Eleven Twenty-Three (23 page)

Roy Raymond caused a permanent splash
earlier in his career when, after finding himself embarrassed about
buying his wife lingerie in an agoraphobic department store, he
came up with an idea for a secluded and discreet environment in
which men could buy their female counterparts underwear away from
the prying eyes of others. He called his bra and panties shop
Victoria’s Secret, and opened the first of many in Stanford in
1977. His store was an immediate success, and was quickly followed
by three new boutiques and a mail-order catalogue. Mr. Raymond
seemed to have hit it big.

His fame and good fortune was not to last,
however. After repeatedly failing to garner another brilliant idea
in the vein of the Secret and losing millions of dollars in the
process, Raymond was eventually forced in 1982 to sell his six
million dollar company for one million to the Limited. He filed for
bankruptcy in 1985 after yet another store, this one a children’s
clothing outlet called My Child’s Destiny, went under. Afterward,
Roy Raymond plummeted into the abyss and spent the next seven years
in destitute obscurity. But even after all this, the IRS did not
hesitate to hand him a $77,000 bill from back taxes. His wife
divorced him, as well.

Things may have gotten better for Roy
Raymond, had he toughed it out. They may have gotten worse. He
never found out though. Instead of waiting for the next domino to
fall, Raymond took a walk on the Golden Gate Bridge one morning and
never returned.

“That’s really sad,” Mitsuko said.

“Sad? Oh,
fuck
him,” Hajime said. “He
was crazy. Even if he was broke and divorced, he still had family
that loved him. He still had the fame that goes with opening a
store as lucrative as that one. His suicide isn’t sad; it’s a slap
in the face to everyone that had anything invested in him. He was a
selfish asshole.”

“So must the other twenty or thirty other
people who jump from this bridge every year,” Tara said irritably,
stopping at Light Post 73. “This is the most common place in the
world for people to kill themselves.”

“Yeah, but Japan had the most people in a
single place in a single year,” Mitsuko added proudly, lighting a
cigarette and hanging her head over the side to view the melted
gem-colored water 220 feet below us. “In 2002 in the forests of
Aokigahara at the base of Mount Fuji, seventy-eight bodies were
found. What’s the record holder on the Overrated Bridge?”

“I think it was around forty in 1977, but I
could be wrong,” Tara said.

“No, she can’t,” I interjected. “This is an
obsession of hers. I’m halfway expecting her to try and stand on
the railing later herself, just to get the vibe right.”

“I’m not obsessed, idiot. Actually, I did a
paper on suicide hot-spots and their allure last semester, so I’m
just in awe right now to really be standing where so many people
have chosen to end their own lives.”

“Tara, why you’re not wearing black-and-white
striped knee socks and a corset is beyond me,” Hajime said. “You’re
spooky.”

It was summer, almost two years ago. An old
friend that Hajime and I knew from high school, a nice guy we
always called Joe the Poet because of his Full Bright scholarship
in the subject, was getting married to another old friend of ours
from the bar, a girl we dubbed Paris the Painter because of her
shitty watercolors. The wedding would be in San Francisco just
before the couple moved to Singapore the following month. So, since
Hajime was single and I was not, we brought our girlfriend and
sister along for the wedding and three days of sightseeing.

Tara could not have been more thrilled. The
first thing she asked after I invited her to the Bay for four days
was not who was getting married or what she would wear or if she’d
be able to afford the plane ticket, but when we would be able to
cross the famous orange vermillion bridge.

So one brisk and clear Thursday morning, the
day before Joe’s wedding, the four of us were there on it, looking
down at the water and toward Alcatraz, where we had a tour
scheduled at two that afternoon.

“Are you asleep in the present right now?”
Mitsuko asked me. “Unconscious like me?”

“Right now?” I asked back. “I’m not sure what
the last thing that happened was, so there’s no way to tell if this
is a pure memory or one of those reconstructions of a memory laced
with subconscious awareness of the current situation.
What
did I just say?”

“I think you were standing in front of your
mother’s apartment when it happened,” Hajime said, smiling at
another Japanese girl walking by with her family.

“You see that thing down there on the other
side of the railing?” Tara said, pointing down six feet to a
thirty-two inch beam running along the length of the bridge.
“That’s called the Chord. Most of the jumpers stand on that right
before they do it. A few just dive over the railing.”

“Maybe we’ll see one of them today.”

“You’d actually want to see that, Hajime?”
Mitsuko said, grinning mischievously at me while Tara leaned as far
over the railing as possible. “I don’t think I’d ever get the image
out of my head.”

I turned away from Mitsuko and peered into
the sunlight, at the majestic pillars looming over our heads. I
wondered to myself if anyone had ever climbed to the top of one of
those and
then
jumped, as they might have stood out among
the hundreds of others who’d leaped over the years.

When I looked back down to eye level again, I
spotted Mr. Scott sitting lazily on the railing about twenty feet
away. He was wearing sunglasses, gray slacks with a perfect crease,
gray coat with a small gold American flag pinned to his lapel, and
a red tie. Tourists walked behind him obliviously. A cop drove by
on a bicycle and nodded to him, and he nodded back.

His briefcase was lying on the walkway behind
him.

“Sometimes people leave their wallets or cell
phones or something behind when they go,” Tara was saying. “I’m not
sure why. Maybe so that the police will know who they are and that
they jumped. Maybe they don’t want anything with them from this
life when they go.”

“Maybe they’re worried that their wallet
might break the fall,” Hajime said.

I laughed at this zany comment and went back
to staring at Mr. Scott, who was now looking directly at me and
dangling his feet over the side. He intermittently looked down and
then back at me. He wanted me to dare him.

“What do you think goes through their mind
before they jump?” Mitsuko asked. “Do you think they focus on what
it is they’re doing and why it’s necessary, or do you think they’d
have to put all their thought into something more prosaic so they
don’t delve too hard into their own death and chicken out?”

“It’d be interesting to know,” Tara said.
“Maybe it would save lives.”

“But not the economy,” Hajime interjected.
“The thirty thousand suicides America has a year saves the nation
millions of dollars once they’re not alive anymore and consuming
resources.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Well, Tara, not really,” I said, looking
away from Mr. Scott. “A great deal of suicides are the homeless,
the destitute, the parents overloaded with six kids and living on
welfare, the junkies, the bankrupt, the erratic, the hospitalized,
and especially old dying people swallowing up gargantuan amounts of
money in permanent nursing care. If murder and suicide ended
tomorrow, America would go into a recession worse than the Ford
years.”

“Human despair fuels the machine,” Hajime
said.

“Human despair only fuels you two,” Tara
said, eyeing us with contempt. “You can’t tell me it’s not a small
step to empathize with some of these people. What if suicide is not
a choice at all?”

“But it
is
a choice, Sunshine. It’s
the
choice, really. Do I want to live: yes or no? It’s a
decision most of us never even decide to contemplate except when
we’re really alone and drunk, but these people choose to face that
scenario. Then they choose to die. I can’t really say I feel sorry
for people like that.”

Mr. Scott smirked at this, as if he could
hear our conversation above the din of traffic and wind and chatter
from the bridge-walkers streaming along behind him.

“When I was doing my paper this past semester
for Ab-Psych, I read several accounts from would-be suicides that
actually drove over the Bay Bridge to get to the Golden Gate to
jump. The Bay Bridge is just as effective a spot to die as the
Golden Gate, minus the constant patrols and cliché, and yet there
has never been a single case of someone foregoing the red bridge
for the gray one. They said they were being pulled toward it as if
they had no control over their own actions. The same thing goes for
the Sunshine Skyway in Tampa, or the Royal Gorge Bridge in
Colorado, or the Aokigahara in Japan. These great monuments have an
allure to them, like a radiance, as if the suicidal have no choice
but to relent and make their way in some kind of obsessed trance to
these particular locales before they go through with it.”

“Maybe this spot and other easily
recognizable landmarks like it have some kind of romantic allure,”
Mitsuko said. “Maybe the suicidal have the same intrinsic desire
most
Americans have, which is to acquire their moment of
fame. Maybe they just think that if they come here, by some osmosis
some of the Bridge’s renown will be passed onto them.”

“What about this bridge would pull a guy our
age across the country like a magnet just to commit suicide?” Tara
asked us. “What would it take to lure hundreds of people here to
this spot to jump? Even if roughly eighty-five percent of the
jumpers here were from the Bay, there’s still that other fifteen
percent. Why do they come here?”

“Tara, one example is not enough to prove to
me that certain spots have a kill-yourself-here spell to bipolars
and schizos,” Hajime said. “Have you ever thought that maybe people
kill themselves here because it’s just so damn easy to do so? I
mean, look at it: this railing is four feet tall, everyone who
jumps off either dies on impact or drowns soon after—”

“—There have been twenty-six survivors,” Tara
interrupted.

“That’s not my point. My point is that maybe
it’s all about accessibility. Nothing more. Hell, we’ve been here
twenty minutes and
I’m
thinking of jumping just because it’s
so easy to do so.”

“I believe that once death has occurred
enough times in a certain location, it somehow attains a sort of
subconscious allure to it. Police will tell you about spots across
the country where crimes and murders and suicides just seem to
accumulate without any explanation.”

“Yeah, it’s usually called a black
ghetto.”

“I’m not talking about poor economic areas,
you racist ass. I mean these ‘death spots’ are in good
neighborhoods, in mundane places, where there shouldn’t be this
kind of trouble and yet there is.”

“This relates to what’s happening in real
life in Lilly’s End right now,” I found myself saying, only then
making the connection. “There are these sudden rashes of homicidal
behavior all over town, and as soon as the perpetrators have no
further access to a potential victim, they turn the behavior on
themselves. Miranda is just one example.”

Mr. Scott waved his finger at me with a grin,
nodding his head. Then he looked back down at the water.

“That’s totally different,” Hajime scoffed,
shaking his head. “Oh my god
,
that is
totally
different, Layne.”

“Wait, hold on. Maybe it’s not. We live in a
small, stupid little shit of a town called, quite appropriately,
Lilly’s End. A moron with a penchant for heavy-handed symbolism
would have a field day with the town moniker alone. Further, in
Lilly’s End, not only do the residents never seem to escape—and
that includes Tara and me, since we were drawn back into it by a
death
, of all things—but it also draws hordes of old people
there every year to wait out existence while sunbathing. And with
the suicides happening now—I mean, how is our town so different
from the bridge we’re on in this memory, guys?”

“Because, bro,” he said, “Tara’s over here
going on and on about suicide hot spots, where people have a choice
and can control their own actions. They can live or die depending
on their whim, and the only influence the locations have over
anyone who dies there is the fulfillment of the herd mentality.
People flock to the same spots to die because they want to fit in,
even in death. It’s just like that story our dad told Mitsuko and
me, about how back in 1933 these two school kids from Tokyo jumped
into the Mihara Volcano in Oshima. By the end of the month, six
more people had jumped in and tourists were gathering to witness
the suicides, which totaled 140 that year and 160 the next, which
actually beats out Mitsuko’s Aokigahara score, now that I think
about it.”

“I don’t get your point,” Tara said.

“It’s just that sad people want to die where
other sad people died before them, Tara. That’s it. That’s your
reason. What happens here on the Golden Gate is actually quite
pathetic
in its mediocrity. It’s not some ghostly mysticism.
It’s simply a combination of old-fashioned herd mentality and easy
access. Nothing more. I’ve got to say, I think you’re reaching on
this one, Tara.”

“Oh, and
you
weren’t reaching when you
said that Cheney liked to chase brainwashed children around a
compound in Montana naked?”

“Or when you told us that the Bush family
transformed into Reptilians and raped prostitutes, Hajime?” Mitsuko
adds.

“They were just theories,” he shrugged.
“There were witnesses.”

“These locales have
bodies
, Hajime.
Hundreds of them.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” he said.