by Jean Rabe
“It can’t be kept at a distance, you know.”
“What?” I stammer. But there’s a prickling all along the back of my neck. Overcoming my paralysis, I look over my shoulder, past the idling Kawasaki, down the long ribbon of highway. He’s coming: a black apparition growing up from the road.
“Passionate grief doesn’t create a link. It separates the living from the dead. Do you understand?”
“No,” I croak, but I know you’re right.
It’s always at those moments when I feel the least sorrow that memories of you rush forward with crystal clarity. If I could set my grief—and, God help me, my guilt—aside, then perhaps I could even remember your face.
It’s as if the dead reserve the right to avoid the misery and grief of the living. Haven’t I endured enough? I imagine you saying. Wasn’t it horrible enough to experience my death once, without having to relive it again and again through your eyes? For the living, it’s just the opposite, as if the dead must be recreated moment by moment. In the middle ages, there were scholars who believed that the universe was sustained only by divine willpower, by the power of belief. For the living, the dead are like that. Stop believing in them, and the dead are truly gone forever.
I don’t know what to say to you. What comes out is: “I’m lost without you.”
And the memory that rushes forward to fill the brief second of silence on the phone line is of me getting on my motorcycle so very long ago and leaving for LA. “What if I can’t find my way back to you?” I asked, holding your hand there beside the bike, afraid to let you go.
“Reach up above the phone.”
“What?”
“On top of the pay phone. Do you feel it?”
It’s round and smooth and Arctic cold, this ransomed moment in time. I remember you pressing it into my hands as I sat on the bike, struggling to explain even then how lost I was without you. There, within the crystal globe, its needle turning languidly, lay a compass. Some trick of fate had you standing due north of me, and when the needle stopped, it was pointing directly at your heart—a clear indicator that as long as I had you, I would never be lost again. You were my true north.
But now you’re gone.
In the palm of my hand, as the sound of the rider’s motorcycle screams down on me, the compass needle spins out of control.
Turning, I’m slammed against the far wall of the booth by what I see. The rider has swollen to fill the entire breadth of the road. He’s an ebony miasma, swirling out of synch with his speed and direction, a black maelstrom fussing and flapping like a cloud of bats, a storm of locusts, a horde of ravens caught on film and replayed at random speeds. Bearing down on me, he sprouts monstrously huge wings: an igneous black bone framework tipped with charcoal talons between which stretches a suppurating Teflon-gray hide. The wings arch up and out, swallowing the sky. There’s fire at the center of this nightmare—there where the bike’s headlight should be, there where the rider once peered over the fairing: eyes like hungry embers, reptilian-slitted and simmering with chilling intent; malevolent, fire-licked streams of drool running from a cancerous maw, flickering along the gleaming length of incisors, trickling through deep crenellations and pooling in shadows formed by the misshapen features of what was once aerodynamic bodywork; the spark of flames cast in tiny shards of glass; searing hieroglyphs, like molten brands, twisted like pain-curled fingers along whose edges oozes melting rubber.
It hits like a thunderhead swept before a runaway locomotive.
Your voice comes across the phone: “You can’t run from it.”
The tsunami of grief hits the phone booth. I fall to the floor as the booth explodes in a howling hurricane of glass. The phone is ripped from my hand, but I’ve clenched my other fist around the snow globe and its compass, determined that nothing take away this first and last gift from you.
What I Remember
The scenes we play over and over in the theater of our minds are composed, not of what was or even what we might have wanted to have been, but of what we remember: our own edited version of reality. All other memory is self-defeating. It fades like weak dreams—the ephemeral kind you know were just there but can’t quite touch in the wee hours of the morning, the kind where you wake up feeling you’ve briefly held and then forever lost the most important thing in the world. A man’s history is built of these edited moments. Summer kisses and graveside tears. Stolen glances and fleeting dreams. Second tries and ultimate failures and unflinching hope. History’s breath reeks with every broken promise; through its veins flows every champagne-celebrated success, every petty betrayal, and the certain knowledge that hearts can indeed be broken or mended with a single word.
It’s amative. It’s Panglossian. And it’s serendipitous.
But it’s never free. And it’s never easy. And there’s no escaping it. Like Priam’s daughter, it’s never to be believed, no matter how clamorous its cries. Truth doesn’t figure into the making of a man’s history. History is made of events as we remember them, and the strongest of those memories forge us—a catch-22 if ever there was one.
I remember this.
You loved the little Honda Interceptor. Cherry red. Streamlined with her innovative undertail exhaust. Her V4 engine had an invigorating growl. At 800 ccs, it was a bit more than I’d really wanted to start you out on, but I’d gotten a fantastic deal on it. And controlling a bike, no matter what its size, is all about proper throttle work, something I’d been droning into you endlessly since we first started talking about getting you a motorcycle. The objective was to spend more time together and share that passion which comes only by traveling on two wheels, but I was very mindful of safety. You’d taken the MSF course. We’d spent a lot of hours in an empty parking lot, letting you get a feel for the bike. And by the time we hit the open road, you were more than proficient.
Then we went riding with Chris and Allen, two riders I’d met through Thursday night dinner runs organized by the Kawasaki dealership.
“Listen,” I said as we were gearing up, “the thing that causes most accidents when riding in a group is not riding at your own pace. New riders tend to get caught up trying to maintain the speed set by more experienced riders. They get in over their head.”
“I’ll be fine,” you replied, pulling on your helmet.
“I know you will. And I want you to have fun. But let the guys go if they’re riding too fast for you. We’ll catch up to them later at the restaurant. Ride your own pace. What I want for you to concentrate on is being smooth. Work on your technique; speed will come later.”
“You worry too much.” And you blew me a kiss.
Chris and Allen would take the lead, with you behind them. I would bring up the rear so I could critique you. It was a gorgeous day, nothing but blue sky and small, fluffy cotton balls moving fast across the farthest edges of canvas. I’d ridden this stretch of Highway 2 before, but it was new to you. Oklahoma’s not known for twisty roads, but this was a nice one, stretching through emptiness. From Highway 2, we planned to head east through the little town of Talihina and up into the Ouachita Mountains on that piece of road known as Talimena Scenic Drive. The curves there would be even more intense; some of them posted as low as fifteen miles per hour. I could feel your excitement. This is what I’d wanted, to share the thrill of the ride with you, to introduce you to that Singular Moment of Grace.
When we were mounted, I tipped up my visor to remind you once again to ride at your own pace and not get carried away, but Chris and Allen were already pulling out. You flashed “I love you” with the index finger, pinky, and thumb of your right hand. You pulled out after them. I followed.
You did great that morning. Your entry speeds were spot on. The lines you chose through the curves were as good as Chris’s and Allen’s, two far more experienced riders. And when they really got on the throttle, racing each other through some potentially dangerous chicanes, you wisely let them go, then poured on the gas in a long straightaway to catch them at the ne
xt four-way stop.
Trailing you, I wished we’d invested in some sort of communication system. I wanted to hear your laughter. Wished I could see the ear-to-ear grin that I knew you were wearing, a grin known by every true motorcyclist.
Then, up ahead, I spotted Allen’s brake light. He and Chris were pulling to the side of the road. You pulled in behind them, and I stopped behind you. Chris glanced back at us, and I heard him shout that we’d missed a turn and were doubling back. He and Allen hooked a U-turn in the road and roared past me.
I was looking back over my shoulder when you started into the road, watching the approach of the blonde with the red beads in the little silver sports car, thinking that Chris and Allen had cut it a bit close. I turned back to the front just as you pulled into the road. You hadn’t looked. You’d blindly followed the two riders in front of you. I’d warned you to ride at your own pace, but I’d never said anything about how every rider was on his or her own when it comes to traffic. An obvious thing—and no reason, perhaps, that I should have needed to tell you—but like so many other things that afternoon, the omission haunts me. I should have been a better instructor for you. Should have watched out for you better.
I screamed your name.
But it was too late.
The car hit you broadside at sixty miles an hour accompanied by the ear-shattering screech of brakes. As you and your Interceptor flew through the air, the woman lost control, sliding sideways into a skid, then careening into a telephone pole. She was ejected through the windshield, scattered across the road in a shower of windshield glass and crimson beads.
You came to a halt more than a hundred feet away. How could you have traveled so far? It seemed your name had just barely left my lips. I couldn’t find the kickstand on my bike and finally just let it fall into the grass beside the road as Chris and Allen ran past me. I tried to run to you, but my legs had no strength. Stumbling like a drunkard, I passed the woman who had hit you. Please, someone, pull down her skirt, I thought.
You weren’t moving. Your limbs were spread on the road, disjointed and insect-fashioned. As I drew close, I saw that your helmet visor was still down. I couldn’t see your face through the dark tinting. There was blood on the road beneath you, an expanding pool running toward the grass at the roadside. Chris, Allen, and a couple motorists who had stopped were crouched over you.
Before I could reach you, Chris ran back to intercept me. “Stay back,” he said. “An ambulance is on the way. Someone had a cell phone. Wait over here with me.”
I protested. I struggled. Chris was increasingly more and more insistent.
And you weren’t moving.
A police cruiser arrived before the ambulance. The cop took one look at you and radioed for a helicopter. He bent over the other woman only briefly, and when the ambulance crew arrived he sent the paramedics to you first.
While the Life Flight crew was loading you, one of the paramedics from the ambulance came to talk to me. “She still has a pulse,” he said—this as some vague, impotent reassurance. He told me where they were taking you and apologized for there being no room for me in the small helicopter. (Later I would read somewhere that this is common in cases where the next of kin is distraught and the accident victim is unlikely to survive the flight.) He handed me a plastic bag with some of your belongings, as if already acknowledging that you’d no longer need them. As he turned away, I wanted to tell him something about you, just one of the million small things that made you special, that made you worth saving. But I couldn’t speak. I just stood there, holding that bag (a thin trickle of your blood running down one side), while Chris explained that the cop was going to drive me to the hospital while he and Allen made arrangements to take care of the bikes.
The helicopter lifted from the roadway.
And I never saw you alive again.
I didn’t get to say goodbye. Or tell you how much I love you. Or remind you how lost I was without you.
Hold that frozen moment within the palm of your hand. Turn it this way and that, so that the sun strikes a prism from the glass in which it’s captured. No matter how often you examine it, no matter the angle from which you study it, the moment is set. It’s become your history. It can never be erased.
If I Could Have Put You in My Heart
The Black Rider turns—impossibly fast, much too fast for anything on two wheels, but then it’s really not a rider and a motorcycle any more, is it? It’s something else, some demon spawned in the dark tumor of my grief. I scurry away from the jagged eggshell of the phone booth, helmet clattering across the roadway, glass crunching under my boots, still clutching the snow globe.
There’s nothing but desert, its sand the rusty color of old bloodstains. A maelstrom sweeps down over me, occluding the sun. The snow globe slips through my fingers and rolls several feet away. I crawl after it on all fours, sand billowing up around me, burning in my eyes and nose. The world has gone dark. There’s no valiant twinkle of sunlight from the globe as it rolls away from my clumsy fingers. I can see the needle within the globe spinning out of control. Each time the needle shows signs of slowing, I manage to send the globe rolling further away, like a clown chasing his own hat around the circus ring, kicking it away with his foot each time he stoops to grab it.
And it comes to me then, caught in the nexus of this dust-devil, surrounded by the dark malignancy of the Black Rider, that I’m bound within a snow globe myself. La Boca del Diablo is the globe. I am the one shaking the globe because I can’t let go of you. Like the compass globe, you’re just out of reach, retreating each time I grasp for you, swirling each time I try to remember your face. I sought escape on my Kawasaki, but hours upon hours sitting exposed on a machine hurtling through the landscape is the antithesis of escape. Sealed within the globe of a helmet, the only communication is with oneself. There is no fleeing your doubts, your anguish, your guilt. In my so-called Singular Moment of Grace, introspection reigns supreme, and the rider who can’t live within the landscape of his own heart is fated to suffer the torment of what he finds there.
What did you tell me on the phone? You can’t run from it.
I huddle beneath the weight of the storm and shake with furious grief, pummeling the desert with my fists. Tears come for the first time in a long time, spotting the sand beneath me, crafting a tiny bowl which fills to the brim with my misery. The rider stands above me now. All that dark fury implodes down upon my head, collapsing into substance once again, the dark figure towering over me, a bomb just milliseconds from detonating. My hand finally wraps around the globe and its compass. The needle comes to a halt, pointing over my shoulder to the rider. And I know what must be done.
I struggle to my knees, facing the Black Rider. I reach up to his helmet visor, my hand trembling. When I raise the visor, it reveals your face. When I wipe the tears from my eyes, your beauty is as clear to me as that evening in your apartment when I wiped the fog from my glasses. I touch your cheek and whisper your name. Your eyes are bright and clear. Your smile crushes my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I croak.
“Don’t be.”
“If I’d never—”
“Shush.” You place a black-gloved finger against my lips. “There’s nothing I’d trade for that moment I found you frozen on my neighbor’s doorstep. I will always treasure the time we had, the love we shared. And you must do the same.”
“I don’t want to live without you.”
“You have to. It’s only through you that I live on. It’s only by keeping me in your heart that I will experience the adventures that await you. You must live ... for me.”
“But the pain—”
“Is part of having loved me. To have it taken away ... it would be like we never loved at all. Do you understand?” You kneel and scoop up the tiny bowl of sand and tears, compressing them in your hands. “You can keep passionate grief close if you can contain it.” Your arms shake, exerting great pressure. This is how diamonds are made. When you open your han
ds, there’s a small onyx globe there. You place it in my hands, taking away the compass.
And I do finally understand. Loss is life, as irrevocable as it is unavoidable. It isn’t enough just to survive our losses in life; we must face them and learn from them if we are to flourish as loving human beings. Passionate grief either consumes you or you consume it. If you allow it to consume you, if you allow it to become your prison, you will waste away and die. It’s like the old married couple both gone within weeks or even days of one losing the other. But you can’t discard your grief either, for that would dishonor the beauty of what had been shared. What this black crystal globe contains is very much a part of me now. This capsule of grief and guilt has become a part of my history. Not only must I accept it, but I have to understand that it shapes me from this moment forward.
You press my hands and the black globe against my chest. The globe vanishes, inexplicable drawn inside. “Keep that close. Keep that within your heart.” You hold up the orb that contains the compass, its needle unerringly steady. “And this one ... wasn’t it you who taught me that on a motorcycle you go where you look? You don’t need this one any more, my love.” And the compass globe also vanishes.
You pull off your helmet, shake free your lovely hair, and smile at me with a beauty that I’ll never have trouble recalling again. Then you lean in to kiss me one last, sweet, unforgettable time.
The Road Ahead
I pause at the far rim of the valley. The surreal landscape behind me is disintegrating in my mirrors, but I’m not watching it. I’m focused on the flat Oklahoma landscape ahead. The road before me is composed of high-speed sweepers, the kind of curves you can take at over a hundred miles an hour. Somewhere just out of sight, I know the road will change. There’ll be blind, decreasing radius curves and steep hills and all manner of challenges. That’s just how life works.