Gravity and the Rogers Pass

“Could you slow down?” Connor’s voice was tight, his hands braced against the dashboard. His knuckles were white.

Mika didn't answer. He kept his foot steady on the accelerator, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. The speedometer needle was hovering just over one hundred and forty kilometres an hour. On a flat, straight prairie highway, it would have been fast. Here, on the twisting, climbing roads of the Rogers Pass at two in the morning, it was suicidal.

“Terry, I’m serious. Slow the hell down.”

“I’ve got it under control,” Mika said, his tone clipped. He downshifted and the engine screamed as he accelerated into a curve. The tyres squealed in protest. For a heart-stopping second, Connor felt the back end of the car drift, a sickening, weightless sensation before the rubber caught again and rocketed them forward.

Connor’s breath hitched. The smell of hot rubber and the pine-scented air rushing through the open window was suddenly, terrifyingly familiar. The darkness, the speed, the feeling of being a passenger to someone else’s recklessness—it was all the same. His mind snapped back a decade, to another dark road, another car.

It had been his father’s sedan, not this beat-up Civic. Mika, sixteen and with a brand-new licence, had been at the wheel. They were coming back from a party, drunk on cheap beer and the feeling of being invincible. And then the deer. The swerve. The screech of metal on gravel and the explosive pop of the windscreen turning to a spiderweb of fractured glass. The final, jarring impact as they slid into the ditch.

He remembered the silence that followed. The smell of coolant and damp earth. And he remembered the other car. The one they had clipped during the swerve. He’d never forgotten the sight of its single remaining headlight pointing crazily up at the night sky.

“This isn't just driving, is it?” Connor said, his voice shaking. “This is you trying to prove something. Same as always.”

“I’m just trying to make good time,” Mika snapped, but his grip on the steering wheel was unnaturally tight. “We need to be in Revelstoke by morning.”

“No, this is about what happened with Mark,” Connor pushed, the name hanging in the air between them like a ghost. Mark, the driver of the other car. The man who had walked with a limp for a year afterwards.

Mika flinched as if he’d been struck. “Don’t you dare bring him up.”

“Why not? We never talk about it! We just pretend it didn’t happen. You took the blame, your dad paid the fines, and we all just… moved on. But you didn’t move on, did you? You’re still driving that same car, in your head. You’re still trying to outrun it.”

The accusation hit home. Mika’s face, illuminated by the green glow of the dashboard, was a mask of anguish.

“What do you know about it?” he spat. “You were in the passenger seat. You just had to sit there. I was the one driving. I was the one who saw his face. I was the one who had to lie to the cops and say I was the only one who had been drinking.”

Connor’s blood ran cold. “What are you talking about? We were both drinking.”

“You were passed out in the back for an hour before we left!” Mika’s voice cracked, the confession spilling out of him. “You barely had two beers. I was the one who was hammered. I let you give me the keys. I could have killed someone, Connor. I could have killed you. And every time I get behind the wheel, especially at night, I feel it. I feel that skid. I feel the wheel pulling out of my hands.”

He wasn't just driving fast. He was chasing something. Trying to regain a sense of control he’d lost a decade ago on a dark country road. He was pushing the car to its limit, pushing himself to the edge, to prove he could handle it this time.

Suddenly, two points of light appeared in the darkness ahead. They weren't headlights. They were eyes. A massive elk stood frozen in the middle of their lane, a dark, majestic shape caught in the glare.

“Terry!” Connor screamed.

This time, Mika reacted. He slammed on the brakes, and the car fishtailed wildly, the smell of burning rubber filling the cabin. The anti-lock brakes stuttered violently, a machine-gun pulse under their feet. Mika wrestled with the wheel, his movements sharp and desperate, a dance with physics on the edge of a mountain drop-off.

The car slid sideways, its headlights sweeping across the rock face on their right, then the terrifying, empty blackness on their left. The elk, with a toss of its great head, bounded off the road and disappeared.

They came to a stop, angled across the centre line, the engine stalled. For a moment, there was no sound at all. The wind had even died down. There was only the ringing in Connor's ears and the frantic pounding of his own heart.

Mika was slumped over the wheel, his whole body trembling. He was making a ragged, gasping sound.

Slowly, he lifted his head. In the faint moonlight that now seemed impossibly bright, Connor could see tears tracking through the grime on his friend’s face.

Without a word, Mika restarted the engine, the sound an ugly intrusion into the profound silence. He pulled the car over to a small gravel pullout, the tyres crunching to a stop. He turned off the engine. He turned off the lights.

The darkness that flooded in was total. The silence of the mountains was bigger and more absolute than any silence Connor had ever known. It was the silence of rock and ice and immense, uncaring distance. And in that vast emptiness, the sound of Mika’s quiet, broken sobs seemed to be the only thing in the entire world.