Teslas At The Rubicon
City streets offered only ambiguity when he pressed the earbuds deep, his shades home, and made a line for the bus, only to have the music vanish with a deep beep, beep, beep and there was, One more thing, his boss said, Please be on your phone tonight in case anything else comes in. You need to be on point. And there was a reminder in there, an accusation even, which set him to guns because he knew she was right.
And there he was stepping into the intersection, thinking of a guarded way to say, Okay I’m on it, not looking to his left and here came a beautiful Tesla, that pulled right in front of him, in the crosswalk, blocking his way, and the woman sitting shotgun doesn’t look at him, at all, even though the window’s open, but her little white dog does, squirming about in the folds of her coat, and it barks at him, as he stops short, the front tire almost getting his foot, and still no acknowledgement from the car so he reaches in through the window and plucks the dog out by the collar.
There’s a long moment where he’s not sure what to do. Though he does hang up the phone when his boss asks about the noise, a hoarse little yap, and so he applies a hand under the dog’s chest to take the pressure off its neck. People around him notice. A mother pulls her two kids to the far bank of the crosswalk, watching over her shoulder. The driver of the Tesla labors to register the gist of his wife’s fury and scoots into the intersection, having been mildly aware he’d blocked a crosswalk. When the signals do register, the driver slams on the brakes and looks for further instruction.
By this point our hero concludes the best course of action: release the dog on the sidewalk. And he does this, while a fountain of honks erupt because cross-traffic concluded that this fuck in the Tesla needs to get out of the way. The dog has never laid its little paws on a city sidewalk and a fading star of instinct directs it towards The Most Open Area, which, at 6:42pm Thursday in a busy city, coaches ziggy-zaggy patterns about the sidewalk and, unfortunately, eventually, into the street, where traffic is just starting to move because the driver of the Tesla prioritized honks over his wife’s hysterics, and moved out of the way.
But now she is running into the street after her dog. No one helps. But a lot of people watch. Our hero earns a few gawks but since his transgression enjoys unclear legal taxonomy, no one interferes with his bee-line for the bus, which is just sidling up. He boards, sits down. The bus lurches towards home but as the dog zips past, to the now-learned safety of the sidewalk, the driver hammers the brakes. A cabbie’s fiddling with the radio and allows his vehicle to smash into the bus. People on the bus scream but the driver’s no rookie, shakes his head, parks, takes a deep breath to deal with the situation, right as the dog’s owner finally gets the creature’s attention, captures it and then looks around for that guy who grabbed it. One of the bystanders directs the owner’s attention and follows phone-filming as she storms on board the bus.
[Caleb Garling is a writer in San Francisco and the author of The St George’s Angling Club, a novel about the outdoors.]
