Bollards

FICTION

by Jon Acheson

          The pop is loud, followed by the sound of metal snapping. The rider hurtles over the bollard helmet-first like a stuntman in an advertisement. I bolt to my left toward the scene; Kirk follows me. We crouch over the young man and his bike. The moped is wrecked but still frantically whining, the front wheel slowly, majestically, spinning heedless of time like that spoked space station in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Several small packages and a sheaf of envelopes are scattered around us.
         At first, the fallen rider seems okay, moving now and sputtering, trying to answer our questions. Are you alright? My Chinese only good enough to understand that he doesn’t sound right. A half-hearted assurance. 
         We are two large lăo wài looming over him. Our sudden appearance probably deepening his shock, he repeats Méishénme wèntí. Nothing wrong, nothing wrong. Maybe to convince himself. Nothing wrong. 
         I think he must not have seen the bollards, passing that corner many times before, delivering mail. They hadn’t been there before, but these are those goddamn clever kind hidden down in the ground, automatically activated in the evenings to rise straight out of the pavement like miniature Druid monoliths. These bollards usually weren’t up in the middle of the day. A malfunction perhaps.
         I extract the moped key and turn off the engine. I pick up his shattered cell phone and hand it to him. He takes it with effort, reluctance even, and abruptly slumps back to ground. He is just a boy. We kneel beside him.
         A beautiful marvel to me but something of a risible farce for white-collar Xi’anese we’d met, Kirk’s Taiwan-farmer-Mandarin nevertheless seems to reach the boy. Kirk’s voice has him nodding, assuring him, agreeing now to stay on the ground to try not to get up, to rest a while. Kirk’s physical presence, too, adding to the shock—an aging Viking uttering a soft strange language like a country shaman. A few people have stopped. I manage to ask one woman to call an ambulance. Kirk’s arm partially cradles him and I unclip my water bottle. We get him to drink through his shattered visor. His eyes are crying but his face is calm staring up at us, out beyond us. A single track of blood trickles down his right temple from his eyebrow. For some reason the police give me the receipt for his moped which they haul away as two others, wearing yellow gloves, load the boy into a van. He’s hunched over but can walk. Kirk figures out where they are going.
         Later, at the hospital, we meet Hua, his cousin. I give him the police receipt. Hua assures us the boy will be okay and we can leave. He’s thanking us a fourth or fifth time even as we turn away from him to go through the glass doors and back into the streets. The day is over. Outside, lights are coming on and traffic bollards with tiny white flashing LED lights emerge from the earth at key intersections all across the city.