Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  Then the dark was undoing itself again: out the frame that usually held the windshield there were the trunks of trees and further in the woods full trees and weeds and smaller plants on the forest floor, already, or still, green. Again not seeing April beside him and knowing without thinking that she’d been thrown through the windshield and then a wavelike pain, like an instant fever, ran through his body, making him convulse with shivers, which in turn made his entire body seem a clenched ball of deep discomfort. He felt himself sweating though he was freezing.

  Something in him told himself to breathe. He recognized the voice, though it wasn’t his voice, didn’t seem like his voice, but he recognized it, a voice he felt he’d been hearing in glimpses intermittently as long as he could remember and occasionally came in clearly, like a suddenly tuned transistor radio, during his project on the mountain. It reminded him vaguely of a thing April had once done for him when he’d broken his leg playing soccer. As she drove him to the hospital, he’d nearly gone into shock, the muscles in his arms and legs stiffening, making the pain worse, and she’d told him he was hyperventilating and to breathe slower, slower, slow down, deep breaths – and this voice too had not seemed like hers, like he was hearing it from out of the depths of a cave – and he’d followed the force of those words then in the same way he did now. Eyes closed, steady in and out. He opened his eyes again. For a few minutes, lightheadedness caused his mind to move toward and away from waking consciousness and again he felt himself expansive and large: images of trees and dense wood and second growth timber and weeds and damp, decaying leaves, and the smell of mud, fungus, a burned rubber smell and gasoline or oil, the creak of the trees in wind, a sliver of moon through the trees and among the clouds, all as if being in a dream. He told himself to wake up, thinking it over and over like a chant – this is a dream, this is a dream, the thought stretched out and slow. Then there was a strange sensation – like a record player that had been lagging suddenly moving again at the right speed – and he felt his thinking accelerating, himself slipping back into himself fully, that gathering that occurred slowly and strangely before, now occurred instantaneously, and what for a moment was expansive compressed suddenly: he was in a car, trapped, unable to move, needed to get out.

  He reached with his right hand across his body and put his hand on the driver-side door handle. He could see now that the door was buckled inward. The handle moved, but the door didn’t. He jiggled the handle and shook it and pushed against the door, but nothing happened. He took a breath and pushed against it across his body with his right hand, pushed as hard as he could, but still the door wouldn’t move. It was crushing his left arm, keeping him stuck in place, and wasn’t going to move, wasn’t going to open. He let the handle go and noticed that the digital clock on the dash was still working. It was nearly one thirty in the morning. He tried to remember the last time he noticed time, and he thought it must have been leaving the house where the party was, sometime around midnight. So he hadn’t been passed out long. If he could get out, he could help April. He pulled at the belt and felt wrenched back into place, a screaming pain through his body, which was his own scream. Then, the pain pulling back like a wave receding back into the ocean, the voice telling him to stay calm, to breathe. He thought that he didn’t want to be doing this, he didn’t want to be in here alone, trapped in this car alone. He had the realization that he hadn’t tried the seatbelt. It passed through his mind as a kind of boyish excitement, like a kid finding five dollars in his winter jacket from the previous winter. He reached down, or up, he thought, up, with his free and uninjured right hand and pressed the button thing but the belt didn’t unlatch, or unbuckle, he thought, unbuckle. It was a thing his seatbelt did sometimes – he’d once had to slither out of his seat and then mess with the buckle until it’d come out of the latch – and now it was doing it again, sticking, and he pushed and pushed the button, but nothing happened, and in his right hand he felt a new hot pain from pressing, though the pain wasn’t unbearable. He pressed the button again and again and the stinging pain in his hand dulled some and he pressed as hard as he could through gritted teeth and he heard a click and he felt a huge relief, like the process had begun, like this was the first indication that he wasn’t going to die here, he was going to get out of this car. But somehow, though he’d heard, or maybe felt, the buckle click, the seatbelt was still in the latch, it wasn’t coming out. His breathing felt freer, but when he tried to move his body he still couldn’t, and he thought that he really didn’t want to be doing this, he wanted to be doing anything but this. Then, as if conveyed to him by some reluctant god or alien being, he again thought of April. That this wasn’t only happening to him. That this was happening, had happened, to her, too. And she was out there alone. He thought of her on the road. Or her body on the forest floor among the trees. Wet, maybe, due to the rain, which, he now registered, fell in a gentle humming static. Had it just begun to rain and he hadn’t noticed? The sound of the rain made him feel as though he wasn’t paying close enough attention, that if he just paid close enough attention, he could understand how to get himself out of this position. After a moment of listening, he thought of the rain covering April’s body as a kindness, though he didn’t know why, like the thousands of raindrops that fell on her were thousands of tiny hands holding her. He called out to her. Not loud the first time, then louder, like he had to gather her name in his mouth and try it first in order to make the action real. He called again and again, now shouting her name. He screamed it as loud as he could. He waited. Only the rain in response.

  He pulled at the seatbelt, but it was somehow stuck in the latch, still holding him upside down, and it wouldn’t move. Fucking shit, he said. Thinking of April made him think of Jack – that this was not only just happening to him and April, but to Jack as well – and for a panicked moment he tried to look in the rearview mirror to see the boy in his car seat – a sudden visual montage in his mind of Jack hurt in his car seat, arm broken, tossed about the car during the accident and lying motionless in the backseat, hurt or dead – but then he knew that Jack was with the babysitter, he was in bed, he would be sleeping until morning, which made Nicholas look at the digital clock again and see that only a few minutes had passed. He didn’t know exactly how long ago the accident occurred, though it couldn’t have been too long, and he didn’t know how long he’d have to wait for help, how long April would have to wait but at least he did know that Jack was with the babysitter and safe, his little boy was okay, and in this inward expression he felt what he perceived to be a deep warmth and gratitude move through him, which he told himself to focus on, to stay right there with it. Jack in bed, asleep. Reading a book to Jack. Jack hiding his stuffed animals in the woods around the cabin. Nicholas finding them. Nicholas hiding them for Jack to find. But not too difficult, April said. Don’t make them too hard to find, or too high. Nicholas looked out the car window and understood that when he and April weren’t home by midnight the babysitter would attempt to call April. A phone call would be coming. The babysitter was going to call April. He knew for sure that a phone call would be coming – maybe he’d even hear April’s phone, which he knew to be in her jacket pocket, go off, and he’d be able to locate her by sound – and when that phone call wasn’t answered, people would know something was wrong, someone would find him, they’d know where he and April had gone for the night, they’d retrace where they’d been, they’d call friends, they’d find him on Smoky Mills Road and he’d be alive, and so would April, and they’d get home and Jack would still be asleep, as though none of this had occurred, and at the same time he thought this, he also thought that April might not pick up her phone again and might never speak to anyone, not to Jack, not to him, ever again, and he felt his heart nearly pushing against his ribs upside down in the car, and he shouted her name again, waiting, and when he heard nothing, he told himself to calm himself – though it was not the distant voice, he was aware, that spoke this, but his own mimicking it – and the
n he felt the ridiculousness of telling himself to calm himself when he was upside down in a crashed car and bleeding and cold in freezing temperatures and sweating and could die and April was in all likelihood not alive, she was dead, and yet there it was again, some competing voice in him telling himself to calm himself, this time distinctly not his voice, some voice from some distant place telling him to calm himself, to think of what he needed to do, what do you need to do, which after asking it of himself he knew was to do only what he could do, and to understand that Jack was okay and safe, that the babysitter would attempt to call April, was probably already attempting to call April, and was not getting April, and would eventually call the police, and he’d be found and then be back with Jack. But April wouldn’t be, he thought. There was the competing urge to be both utterly honest with himself and to feel that she was still alive. He felt some knot of tension in his chest, which made his chest hurt, and then tears and he mumbled aloud that he didn’t know anything to be true or not true, you don’t know anything. He thought that maybe she was only unconscious. Maybe April was out there in a soft pile of leaves or maybe she’d been thrown in such a way that she’d rolled and had hit her head and was now passed out, though the delusional nature of this thought was almost too apparent, and his fight against what was actual felt almost stupid, like playing tug of war with a rope securely attached to a wall, though then he considered that maybe she’d walked away from the accident. Maybe she was on her way to get help. Maybe he’d been passed out, and she’d woken up, looked at him, tried to wake him, and then had left and was walking, or running even, jogging, right now into town. How long would that take her? If the babysitter fell asleep, she might stay asleep until the morning came, until her own parents woke and realized she wasn’t there, so it could be hours before anyone found him, but if April had walked away from the accident, someone would find him. She’d turn off this old, isolated road, get onto one of the old farm roads where surely someone would be driving by, some farmer maybe, would pick her up, she’d call the police. Maybe she already had. Though none of that made sense. Her door was closed, her seatbelt recoiled, she’d left no indication that she’d gone for help, and if she was okay, why hadn’t she just called the police? But maybe she was okay and looking for help and had called the police and they were on the way and had called the babysitter, what was she going to do, leave him a note, she probably rushed away as fast as she could to get him help, and if her cell phone had been damaged, or lost, she could still be walking and it could take hours to get back to town on foot, he thought. Maybe it wasn’t such a ridiculous thought after all.

  The rain increased, a near hissing sound off the forest floor, and now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he saw both the rainfall and spray of rainfall as it hit the ground, as well as a soft mist moving between the trees. Because the car was on a slope, he could look down into the forest as it moved down the mountain. A scattered light reflected on the corner of the flattened windshield, and he couldn’t understand what light it was, then knew it was the moon reflected there, fractured into glints of light. A single ant was walking along the cracked windshield. It seemed to rise up on its hind legs for a moment to survey Nicholas. He half wanted to ask it for help. He called April’s name again, then again, louder, and heard only the rain on the trees and leaves of the forest floor. He felt afraid to say her name and then said it, quietly, and then yelled it. The rain seemed to increase as if in remorseful response. It was not helpful to think that April was alive and walking toward help in the same way that it was not helpful to think that April was dead simply because he couldn’t see her or hear her, or that she couldn’t hear him. He told himself that he couldn’t know anything for certain. He grabbed onto the steering wheel with his unstuck arm and tried to pull himself out of the stuck seat and horrifying pain like ripping occurred in his left leg and he stopped immediately. In order to not feel the echoing pain, he made himself recall that he’d actually witnessed an accident once in graduate school when he and April had been driving to see her mother, they were driving on the highway, and in front of them, maybe two hundred yards, a truck’s tire blew out and the truck flipped several times and he’d seen a girl inside the truck sort of fly out of a window like a crash-test dummy, her body seeming not real at all, and her body kind of did two strange rolls, half-summersaults on the side of the road into a sitting position. He’d barely been able to believe that the girl sitting there had survived. Like other people, he and April had pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped and gotten out of their cars and rushed over to her. The girl’s eyes had been glazed and she appeared to be looking down through some telescope at her hands and body, a little cross-eyed almost, her head unsteady, as though she was not in control of herself. But she was okay. They all asked, What hurts? Are you okay? And she’d looked up at them and down at her hands and said, I’m fine. I think I’m fine. Then she said to them when they asked if she was okay again, she said, directly to Nicholas, Where’s Mark? Mark was her boyfriend and he was back in the truck, which was flipped over, and he too was okay except for a cut on his forehead, a bruised thigh. Nicholas thought now that maybe that was like a precursor to this moment, that maybe him witnessing that accident was proof not to be despairing now, that maybe April was okay, and so maybe was he, though he then considered the idea that another person’s life, this girl, whose name he never learned, and this Mark person, they were not blueprints for his life, they were not signs or symbols, they were real people, who didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him. So maybe just take it as evidence that people survive, he thought. Then he wished he had a phone, wished he hadn’t taken what now felt like a somewhat stupid stand against certain technologies, refusing to ever have a phone, and in this wishing, he looked at the center console, near the gearshift, thinking that’s where it would be if he had a phone, but then remembered he and the car were upside down and his hypothetical phone could be anywhere, might not even be in the car. The digital clock said that it was just before two in the morning. Only twenty minutes, he thought. How long was this going to take?

  The rain held a steady rhythm and he now began to feel some drops hitting his face and arms, which at first he didn’t understand, how it could be raining on him, then realized the drops were warm, that he was bleeding on himself, from his legs. He was panicked a moment, desperately wanted out of the car, and he pulled with his free right arm on the steering wheel, pulling harder than before, pulling his entire body toward the open windshield. Pain throbbed through his still stuck left arm and in his legs. It moved up his body in a hot and cold light. It blurred his vision. He heard himself sort of whimpering and sobbing, breathing quickly, and saying, Okay, okay, I won’t, I won’t move, as though he was talking to his own body from outside it. He tried to make himself very still and breathed and breathed and tried to slow himself down, just like he’d been practicing on the mountain. He suddenly understood that this was an opportunity to view things as he’d been trying to view things, without any positives or negatives, but just to constantly be learning from his existence, and to be able to calmly approach all situations, and yet, despite this understanding, he felt himself trying to not think that he was stuck here, trying to not think that he was not only stuck but trapped and could die here, trying instead to allow the part of himself that believed that he could get out to take over his thinking. He’d just have to do it slowly, carefully. It couldn’t be some rushed and unthought thing. He’d have to get his body out of this car with great care, he thought. In fact, he’d have to do it in stages, like with the seatbelt buckle. First free his left arm. Then one leg. Then another. With care for each part of his body in order to keep pain at a minimum. He could do it if he did it in slow increments.

  His project on the mountain had been to slow his life down in order to teach himself to be content and easeful with all situations, with all life, even negative moments, to be always in aware repose, like a tree accepting its divestment of leaves e
very winter, and he thought this situation now couldn’t be more negative and that his fighting against it was purposeless. He had to accept it, be with it, and with a calm awareness, he’d get himself out of it. But he couldn’t hate it or fight it. He’d wear himself out, pass out, or, if he wasn’t careful, he’d hurt himself more. He almost started moving his left arm, then stopped himself, and inwardly repeated to himself to wait, just wait. He needed to let the pain subside, needed to allow his body to get back to a sort of stable base of non-pain, or less pain, because freeing the arm would be excruciating, and he was still feeling a hot tingle in his spine and legs, sweat on his forehead though it was very cold. Rain began falling harder, and a little distance from the car, there was a spiderweb shimmering in the rain and wind and moonlight. The web had no insects in it, no spider, it looked abandoned. He could see where the web connected at several points to a branch of a small tree, and then on the other side, to the stem of a weed. A circular pattern at the center of the web. He didn’t want to be doing any of this, he thought again, but he was, and next he had to figure out some way to free the arm that was stuck, and in doing so, he knew he had to feel that pain again, which was not something he wanted to do, then he would have to take a rest, then feel more pain freeing the left leg, he thought, then rest, then more pain, then rest. Again, something in him viewed this from some distance, something far from himself communicating to him that all things were this, suffering, then no-suffering, then suffering again. He told himself it was as simple as this: pain, rest, pain, rest, and he could do it now again, just as he did anything, even though he didn’t want to and some other part of himself told himself that it was not possible, he was trapped here. So much of his life, he reflected now, was determined by what he wanted to do and how he wanted moments to be as good as they could possibly be. And he was dissatisfied by so much of his life, as though he had failed, over and over again, to get the message that his wanting to do something and make it exactly how he wanted it to be did not equate to any kind of satisfaction. In fact, this wanting was often starkly against his own satisfaction. He’d learned this in numerous ways, and he thought now, it was only in the last few years that he’d actually begun to try to live by it, in a slow, stunted manner, like an android first learning it was not a human but an android and speaking again, for the first time, its millionth word.