The gate began closing. I went for it, twisting my body as far to the left as possible. Chair’s right wheel lifted off the ground. It moved an inch. Making it required the kind of perfect timing, and magic, that it took to race through a moving revolving door without touching it. I slipped under the gate. I was barely in control, my seatback still partially reclined, heading directly for the spinning cement mixer.

Admittedly, the fact that I’m telling this story does eliminate the suspense. Once again, I got lucky.

The whine of jagged metal scraping along concrete had alerted pedestrians. They were running for safety even before I came hurtling out of the garage into the street. I heard screams and saw them scrambling as I tried desperately to regain some balance. Chair’s right wheel hit something and bounced into the air like a racing car hitting a speed bump.

I didn’t know what the SUV was doing. Later I learned that it had slowed when its tires went flat, and finally skidded sideways into the kiosk.

I held on. There was nothing else I could do. My fingers dug into Chair’s arms. I had slowed down, but not enough. I saw the cement mixer directly in front of me. I closed my eyes.

Suddenly, something slammed into my side, like a tackle hitting a running back. Mighty Chair was jolted, then whipped sideways. Stuff was falling all over me. Chair slowed, bounced, tilted, then regained its wheels, finally spinning to a stop. My heart was blasting. I forced out a huge puff of air. I was alive. Alive. It was a surprise to me too.

I had no idea what had happened. “Y’okay, Rollie?” I heard a man asking with concern. “You ’live in there?” I heard sirens, a lot of them, loud and insistent. I opened my eyes. Everything was black.

I reached up toward my eyes. I pulled a flannel shirt off my face. I was covered with clothing. I picked off some of it, while other pieces fell off. People were standing around me, looking down at me with curiosity. I heard a distant voice ask, “What happened to him?”

I kept looking around, trying to figure that out. The blue SUV and the cement mixer were blocking the street. They were entangled. In the garage entrance the SUV was wrapped around the kiosk, smoke pouring from its undercarriage. The broken kiosk was dutifully spewing tickets. Firemen were rushing toward the wreckage, pushing spectators out of the way. Nothing was making sense to me. People were shouting, trying to shake me back into the moment with questions; their voices were jumbled. I had no answers.

Then I saw a supermarket shopping cart, a small one, lying on its side. A lot of clothing had fallen out of it and scattered on the street.

Reality slowly came into focus.

I figured it out. As I came flying out of the garage, an instant before I’d kissed that mixer, I’d been hit by something, or I hit something and got pushed to the side. Amazing. It was one of the people leaning over me, one of my street guys, one of my buck-in-a-cup people. Another veteran. I couldn’t remember his name. He’d been wounded too, but his wounds were storm clouds in his mind.