According to Olivier, it happened like this:
First thing Friday morning–4 or 5am–a delivery driver (we’ll call him “Jacques”) left a slaughterhouse with a truckload of carcasses.
Mary…now that I think about it? This might not be the entry for you. Sorry.
Anyway: apparently Jacques didn’t secure the back door of the truck properly, because at a certain point along his route, something (say, a bit of cow) fell out onto the road. And by “road” I actually mean “Périphérique,” the eight-lane highway encircling Paris that Wikipedia calls “one of the busiest freeway/motorways in Europe.” So…cow leg on the Périphérique. Bad, but not catastrophic, right? And it wouldn’t've been, either, if Jacques had noticed, pulled over, and closed the door more firmly.
See where this is going?
Thirty kilometers of strewn body parts later, it appears that he finally caught on.
Ever have that dream where you’re late for an exam or something, and things keep getting in the way and you’re lost and there’s an emergency and then the whole thing has been moved and there comes a point where you realize that there is quite simply no way you’re ever going to get there, even for the end of it? So suddenly the dream’s raison d’être is gone, but you’re still stuck wandering aimlessly through it, feeling completely cut off from your original purpose? It’s like it stops mattering what you actually do–the comprehensible part of your life is done with.
I’m thinking that Jacques had one of those moments.
We certainly can only imagine what he was thinking, though–even my account of his actions is largely speculation from here on out. It seems, however, that, finally noticing that his truck felt lighter, or perhaps having glimpsed something in the rear-view mirror, Jacques pulled over and contemplated his empty truck. Then, perhaps, he surveyed the bloody mess stretching behind him as far as eye can see, and imagined what it would be like to have to explain this to anyone, ever. Maybe he even held his cell phone in his hand for a few moments, and considered setting the process into motion.
At some point, however, he decided to just climb back into his cab and get the hell off of the Périphérique before anyone noticed. And although the resulting clean-up still was not finished by 8pm that evening, forcing us to sit in unprecedented city-street traffic the whole way to Olivier and Penny’s, we were still able to enjoy the specter of him going back to his slaughterhouse, claiming that his delivery had been made as usual…or, just maybe, of him driving off into the sunrise without ever returning the truck at all.
Go, Jacques. Go.