Knowing these facts did not make it any easier on Figman as his car sped, seemingly in slow motion, toward the motionless Pinto. He checked his rearview mirror for a possible route of escape, but traffic on both sides of him was moving faster than he. A lane change now might cause a series of accidents as cars swerved consecutively to move out of each other's way. The truck directly behind him was traveling slowly and at a reasonable distance, leaving Figman no choice but to remain in his lane where he was certain to hit the Pinto.
Lifting his foot off the accelerator, Figman moved it over into the space above his brake pedal. His muscles clenched. Litvak had told him never to clench in an accident. It was reflex, he knew, but one to be fought with every brain cell he could call to action. The dead branch snaps in the hurricane. In rear-enders, drunks and druggies walk free, while the sober man bites the big one. It had happened in the Triggs claim. Randy Triggs, high on Old Crow and sinsemilla, had skidded fender first into the back of a late-model Lincoln. Two children on their way home from nursery school had burned to death, while Triggs suffered only a scalp wound.
The thought of flesh burning made Figman realize, for the first time, that the car into whose rear he was directly headed was a PINTO. What year was it? '69? '70? Had its fuel tank been converted? He might never know.
His own first car had been a Pinto, a gift from his mother upon his having graduated high school. He'd sold it years ago, as soon as he'd learned about the problem with its fuel tank. Figman was a man who took few chances in life. Now, absurdly, he appeared to be on a collision course with his own destiny. He thought of Oedipus on the road to Thebes. He thought of Laertes. He clenched tighter, still running on instinct and adrenaline. It was hard fighting instinct, a point he vowed he would take up with Litvak if he lived to see him. As his foot slammed down on the brake pedal, he felt his torso strain against his seat belt. The rear of the Pinto grew ominously larger. Rain fell harder. Water sheeted off his windshield faster than his windshield wipers could sweep it away, obscuring completely the blur of cars in front of him so that the only thing Figman's brain could process in the micro-moment before impact were his car's headlights making sense of the Pinto's bumper sticker: FATE HAPPENS. And indeed it did, for here was a concept whose synchronicitous irony caused every muscle in his body to relax, a second and wholly unexpected reflex that Figman later came to realize had both saved his life and bought him a morsel of fame.
The nightly news called it a miracle. Six Mexicans had been killed in the explosion, and here was this guy, Figman (an insurance adjuster of all things), with nothing more than a cut finger. His Aion had been totaled, its front, rear, and passenger sides crushed like an empty beer can. The Pinto (a '71 as it turned out) was unrecognizable, melted, as footage showed, into a 911 roadside call box. From his hospital bed, Figman explained to one reporter after another how he'd watched in horror as the car full of Mexicans had balled into flames. His Aion (whose left front brakes had locked, thus twisting his trajectory) had deflected off the Pinto's left rear bumper, first jerking right, then spinning one hundred eighty degrees in the opposite direction while skidding backward and sideways across three lanes of traffic. California lane change. Amazingly, no other vehicles had been in his way.
When his Aion struck the center divider, Figman's head jerked right, then left, hitting hard against the door frame. But he didn't black out or even bleed. He sat for a moment behind his steering wheel, astonished to find himself alive. The right front end of his Aion had been shoved up into its engine, its hood bent up like a steeple. Its rear suspension and trunk had accordioned into the back seat. The only section of Figman's Aion left undamaged was the place where he sat, dumbstruck and shaken. Through his shattered windshield, he saw smoke rising from the burning Pinto — black, thick, and stifling. He wondered, then, if he were dead and undergoing one of those out-of-body experiences he'd read about in his doctor's waiting room. But his chest hurt and his heart pounded. Glass chunks fell from his shoulders and hair. His legs felt weak and soon there was this fellow at his driver' s-side window, banging on it with the palm of his hand, shouting at him, frantic, asking him if he was okay. Figman's window had stuck and his door had jammed; it took the Jaws of Life to pry it open. When lifted, an hour later, from his Aion's wreckage, he cut his knuckle on a piece of metal.
"Let's see it," said the cameraman beside his hospital bed.
Figman held up his middle finger.
By the time he was released from Valley Memorial, Figman had given no less than a dozen bedside interviews. His doctors, doubtful that a person could come through such carnage unscathed, had detained him twenty-four hours for observation, a day that, despite the dull pounding in his head, had proven to be the most exciting Figman could remember. It had been a day filled with lighting equipment, minicams, and pert young reporters scribbling furiously on notepads. That evening, he had dedicated himself to the nightly news, clicking avidly from one channel to the next, searching for his own sound bites. By eleven o'clock, the TV had called him a miracle so many times that his roommate, Bigler, suffering from bleeding ulcers and an irritable bowel, told him to turn the fucking thing off. Figman did as the man requested. He slept fitfully, not because of the day's excitement (for by this time he was truly exhausted) but because Bigler snored like a walrus. The next morning, the Los Angeles Times featured his picture on its front page. There he was, beneath the headline MODERN-DAY MIRACLE: Louis Figman in his hospital gown, giving all of L.A. the finger.
The following Monday, when he returned to work, Figman found himself a hero. By his fellow adjusters, his survival was seen not at all as a miracle but rather as proof that most accident claims were bogus, a conclusion that reinforced their strongest suspicions and boosted, temporarily, the gross profits of the company. Patterson patted him on the back and invited him into his office. Once seated, his boss leaned conspiratorially over his desk and informed Figman of the company's intention to file suit against the Ford Motor Company. This it planned to do not only on Figman's behalf but on behalf of all six of the dead Mexicans (once they had been forensically identified). An aggressive stance at this point, explained Patterson, would preempt a move on someone else's part as well as mitigate whatever liability their own company might incur. Not coincidentally, this might help garner publicity for Goetschke Life and Casualty. Mr. Goetschke himself was determined to smoke out the sleazebag behind the scam and publicly expose him as the scum-sucking dirtball they all knew him to be.
But in truth, there had been no swoop-and-squat scam. Instead of having been pawns in some elaborate scheme, the six dead Mexicans turned out to have been a crew of office janitors coming off the night shift. With their Speedy-Kleen van in the shop with a blown fuel pump, they'd collec tively had the misfortune to have let Luis Rivera drive them home in his Pinto. In all likelihood, Luis Rivera, blind in one eye and unlicensed, had never even seen Figman's Aion.
This revelation, carried on Tuesday night's local news, threw Figman into anguished self-reflection: Had he done everything in his power to avoid the accident? If he'd known these men were janitors and not instruments of some insidious plot to defraud his insurance company, might he have reacted differently? Was it racist of him to even ask himself such things? Yes, no, and probably, he concluded. Still, these and other questions gnawed at his conscience. Why had he been chosen to survive and not the six Mexicans, all of whom had wives and children? What kind of world allowed six hard-working family men to burn to death in an automobile whose potentially fatal design flaws had been known all along to its manufacturer? What kind of God, if there were a God, would allow such evil and inequity?
Later that same night, Figman had his first in a series of violent headaches. It frightened him, with its vision distortion and excruciating pain. When, the following Friday, he suffered a similar attack, Figman put in a call to Dr. Feldstein. In the next two weeks, he endured four more of these episodes; by the time of his appointment in mid-April, Figman had convinced himself he was not quite the miracle the media had made him out to be.
Feldstein put him through a month of testing and found nothing. At a loss for any other explanation, he diagnosed Figman's problem as chronic migraine. The doctor gave him a list of foods to avoid, wrote him prescriptions for Ergomar and Vicodin, and sent him home to manage his pain.
Figman dutifully followed his doctor's advice. He cut