Jumper

We first saw him around five o’clock, when a delicate brunette was being rung up at the counter for a pair of black jeans that, we assured her, fit her deliciously. Two of us were standing by the door, making notes on the window displays, and saw him. Then the rest saw that we saw something, and came to see for themselves.

He must have climbed up there a bit past four-thirty, when the afternoon rush hour had just begun, and he could probably see the subway station exit the next block over, with the busy-stepping people streaming out of it, dressed in every imaginable shade of gray and blue. The view probably revealed itself slowly as he approached the ledge, spreading wider to contain more and more buildings, the whole downtown skyline, the hilly parks, the bay, the silver bridge, the red bridge. It was a warm day and so the fog had burned off completely, and the hollering afternoon wind had tired and was now just tickling the imported palms with its whisper. It was probably the perfect kind of day to be up there, weatherwise.

He stood at the very edge of the top of the building directly across the street. Now, someone can stand at the edge of something, or someone can really be on the edge, and he was the latter—one half of each foot projecting out off the roof and pressing down upon 70 feet of yielding, diffident air. Very large sneakers with thick white corrugated rubber treads, Reeboks maybe, provided the only bond between him and the solid world, and we were concerned because clunky clumsy shoes like that don’t necessarily promote balance. His torso leaned forward almost imperceptibly, pushing against something invisible, swaying, vertiginous. He looked down.

Our neighborhood has no skyscrapers to offer, but he had done his best, climbing to the tallest point in at least an eight-block radius, a salmon-colored six-story apartment building with a Mexican restaurant on the ground floor. We wondered how he’d gotten up there.

We stood in a clump and looked up, heads inclined at identical angles. The delicate brunette burst into tears, and her boyfriend asked if they could be let into one of the fitting rooms to sit in private while she collected herself. We let them in, and returned to our spots by the window to watch the man look down and the building stand tall.

He had shaggy hair and a beard and mustache, although the slanting dusky light bathed him in amber and made it difficult to tell whether the hair was brown or gray. Above the Reeboks, he wore ill-fitting jeans and a button-down plaid shirt. The saddest thing was to imagine him buttoning all those buttons that morning.

After some time, the brunette, her porcelain skin turned to ashen chalk, stopped crying and returned to the counter to finish making her purchase, which we helped her do. She took the tissues we offered and thanked us. Under the arm of her boyfriend, she was ushered out. We watched them go and a few of us wished we were crying like she was.

The twilit streets lay barren, the busy road blocked off. Throngs of people had collected at either end of the block where they pulsed against the yellow police tape, trying to see. We had the best view.

Serious-looking policemen and firefighters in heavy uniforms moved up and down the streets, necks craned upward all the time, sometimes talking into walkie-talkies. It looks like a scene from an end-of-the-world movie, we said.

Our front door was still open, and a cop stood by it, outside, looking up.

“Is someone up there trying to talk to him?” we asked.

“Yes.  Someone is up there right now trying to talk him down.  We’re doing everything we can to make this as safe as possible for him.”

We nodded and retreated back into the store.

They’re doing everything they can to make it as safe as possible for him, we said to each other.

So we stood together, rapt, staring up at the man until we couldn’t bear it anymore, and then walking away from the window to fiddle with things on shelves, rearrange magnets or fold T-shirts. We stood in clumps of two or three, seeming always on the verge of saying something but then deciding better of it, and then we would dissolve back into single units, touching our hands lightly to our throats. There was a rhythmic throb behind our movements. To the window, then back; together, then apart.

We crouched behind the greeting card racks and looked up through the grid of wires and paper, the obstructed view making it safer, like watching a scary movie through the crevices of fingertips.

Do you see all those other people up on the roof?

What?  Where?

Way back there, you can see the top of their heads, there’s all these guys in cowboy hats.  See?

Those aren’t cowboy hats.  They’re firemen in their firemen hats.

Ohh, that makes more sense.

Our manager called.  She’d heard what was happening. She asked if we were getting any customers, and we said No, the street’s blocked off, there’s nobody. She asked if the other stores on the block were still open and we looked outside and said No, they all look closed. She said we could shut the door and flip over the Open sign and go home if we wanted to.

“Are we allowed to leave?”  We asked the police officer by the door, now a different one from before.

“You can leave, but you won’t be allowed to come back on the street until the situation is resolved.”

“Okay.”

We didn’t say anything but we knew that the decision was to stay. Partly, it felt callous to leave, like we didn’t care about this man’s suffering, but mainly, it was that life was happening right here and to leave would be to step outside the world, to stop existing for an hour or two or the whole rest of the day or however long the situation lasted.

Our boutique was small, but big enough that we could all be in the back and out of view from the windows if we wanted to, which we did sometimes. We sorted through the clothes on the Sale rack, and made sure all the Smalls were with the Smalls and Mediums with Mediums, and so on. We put sensors and price tags on new clothes. Some of us called our moms. One or two at a time, we would stand by the window for a few minutes and watch. But really, there wasn’t much to see, because the man never moved and nothing ever changed. After one second of looking, there was nothing left to take in, all that was left was to really think about it, which was hard, not because it was sad or disturbing, though it was, but because what thoughts were we supposed to think when looking at that?

A firefighter had taken the spot outside our door.

“Do they know anything about him?” We asked.

“Not much.  Name’s Joe, 30-35 year old white male, seems to be a loner.  He’s not being responsive to counselors.  He’s pretty picky about who he talks to.”

We nodded and moved back inside, and were glad that his name was Joe because that was like a non-name. We’d all known a Joe or hadn’t known a Joe, it didn’t matter, it was a name like tofu.

We cited statistics about the decreasing likelihood of a person jumping with every additional minute they spend deciding whether or not to jump, and studies about how most people who are serious about suicide choose a private and fool-proof way to do it.   Those of us who had personal stories to tell told them, evoking people we’d known who had killed themselves or tried to do so.

Eventually there was no more work to do and so we started trying on clothes, the clothes we’d been eyeing, the ones we watched customers try on all day and couldn’t afford ourselves.

Does this shirt make my breasts look flat?

Did you just call them breasts?

Yeah, what do you call them?

I don’t know, boobs.  Tits.

Ta-tas.

No one actually says ta-tas.
I just did.

Seriously though, should I buy this?

Yeah, why not.  It’s only, what, 24.99?

Yeah, it’s marked down.

Do it.

But what about, what about my boobs?

But then someone would laugh too loud or wander too close to the front of the store, or a moment of silence would be allowed to linger for a bit too long, and we would remember. We would send a scout to the front windows, to walk to the glass door and look up.

Still there.

It got dark fast, which made us feel safer. A womb of black enveloped the boutique and nothing existed in the vast beyond, except the yellow reflective bands of the firefighter’s uniform pressed against our window. Of course, if we wanted to, we could see things. If we went up close and pressed into the pane and squinted, we could see two thin beams of dark against the lighter shadow of the building. The beams swung slightly sometimes; they were his legs, dangling off the edge of the roof. He’d sat down at some point.

We were getting very hungry. We’d all missed our lunch breaks and every restaurant or corner store on the block was closed. There was nothing in the fridge except a half can of Diet Coke and a Tupperware container of rice that didn’t belong to any of us. We could just lock up and go home, one of us said.

Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped a mile. A young woman stood there, a woman we knew, a waitress at the Indian restaurant next door.

“Hey, this might be weird, but can I buy something from you guys?  Everywhere is closed and we’re stuck over in the restaurant, and I figure I might as well get something productive done.”

We said Sure, and let her come in. She tried on several winter coats, because winter would be coming soon, and we told her which ones we liked and helped her find other colors and sizes. She chose a long blue peacoat with a high collar. We rang her up and gave her a discount for being our only customer in many hours.

“You guys should come over,” she said. “The kitchen is closed but we’re all just hanging out drinking. We have a bottle of Fernet, plus all the beers on tap.”

We all looked at each other and said Okay, because we were tired of being there, and we closed up shop.

When we walked outside, some of us looked up, although most did not. It was strange, invasive even, to suddenly be in the same universe as the man. We wondered aloud if he could see us, if he was looking at us, if he cared about the crowds of people gathered to watch him. We could barely make out his outline against the darkness now. We hurried next door and ducked inside and shut the door on the world.

The waiters and waitresses and cooks and bartenders were all talking and laughing, standing around the bar, uniforms still on, aprons slung on the backs of stools.  It felt like a family huddled around a fire during a blizzard. The tall bald bartender handed us all half-glasses of beer.

We drank our small pours and asked for more. We all got a nice buzz, intensified by not having eaten for many hours. We forgot ourselves in the warm, spicy room and the dim lights and the black-and-white clad servers who hugged us and joked with us and poured us shots of Fernet. Also, the restaurant didn’t have very many windows, and was diagonal to the man, not directly across, which felt very different.

But there was still no food, and we were all now tremendously hungry, and so, one at a time, we began to leave. We went home to our showers or refrigerators or beds or lovers, or to other neighborhoods where time had continued to pass and we could eat and drink and tell the story. We scurried by the police barriers, dispersing in all cardinal directions, connected by a diaphanous web of thoughts we cast over the city.

We walked to work the next day, and from a block away saw the yellow police tape, and for a moment thought that maybe it was still going on, maybe the man was still there, maybe the streets were still blocked off and everything was still closed and cancelled, like a Snow Day. But, drawing closer, we saw that it was a parallactic trick or mischievous eyes, and that the police tape was just around a manhole cover that was being worked on. The street was open and nobody stood or sat on top of the building.

During the day we told our other coworkers and friends and customers who came in about what had happened the day before. Are you traumatized, they asked, and we would answer yes or no, depending on who spoke.

We wanted to know what had happened to the man, but where do you go for information like that? None of us read the paper, though we imagined it wouldn’t have been there anyway. We could ask the tenants of the building, but how to know who lived there? The information would make its way to us eventually, surely. But there was also the sense that the answer, no matter what it was, wouldn’t be the conclusion we needed. We’d been set up to have something happen, to balance the happening of the man at the edge of the building ready to jump. Words proved an inadequate balm to soothe the agitation of action. We hungered for more—words to tell us why he had gone up there, what lover had spurned him, what childhood trauma haunted him, what drugs coursed through his veins, what boss had cast him out—but knew that no words could satisfy our appetite. They were peripheral. No one would say that maybe we would feel more settled if we’d seen him jump.

If they talked him down, he could be out on the streets right now, we said.

He could be that guy over there.  We don’t know, we didn’t see his face.

That guy is too short, he was really tall.

Anyone looks tall six stories above you.

What if he came in the store.

I think I’d know it was him if I met him.

Me too.

I’d like him to come in, I think.

Me too.

Kate Willsky is orginally from the Boston area and blogs at  www.suckmyguac.com,  a general blog about her SF adventures and  www.funwithulysses.wordpress.com — the chronicle of attempting to (and succeeding in!) reading Ulysses.  Kate once won a crossword puzzle tournament and is uncannily good at balancing shit on her head.