Falling for June: A Novel (5 page)

David lifted his foot and stepped across the threshold onto the roof. There was not nearly as much wind as he thought there should be at such a height, and he walked slowly and methodically, crossing the rooftop toward the edge. He had doubts, of course—who of even the most depressed among us wouldn’t?—but each step was a silent vote for following through. And
although he had expected to feel nervous, his breathing and his heart rate actually calmed the closer to the edge he came. Then suddenly he was there, with a woozy head, wobbly knees, and a whirling stomach. There was a wide, foot-tall rail, a kind of bulkhead covered with metal flashing, and he sucked up his fear and stepped up onto it and looked straight down into the gray.

A thick fog had rolled in from the sound, and only the tops of the highest buildings rose above it, piercing the fog and creating the impression of a disconnected ghost city floating on a cloud. But the city was not floating, and he knew that were he to lift his foot once more, just one easy step after all the others in his life that had been so hard, the ground would come rushing up through the fog to meet him, putting an end to his imponderably pathetic life. And in a mercifully short amount of time too, he thought. He guessed about six seconds. And because he was an accountant, he was close to being right.

He closed his eyes and imagined he had already jumped:

One one thousand—the roof falling away—two one thousand—accelerating fast—three one thousand—exhale your last breath—four one thousand—faster yet—five one thousand—fractions of a second left—six one thou— Cut to black!

Then that would be it. No more seconds; no more regret. Just death. Just endless nothingness. Just the absence of living. Nothing to be fearful of at all, he thought. It was, after all, a state he’d existed in, or not existed in, for billions of years before he had been born. A little voice inside his head rose up from some dark and baleful place where it had been hiding his entire life, apparently waiting for just this kind of moment. “Here’s your answer at last,” it said. “Here’s the one thing at which you cannot fail. The one decision you cannot second-guess. Take the step, my man; accept the relief. I know you’re nervous. Don’t be. It’s easy. Trust me. Just lean forward and physics will take care of the rest.”

David felt his quads twitch and flex as he leaned out, as if his muscle fibers themselves knew what was coming and were protesting. Second thoughts fought to save his life, but corporeal doubt was no match for the certainty of his spiritual pain, and feeble reason was no match for the voice. “You’re brave, my man. I always knew you were. That’s it. Just a little bit farther.”

Then his head went quiet and calm washed over him. For the first time in a long time he felt fine. So this is all it took, he thought. Freedom had been waiting here all along. All he had needed was an opportunity and the resolve to follow through.

He leaned out, attracted by the gravity of relief and the promise of a rush toward quiet bliss. His eyes were still shut, his knees trembling—
no, maybe, yes
. He knew he had decided when the chatter of his thoughts stopped altogether and his lips curled into a smile. He had found a solution at last.

Now willfully, he inhaled his last breath.

Leaning out into the void.

No fear left.

He felt his stomach lift, his legs going limp. Then he heard another voice, this one quite different from the other, and coming, it seemed, from outside his head:

“You can’t change your mind halfway down.”

David opened his eyes, saw the fog beneath him, and panicked. His arms came out instinctively and began flailing in the cool damp air, the gyroscopic thrust arching him, pulling him back, steadying his precarious stance on the ledge. Then he looked to his left, from where the voice had come, and saw a woman standing next to him. The adrenaline coursing through his system had his brain firing double speed, but even so, or maybe because of it, time seemed to have slowed, or perhaps stopped altogether, as it sometimes does for those who have come to the end of a life and have only moments left with which to contemplate it. And although David was mildly aware
in some remote corner of his mind that he was still standing on a roof ledge nine hundred feet plus above the street, all he could think about was this curious creature standing next to him with the peculiar and enchanting smile.

It was the most mysterious smile David had ever seen. Although it was not so much upon her mouth as it was contained within her eyes. It was a smile at once intimate and elusive, familiar yet strange. Her irises twinkled with ironic exuberance from within the folds of the tanned and crinkled skin that surrounded her eyes. He could not tell their color. He could only tell that they seemed to be illuminated from within and altogether too bright for the gray light in which they both stood, side by side now, on the quiet roof. She was gazing idly out at the city below them, as if the two of them were nothing more than old friends enjoying the view. She was slight of frame, almost birdlike in her build, and yet she was somehow anything but small. He could not have guessed her age. She appeared both impossibly young and utterly timeless. There were deep lines etched on her face, but they contrasted so sharply with the youthful energy in those sparkling eyes that he would have believed her had she claimed to be either side of seventeen or seventy-five.

All of this ran through David’s mind in mere moments, of course, and when he finally realized that he had not actually jumped, and that this woman was not an apparition come to visit him in death, he opened his mouth and in a nervous, high-pitched voice that sounded very out of place considering the circumstances, asked her the only sensible question that came to mind: “Do you work here in the building?”

“Only today,” she replied, very conversationally.

His gaze dropped to the Building Maintenance logo on the breast pocket of her jacket. The jacket was blue, and she wore a blue backpack that matched it so perfectly he only saw it because the straps crossing her chest bisected part of the white
lettering. None of this would have seemed out of the ordinary had he not glanced farther down and seen that she was not wearing any shoes. She had on khaki cargo pants, the kind hikers often wear, and their bottoms were cinched tight around her thin ankles, showing off her sockless feet. David noticed that three of her toenails were pink, as if she had started painting them but had given up.

“Are you planning to jump?” she asked.

David lifted his gaze back to her face. She was looking directly at him. Her eyes were still smiling, but they seemed to him to contain something else now too. Possibly concern, he thought, or perhaps just curiosity.

“Ah, well, not really,” he stuttered. “I was just looking.”

He wasn’t quite sure why, but he stepped back down off of the ledge. Her head turned to follow him, but she did not move. She was eye level with him now.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”

“I’m not ashamed,” he said. “I have no reason to be ashamed.”

This was an enormous lie of course, because he was ashamed about everything and he wore it like a neon safety vest. But she did not challenge him. She only smiled more deeply with her eyes and said, “Good.”

Good.
The way it rolled from her mouth gave it much more meaning than the word itself.
Good.
As if she were telling him with that single syllable that he was right to not be ashamed, and that he never should be, ever.
Good.
As if the word itself was a reason to live.

“Are
you
planning to jump?” he asked.

“Oh, I never know what I’ll do anymore until the moment comes and I’ve done it. Although I guess it did take a little planning to get the door unlocked today, so it would seem a shame to waste all that effort.”

He felt his heart sink. Part of him had thought that maybe
she had come to convince him that jumping was a bad idea, and his realization that she might be as suicidal as he was stripped him of even this little glimmer of hope.

“So, you do mean to jump.” It was a statement more than a question, for he already knew the answer. Somehow, he knew.

“I sure as hell don’t want to hike down all those stairs,” she said. “It was a real trek just getting up them. No, I think jumping seems the faster way down.”

He began to panic. Was he talking to a lunatic? Should he restrain her? Call for help? He knew he was in no position to give advice on the subject, but at least he hadn’t been so cavalier about jumping to his death.

“You mean to tell me you’d rather jump than walk down stairs? That’s your reason for wanting to die. Are you mad?”

“Why of course not, silly,” she replied. “I’m not jumping because I want to die. I’m jumping because I want to live.”

“You want to live?”

He was feeling rather confused, naturally.

“Yes, I want to live,” she said. “And so should you.”

“I should?”

She nodded. “I think so. Don’t you?”

“But you don’t even know me,” he said.

The smile in her eyes deepened. “I think I know you better than you think.”

Something about the way she looked at him made him believe that maybe she did.

“But what if there doesn’t seem to be any point to living?” he asked.

He detected a subtle nod of her chin, a momentary look of sadness, as if she understood his statement all too well. But then her lips curled at the corners and her eyes took on their sparkle again. “Maybe there is no point to life,” she said, “except falling pointlessly in love.”

This caught him off guard, and for some reason he blushed. Then he felt the old resentment rise, the one buried deep in his guts that he only took out on special occasions when he wanted to simultaneously feel sorry for himself and hate his ex-wife.

“I know for a fact that love has killed more people than it’s saved,” he said.

As an accountant, of course, he knew damn well that this likely wasn’t true and certainly couldn’t be proved, but he said it anyway. But if she disagreed with him, she chose not to argue over it. She simply shrugged it off and said, “You’re so cynical.” As if that were news. As if he hadn’t just been about to kill himself. “Besides, what if life and death aren’t separate things anyway?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘aren’t separate’?”

His mind was working overtime to keep up.

“Well, what if they’re just sides of the same thing? What if death is not the opposite of life, but rather the one part that gives all the rest of life its meaning? I’m not saying it’s so. But what if it is? What if you have to let go of your life to truly live it? Wouldn’t that give you an edge on the rest of the world, knowing that, now that you’ve looked into the abyss and stepped back from the ledge?”

On some subconscious and metaphorical level David thought maybe he understood what it was she meant. As a suicidal accountant standing on a roof, however, her words confused him greatly.

“Let go of life to live? That sounds a little clichéd and a lot hopeless.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But hopeless can be a good place to start again.”

A cold wind came up and pressed against his back and he suddenly felt unstable, and surprisingly, especially to him, afraid of falling. They were after all on the edge of a very high
building. The wind seemed not to worry her, however. In fact, it hardly seemed to touch her slight frame, and only the ends of her hair danced in the cold breeze. His mind raced to make sense of what was happening. He glanced behind them at the open stairwell door, then back to her. He wanted to say something thoughtful, but words betrayed him. Then he realized that while they had been talking she had actually stepped closer to the edge and her pink toes were hanging over. He recalled her first words to him, and as if his having taken that one small step down off the bulkhead had somehow reversed their roles, he repeated them now.

“You can’t change your mind halfway down.”

Her face lit up once again with her mysterious smile, and she held him suspended in her eyes. He knew then that she would jump, and that he was powerless to stop her.

“Make me a promise, will you, darling?” she said.

David was lost for a response, hung up on the intimacy of the word
darling
, but she went on without waiting for an answer anyway.

“Don’t make a choice today that your future self can’t undo. Please, promise me. We all owe ourselves that. We all owe the child inside of us at least a chance to be forgiven by the man or woman we’re destined to become.”

He was shocked by her familiarity and her insight. Had she been in the bathroom with him when he looked into that mirror? Had she been reading his mind here on the roof? Perhaps he had jumped after all, he thought, and this was just some crazy imagined conversation occurring in the last milliseconds of brain activity as he smashed at a hundred miles an hour into the sidewalk below.

“Promise me,” she said again.

“Promise you that I’ll give myself another chance?”

“Yes, exactly that.”

Something about her eyes made it impossible to do anything but agree—and not just agree for the sake of agreeing, but to actually agree and follow through.

“I promise,” he finally answered.

“Good,” she replied, the simple word filled again with hidden meaning.

Then, having secured his promise, her eyes released him. One moment her smiling eyes had offered the intimacy of a lover—“darling,” she had called him—and the next moment they had withdrawn into themselves as quickly and coolly as two flames being turned down in their lamps. She was still standing there with him, but he felt suddenly helpless and alone on that roof. Then she turned her eyes away.

With one quick and powerful motion that reminded David of the uncoiling of a spring, she leaped away from him and out into the gray. He lunged forward to grab her, but he was too late and only the bulkhead saved him from falling over after her. His heart sank and he felt like puking again. He was afraid to look down. Then he heard a thick whoosh of air followed by a sharp snapping sound, and he leaned over and saw a bright-yellow smiley face grinning up at him from the top of her parachute canopy as it disappeared into the fog.