BLACK RIDER

Brian A. Hopkins

Four-time Bram Stoker Award winner Brian A. Hopkins is the author of The Licking Valley Coon Hunters Club, Wrinkles at Twilight, These I Know By Heart, El Dia de los Muertos, and Lipstick, Lies, and Lady Luck. His short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Historical Hauntings, Sol’s Children, A Walk on the Dark-side , Mystery Scene Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Black Gate, Cemetery Dance, Haunted Holidays, Postscripts, Renaissance Faire and others. Brian has been a finalist for both the Nebula Award and the Ted Sturgeon Memorial Award for science fiction, as well as the International Horror Guild Award. Brian lives in Oklahoma City. After a multiyear hiatus from writing, Brian returns with this story of coming to terms with grief and despair. Visit his webpage at www.bahwolf. com.

My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of laments
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
There lies the substance.

-Richard II, Act 4, Scene 1

La Boca del Diablo

At the top of the ridge, I take a moment to raise my helmet visor and wipe the sweat from my eyes. I need to open the vents in my leather jacket, but there isn’t time to remove it and get to the zippers on the back. Idling in the heat, the fans on the Kawasaki’s 1200cc engine kick on. The inline four thrums smoothly beneath me, inexhaustible, eager for the plunge into the valley.

I don’t know the name of this valley out in the middle of nowhere—I christen it La Boca del Diablo, because its appearance strikes me as a symbolic scream from hell, the visual manifestation of an auditory overload, all those billions of souls crying out at once until the landscape becomes the gaping mouthpiece to their torment—but it’s as wide and barren as an ocean, rippling in heat waves to the horizon, where I imagine the clouds sizzle as they touch the red earth. La Boca del Diablo is choked with arroyos and short, decapitated mesas, but there’s not a single sign of civilization: no gas stations or rest stops or precisely arranged tract homes, just that ribbon of highway vanishing into the distance. It could be a snapshot from Arizona or Utah, and the name I’ve given it does have a piquant southwestern flair to it, but I started my ride less than an hour ago from Oklahoma City, where roads as twisty and steep as the one I just climbed do not exist, let alone terrain such as that spread out before me.

It’s nearly a straight shot down—just three tight switchbacks and then the bottom, the sort of grade on which you expect to find runaway truck ramps. But it’s a road for which the Kawasaki was made. It would be an easy ride were it not for the rider coming up the road behind me. If I can beat him to the bottom, I can tuck down behind the sportbike’s windscreen and open her up, leaving him behind on that long, straight stretch of asphalt. Though I’ve never had this bike over one twenty, they say she doesn’t quit pulling until somewhere around one eighty-five.

My pursuer’s bike is half the size of mine, which makes it infinitely more maneuverable in the tight stuff, but much slower in a straight line. Though at times he’d been just a bike length or two behind me coming up the hill and I’d gotten a good look at him in my mirrors, I couldn’t identify the bike’s make or model. It’s nondescript and black, as is the rider: black leather and an even blacker helmet with an impenetrable visor, a screaming hole in reality behind me. I’d only beaten him to the crest of the ridge by accelerating faster out of the corners, riding well beyond my previous limits, spinning and sliding my rear tire as if I thought I was World Champion Valentino Rossi, then going full throttle up the straight stretches to the next switchback. All of which meant I was last-minute-hard-on-the-brakes coming into each turn, my front end near washing out, my stock brakes fading more and more after the first ten minutes of abuse. Even now, I can smell where the pads have literally been cooking against the discs. I’ve no idea if they’ll hold up going down the steep grade before me, if I’ve already warped a disc or over-stressed the stock lines. I’ll have to use the engine for most of my braking, dropping the Kawasaki into ever lower gears while she screams in the upper ranges of her tach.

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 arrived 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 forward 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.

“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 next 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 hands, 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.

My shadow stretches out in front of me, chased by the setting sun, showing me the way. I place my hand over my chest, feel the weight within my heart, and know that you are with 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 accelerate toward the horizon.