by Jean Rabe
I turn and look back down the mountain. The feeling I have watching the Black Rider navigate the last of the switchbacks is like a blossoming hole in the pit of my stomach. Not fear, but the overwhelming absence of fear: a terror that has already consumed and negated itself. This is intimately coupled with a remote twinge of disbelief. It’s as if I’ve been reading a novel and half way through encounter a page blank but for the words “None of this is true.” Well, if none of this is true, then what does that say for the solitary statement itself?
But I know what is true. Two things, if you want to get specific.
I know you’re gone forever.
And I know it’s possible for guilt and grief and despair to consume a man. To grow like that expanding black void in my gut. To take wing and fly. To become substance. To want, and need, and ... take.
Just witness my pursuer.
None of this is true.
They say that the instant before a bomb goes off, it will inhale enough oxygen to fuel its detonation, much the way a backdraft occurs in a house fire. If the bomb is packaged in an airtight container, it will actually draw a vacuum, sucking at the container walls, imploding for an instant before it explodes. My world does that now, just as it did the instant before the accident, in that arrested moment when I screamed your name. My ears pop. My heart stops. The sound of the bike vanishes. And the sudden cessation of time and place is consumed by a piercing banshee wail from the Black Rider. He thinks he’s caught me.
I drop my helmet visor, toe the bike into first gear, twist the throttle hard enough that the rear tire screams white smoke, and plunge down into the mouth of the devil.
If I Could Just Remember Your Face
C.S. Lewis said that we’ve seen the faces of those we love so often, from so many different angles and in so many different lights, expressing so many different emotions and engaged in so many different activities, that all these images crowd together in our memory, overlapping and blurring until once that face is removed from our daily lives it becomes impossible to recollect. The dead are effectively destroyed not by their leaving but by our very memories of them.
I have no trouble recalling the face of the woman who killed you (and incidentally died in the process), perhaps because I have just that single image of her in my mind. You wouldn’t know this, of course, but she was ejected from her vehicle and scattered across the road in a shower of windshield glass and impossibly red droplets (it was weeks later that it occurred to me that these were beads from a necklace). Scattered. No better word describes it. There was a flat-soled shoe right about here. Her cell phone there. (If I’d picked it up, would there have been someone at the other end frantically asking if everything was all right?) Her glasses, minus the left lens, placed just so across the white line at the edge of the road. Her purse and its contents, here, there, everywhere, distributed like tiny bones in some primitive ritual.
I remember there were delicate diamonds of windshield glass impregnating her face, twinkling like Christmas lights in the strobes from the emergency vehicles. Her long blond hair had spread like a fan. Her skirt was up around her waist, and a part of me couldn’t help but notice how lovely were her legs, but a greater part of me wished that someone would cover her, ached for the fact that her own loved ones might one day see a police photo or a callous video sequence shot by reporters (already gathering on the scene like vultures) and think the same thing: “Dear Lord, why couldn’t someone have at least pulled down her skirt?” (Eventually, the EMTs did cover her, but like every other moment following that brutal millisecond that contained the impact, it seemed to take a lifetime, as if time had been broken when you were broken.)
If I could just remember your face, then perhaps I could sit you down across a candlelit table, intertwine my fingers with yours on the fine linen, and tell you goodbye. I didn’t get to say that. Didn’t get to tell you I love you. In that frozen instant when it seemed I vacated my own body and circled the scene, witnessing the accident from every angle but incapable of interceding, all I had time to do was scream your name. You looked at me, but I can’t remember your expression. Can’t remember your face.
And then you were gone.
If I could just remember your face ... if I could just bring you back for one day, one romantic evening, one minute in which to do more than say your name ... then maybe I could let you go.
Ribbon of Black
The first switchback comes at me horribly fast. I’m downshifting-third, then second gear-blipping the throttle each time before easing out the clutch in order to match engine RPMs to the rear wheel. Imprecision kills. A locked rear wheel could flick me into a highside crash, bringing the bike down on top of me, hurling me toward the outside of the curve where aluminum guard-rails have been known to mutilate, amputate, decapitate. The engine howls. The forks compress. The front end shudders and threatens to go into a tank-slapper.
I shift my weight off the seat and to the inside. Like a racer, I extend my inside knee. It’s essential that I get my weight down and inside; otherwise, I’m not going to make this turn. I push the inside handlebar down, and most importantly, stay on the throttle. Backing off now would slow the rear tire and send the front end wide. The rear of the bike must be moving faster than the front in order to drive the bike toward the apex of the curve—basic physics. Chopping the throttle after you’ve overcommitted to a turn is a classic beginner’s error and has taken many a life.
Somewhere above me, the Black Rider is cresting the ridge and starting his own decent into La Boca del Diablo. I dare not look back, though. All my attention is focused on the exit of the turn. On a motorcycle, you go where you look. Though I’m peripherally aware of it, I can’t look down when my inside foot peg scrapes the asphalt, can’t watch the trail of sparks dancing behind me, much as I would like to. I’ve never dragged hard parts on this bike before. As terrifying as it is, there’s a sense of accomplishment as well, an adrenalin rush that comes from being this far out on the edge.
The curve’s apex whips past at over 70 miles per hour with the engine screaming in second gear. The exit of the curve is coming up fast. I see the edge of the road and the steep side of the mountain from the corner of my eye. (Must not look at it!) As it rockets past, I nail the throttle and let the bike stand up. The front wheel leaves the ground. The rear end of the bike slides, but I’ve got it under control, squaring off the corner like a pro. The engine howls, I nail third gear, and the speedometer needle sails past a hundred. Two more switchbacks and I’m home free. There’s no way the Black Rider can keep up with me across the floor of the valley.
I’m riding like I never have before. It’s as if the loss of fear has galvanized my skills, forging an entirely new breed of confidence. But it’s an ambivalent beast. I feel no need to look back over my shoulder and crow at the other rider. After so many years of motorcycling, to have achieved this once-unattainable level now, when I have absolutely nothing to live for and no one to share the exhilaration with ... well, I suppose there’s an intricate substructure that ties the events of our lives together. It’s more than just fate or karma, and it’s far more cynical that it has a right to be.
Take, for instance, the fact that it was motorcycles that brought us together. (I pick at the scabs of these memories as the second switchback rushes up to meet me. I’m on the brakes again and shedding gears, the gas tank pressing into my lower abdomen, sliding my butt off the seat and extending that knee like a sail.) I’d just ridden over a thousand miles to meet an old flame. After finding her on the Internet, I’d been trading e-mails with her for months, reminiscing about the good old days, and in one of those e-mails I had confessed that I’d never really gotten over her. When she said we ought to get together, I took her literally. I didn’t own a car, but had just bought a used motorcycle, my first. Without knowing anything about riding long distance, I bungee-corded some haphazard gear on the passenger seat and left Los Angeles for Oklahoma City. Twenty-two hours and 1,300 miles later, I ar
rived at her apartment—only to find there was no one home.
There had to be some mistake. She knew I was coming. She must have just stepped out for an hour or two: a quick trip to the grocery store so that she’d have something to feed me when I arrived; a post office run that she absolutely had to make; a sick friend. It had to be something like that. With rain coming down in sheets, I settled on her front step, my back against the door, partially sheltered by the awning. Long past exhaustion, I fell asleep there, wrapped in my sleeping bag with an old sweatshirt as a pillow, the rain turning to sleet.
I didn’t wake until you poked me some four hours later.
“You’re going to freeze to death out here.”
When I tried to sit up, I saw that you were right. My leather jacket crackled, shedding ice. I blinked, my eyes refusing to focus on the petite blonde who’d stepped out of the opposite apartment to check on me. Your hair was disheveled and you were wrapped in a comforter, as if you’d just gotten up from an evening curled in front of the TV. I could feel warm air escaping through the door you’d left open, and I realized you’d left the door standing open as an escape route in case the vagrant on your neighbor’s doorstep turned out to be dangerous. I suppose I was lucky you hadn’t called the police.
“She should be home soon,” I said, suddenly shivering, my blue lips having considerable difficulty with the words.
“I don’t know about that,” you replied with a shrug. “Sometimes she’s gone for several days at a time, visiting her family in Tulsa or staying over with her boyfriend in Norman or—”
“Boyfriend?”
“Yeah. Boyfriend.”
“But ...” The word hung in the air between us. Pride put the brakes on whatever I’d intended to follow it. I’d just ridden halfway across the country to meet a woman who’d obviously had second thoughts and ducked out on me. A woman who was actually involved with someone else. Flirting in cyberspace was one thing, but reality was something else entirely. She’d never intended it to go this far. I was such a schmuck.
I tried to get to my feet, but my joints were stiff and uncooperative. I was sore from the ride. Sore from the hard concrete of the step. Frozen to the very core of my being.
“Here, let me help you.” You took my arm and pulled.
“Just help me get to my bike.”
“There’s no way you can ride like this—even if the roads weren’t starting to ice.” You pulled me toward your open door and that glorious warmth.
“I can’t ...”
“I’ve got some coffee on the stove. And I’ll make soup.”
“How do you know I’m not dangerous?”
You smiled then for the first time. (I wish I could remember it, but all I have are these out-of-focus scenes that play over and over in my mind, the emotions delivered with crystal clarity but the images clouded with a dreamlike, slow-motion fog.) “Dangerous men don’t ride their motorcycle through sleet on the off chance of finding an old girlfriend at home,” you said.
Then you drew me into your apartment and deposited me on a worn but comfortable sofa. As the heat fogged my glasses, I found myself encapsulated in a diamond mine. I had to pull my glasses off and wipe them twice before I could discern that the glittering objects all around me were snow globes. Hundreds and hundreds of crystal balls, each containing its own frozen moment in time. You pulled one from a shelf and, after tugging off my gloves, placed it in my hands.
“There,” you said, tapping a fingernail against the glass ball, “concentrate on that.” It was a scene from some Caribbean paradise: white sand, wind-tossed palm trees, dunes shifting back and forth in a liquid breeze as the globe rocked in my trembling hands. “Think warm thoughts while I get the coffee.”
I think I fell in love with you at that very moment.
Sure, I’ve embellished it all in my mind. (We all rewrite our own history.) Love at first sight doesn’t really exist, does it? It would take weeks of getting to know each other before that first kiss. Several trips back and forth between LA and a suburb of OKC. Endless nights with telephones pressed to our ears. A thousand secrets exchanged and the ensuing anxious moments. But I spent that night on your couch wrapped in your comforter, smelling your subtle perfume in its folds, wondering if you were asleep in the next room, or if, like me, you were thinking that everything might finally be clicking into place. And I wound up not caring that my old girlfriend never put in an appearance or bothered to answer my e-mails or make any attempt to explain herself. As I remember it now, none of that mattered. What mattered was that I had finally found you.
Clearing the last switchback, I twist the throttle for a short, steep run to the flatlands. The suspension bottoms out as I hit a wicked dip in the pavement at one-forty. Then the road opens for me, flat and smooth and un-daunting, a ribbon of black stretched into the distance, vanishing somewhere in the heat waves. Scanning my gauges, I see that my gas needle hasn’t budged. No surprise: the sun hasn’t moved from zenith in all this time either. The speedometer is working fine, though; its orange needle whipping around toward the tiny peg that will halt its progress at the far end of the dial.
None of this is true.
I tuck down behind the windscreen and hang onto the bars as the bike roars down the highway.
Let’s see if you can keep up with me now, Black Rider.
A Singular Moment of Grace
People are amazed that I still ride motorcycles.
“How can you,” they ask, “knowing how dangerous it is, having watched what happened to ...” (Here the question always trails off, as if what they see on my face makes it impossible to use your name. But I hear them sometimes, my friends and yours. Whispering like ghosts in another room. A muted, indecipherable trickle of water on glass or the wind through a weeping willow—sounds from which I can always pick out your name, a single, clear monosyllable of anguish.)
I wondered the same thing about a friend once. He was an accomplished rider—better than me, in fact. He was a safe rider, too. Even taught for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. Like most riders, he wanted to share his passion. His favorite passenger was his eight-year-old daughter, who absolutely loved to ride with him. He taught her to hold on, to lean with him in the curves, to shift her weight to the foot pegs when going over bumps. They were on the interstate one afternoon when a sofa fell from the back of a pickup truck in front of them. There was very little time to react. Most riders would have hit the sofa or locked up the bike’s brakes and gone down. But my friend was one of the best riders I’ve ever known. He executed a high-speed evasive maneuver, whipping the bike around the tumbling sofa, a great example of countersteering and swerving. But the maneuver was so quick and unexpected that it caught his daughter unaware and flicked her off the back of the bike and onto the roadway ... where she was crushed beneath an eighteen wheeler.
Though my friend never again carried a passenger, people found it hard to believe that he continued to ride after his daughter’s death.
What they don’t understand is this: when I ride, it consumes me. Everything is focused on the present moment. Crouched over the tank, I’m captured in an insulated instant where past and future do not exist. Because there’s no future, there’s no fear. A person freed of what might happen, what could happen, what will happen in the next moment knows nothing of fear. And because there’s no past, there’s no pain. Wrenched from the continuity of time, there is only now, and now cannot hurt me.
Riding, I’m caught in that vacuum sphere just before the bomb goes off, where nothing exists but the machine and me. An amniotic bubble in time and space. The frozen scene in one of your snow globes.
Call it a Singular Moment of Grace.
True North
The speedometer needle quivers wildly around 180, and it appears that’s all she’s got. The road has become a tunnel, a hole sucking me toward the horizon and that point where the yellow centerline vanishes in an infinitesimal pinpoint. I risk a quick glance over my shoulder—hurtling for
ward at this speed, taking my eyes off the road for even a second is dangerous. I can no longer see the Black Rider. For the time being, it appears I’ve escaped.
The rim of the valley shrinks behind me. There’s just me and the bike beneath a boundless sky. The valley’s much larger than I imagined from the rim, and the far side—a jagged line like the edges of a broken clay pot—doesn’t seem to be coming any closer. Here, within the bubble that is La Boca del Diablo, space is infinite. Time has no meaning. Pain is forever.
Inexplicably, something appears in the distance. A small building beside the road. Black metal framework and glass I ease off the throttle and rise from my tuck as the building looms up out of the sand and skeletal scrub brush. I know I shouldn’t stop, but this anomaly screams for investigation. The rider is nowhere to be seen behind me, lost perhaps in the heat waves rippling over the road surface.
The rear wheel locks and the bike slides on sand the last ten feet or more. I drop the kickstand by pure reflex, because I’m not thinking. The building is a phone booth. The phone is ringing. I know I have to answer it—before he gets here. My helmet is in my hands as I slam aside the doors. The ringing stops as the receiver leaves the cradle. The earpiece is as cold as a tombstone against my face.
“What took you so long?”
I can’t speak. In the suffocating dead space of the booth, I feel a great pressure stifling my breath, the beating of my heart, even my thoughts. I’ve gone numb. Your voice is a million miles away, but the teasing laugh is unmistakable.
I manage to whisper your name, nothing more.
“Listen carefully. We don’t have much time.”
We didn’t have much time, I want to tell you. We should have had a lifetime. We deserved a lifetime.
