Upward Over the Mountain

Jamie had always hated physics. The math, of course, but the concept, too. He’d never found it within himself to give a shit about the physics of the world he lived it. Why did it matter how gravity worked—it just did, and that was enough for him. Poetic, he thought, that physics was the reason the bus hadn’t gone over the cliff yet. It hung there precariously, two wheels on the road, two wheels spinning over a chasm.

Jamie Dorsan and his mother had hopped on a bus going west just two days ago, and he could still remember with terrible vivacity the image of his father yelling across the bus station. Maybe blood was thicker than water, but sharing DNA with Dan Dorsan had never made him Jamie’s father. From dreary Ohio to California, they were slowly but ever so surely putting thousands of miles between him and themselves-- leaving the darkness behind for the bright lights and fresh dreams of the Golden Coast.

Jamie had been thrilled to pass through Colorado; Ohio didn’t have mountains, it had miles of the flattest land in the country. Amber waves of grain, as he’d so often heard them referred to. As though acres and acres of tick-infested crops warranted a metaphor as lovely as a wave.

There are mountain passes in Colorado, tunnels you have to drive through in order to cross over to Utah, the next step on the way to California. When Jamie and his mother and the thirteen other passengers on the bus had gone through the first one, the bright, clear daylight of the mountainous altitudes had turned instantly to night, reminding Jamie a little bit of subway trains, only ten times more fantastic. His nineteen-year- old brain saw metallic walls flitting past the window and thought it might just be what time-traveling looked like.

It was on the other side of the pass, with daylight shrinking his pupils back to tiny dots swimming in the middle of his warm brown irises, that the bus had swerved to avoid a stalled truck and nosedived halfway off the side of the cliff.

How long had it been? The ten-year- old across from Jamie and his mother had stopped screaming, at least. There was only the quiet sound of sobbing, slightly muffled by the chest of the young boy’s mother. Jamie’s own mom, for her part, was as ghostly white as the chipped paint on the inside of the bus. She sat unnaturally still in her seat with her gaze resolutely fixed on the horror happening outside, as though she was perceiving the situation from another plane of reality. One where the bus’s enormous ass wasn’t hanging over the edge of a cliff and the only thing keeping them alive was physics. Fucking physics. It was science, gravity, a thousand other esoteric “science words” that would determine for how much longer the fifteen people on this bus would be alive to contemplate their imminent death. It seemed to Jamie coldly pragmatic. He thought of his junior year science teacher and what a good psychics problem this would make.

“I see lights.” Kelly’s voice broke Jamie out of his reverie. He looked away from the window—from the cliff drop that may or may not be his grave, and fixed calm eyes on his mother. Her own eyes were puffy; before her decent into catatonia, she’d been crying for the twenty minutes since the bus had gone over, crying hard. It had set off the ten-year- old in the first place. There was an older woman in the back, she looked to be in her late seventies, and Jamie had seen silent tears making tracks down her wrinkly cheeks. She wasn’t the only one, either. After the initial alarm and a lot of screaming, Jamie had watched most of the other passengers devolve from sheer panic to quiet terror, and from terror to resignation. “Look,” Kelly pointed out of the back window, blue eyes so unlike his own squinted to slits. “There are trucks coming.”

They were in the second row, on the right side. Jamie had spoken to the driver when they’d first gotten on. A sixty-something man named Dave with a dead wife and no children. Looking at him now, Jamie saw Dave shared none of his mother’s hope, but he seemed to have decided to let her have it anyhow. Ten minutes earlier, Jamie had spoken to him in whispers, and Dave had told him it was a couple of boulders jamming the back wheels that were still on the road. When the rescue vehicles came and started playing around with it, the boulders would shift and the bus would slip.

“So we’re going to die, then?” Jamie had asked him. Dave hadn’t said yes, but he’d not said no, either. His gray eyes were soulful and sad and when he turned away from Jamie, it was with an air of finality.

His mom was right: there was, indeed, a truck coming—probably more than one, judging by the vibrating ground beneath them—and Jamie shared an expressionless glance with Dave.

There was a loud grinding noise and the bus shifted an inch, maybe three, tilting further into the chasm, and as it happened the passengers held their breath as one. Then it stopped, resettling, prolonging the inevitable and sending four or five people to descend back into hysterics. This caused the ten-year-old burst into tears again, and now Jamie’s mom did as well.

“Mom?” Kelly lifted her head from her hands to look at her son with red, watery eyes, and all he saw in them was fear. Fear, and maybe a little regret. “I’m glad we’re together.”

And then he was enveloped in her arms, and suddenly the tears he’d been holding back this whole time came flooding out like a broken dam, soaking the thin cotton of her cardigan.

“I’m sorry,” she said into his ear, and he could feel the wetness of her cheeks on his neck. He could feel her heart beating where their chests pressed together. “For your father. For running away.” Here she broke down once again and her words became indecipherable, and Jamie, crying silently, clutched her back. “I love you, James.”

“I love you too, Mom.” The words worked around a solid lump like a rock in his throat. “And it isn’t your fault.” The bus lurched this time, his stomach dropped, and a flash of dizziness temporarily made him feel sick. How much longer, he wondered? How many more minutes, how many more seconds? How many more times would his heart beat before the end? How much longer would they endure this?

And was there blackness ahead? He didn’t know. He’d never believed in an afterlife. He wasn’t ready to die, but now Jamie found that he was, in fact, prepared for it. In his nineteen years, he’d been uncommonly good at acceptance of the things he could not change. Perhaps because there had been so many of them.

This was one of those things.

The last thing the fifteen passengers on the bus felt was the rumble of the rescue vehicle’s tires stopping on the road behind them. Dave had been right: something dislodged underneath, and suddenly physics was dragging the rest of the bus over the edge.

Jamie was weightless. He counted as they fell.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

In the middle of five, impact, and a millisecond later, nothing.