I’ve
been thinking about dead bodies lately. Iraqi civilians. American troops.
Suicide bombers in London. Their victims.
I’ve also been thinking about deaths involving motorcycles and scooters.
Thinking about war and terrorism sends me into a deep, immobilizing funk. So
I’ve chosen to obsess about accidents instead.

This
is a rich vein for me to mine, because my husband bought a Vespa this spring. I
know they’re chic and everyone in NYC has one. I know they are used to lend
style and street cred to everything from Mann’s Jewelers’ catalog to the Food
Network’s ads. But they’re dangerous. Like motorcycles, they’re hard to see.
And, despite a significant surge in motorcycle and scooter ownership, motorists
don’t look out for them.

So
I worry that my husband will get killed. It wasn’t always like this. I fell in
love with him on the back of a motorcycle. The heat of it, the roar. Hugging
him as we banked around corners. It was dangerous, sure, but back then I didn’t
care.

Lucky
cat that he was, he walked away from his accidents. He used up at least two of
his nine lives. In one accident, he slammed into a cab’s rear bumper and went
flying, ass over teakettle, onto the hood. He brushed himself off and wheeled
his bike away as the woman in the cab, unhurt, screamed.

But all that
changed. My
husband — then boyfriend — locked up his motorcycle and enrolled in medical school.
At first, I was against it. I missed his biker garb and attitude. Then I, too,
grew up. I had an epiphany in the most unlikely of places: a room full of
cadavers.

We
were broke so instead of going to see a band or a movie, we sneaked into his
dissection lab one night. His cadaver was a woman, a giant woman. We couldn’t
tell if she was white or black or even how old she was, because formaldehyde
alters the skin.

I
couldn’t get over the magnitude of her. Not just her size but her gift. The
gift of her body to the medical school. And she was beautiful. Not on the
outside, necessarily, but on the inside. She was you, she was me — every inch
of her body was exquisitely designed. In the end, though, it was her body that
failed her. She died of an aneurysm.

He
peeled back the flap of skin from her chin to her clavicle. I could see one of
the ropy neck tendons that stand out when you turn your head. I asked him why
getting a hickey felt so good. He held a slender tool and delicately pulled
things back so I could see the artery that thump-thumps when your heart beats.

“There’s
a nerve here somewhere.” he said. “It’s hair-thin.” I could see his neck as he
bent over hers. He was a completely different person. Suddenly, I didn’t want
to see that neck, his neck — strong up close but fragile between leather
jacket and motorcycle helmet — snap in an accident.

The
world shifted slightly. I stopped taunting life and started trying to preserve
it. I tried to keep him — and the kids that came later — bathed in the
disfiguring formaldehyde of maternal worry and restrictions.

The
first thing I did, after we got married, was make my husband sell his
motorcycle. I know: emasculating bitch. But, hey. I didn’t want him to die, or
worse, end up like those guys in wheelchairs at motorcycle shops. It’s true
that I think the human body is a miracle, and I get all teary-eyed when I think
of the beauty of it. But I’m no freakin’ nurse.

I can’t stop
thinking about those other deaths. They are happening because men who have an end-time
mentality declared this war. These men believe that a better time is coming
when God or a bright light or something will raise them up. They are missing
the point. They are missing life.

This is rapture or
Armageddon or whatever you call it. This body. This air you breathe. This life
is the heaven and hell they seek. And in their hubris they are creating even
more hell on earth. They are destroying this lovely planet and causing the hate
and the deaths and the men with bombs getting on subway trains alongside
tourists and commuters.

So
why, you ask, why now that I value life so much, did I recently encourage my
husband to buy a motorcycle or scooter? Because he loves riding. And because of
Bush’s misguided, dangerous, end-time policies. I know a little history (and,
unlike Matt Lauer, I know the history of psychiatry), and I can tell you that
millions of generations of people have gone before us. God didn’t come down and
choose them. Why us? Now?

It
follows that, since I’m such a damned atheist, I can’t really justify
controlling someone else’s life. This is the only life we get. This is it. Live
fast, die pretty if you like. Or live long and live large. Buy a scooter if you
must.

When
I kiss my husband goodbye on the neck just below his helmet as he revs up the
Vespa, I try to ignore the fact that he has a 27 times greater chance of dying
on that thing than he does in a car. I hope he views me as a wise, brave wife.
Little does he know I’m secretly counting on the remaining seven of his nine
lives.

This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2005.