Instant Karma

I stared in disbelief and the left front wheel, which stuck out at a forty-five degree angle from the car held on only by the shock absorber. Dina’s Fait stations wagon looked like a bond car which had accidentally started to fold in its wheels for submarine mode while still on dry land. The second problem was, with the damage contained to the front left side of the car and bottomed out half way into an intersection, none of the cars coming from behind us or from the right could see that we had been in an accident, and so they just assumed we were idiots and made a point of telling us so. Night had fallen an hour before, and in the street-lamp-lit Cairene half-gloom you, if you climbed up on the curb, could experience honking, yelling, light flashing cars stretching for half a kilometer in either direction. As each set of two cars would squeeze by and yell at us, Dina or I or one of her friends who showed up later during the two hour wait for a tow truck would point at the severed wheel and the angry driver would nod knowingly as if to say “you poor, poor saps.”

The actual accident had occurred almost a kilometer before the intersection. Dina and I were driving home from school after staying late at the library finding books for our upcoming papers. As we cruised down the homestretch of highway into Maadi listening to U2, I stretched out my seat built and pushed across the seat divide to lay my head on Dina’s shoulder. I said jokingly, “Don’t get into an accident now.” It was mere moments after this position became uncomfortable and I had readjusted in my seat that a scrawny Chinese kid in a new silver Mitsubishi, without looking where he was going, pulled unto the highway from a U-turn gap in the barrier. Dina didn’t even have time to scream, much less brake. I clutched the armrest as the impact hurled the driver’s side of the car into the air. For a moment we both thought the car would flip, and then it fell back down on all four wheels and we screeched to a halt.

Dina climbed out furious and confronted the kid. Around us you could hear glass popping and scraping as cars sped around the scene of the accident. The kid, whose name I do not recall, was nice, but showed not a fraction of remorse. Half a second later and Dina would have been in the emergency room, and he never even said he was sorry. Every now and then he would glance quizzically at the crumpled siding at the front of the car, half-connected, bouncing up and down and he would give a “well that’s Cairo” shrug. He said he knew a mechanic near so we started up the car which drove relatively fine until the intersection, at which point the wheel broke off.

Later I mentioned Karma and Dina responded that when she told her parents they would say she deserved it for driving alone with me.  For those of you who read my last post, you know this is not what I meant.