Mountain Road, Late at Night

by Alan Rossi

  He opened his eyes. Listening to the rain, he wondered if this was the last word she’d spoken to him. They often reached a point in their arguing when they’d stop, and they’d both relent, and then both claim that they’d attacked the other, that the attack wasn’t really how they felt and thought about the other, but this time there had been nothing more. In remembering the argument with April, Nicholas now wondered if everything he’d ever done had been a selfish delusion, if nothing in his life was truly done for another person, but was always done with some thought of self-gain: make a nice dinner for April and she’d massage his back later, play and sing with Jack because he wanted to be seen as a caring and attentive father, publish articles and become slightly well-known in his field to impress his colleagues and parents and old friends, live off the grid to show his moral superiority to everyone else, thereby impressing them. It made him feel self-pitying and ashamed at his self-pity, just another selfishness, another way he put his pain before anyone else’s. In an effort to not keep thinking in this painful, though possibly true way, he decided it was time. One more pull and the arm would be unstuck, then he’d do the legs. Do it now, he told himself. He thought that he had to move in order to at least have an attempt to correct this last conversation. He wanted the chance to make it so that his last interaction with someone on this planet was not one of meanness and ugliness and selfishness. He breathed in and breathed out, steadying himself, waiting for the moment, and in the waiting he thought the last thing she’d said to him was that he was an asshole – the word like an echo – and he thought that this couldn’t be the last conversation they’d have, then, in a kind of horrified understanding, realized it was, knew it was, and attempted to think of what else he’d said, what else she’d said, had either of them said anything more? The conversation couldn’t have ended with April saying this and him feeling angry and guilty and mean. He couldn’t remember anything else though. He remembered not talking after that, and he feared for a moment that this was maybe the actual expression of who he was. That this last thing that April had said, maybe it was the truest thing, the realest thing about him, was the most banal and stupid thing one could be. Maybe the universe had designed his living to inevitably lead up to this moment when he had nearly died and April presented to him what he actually was, as though through April’s mouth, the universe had said: selfish asshole. And in hearing this message from either the universe or April, he thought now, he had no choice but to face the idea that he was an asshole. Was essentially an unkind, uncaring, selfish, idiotic person despite whatever intellectual successes and understandings he’d had. Then he thought that he was turning April into a message for him, another selfishness, and he made himself stop. Was life a designed teaching or was it happenstance? Were there real messages behind things or were things things themselves, or were they not even that? What was real and what was delusion? Trying to keep breathing steadily and deeply and to let go of the pain that was pulsing in his arm and shoulder and dully in his neck and back, he thought that what he felt he’d been doing in supposedly cultivating clarity, in coming to the mountains, in attempting to live in a sustainable way, in attempting, with April, to live again in balance with the world, in attempting to extricate their lives as much as possible from the patriarchal, materialistic, corporately driven, consumerist, competition-based culture that inundated everything in their country and was oppressing not only minorities in the States, but was exploiting people in other counties, the poor and indigenous, as well as exploiting land and plant and animal, maybe in moving to the mountains and in building the little cabin and taking it off the grid and attempting to create a garden they could live on, maybe what he’d been doing was actually nothing. Maybe what he was actually doing, maybe all he was really doing, rather than getting rid of his stupidities, rather than seeing into and listening closely among the quiet to his better self, rather than dropping what he had come to see as cultural selfishness, he had become, as April indicated, selfish in a different way. Maybe they both had. Maybe they’d just created a little island of selfishness. Maybe what he thought they’d done in order to be less distanced from each other and the nature of things was merely create a space where they could more easily fight one another, more easily see how they were in the same room and yet were not, were there and not there, were with each other and somewhere else. Maybe all they’d really done was given themselves a space to see just how alone, how distanced from each other, from their family and friends, from society, and from even themselves they were.

  Out the open frame of the windshield, the now gentle rain continued falling in a pattering rhythm that seemed to regenerate itself through sound. He thought that it was probably raining where Jack was sleeping. He looked at the digital clock nearing six in the morning, and out the window through the trees, the small space of sky he could see was just lightening. In his exhaustion, he thought that he’d never say goodnight to Jack again, never get to sing him a new song, never show him the movies and albums he wanted to show him when he got older, never argue with him when he became a teenager, never feel like he was losing him when he left, never feel old himself due to the youth of his kid, never have a falling out and reconnect, and his little boy would always be the little boy whose parents had died, and someone else, over time, would become Jack’s real parents, and what had been real for Jack would become unreal. Just like it was doing for Nicholas now. What was real became unreal and what was unreal became real. He hoped it’d be Nathaniel and Stefanie, and he thought for a terrifying moment of April’s mother wanting Jack and how he and April had never made a will, and the poor boy being fought over by the entire family. He tried to think of Nathaniel and Stefanie, like thinking of them taking the boy could somehow create the reality. He closed his eyes and tried to construct the thought from some sourceless depth inside him in an effort to make what was unreal real. When he opened his eyes, viewing the dark woods in the rain, he didn’t know why someone hadn’t found him yet, why someone hadn’t called April’s cell phone and realized something was wrong, and he began crying, and said in his mind to Jack that he hoped he would be okay and he was sorry for not being there, for the fact that he might not be there again, he was sorry he’d been stupid and was stupid, he apologized for not being able to say goodbye, he apologized to April, though he knew she was no longer alive. He apologized to his parents, to his brother. He apologized to the rain falling in the woods, and felt his consciousness slip toward the woods, move away from his body, and he seemed to be looking at himself, his face a pale light in the dark of the upside-down car, staring out, but not seeing out of his own eyes, seeing into them, and then he seemed to be viewing himself from up on the branch of a tree, like he was seeing out of the owl’s eyes and viewing himself from above, feeling himself move away from his slumped and upside-down body, now above the car, and a part of the woods, the rain, the mist moving through the forest, and he felt as though he was the mist, as though he was gently moving over the earth, and in watching himself grow smaller (he could somehow see himself through the bottom of the car) and now that he was more distant from himself through the trees, he felt a gratitude for his life, and instead of apologizing, he thought the words thank you to the same people he apologized to a moment before and then said thank you to what was everything else. Then there was a sharp pain in his ribs and he was back in his body in the car, looking out. The owl was there looking in at him through the opened frame of the car. A brief moment of feeling dispersed and bodiless slipped away, and was replaced by utter fear, which in turn was replaced by the thought that he needed to understand right away if he and April had said anything else after this argument they’d had. Then, in both fear and awe, he observed his mind slow down and his thinking become abstract, as though his identity was dropping away and he was a representation of one half of the universe, male, though he felt also female, and the female in him was April, was his mother, was other women he knew, and the male in him was his father, Nathaniel, Jack, that
existence was divided, that everything was separate and alone so that it might know itself, divided on some vast continuum between male and female, divided between myriad other forms, plant, land, water, animal, air, and myriad other forms of mind, clarity, confusion, boredom, excitement, lust, love, greed, giving, kindness, hate, each complementing each, each forming each, nothing its own existence, selfishness and selflessness, all the same thing, all in him, and his face became some other face that he both knew and didn’t know hovering right behind his own face. He didn’t see the face so much as become it, which made him breathe in shallower, shorter breaths. Not even become. He was it. This other face that wasn’t other. Then he perceived the female face, that also was not fully female. Both faces were looking unwaveringly at each other, and in his fear at observing these faces that were his and not his, he began crying, at the understanding that these thoughts he’d been having were not him, they were not April, not Jack, not his mother, father, Nathaniel, that all of them and everyone were beyond his thinking of them. He closed his eyes to make the faces go away and opened them again and saw them behind the rainy forest. It was as though his mind had become intermingled with the forest itself, had become a physical thing. He could not tell if it was his mind or the not speaking faces that he lightheadedly perceived that conveyed to him that what he’d been learning on the mountain with April and Jack was that what he knew was insignificant compared to what he didn’t know, both about others and about himself. He didn’t know himself or anyone. Everything was shining beyond knowing. I’m dying, he thought. The lack of knowing was a gift that he’d always been hesitant to accept, afraid to accept.

  His vision darkened from the outside in, making a sort of tunnel of looking out the empty frame of the car into the rainy woods. He closed his eyes – a bright pulsing star of light behind his lids – and opened them. The seatbelt suddenly slipped off his left shoulder and hit his ear as it slipped around his head and jolted, retracting back into place, and in an equal and opposite reaction, his body lurched forward and he fell from his sitting position and his right leg came unstuck, and all except for his left leg was loosed onto the ceiling of the car and heard himself yell in pain. The moaning understanding that he’d unbuckled the seatbelt, but it had remained latched, and it had suddenly let go fully and retracted. He was splayed across the ceiling of the upside-down car, his left arm broken and limp above him, his right knee coming down, and the left leg was still stuck beneath the dash, but the entire leg now outstretched, his entire body pulling on it, a burning, pulsing pain through the whole leg. He reached up and tried to move his left arm into a more comfortable position but there was a stabbing jolt against the side of his body and he stopped moving. He felt warm liquid hit his face and knew it was his own blood and knew that he needed to get the stuck leg out now. If he could get the stuck leg out, he could then get out the car – an image of him crawling out from under the car, through the open windshield, over the cracked glass, into the rain and ditch, free. He reached down across his body with his right hand down below the dash, to his left knee, and he felt up and down the knee and thigh, the lower part of his thigh smashed by the dash, and he reached down again to the knee, in the space between seat and some part of the dash, and pulled hard against the outside of the knee, sliding the leg under the dash, the thigh resisting, and he pulled harder and the entire leg slid along the seat, between the seat and dash, a fire burning up and down his leg and up his back and into his neck – the faces behind and beneath everything hovering in his mind and vision. When he closed his eyes, the faces were there, and when he opened them, they were there. He whimpered in pain, heard himself whimpering, half crying, then breathing deeply, trying to make his shallow breathing deeper. Rainwater was now gathering in pools inside the car, on the ceiling of the car, and running over the windshield in small streams. He waited for the burning pain in his leg to settle and he breathed and breathed and told himself to breathe deeply and he heard his breathing quivering. It was just a few more inches, he thought, it must be, slide the stuck leg just a little further, and it’d fall on top of him and he’d be able to get out. He could look at his legs now, he noticed – the faces behind everything seeming to be watching him with distant and neutral curiosity, as though they were the filmmakers of the universe – and he moved his neck and head, and through streaks and sparks that filled his vision, when he looked into the dark below the steering wheel and blood-soaked airbag, he saw his pants ripped and left leg bent strangely at the thigh under the dash, and for a moment he felt he might vomit and then did, watery bile, onto the ceiling beside him. He looked away. The seat where he’d just been was soaked in blood and now he felt the stickiness on his head as well and again thought that this couldn’t be the way he died. He couldn’t die in a ditch trapped in a car after arguing with his wife about some stupid moment at a party. The faces in his mind, or that were his mind – he was trying to understand – were there. He could not tell if he thought it or if the faces conveyed that he was nothing, was not even a he, and he fought against this and said aloud that he was getting out of this car, he was just drained and tired and hallucinating and told himself to not pay attention to anything his mind was making up and he shifted on the ceiling of the car, moving his torso and trying with his good right arm to reach his stuck left leg, but he couldn’t reach it now without a new, sharp pain in his back, that made him take quick breaths, and then he forced himself to do it and through screaming pain pulled and slid his left leg beneath the dash and felt it come loose when he pulled sideways and then the entire leg fell on top of him – his vision bursting in sparks and stars of convulsing energy that was pain – almost feeling as though it was dangling right above the knee, and he had his left thigh in his right hand, his entire body flipped on itself. After a moment, he propped the leg against the steering wheel so it wouldn’t fall, and then he looked out the open frame of the windshield and pulled with both arms toward the opening and scooted his upper body, his legs falling down, his left leg on fire, and pulled his body out from the car and then out from under the hood, pulling himself and almost growling through a clenched jaw, pulling onto wet leaves away from the car, and then he was looking back at where’d he’d been trapped and saw something like the impression of his body in blood in the upside-down car seat. He moved himself to lie on his back and had to hold his left thigh to do it, and he felt, in his thigh, bone coming through muscle and skin and jeans, and newly moving blood. When he had flipped onto his back his body remained a pulsing center of pain and for a moment he didn’t register the rain, until he did, and told himself to breathe, and took a deep breath, which eased his body momentarily.

  Rain was falling gently through the forest onto his body, and he saw now, looking back about ten feet, that the car had gone into the forest some, was actually beyond the ditch near the side of the road, and had broken a tree. He looked around for April, but didn’t see her. In exhaustion he let his head fall back on what he assumed were wet leaves, and again took a deep breath, which seemed to come into him slowly. Being free of the car made it feel as though his body was not his and was expanding, and with a slow-moving in-breath, the rain falling on his body slowed, and he looked up on the out-breath, which proceeded from him even slower, and he could see each raindrop that was falling and behind each drop of rain another drop, his eyes barely open, and the warmth of blood running down his leg, the brief vague thought that he shouldn’t have moved it, that it was pinned and something had been stopping the bleeding, but nothing was stopping the bleeding now, and the faces he’d seen in the car emerged again more clearly and forcefully, behind the trees and mist and rain, and then the rain stopped and the paused rain was now a ladder, each drop a drop proceeding up, outward, and each drop led toward the faces, which were both of his faces, his face merely an aspect of these other faces, and felt himself go into them, which was himself, but not himself as he knew himself, and so he was no longer he, and he saw time moving beyond him, time that was no longer hi
s time but was Jack’s, Jack with him and April on the mountain, then Jack with Nathaniel and Stefanie, Jack amid conversations and argument between the family members in the cabin, the entire family discussing and questioning and propositioning and debating in the cabin, Jack alone in his room, Jack crying, a decision finally made, promises and compromises and intentions presented, to include all, to allow Jack to know both sides of his family, and Jack leaving with Nathaniel and Stefanie, Jack in an apartment, Jack in a new room, Jack crying, Jack going to a new school, Jack alone, Jack sitting with Nathaniel, with Stefanie, Jack watching TV, Jack playing soccer, Jack running around the house while Nathaniel chases him, Jack sitting in a chair while Stefanie cuts his hair, Jack helping Nathaniel make bread, Jack helping Stefanie in the urban garden, Jack having friends over, Jack spending weekends away, Jack sitting between Nicholas’s father and mother and watching a movie, Jack playing with Tammy, who’d moved across the country, Jack doing flashcards with her, Jack showing her videos of Nathaniel cooking online, Jack growing taller, Jack with his friends, Jack moving to a new house in the suburbs, Jack with new friends and girlfriends, Jack through his life thinking of Nicholas and April, Jack missing them, Jack wanting them back, Jack seeing his father in Nathaniel, his mother in Tammy, Jack missing his mom and dad, Jack wondering who they were, where they were, if they could hear him, if they couldn’t, Jack talking to them, Jack no longer talking to them, Jack forgetting them, Jack becoming Jack, Jack’s life moving in a slow bloom outward like a flower opening and all the people around him doing exactly as he and April had done, trying, despite their selfishness, to be there for him, to be there for him in his sadness at losing his parents, to be there for him at his first soccer game, to be there for him when he hated them, when he loved them, when he felt cared for, when he didn’t, when he wanted them, when he didn’t, when they thought he was being difficult, when he was, when he wasn’t, when they were too busy to be there for him, when they weren’t, when they held him, punished him, thought they knew how to raise him, didn’t know, when they judged, blamed, accused each other, when they didn’t, when they needed each other, when they each wanted to do it alone, when they were right, wrong, open, closed, considering Jack, considering themselves, when they gossiped behind each other’s backs and Jack heard and felt alone amid the fighting and arguing, when he felt the family members, on a car drive, on a walk, while eating pizza, subtly suggesting that this person was not good enough, that this other person was, when they relented to each other, when they all saw beyond themselves, when they failed to, when they remembered that they had all agreed to do it together, when they all did it together, for Jack they all did it together, whether they wanted to or not, when Jack felt it, when he didn’t, all their concern and neglect and selfishness and judgment and greed and delusion and kindness and care, all exactly as it was, his face and all of their faces merging into the two faces in his mind and Jack’s face merging there, too, all held by each other. His breath still slowly moving out from him and breathing them all out, up the drops of rain, up through the mist, beyond the mist up through the treetops with just sprouting leaves, up beyond the treetops – his body lying on the ground bleeding – up into the raincloud, a grey growth on the sky, up beyond it into the dark blue night and beyond the moon swiftly passing by, planets, beyond the solar system into some deep darkness and then a galaxy and the faces behind it and further – the flashing image of the body on the ground – a gaseous cloud that was passing through faster into the blackness toward the two faces which slowly merged into one expressionless and calm face which at the same moment dispersed into being the web of the universe which was a mind and every mind and yet also there was the body on the ground trying to hold a hand though there was no hand to hold watching the rain fall from the treetops and being afraid the neutral and calm mind itself afraid through the wet trees a crescent moon in the now lightening sky beyond and moving so fast that galaxies and stars passed by in streaked light, the light also rotational, the streaking light seeming to rotate or spiral inward and outward at once to the neutral face and mind which was the face and mind that was also on the ground feeling an enormous fear that was the fear of itself inviting itself to be itself and then again breathing on the ground feeling the rain hit the body and in each breath the raindrops fell on the body as the face and mind of everything moved up into the body and breathed in and out and this mind that was everything rose up through the body and breathed in just as it ever did and that mind despite its calm acceptance of everything it gave rise to felt fear and awe and foolishness and gratitude as it once again breathed in and out and collapsed in on itself once again, and the first flashing blue lights lighted the treetops.