But the first word you see when you slide the report from its manila envelope, the lonesome word perched there in caps, centered at the top of the page, is FATAL, the de facto title of the report. I’d mailed fifteen bucks to the Springfield Township Police Department and they in turn sent me this photocopied document of my father’s death, more pages to feed the mandatory obsessiveness of grieving. On the first page the data lie in blocks under headings—police information, accident information, accident location—and there are a total of seventy-seven numbered boxes. My father’s bike (and sometimes my father himself) is referred to as UNIT #1, which has its own block. Some of the data are exceedingly clear: box 13, labeled # KILLED, is marked with the Roman numeral I. (What insouciant shorthand, that particular use of the #.) Other data are deliberately cryptic: box 47, BODY TYPE, is marked with the number 20. Box 50, INITIAL IMPACT POINT—meaning, I think, the guardrail—is marked with the number 9.
