There is no accounting of his own condition. No inventory of missing parts or locating of hurt. He doesn’t even wonder where he is. At first, there is only the search for his voice.

Jenny.

She had been next to him in the passenger seat, he knows, because the one thing he remembers before the pickup with the blacked-out headlight came swerving over the rise is a joke she had made about his mother’s jellied salads.

“So what if your mom likes to stick banana slices in aspic? I think it’s great,” Jenny had been saying through gasps of devilish laughter. “My only thing is: does the mould she puts it in have to be shaped like a bunny?”

They had been driving back to the city from his parents’ farm, from the same hundred rented acres and red-brick dollhouse where he had grown up and escaped to university and a life of suits fifteen years ago. The night was cool for mid- August but clear, sharpening the stars into marquee bulbs. He’s got this much straight.

He lifts his forehead from where it’s been resting and nearly giggles at the way the steering wheel has been folded over by the impact of his skull. Strokes his thumb over cheekbones and eyelids, but there is nothing more than the half-dried blood of a few shallow scrapes. A shiver snakes up his legs. He squints down to find the air conditioning knob before noticing that the breeze is coming from where the windshield used to be. The glass now shattered over his shirt, the passenger seat, stuck in the grooves of the floor mats. Shards of moon-catching crystal, some as neatly cut as the engagement ring he’d asked Jenny to accept eleven months ago.

They’d finally made it to his parents’ for dinner. Twice bumped for other commitments (one fictional, one legit), an occasion to celebrate the return of the newlyweds from their Maui honeymoon. A gathering the two of them had dreadfully, affectionately come to capitalize in their talk as The Dinner, though they in fact looked forward to it, in the way of all happy, albeit familial, obligations. He can still smell the air in the kitchen, humidified by boiled carrots. There was roast pork (cheaper than turkey if your neighbour runs a pig slaughterhouse, as his father liked to point out), mashed potatoes buckshot with green onions, and the usual assortment of canned fruit suspended in Jell-O. Jenny found the last of these hilarious, inedible, scientifically curious (“How do you do these again, Miriam?”). She loves her mother-in-law for such dated confections, the fact that kitschy recipes from fifties cookbooks are still actually made “out here.”

He peers out of the car at a stand of Manitoba maples on his right, and on the left a heavy-headed battalion of cornstalks. The road rolling over the horizon a half-mile ahead. Nothing to illuminate the double yellow lines running down the middle except for a lunar glow that turns them into fissures, two streams of hardening lava.

“Ouch,” he hears someone say. Tries to lift his legs out from under the twisted steering column and hears his own voice again, squeaky and boyish. “Oww.”

Using his hands, he manages to unscrew his thighs, his knees, and with a final yank tosses each leg out the ripped-away driver’s-side door. All this should hurt more than it does. For the moment, he’s being treated to a forgiving squirt of adrenaline or the temporary shutdown of some sensory lobe in his brain—whatever it is, he’s thankful as hell for it.

With one hand on the roof rack, he manages to wobble to his full height and stay that way until the circulation returns and he can take a few shuffling steps on his own. Savours a slow breath, hands on his hips, the pose of a man stepping out of a mountain cabin to enjoy the first air of the day. And it does feel good inside him. The oxygen already doing its job, shuttling renewed cells out to the extremities, clearing his vision. He moves his feet around in a tight circle so that he takes in a panorama of night: the aloof sky, the shadowed ditch, his car a coil of tin squeezed tight as a Slinky.

He can sense his wife behind him. Knows she is about to place her hand against his neck in the tender, purposeful way that she likes to, as though feeling for a pulse. It is a gesture no other woman he has known ever tried with him. There are, to his mind, a thousand things Jenny does naturally that are unlike the things other women did. To say he had fallen in love with her for this—her out-of-nowhere strokes, spontaneous ticklings, the goofily erotic pinches—would be at once to understate and exaggerate the point.

Jenny.

He says her name aloud and turns to inspect her face, licks his finger to wipe away the scratches she had taken in the crash, but there’s nobody there.