Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth and something distant in him told him to breathe. He opened his eyes and looked at the digital clock, which neared three a.m., and he wondered again where April was, why no one had found him yet, and how long he’d have to wait, and he felt a tiredness that was more than being sleepy, he felt weak and drained, literally drained, the blood in him going out still, and he wondered if someone didn’t find him soon, if April wasn’t walking to get help right now, who would take care of Jack, and like the thought of April and him arguing in the car, he didn’t want to think of him and April not being there for Jack, and he willed the thought to stop, and what was waiting there behind it seemed to wake and come into being, and he again thought of what April had said in the car, Yes, I heard her talking to you. She was talking to you and being all flattering, Oh, Nicholas, what a brave forestman bringing his family to the forest to live a life of forest people among the bears, please show me what a big forestman does please, she had said. Nicholas remembered saying that he couldn’t believe she was eavesdropping on his conversation, what a ridiculous and untrusting thing to do. I can’t believe that after eleven years together you still don’t trust me with a woman who you deem to be somehow above you. April had said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard, and yes, she felt bad she’d eavesdropped. Nicholas told her to just wait, just hold on a minute, because he wasn’t finished, he wasn’t going to, you know, he wasn’t going to let this happen, he wanted to finish this fight before it began. Oh, you’re going to finish it, big forestman, she said. Nora Evans wasn’t interested in him, he had continued, and he wasn’t interested in Nora Evans, it was all just happenstance, he’d said to April. April had said that she was going to interrupt him now in the same way he had interrupted her, and then she added, Watch the road. She was quiet for a moment, testing him, he knew, to see if he’d say anything more, if he’d fill in the silence with more explaining, which he knew was an indication to keep quiet and also a temptation: he wanted to speak. Then, when more quiet passed than he could stand, he said, Say whatever it is you actually think, feeling a quick anger in his body extending from mind to arms and chest and legs, which were clenched and tight. April said he just couldn’t shut up, could he? You’re drunk, he’d told her, you did that on purpose and I know you did. And yet you couldn’t not talk for fifteen seconds, she said. Try it now. Fifteen seconds. I’ll count. He’d waited, counting in his head in the same way he was counting now, then told himself to stop counting, annoyed at her. After a moment, she said she was just going to say one thing, and that one thing was that whatever Nora Evans had said in the kitchen with him, that’s just what she was saying. What she was doing was giving you fuck-me eyes. And you were playing along. And what really bothered me about it, was she was using me and Jack, but mainly I was pissed that she was using me, using me, to do it. The comment caused Nicholas to say to April that that wasn’t fair, that wasn’t fair both to him and to Nora. He didn’t think anyone would be that brazen about something like that. Nora wasn’t a bad person. Upside down in the car, he recalled feeling a little insane when he was talking, as though the beers and drinks had loosened his mind enough to let it spill forth unreservedly: he recalled the clear feeling that much of what he was saying he didn’t really mean and didn’t feel very convincingly, it was just glancing thoughts, like the white noise of his mind, that he simply allowed to slip out without any real investigation or care.

  Additionally, he remembered adding – unable to stop the random thoughts and words and seeming to view himself from outside himself, as though his words were tuned to some disparate source of annoyance and anger but his actual being was observing from some distant place in the cosmos, calm and dispassionate – that it annoyed him that if he was talking with a woman, any woman, the first thing April went to was that he was, in some way, flirting with said woman, a statement that he understood to be utterly false, and yet which he said in order to make April angry. April replied by saying that she hadn’t said that Nicholas was flirting, she had said that Nora was, but that it wasn’t the flirting that had annoyed her, and actually, she wasn’t even that annoyed, she’d wanted to talk to Nicholas and instead he was being an asshole, but what annoyed her was Nora Evans was flattering Nicholas and using her and Jack to do it, like he was the big man of the family and took care of April and Jack and fended off bears and invested their money and taught them how to live in accord with nature, like I’m your little housemaid of a wife and Jack is going to take over the family one day and become an intellectual Navy Seal. It was gross. Nicholas said, Look, Nora was a gender studies professor. He didn’t think she’d think that. April said that she didn’t think Nora thought any of that shit was true – it wasn’t the flirtation itself that bothered April, it was the nature of it, which was to flatter his manliness. It was disgusting. And what was doubly disgusting, though mainly annoying, was how easily Nicholas got sucked into it, blushing and looking away in his deep flattery, swimming in flattery. That is really all that April wanted to say, why couldn’t they just have a conversation, why was Nicholas defensive, which Nicholas recalled now had caused him to say that he wanted to go back a minute, to the idea that maybe it was just Nora flirting and not him, maybe that was the case, but then why bring it up? I understand now you’re saying you just wanted to chat with me about it, but if she didn’t suspect him, or if she knew that he wasn’t participating in the flirting then the idea that she just wanted to have a laugh about Nora or whatever seemed weak, like why she really wanted to bring it up was because it really felt like she thought he was in some way participating and that she was subtly attacking him here, or wanting to fight or something. It wasn’t him wanting to fight, it was her, she was the one doing it, he’d told her. He had tried to keep what he felt was a clenched anger – all his thoughts and energy compressed to a singularly dense frustrated point, which he was fighting to not let explode out, like trying to hold in a universe which would explode out from him only to create more anger and resentment and fighting – down and unexpressed. He had always been able to do this: to view himself and his anger and his emotions as though at some remove from them, both engaging in them and somehow some other part of him acting as the passive observer. April had replied that she wasn’t attacking him, that she hadn’t been, and wasn’t now, but she felt jealousy, insecurity, and yeah, it was annoying, this woman, him giving so much of his attention to this woman, but what she didn’t like now was that if Nicholas had nothing to do with this flirting, well, his defensiveness showed her that maybe that wasn’t the case, that maybe he wasn’t being completely honest here. Nicholas had gone quiet. He had paid attention to the mountain road, the slow rain, the slow wind, the trees slow in their rocking, in an effort to let his anger pass. He’d thought in the space of their quiet that April was right: he had in fact enjoyed the presence of this other woman. He had noticed, at some point, that Nora Evans was flirting with him, and while he didn’t feel as though he engaged with the flirtation, he hadn’t stopped it either. He didn’t like this, he didn’t want it to be the case, he was arguing with April as much as he was arguing with himself, for indulging in the flirtation. Yet, there was something more there, he knew. He remembered being in the kitchen, and in remembering it, he recreated it, being in the kitchen, whose faucet was dripping slowly, enjoying this other woman talking to him and possibly flirting with him and him possibly flirting with her, her being impressed by something he’d written in one of his books, which April maybe hadn’t been eavesdropping on yet, her looking different than April, her face different from April’s, her eyes not grey-green, but brown, her hair not sandy blonde, but dark, her face not oval, but round, her upper lip fuller, though her lower lip not as full as April’s, the rest of her body different, slightly younger, maybe more in shape, maybe her breasts a little bit smaller than April’s, her fingers slightly longer than April’s, her breath different from April’s, the recognition of her different body instantly manifesting a
s sexual attraction, him briefly wanting her (and, secondarily, annoyed that he was wanting her, annoyed that something in him was attracted to her, and annoyed that, once again, his biology was taking over, compelling him, this other side of him he associated as being the negative, selfish, probably more primitive side), her voice different, her opinions different, her thoughts and feelings different from April’s, her interest in him newer and different and in all likelihood caused because she didn’t actually know him. At the same time that he felt and sensed all of this and both enjoyed it and wanted her with some part observing that he didn’t want her, and feeling a little repulsed by his own wanting, he also was listening to the dripping faucet. The drops of water spaced perfectly, like the metronome of his thoughts. Something about the slow drops slowed his mind, slowed Nora Evans speaking, slowed his occasional looking past Nora Evans to the party in the other room, everything moving slower, even his sudden wanting of her moving slower, so that he could see it. Suddenly a drop of water in the sink seemed to reverberate like a bell through his mind, rippling out and settling the surface of the water of his mind into a glassy stillness so that the kitchen and Nora Evans and the party and everything almost rippled to a stop, and while waiting for the next drop, the moment in the kitchen slowed so much that he suddenly saw, and saw again, his wanting this person as purposeless and selfish and completely biological and as only leading to dissatisfaction – which, in some way, was exactly what it led to: the fight in the car – and saw Nora as somehow being the same as April. That April’s body was not new only to him. That April’s voice, her habits, her actions, her interests, were only not new to him. That because he knew April so fully, this other person he didn’t know created some sexual attraction in him due to her newness, which when he allowed himself to see clearly, as Nora Evans spoke, he saw as specter-like, and which he recreated again now, recreating the moment, the thoughts of the moment, the intuition and understanding of the moment, and he imagined that her beauty and his attraction dispersed as a cloud might. The force of his attraction undoing itself like a mist clearing, and in the space of the moment before the next drop of water from the kitchen sink, he felt this all clearly and simply, and then he observed April in a surrounding room, talking to one of his colleagues, about to eat what appeared to be a piece of cheese on a cracker. He then saw April’s immediate freshness, her always newness, everyone’s, Nora the same as her, not the same person, but both of their newness in each new moment complete and whole, and what replaced the passing sexual attraction for Nora Evans was a gentle and open seeing of Nora Evans no longer as a sexual body, but just as a body. Which he was too. Which April was. Each in their difference the same. All of this had materialized in his mind, he thought and reconstructed now, in the instant a drop of tap water fell from the sink: he felt it all move through him and understood it with the intuition he’d developed over four years living in the woods and living in complete silence for a week at a time each year. He’d thought, standing in the kitchen, that this moment wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t learned to pull from himself the inner feeling that often got covered over in his stupid and selfish wants: some distant voice inside him that spoke as though from the depths of a cave – your wanting isn’t you. Yet, he hadn’t been able to tell any of this to April in the car on the way home, he hadn’t been able to explain any of it, it was too complex, the way his feeling about the situation with Nora Evans and how it had transformed was too complexly intertwined with his perceptions, his view of himself, his opinion of April, of Nora, of the water dripping from the faucet, of how he wished he was and how he actually was, how he wanted to be and how he actually was, and so he hadn’t said any of it. Feeling an intense pain behind his eyes now, like a sudden migraine arriving, he hated that he hadn’t said any of this and he tried to think if their last conversation had really been this ugly or if he or she had said anything more, and at the same time he tried to think if they’d said anything more, he also didn’t want to think about it at all, and then he wondered what was more real: his attraction to Nora Evans or his sudden unattraction, his fight and annoyance at April or his care and concern for her, his thinking and recreating these moments in his mind in the car or his body in pain in the car. It was impossible to tell, he thought, what was real and what wasn’t, and he thought that his problem was that he thought some moments were real and some weren’t, that some moments appeared to be real and some appeared to be a dream that needed to be woken from.

  His cheek was smashed against the roof, and his neck was bent and growing sore and stiff. He moved himself a little, readjusting his neck with careful movements, rolling his neck so that his face was off the roof of the car and his ear was pressed against it, muffling the sound of his breathing. It felt good to move and when he felt no pain, he thought he’d try again in a minute, feeling in this new position like he could go to sleep, though he was thirsty. The sound of thunder reverberated through the car. He felt it in the ground, and heard the rain increase, and then felt rainwater running under him, as though the thunder had loosened some pocket of water somewhere. The little stream went right by his face and he moved his neck to lap at it, his mouth so dry, and what he tasted was water mixed with his own blood, and he momentarily became lightheaded again and nauseated. A flickering of dizziness and nausea that made the world reconfigure: the trees and forest and interior of the car all blurred into a flattened visual field. His body and the pain in it pulsed and then seemed diffuse and amorphous and bodiless and not there, and his hearing became confused, as though the sound of the rain, breathing, the running rainwater, the wind in the treetops all became voices speaking an alien language to him in order to coax him from himself. He closed his eyes and breathed and tried to make it stop, and his senses gathered inside him again, and the pain that had dispersed momentarily returned, and his body was the different parts of his body again, pain in arm and left leg and neck, and he opened his eyes, grateful it was back, though now he felt an extreme exhaustion. He thought there was no way he was getting out of this car, he was so tired – he looked at the clock nearing four in the morning. Why hadn’t anyone arrived? Why had no one found him yet? He reached down with his right arm and felt around his left leg. There was sticky blood there making his pants feel thick. He explored what he could of his thigh, knee, and when he moved his hand up his leg, maybe mid-thigh, there was a searing sensation that made him stop touching the leg for a moment, and then after the sensation faded, he reached down again and felt around the knee, noting that there was less pain. He reached across himself toward the outside of the left knee and then pulled a little, felt only a dim ache, and then pulled harder, and the knee moved some. Maybe that was it, he thought. Slide the leg toward his right leg, away from the crushed-in door, just slide it carefully. He took a breath and reached across his body again and grabbed the outside of his knee and pulled it. Instantly a stabbing pain in his thigh, but he kept pulling, and the knee and leg moved a little, and gritting his teeth and yelling he pulled hard one more time and the leg slid a bit more and then the pulsing and stabbing moved up his spine into his head and his vision flashed in and out and he stopped and breathed, breathed. More sweat dripped down his temples, he could feel some sweat getting into an ear, tickling it annoyingly. He breathed and waited, was so tired, so glad to not have to move the leg for a minute. He’d done something, he thought. It’d moved some. He felt his legs shifted, both aimed now diagonally toward the opposite side of the car, away from the crushed door. He could still get out. He was doing it. He was getting out, untrapping himself, slowly, just as he pictured it. Take your time, he told himself. The leg would come free. It was nearly free. He could feel it under the dash, the dash still holding it, but looser. It was just the arm now that would hurt. Take your time. Take a little break. Rest.

  After a moment of getting his breath back, of hearing the rain outside and the wind in the trees, he suddenly had the feeling that he was more alone than he’d felt in a long time, mayb
e than ever before, as though he was experiencing loneliness again for the first time. There was no one else. Just rain and wind, just this crushed car, his body. He tried to think of when he had felt the least alone, or when he didn’t even consider loneliness, when it didn’t even enter into his being, and knew that the answer was when Jack arrived, when it felt like the first time in their lives that their life was not about them: the force of the sleeping baby’s presence on his chest, the connection of the baby to April’s breast, milk and spittle on their clothes, soupy diarrhea in cloth diapers and on Nicholas’s own clothes, washing the boy’s clothes and hanging them on the line that the mountain wind dried crisp and fresh smelling, the baby growing from a baby into a toddler, slowly learning consonants: Nicholas thought that these bas and das and mas were the complete expression of this little, helpless being, stating exactly what it was: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. But not only that. I’m with you. You’re here. You tell me, what is that, what is that, what is that, like a mind awakening to everything and everything in turn inviting it to awaken. At nine months, pointing to everything: ba. I’m here, you’re here, what is that. April sitting on the floor in the small family room, the windows of the cabin open, rolling a ball toward the baby. Jack reaching for Nicholas by constantly grabbing the air and flapping his hands toward Nicholas. Reading books in the low, yellow lamplight. Holding objects for the baby, slinging him over his shoulder. The baby crawling toward Nicholas as he worked on an article, as he cooked dinner, as he vacuumed, swept, cleaned, and everything pausing for the immediacy of Jack. The first time Nicholas felt a warm energy move from his head to his heart and expand through his chest like a kind of gentle electricity, he’d been holding April in a parking lot after an argument. In the parking lot, it occurred to him that the thought of Jack, of April, of both of them, of him with both them, made him aware that this energy – not an emotion and not a conceptual feeling, but a sensation in his body, his chest – had always been there and was only waiting to be awakened.