Hit and Run

By John Freeman

A prolific and celebrated poet, critic, editor, and teacher, John Freeman is one of the most recognized and versatile forces behind today’s literary scene. His Everand Original, Hit and Run, represents a departure for him as a writer. A work of autobiographical fiction, it inhabits that space between lived experience and the imagination’s riff on that experience.

It begins when the narrator — a newly married young man named John — witnesses an accident at the ragged end of a night out with friends. A hit-and-run in downtown Sacramento, California: “Bang! A body pinwheeling in the air,” Freeman writes. “Then something which felt like silence but surely wasn’t. Not at three a.m. at that intersection. When the reality reel rethreaded into the projector there was a man splayed out on the center median, a crowd of revelers laughing and teetering….”

The victim does not survive, and that fact — as surreal as it is undeniably real, as horrifying as it is commonplace in its testament to human fragility — becomes a destabilizing crack in John’s world. His sense of safety, home, and his own assumptions about himself are shaken, setting off a series of shock waves in his life that test his marriage, sanity, and what sort of justice is possible for the dead man or for any of us.

As the police try to find the driver responsible and enlist John’s help in the investigation, Hit and Run becomes a page-turning whodunit while taking on age-old and acutely topical human mysteries: how we make sense of the unimaginable and brutally unexpected, and how we manage to heal and find connection even as we’re hunted and haunted by loss and chaos. Perhaps the most personal and revealing work Freeman has ever written, it is also a story of romantic love lost and then — against all odds — found. Above all, it’s an urgent and audacious consideration of what it means to bear witness. Freeman does not shy from that responsibility, whatever the costs and frights, and word by word moves from the self-estrangement common in those made to cope with traumatic events to a kind of homecoming, with all the stakes and intimacy of personal essay and the poetics and possibility of the best literary fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: Apr 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094456386

John Freeman

John Freeman is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, the founding editor of Freeman’s, and the former editor of Granta. He is also the author and editor of a dozen books, including the book-length essay Dictionary of the Undoing, the poetry collections Wind, Trees and The Park, and the anthologies Tales of Two Planets, Tales of Two Americas, The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, and, with Tracy K. Smith, There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Zyzzyva. Each month he hosts the California Book Club, an online discussion of a classic in Golden State literature, for Alta Journal. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

I ONCE SAW A MAN HIT AND KILLED BY A CAR. I’d been out with some friends throwing darts on a Friday night. We were walking home very late when we heard the crash. We’d paused at a street corner, the walk-sign blinking red, when a car roared up in the lane nearest us. Like it was a drag race. Bang! A body pinwheeling in the air. Then something which felt like silence but surely wasn’t. Not at three a.m. at that intersection. When the reality reel rethreaded into the projector there was a man splayed out on the center median, a crowd of revelers laughing and teetering and pointing like one of those Hieronymus Bosch paintings which tells you the garden of earthly delights is treacherous.

Whatever had hit him was gone.

That guy’s dead, Louise said. She had been an EMT.

What do we do? my other friend Brian asked.

We didn’t have long to wait. Within a minute, a bleeding halo of police cars surrounded the body, and soon after an ambulance arrived. See, look how slowly they’re moving? Louise said. It was true, the EMTs stood about like what they saw was a destination, not a starting point. Crowds of drinkers now passed by with barely a glance. Cackles. The smell of beer. Finally, one of us broke the spell of our shock and approached the police officer.

Sir, I may have said, we saw the accident, do we need to file a police report? His reply I vividly recall.

No, no, he said, holding up a license plate with a dark grin. He left his calling card. Apparently the impact of the body upon the bumper had torn the number plate right off the car.

We walked home. It was spring in the city, the air dry and soft, and at night in the dark the buildings gave off the mock solemnity of an amusement park at dusk. Spotlighted like frozen rides that would be cranked back to life in the morning. It was April, often the nicest time of year in Sacramento. The palm trees around the capitol building clacked quietly in the breeze as we strolled beneath them. Brian held Louise’s hand. We had been that way all spring, lost souls who made of themselves something like siblings, as buffers or stand-ins for a change just about to happen.

I didn’t slip into the house quietly like I normally did when I’d been out late, or even begin making one last drink. I sat down hard on the bed and burst into tears. This phrase always struck me as a cliché until I realized there are times when this is exactly what happens, something inside you breaks and it’s as if that object’s primary function had been to keep water from surging out of your face. My wife Linda sat up fast and hugged me and stroked my back, and when I’d calmed down, she asked me to say what I’d seen and then reminded me it hadn’t happened to me and we were okay, so we curled into the shapes we always slept in and fell into a deep, dreamless dark.

The next morning Linda and I woke late. It was sunny and hot out already so we drove downtown with the car’s air-conditioning on high, the enormous trees creating canopies over the road. Retired couples ambled beneath them as if in a dream. It wasn’t far to get downtown, but we were late. The café I’d taken to frequenting on Saturday mornings had a line of people waiting for tables. I put our names down, and joined Linda on the curb. She was leaning on a silver Mercedes. As I walked back to her, I saw over her shoulder that the car’s front windshield was punched in. Did you see this? How could anyone drive like this? I asked. I leaned over the hood of the coupe, it was a convertible: dots of red and something that looked like putty speckled the smashed glass. Where the canvas top met the window was also stippled by yellowish globs, and a dark smudge ran the length of the car’s roof. I walked around to the front