The Humanity Equation – Part 3

I usually drove just a little over the speed limit on the freeway. The lack of numbers didn’t phase me, at first – I had a plan. I was going to just match the numbers on the road signs with the ones in my car’s speedometer. I wouldn’t need to know what they meant, all I had to do was match shapes. I thought it was going to be simple. I thought this would be a non-issue. Square peg in the square hole, triangle peg in the triangle hole. Easy peasy.

What I didn’t count on was the other drivers.

The second I got on the freeway a car tore by me so fast it must have been going… Well, pretty fast. Fast enough to know they probably weren’t driving safely. Any other day I’d have been able to put a number to that, but today was special. Pants-on-head short bus kind of special. I tried to get up to speed, but it’s incredible how difficult that is when you have no idea how fast you’re going. I accelerated until my speedometer’s needle looked about right, close to what I remembered, at least, and tried to read the speed limit on the road sign.

The next hurdle came when I tried to match the numbers on my speedometer to the numbers on the speed limit signs. The numbers on the signs just seemed to bounce around in my head until they became unrecognizable. My eyes darted back and forth between my dashboard and the road so fast that I almost drove off the road, and yet I still couldn’t match the numbers. It was like a hole had opened in my brain, and anything math-related that I put into my head disappeared down that hole, never to be seen again. It was infuriating.

Eventually, I gave up, and just tried to drive at what I imagined was a reasonable speed.

Yeah, the lane lines are passing… about right. And the mile markers aren’t coming by too fast. This is probably fine.

I started looking at the other cars on the road a bit closer. Most people were going the same speed I was, but some were driving much faster. Way, way too fast for safety, I thought. A bit more observation confirmed that I was right, as I watched someone pull off the highway at what they must have thought to be a safe speed, only to spin out of control on the off ramp and into a ditch. The car rolled several times, and was still rolling by the time it left my view.

“Holy shit” was about all I could muster up.

I saw a few similar accidents at other off ramps and made an effort to slow down to a crawl before exiting. Thankfully, I gauged it correctly, and didn’t wind up scattered across 40 feet of pavement. The rest of the drive home was uneventful; the only other car I saw was moving so slowly I probably could have outrun it on foot. I pulled into the parking lot outside my apartment building, and shut the engine off. It was only then I realized how much it hurt to unfurl my fingers from the wheel. I had been gripping it so hard I’d left an impression in the fake leather. My hands ached, and I sat there closing and unclosing them in my car for a few moments in an attempt to regain feeling.

There was a crowd of people milling around the building as I walked up. I saw a woman in a purple dress shouting obscenities in both English and Italian at another tenant while most of the bystanders just sat around with stricken looks on their faces.

“Hey,” I said, tapping a brown-haired girl on the shoulder, “what’s going on?”

The girl turned to look at me, and I saw it was Jen Baker, who lived on my floor. I’d bumped into her once or twice in the hallway, and we’d say hello when we saw each other, but her name was about the extent to which I actually knew her.

“Hey,” she said back at me. “Don, right?”

“Dan.”

“Dan, sure. This lady is losin’ her shit ‘cuz she can’t remember where she lives, and apparently that’s our fault somehow. Like we ain’t got our own problems right now.”

“Can’t she just try her key on every door?”

Jen looked at me as though I were the last person in the room to catch on to a joke.

“Well Dan, that’s what she was doing until she gave up and just sat her ass down on some guy’s couch on the first floor. His door was open, I guess. He took offense to it, and they quite literally took it outside.”

“Ok,” I nodded, “but why is everyone just sitting around watching?”

Jen cocked an eyebrow.

“You just got back from work, right? Where do you think everyone else just came from, Dan? We ain’t got shit to do. Nobody’s working today, probably.”

I sighed.

“Whatever. I’m going inside. See you around, Jen.”

I pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers only to bump into the screaming woman myself. She must have taken it personally because suddenly there was a shoe in her hand and she was swatting my head with it. I uttered a cry of surprise and fell backwards on on my ass as she began yelling incoherent bilingual slurs at me. A big hispanic guy grabbed her by the arm to stop her and, her targets re-prioritized, she began attacking him instead. I took the opportunity to run inside with a hand over my head.

I didn’t have any trouble finding my apartment. I lived at the end of the hall on the ground floor. I unlocked my door, and went inside. I collapsed on the couch, and looked at the clock on the wall.

Jesus, I thought instinctively, I’m this tired and it isn’t even… Isn’t even… Shit.

I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to tell time any more. Feeling suddenly very foolish, I turned on the TV.