It only takes a second. Peters spent his teenage years living in the loose community of followers around the mystic George Gurdjieff , arriving not long after Gurdjieff suffered a near-fatal car accident outside Paris and often wheeling him around the grounds in those first months β one of the memories recounted in his Boyhood with Gurdjieff Peters captured the disruptive effects of an accident:.
Reality, the fundamental, basic reality of life, had been imposed upon everyone involved in the accident for at least a short time. The dreams, illusions and enchantments, the superficial aims and purposed, desires and wishes, of the victims and the spectators were stripped away by the shock, leaving only the human essentials.
The veneer of civilization that passes for human dignity had β for a time β ceased to exist. It was brutal, instantaneous. And yet he was neither surprised nor resentful, as if he had always been expecting it.
He realized in a flash, as soon as the horn started screaming behind him, that the catastrophe was inevitable and that it was his fault. Not just a hit-and-run accident, but adultery, corruption, cover-up, collusion, and good old-fashioned hypocrisy. When Joe Harrison, heading home after three martinis and feeling no pain, runs down and kills a pedestrian on his way home, the system of business and justice in Southern California kicks in.
The head of a chain of newspapers and television stations, Joe is in too prominent a position for those with a stake in his reputation to sit idle. Becker caves in to his sense of justice in the end, which prevents Juice from being quite as juicy as it could have been. Here, the focus is on the passenger, not the driver or the victim. For a while, she plays along β it was her car, after all β but gradually understands the inevitable domino effect of compounded lies.
