for me. I think they will, but not tonight. "Take a break from the office, it’s not all about appraising houses and land, you look stressed," they said. Of course, they didn't warn me, "check your car, it’s the rainy season."

It was impulsive to come here, the forest is always hostile at dusk. By day, it cleanses your lungs; at night, your bones ache from the cold. Just for a little while, I told myself, just a Saturday morning to see the lake. One morning. It was mid-afternoon when I started the return journey, but the storm hit and the car got stuck in the mud. I got out to push it; I couldn't move it an inch. The water kept running down the road. I tried to start it, but it remained completely motionless, a car-corpse on the path. And I, paradoxically, ended up trapped in the vast wilderness.

There is little light around me, ancestral lights I'd call them. They were here before me, and they will be here after. Although there are also glimmers lighting up around me, I can't quite tell if they are fireflies, yet I also feel they have existed since antiquity.

The cold is uncomfortable, it won't let me sleep. I took off my sneakers and wet clothes. I have a good jacket, luckily. I removed the seat cover and tied it to my legs to warm up. Nevertheless, the shivers persist. I can't see the moon, but the stars are intense; it's a true sea hanging up there, a gigantic tapestry. Instead of feeling alone, I feel sheltered, accompanied somehow.

I hope they come. It will be tomorrow; the emergency services told me there are floods. Every two hours I turn on my cell phone to tell my family I'm okay; I have to save the battery. I'm hungry, I have no music, and my head is starting to hurt. Outside, in the night, everything seems to observe me.

The last cigarette, I was saving it for when it was necessary. Now I smoke the second-to-last one; what else is there to do in this stranded car, waiting. The act of waiting is the worst of all, because it implies being inactive. Space shrinks and time expands like the rising of a river. Maybe they won't find me, or they'll find me dead. The newspapers will say I died of waiting, although if I wrote the news I would choose a different headline.

I remember the waves. I remember watching the sea from the beach as a child, amid my mother's screams. Far away, between the waves, my aunt was fighting the water. I only saw her head being covered and reappearing according to the swell. At four years old, I knew she was in danger. But I had been left alone under the umbrella, waiting. I felt a great void; I had to stay there, impotent. I didn't see when the sea dragged her away; they told me later that they were simply at the shore, collecting shells, when a powerful wave knocked my aunt down in the sand and dragged her; she didn't know how to swim. My mother's screams continued, looking for the lifeguard. Not finding him, she entered the nearest hotel asking for help. And it was at that moment that the lifeguard came running and threw himself into the sea. He reached her and tried to swim back with her, but the waves wouldn't let them advance; it was a whirlpool. My mother, at least, could breathe when she saw her sister floating with the help of that man. It must have been fifteen minutes or a lifetime fighting against what cannot be fought: the infinite. They sent a boat to rescue them. And they both climbed aboard, alive. By the time my aunt and my mother returned to me, I barely uttered something like, "the sea caught you." "Yes," she answered, "you will never do this to me again." She was screaming in her mind at the infinite water.

It is true that no one has died of time—correction, we all die with time. When the hours crush us, we need a boat, a life vest to float. No one has talked about this; I don't think there are scientific records of a hyper-concentrated time that drowns us, one that dismembers us in a single pull. It could be, perhaps, when there is a lot of matter accumulated, as in the center of a black hole. There, possibly, time tears us apart before gravity itself.

I am sweating in the wait. Time is so heavy, so essentially concentrated, that it begins to crush me. It is collapsing my certainty of continuity, this shipwrecked car, which is sinking, is being distorted. I no longer remember if my past is in my future or is still the present. In what moment am I? Will it be more terrible to die from a time that implodes your memory; or from one that tears your neurons apart; or from one that leaves you completely frozen in an instant, like the gods' punishment for Prometheus or Sisyphus?

I try to start the car again... nothing. The insects shriek unbearably. A sudden jolt makes the metal creak; in front of the windshield, a shadow watches me. It is a wolf examining my interior. It knows I will die here, it smells the sweat that is draining my soul. Its fur puffs up as if ignoring the cold and the night. Soon it loses interest and jumps away in another jolt; it is swallowed by the darkness.

The sinking has begun.

Tick-tock, the car is sinking. Not in the mud, but in time.

The windows started to fog up, that's the first thing that always happens, the storm is falling upon me. My safe place is being crushed. I hear the steel creak. Everything human tends to putrefaction, to become motionless at the end, when it is needed the most. Cracks are starting to grow in the plastic of the doors. The seats, with their fake leather, are crackling. The glass is shattering and the roof is sinking toward my head. Little by little the plastics come off and rust spills from the metal, it is the blood of the steel. I don't have the strength to open the door; there can be no movement during the collapse. And the only direction is to sink, to the bottom of time. Which gnaws, slowly crushes. That creaking again. The tires are deflating, and the roof is thinning because the rust is turning it into dust. The cracks become sores, the glove compartment has begun to disintegrate. And the seats are now releasing their fake leather spores. Because all skin sheds and changes in its own moment, when its exact time arrives. I should keep my eyes open but I feel exhausted. Every noise unnerves me. Another vibration makes the car tremble; all four tires have punctured. It sinks, I sink. The accumulated hours make me breathe with greater difficulty. I try to cough, but the pressure of time makes only an infamous whistle come out. I scream, but even that sound has crystallized.

What do sailors do to survive the storm, on a cold night, when there is no hope left? They need a lantern. What will be my lantern in this shipwreck? I light my last cigarette; it truly is the last one. That smoke enters me again, it is a pause, it draws the hours out of my lungs, smoke always drives away predators, now it can ward off the minutes that are suffocating me.

The shivers persist, I feel very hot. They are going to come, I know it. They are going to come to rescue me, as soon as the minutes subside and the waves of time calm against my small, motionless refuge. I know they will come; they promised me. Surely they will throw me an hourglass to save me, before my stomach inflates with centuries.

Time is drowning me, I am a body left at the shore, choking on hours, months, years. My chest is inflated, bursting into billions of seconds.

It is dawning; a tow truck is approaching on the surface, it looks like they see me at the bottom with their light. They look down from above, but I am no longer in this body. They will say I died of cold, sick. But when they examine my lungs, they will see them burst, they will know I drowned in time.