Mountain Road, Late at Night by Alan Rossi

Author:Alan Rossi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

NICHOLAS

Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘All people are in the midst of illumination. When you look at it, you don’t see it; everything seems dark and dim. How is it being in the midst of illumination?’

—THE TRUE DHARMA EYE, CASE 81

There was the ticking of the car’s engine and the sensation of falling awake in the dark. The grey outlines of the interior of the car slowly materialized in the darkness – steering wheel and dash and airbag and frame that once held the windshield. Then he felt himself, felt his head pressed against a flat, almost carpeted surface, which he knew, after something in him made an adjustment, was the roof of the car, and that he was upside down in it, still in his seat, held by the seatbelt. In and through the grainy dark, the splintered windshield lay flat on the ground, grass flattened beneath the cracked glass. The ticking of the car’s engine slowed. A humming of pain from some distant source, like a tuning fork struck gently, grew louder and more intense. He felt himself falling into himself to the sound of the ticking engine. His vision darkened and he closed his eyes, and after a moment, opened them. The darkness undimmed again, and there was the steering wheel, the deployed airbag, a pulsing pain behind his eyes that sent brief flashes of white into his vision, which slowly faded. Beyond the flattened and splintered windshield was the muddy ground, grass, leaves and brush outside the frame of the car, and further out, the forest. It was dark, but he could see, and suddenly he knew that the forest was lighted by moonlight, almost held by it – that silvery light. That humming pain grew louder. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and now saw the deflated airbag hung upside down from the steering wheel and was wet with blood and swayed gently. It felt like there was an optometrist clarifying his understanding of reality with each closing and opening of his eyes. The airbag swayed noiselessly, a drip of blood hanging from a corner. It occurred to him that the bag hung upside down in the same way he hung upside down from the seatbelt, and yet he was still compactly in his seat, almost squished in it, and he realized through a wave of pain – suddenly the hum of pain crescendoed – that moved up his abdomen and back and into his neck that the roof of the car had been collapsed in the accident, and he had almost been smashed. He felt his breathing get faster, shallower, trying to remember the accident, trying to not feel his body, which suddenly seared with heat and ache. The passenger seat, he could see by moving his eyes but not his head, was empty. He observed his body try to move almost without his will and then tried to think it into movement to get out of the car, as though getting out

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