Strange Encounters: the ultimate saya sebuah basikal story

Quick explanation: one of the more common essay formats assigned to primary schoolchildren in Malaysia is to imagine oneself as an inanimate object, e.g. "Saya sebatang pen" (I Am a Pen) or "Saya sebuah basikal" (I Am a Bicycle). The stories usually follow the format of - I am purchased in a bright shiny new condition - A bad child abuses me and throws me away - I am lying desolate at the side of the road - A good child picks me up and cleans me off - I am happy!

A couple of years ago I wrote this little story but I forgot about it until recently.

When you are very young, you hear about certain things that people talk about all the time; you imagine them, but never fully applying them to yourself. So when such a thing happens, the shock is almost pure. Many states of mind and body occur in a very short time. Fright - what have I done? Nausea, but briefly. A sensation of having been ravished, stripped, and torn. You feel like you're flying, and it ends with a strangely electrical jolt.

So death happened to me one day on the way to work by way of a careless right turn in front of an equally careless lorry running a red light. Once a physics teacher demonstrated a collision between large and small bodies, by dropping a ping-pong ball on top of a basketball. After the basketball hit the floor and bounced back, its motion was barely altered by collision, but the ping-pong ball shot up to the ceiling with surprising velocity.

So it was.

The shock of hitting the ground was so great that I was beyond pain in an instant. I could still see – gray asphalt, white paint, glittering chips of metal and plastic, and hear the honking and shouts, but washing out all other sensation was the impact, which echoed through my body for long seconds like a gunshot in a cavern.

The black-and-white painted curb of the road median was staring at me. Moiré patterns, like those seen through the cage of an oscillating fan, began to appear on the white parts. The scene began to wobble back and forth in synchrony with a whooshing sound, which I realised was my pulse. The gray splotches of the pattern grew larger, and then consumed all sight.

Cars stopped, people came. Someone called an ambulance.

Even with no sensation, I wanted to scream as they pulled us apart, disentangling my shattered limbs from the bicycle frame. Even retrospectively, I can’t say if this is the moment my soul fled to its new home. Those first few minutes after the crash were so numbed and disoriented that the entity I call myself might have inhabited both dying flesh and inanimate steel, as if the lorry were a hammer forging two metals into one piece.

The crowd moved about, dispersing slowly as the ambulance attendants laid my body on a stretcher. Someone had the presence of mind to place the hand-painted bike helmet on my chest, a touch I would have appreciated. The ambulance left, and still I lay on the pavement, wrecked.

I would have cried out but found myself voiceless.

Hands gripped me again. You took your time, I thought. I counted the light and the darkness, and surely someone should have noticed I was still here in less than two days. Bones ached and tendons screamed as I was lifted up. They forced me to stand, and in the haze of pain flared a spark of indignation that someone in my condition should be made to walk. Insistent, my rescuer pushed me forward, and I limped along, twisted rear wheel squeaking against the brakes.

Something was wrong then, I knew – people don’t have wheels. As my rescuer pushed me, I took a mental inventory of my parts. Except for the damage to them, the sensations of having wheels that rotated at hubs and handlebars that turned on a stem seemed perfectly natural, even though my mind said otherwise. When the person pushing me applied the brakes on a downhill and the cables pulled smoothly instead of with cramp-like stiffness, I would have sighed with relief were it possible.

I felt no panic or fear at the realisation, nor have I felt anything like them since. Perhaps it comes from being made of steel, with nothing like a hormone or a neurotransmitter to feel those emotions with.