Denver, Colorado. 2002.

One Saturday afternoon some years ago, after spending several hours at the library as I tended to do back then, I found myself wandering through town in a more or less homeward direction, still a little word-drunk from whatever heady topic I was getting myself worked up over on that day. The weather was fine, and my already exalted mood was becoming more expansive with every step. Without a giving it a thought I hopped up on the barricade that separated the sidewalk I was walking along from the street. At that moment I would have sworn that I could feel my heart expanding in my chest as I stood there on that dirty concrete partition, beaming down on the passing traffic as if from atop Mount Olympus.

Just then, a man about my age in sunglasses and a trucker hat hopped up onto the barrier about three feet away from me and looked at the passing cars with me from behind his dark lenses with a mocking little smirk on his face. With that I suddenly became aware of myself and instantly felt ridiculous. I jumped back down and walked away as my face turned deep red, trying to ignore the man who was now staring down and me as I ducked into a record store on the corner. Once inside, I spent several minutes walking up and down the aisles, nervously adjusting my glasses and pretending to look at CDs as I tried to shake off my unreasoning embarrassment. Having thus fallen from Olympus to Tartarus, I was struggling to find my way back from that low place when it occurred to me just how fragile we really are.

Before too long, though, I was able to gradually let go of that morbidity that had overcome me and lose myself in looking for new music. I didn't notice the door open, but when I heard the clerk say something about not bringing that thing into the store, I looked up to see the man from outside walking a bicycle toward the far end of the row where I was browsing. When he got there he mounted the beat up old road bike, pointed it in my direction, and started pedaling so forcefully that he reared up high on his back wheel before coming back down and hurtling toward me.

With no small amount of luck, I was able to dodge to the side and give his handlebars a hard yank as he passed, sending him crashing to the floor. It was as if he didn't register the hard fall he had just taken though, because he jumped up in an instant and closed the small distance between us in that narrow aisle. When we came to grips, he was using his momentum and an uncanny physical strength to try to bowl me over. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, but luck was on my side again, because as I moved to break away from his iron grip, he slipped on a stray glossy magazine that had fallen to the floor. He managed to flail about and recover before he fell over, but not before I took advantage of the opportunity and hit him with a straight right to the eye that took away the little balance he had regained and knocked him straight back on his rump.

Still nonplussed, but emboldened by that little success, I stepped forward to follow up with more blows while he was down, but he was on his feet quicker than I had anticipated. I put as much power as I could behind a wild left hook, but he ducked beneath it, shot in, and scooped up both of my legs, lifting me high and sweeping my legs sideways as he threw me backward. I landed painfully halfway on a display rack before falling to the ground amid a clatter of upturned CDs. Writhing from the pain in my back where I landed on the sturdy rack, I struggled to defend myself as my assailant followed me to the ground, fighting like a devil.

As we rolled around on the floor, crunching over scattered CD cases, each trying to gain the upper hand, things began to get confused. It's hard to explain just what went on then, but it was as though I lost all sense of struggling with an opponent, but retained a detached sense of the struggle itself. What finally pulled me out of that dreamlike state was the store clerk shouting that the police would be there any minute. Upon hearing that, my adversary stood up, straightened the small spectacles that had been knocked askew on his face, and ran out the door. I quickly scooped up my trucker hat, grabbed my bike, and left just behind him.

Once outside, he hurried off in one direction, while I pedaled away in the other. I had managed to lose my sunglasses in the struggle and felt conspicuous without them to hide my blackened left eye that was rapidly swelling shut, so I quickly turned down a side street and started to walk my bike down the sidewalk as nonchalantly as I could toward my apartment. I must have still been suffering from some remnant of the bizarre confusion that had come over me earlier though, because all the way home, I couldn't get over the feeling that I was going the wrong way. When I finally got there, I stood the bike up and stared at the apartment building I had been walking towards. It looked especially crisp in the bright afternoon sun, but I was confounded by the fact that I somehow did, and did not, recognize it at the same time. I closed my good eye and took several deep breaths to keep the utter strangeness of everything from overcoming me.

With each breath I took, I felt a sharp pain growing in my upper back. When I opened my eyes my vision had become blurred, but my left eye was open again and pain free, and I was relieved to recognize the fuzzy outline of my apartment building in front of me. As I stood there, I had the vague sense that someone was standing next to me, but I was so glad to be home that I didn't care to look to see who it was. I couldn't seem to take my eyes off the building, even as I felt my hat being gently lifted from my head, and a pair of glasses being slipped into my hand. As I put on my glasses I heard the click of a kickstand being put up. I remember thinking how nice it was to be able to see clearly again while I walked up the steps to the front door, as the small, receding sound of rubber tires on cement registered somewhere else, deep in my mind.