It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses a Life

Your correspondent very nearly got logged out for good today. I'm crossing this intersection in Bethesda on my way to the Metro when a driver races through the red light, taking a wild left turn onto the street just where I'm walking. He doesn't see me, and this intersection has bad visibility, and none of this really matters in the two seconds it takes me to suck in my breath in order to prepare to begin freaking right the fuck out, because driver swerves, slams on his breaks, hydroplanes but then kind of fishtails, and crashes his Cherokee against the curb. Swoosh, his bumper nearly grazes my bag. The whole exchange: two, maybe three lousy, excruciatingly drawn-out seconds.

Now the guy who walking to my left has it worse—he actually hops out of the Jeep's path when it careens by me. It wasn't expertly athletic or anything, but it was still so fast. Both of us hustle across the street, cursing earnestly while Cherokee drives away. Both of us clearly stunned, we commiserate for only a moment and then walk off.

A few minutes later, he steps onto the elevator to the Metro just as the doors close. It's just us in the car, and when the elevator moves we turn to one another with the same look on our faces—a grimace, primed for volcanic blasts of profanities and shared indignations. And of course all that pent-up consternation, carefully considered and mentally rewound and replayed, has hilarious effects on the human face: scrunched-up, puffy red features, ears steaming and brow furrowed and mouth drawn up in a muscular, tight-lipped frown. We get as far as Can you believe—? and That guy—! before this face that we're mirroring registers, and it all folds and we just laugh.

Now, I bet laughter's just the automatic, visceral response to a scary experience. But in my limited experience with this kind of adrenaline spike, the mind records everything in crystal clarity and it feel as if you have minutes to process seconds—and I really did get a good, long study of this guy's facial features just as he opened up his mouth to cuss the air, and the look on his mug was hysterical, just too much to take. He must've seen the same angry baboon staring back.