Have you ever seen someone commit a crime? Maybe you saw a kid slip a candy bar in his pocket at the gas station. Something like that. Unless you start shouting and pointing, you become an accomplice.
A stolen candy bar is nothing, though. What would you do if you saw something worse? Maybe a car slamming into another and driving off? Or a brick being thrown through a window?
Or a murder?
You might have guessed that I saw one of those. I can neither confirm nor deny that. But just for the sake of argument, let’s continue in hypotheticals.
Maybe I saw an argument outside of Jolly’s Bar last Tuesday night. It might have been a tough day at work and I needed to process it with eight to ten beers. Let’s just say that I met a girl there with a great laugh that made me forget about stupid John needing a last minute PowerPoint deck built from scratch.
It was a fun night. Hypothetically. But when bar close came around—something I’d never do on a weeknight, mind you—I heard something outside.
Someone was yelling. Or, let’s say they were. And let’s also say that I walked out the side door of Jolly’s to the parking lot where I saw one guy getting slammed against a wall. And maybe he was crying. The guy getting slammed. And the slammer was yelling something I couldn’t understand. And even though it was bar close, the girl I was talking to was nowhere to be found. Maybe she left 15 minutes earlier. And let’s say that everyone else was settling their tabs at the bar so it was just me and these two guys. Maybe I tried to say something to calm them down but it was over soon anyways.
Maybe the guy getting slammed against the wall—crying, asking the other guy to stop—finally put enough distance between them to throw a punch. And what if that punch landed just right? And what if the guy fell, hit his head, and never got back up?
I imagine there’d be this silent moment that felt like everything froze. Like time stopped. Where that guy who threw the punch would look over with this heartbreaking, terrified look on his face and say, “I just wanted him to stop hitting me.”
I bet a bond would form in that moment. Whether you wanted it to or not. And I also bet that when someone finally came out of the bar and saw you two standing there, you’d say something like, “Quick, call an ambulance. That guy fell and hit his head.” I also bet you’d have told the guy that was getting slammed to get out of there before anyone with lights on top of their car showed up.
But of course, these are all just guesses. None of this is real. It’s just a thought exercise to picture what it would be like to form a tacit bond with someone who was put in an impossible situation. But if it did happen, hypothetically, I bet you’d hear the sickly wet sound of that person’s head hitting the parking lot blacktop every time you tried to go to sleep.