Heartbeat

In the rushing dark on the mountain, the banshee screams of wind in the pine trees are counterpoint to the car's heartbeat. There is no life, no death, no heaven or hell, no demons nor gods. When the moon is dark and the sun has died, there is only the ghostly centerline running into the night, running straight and narrow and ever so faint, but always running on.

Father once told me that a boy died here on the mountain twenty years ago. He was a local boy, he said. A local boy who had got caught up in a dare, a foolish dare, a stupid dare. His Toyota smashed into the side of the rail on the fourth turn just before the straightaway, flipped into the air, like a diver arching high overhead into a perfect swan dive onto the ancient glacial rocks below. The onlookers atop the mountain saw the lights, heard the sound like a metal thunderclap. The car as it fell, he told me, looked like a shooting star.

Since then, there has always been something very sad about the very act of setting my foot on the gas. With every curve in the asphalt and every time the bottom of my sole hits the pedal, I think of the dead boy. Will I meet him one day on that fourth bend in the road? Sometimes as I climb the winding pass in the morning before the blue light of dawn touches the treetops, my eyes steal to the edge of the guardrail, which is pale and perfect and whole in its seductive curves now, and wonder.

I do not fear death now, because for five years past, I have driven for the sake of a dead boy's ghost.

It remains in my mind the most vivid scene that I remember. It makes no difference that the memories are not mine, that the hands on the wheel and the squeal of tires on the road are not his hands as he misjudged that fateful turn, are not his tires spinning suspended between fear and redemption. That is simply the story of all those who try the roads. The dark takes no prisoners, hides no secrets that will not be revealed in the end. Even tears are dashed away by the weeping currents of air. Their salt is the fuel of the compressor's fire, their sobs are the roar of the turbine, and their glistening trail is the same glittering arc made by the car as it makes its final turn into the night sky, a shooting star.