Lee Fowler leaned over the edge of his balcony.  Thirty feet below, the BQE carried its load of rumbling flatbed trucks and late-night commuters across the city.  The air stank of exhaust.  When he’d moved in, Lee had thought he’d get used to the smell, but he never had.

An ambulance went by, screaming, and was gone.

The sky was as dark as it ever got, lit by the thousand windows of Manhattan across the river.  It got darker as you got closer to Brooklyn and her dead, empty piers.  Looking straight down at Joralemon Street, you couldn’t see a thing. 

Lee took a drag on his cigarette, then tossed it off the balcony.  He followed its glowing tip until it went out some time before hitting the ground.

He had waited for a warm night like this to kill himself.  There was no breeze, just the movement of air from the passing cars below.  The water in the river would still be cold -- did it ever get warm? -- but if what he’d read was true, he’d never feel it.  The fall would break his neck, or hitting the water would.  Or he’d sink under the surface and drown in an instant.

He’d thought first about going off his roof.  It would have been easier and more certain.  You did hear about people who jumped off bridges, fell a great distance, and lived.  You never heard of anyone surviving a ten-story dive to the pavement.

But Lee didn’t want to die a blot on a New York City sidewalk.  He didn’t want his tarp-covered body photographed and sold under a headline in the Post.  He wanted to hit the water and disappear into it, sink to the bottom or float out to sea.

Lee looked out at the darkness, pierced here and there by the pinpoint light of a star battling to be seen through the skin of pollution that hung over New York.  The city had never looked so ugly to him before.  It lay in the river like a corpse, encrusted with layers of buildings and swarming with parasites -- parasites who lived day by day and were instantly forgotten or who killed themselves in the middle of the night and were never missed.

Lee went back into his apartment, collected his wallet and a half-full pack of cigarettes, and walked out.  He didn’t take his keys, just let the door slam closed behind him.

***

He ordered a sandwich, turkey on rye, and couldn’t eat it.  Each bite stayed in his throat until he chased it down with a burning mouthful of whiskey.  He gave up halfway through and had the waiter take the sandwich away.

His head started to go soft at the edges.  Loud conversations around him blended into a uniform roar, backlit by tinkling cutlery and a jukebox that sounded as though it were pumping its music out underwater.  He looked down into his glass, into the liquor, and in it he saw the amber of Melanie’s eyes.  He thought he heard her voice, whispering, thought he felt the touch of her breath behind his ear.  But he knew it wasn’t so.  He’d stopped imagining it might be around the same time he’d started dreaming about throwing himself into the river.

Melanie was somewhere else now, twinkling with the stars, maybe.  Or at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for him in darkness.  Wherever it was, it wasn’t in his glass, it wasn’t in this bar, it wasn’t in his life.  It wasn’t anywhere he’d ever been.  It was where he was going.

Lee drained his glass, pressed his cigarette into the ashtray, crumpled his empty Marlboro pack.  Twenty bucks took care of the bill with plenty left over for a tip.  Lee got up from the table before the waiter could bring him his change.

At the door, Lee turned back and watched a kid in a greasy undershirt collect his glass and change the ashtray.  The ashtray would get wiped with a rag and given to some other table, the glass would be rinsed and re-used, and then the remnants of Lee’s last meal on earth would be gone.  No one would remember that he’d ever been here, that this bar was the last place he’d spent his money, the last place he’d taken a drink.  Maybe, if his body did wash up, the police would note the level of alcohol in his blood and wonder whether his death had been a suicide or a drunken accident; and maybe, if the papers printed it, the owner of this bar would read about Lee and wonder whether, given the proximity, it was his bar that had served the fatal shot.  But even if he wondered, he’d never know.

Lee walked away.

***

If Melanie knew what he was doing, would she approve?  Lee thought about this as he made the turns to get onto the promenade.  He walked casually and calmly, his hands in his pockets, toward the bridge outlined in lights. 

She wouldn’t approve -- not if she were alive and he were going off to kill himself.  But she was not alive, and that made all the difference.

The memory tore at him daily: the sight of Melanie’s face the instant before the crossbeam fell; the moment when Lee saw them both as he stood at the curb trying to flag down a taxi, Melanie standing under the wooden scaffold, the beam driving through the planks above her head; Lee’s terrified dash to pull Melanie out from under the beam’s path, which he did; and then the awful moment when he realized that it didn’t matter, that a fragment of the scaffold had splintered off and, with a bullet’s force, struck her beneath the ear. 

She was limp and heavy in his arms, not from fear or relief as he had first thought but from death, bloody death that was streaming onto Lee’s shirtfront and down his sleeve.  Melanie’s eyes were wide open and completely unreadable -- had she known she was about to die? -- and as Lee lowered her to the ground, as a nervous, curious crowd gathered to find out what had happened, as an unnecessary samaritan pushed through to Melanie’s side and, after feeling for a pulse he couldn’t find, looked up sadly into Lee’s eyes, Lee died as well.

Yes, Lee decided, Melanie would approve.  Or if she wouldn’t, at least she would understand.

Traffic was light going over the bridge.  Lee could see that already.  People were home by now, or if not home then somewhere else they wanted to be. 

Lee walked along the promenade, past the one-armed man who sat each night hawking glow-in-the-dark bracelets, past a couple of kids dry humping on a bench, past a trash can piled so high that it had overflowed, creating a garbage moat around it on the street.  Across the water, where the World Trade Center had been, you could see the steel arms of cranes, a hint of scaffolding.  New York was always under construction, always rebuilding itself on the backs of its dead.

On the bridge, headlights flowed in pairs toward Brooklyn and paired red taillights flowed away.  The water under the bridge was black and looked solid, like a ridged slab of stone.  There were no boats in the water this late at night, or at least none that Lee could see.

Lee stopped near the entrance to the bridge.  A man was sleeping off to one side, on the pavement, his head resting on a pillow made of his shoes wrapped in a sheet of newspaper.  Even in sleep, the man’s face was twisted into a grimace, as though his dream life was no better than his reality.  Lee squatted next to the man, took his wallet out of his pocket and put it in the man’s hands.

The man raised his head and squinted at Lee, now half-awake.  He turned the wallet over in his hands.

“There’s some money in there,” Lee said softly, “and a bank card.  You take it to a bank and type in four, five, nine, four.  Can you remember that?”  The man stared at him.  “Four, five, nine, four.  Remember that.”

The old man nodded and slipped the wallet inside his shirt.

“Do it first thing tomorrow,” Lee said.  “The next day may be too late.”

The man nodded again, more slowly.  He was already drifting back to sleep.

Lee walked on.

***

Lee waited until there were no cars coming or going, and then he climbed over the barrier that separated the walkway from the edge of the bridge. 

Up here, the air was brisk and the view was startling.  To either side, the city stretched out into the night, fading to darkness at the horizon.  Above, the bridge’s cables rose in great curves and vanished, as though they weren’t so much holding the bridge together as suspending it from the night sky.  Below -- below there was the water, now clearly moving, in shadowy rises and shifts, but so slowly and silently that the surface appeared formidable, even unbreakable.  It was against that surface that Lee would throw himself.  Holding onto the barrier behind him with both hands, Lee looked down and shivered.

Was this what he wanted?  Was it really?  For a moment, Lee wavered.  The fall appeared so great.  But the alternative was to live, and he knew he couldn’t do that.  He had tried.  Alive, Lee was a type of walking dead, pushing himself through his days by force of habit alone.  His actual, physical death seemed a mere formality.  All that remained was for him to step off the bridge into darkness, and finish what had begun two weeks earlier when a steel girder had come loose from its anchoring thirty stories above the ground and had narrowly, fatally missed crushing Melanie Fowler.

Lee let go of the railing and steadied himself on the balls of his feet.  Each time he looked down, a wave of dizziness flooded him and he had to lean back for support.  But he refused not to look down -- he had to see what he was facing.

Holding on first with his left hand, then with his right, Lee pulled off each of his shoes and dropped them over the edge.  They fell, reflecting the bridge’s lights all the way down.  Lee didn’t hear the splashes.

He stripped off his socks and let them fall out of sight, then carefully pulled his t-shirt over his head and dropped it.  The shirt glided away from the bridge, whipped around, twisted and unfurled in the wind, before gently descending on the water.  Lee watched it go.  If only his fall could be like that!  But it wouldn’t be.  He would fall like his shoes, straight down.

Lee unbuckled his belt, let his pants fall down around his ankles, kicked them off into space.  Then he walked to the very edge of the bridge, his toes sticking out over the rim, his body wrapped up in the wind and the darkness.  He closed his eyes, felt himself dangle in space, connected to the world only by his heels.  He whispered goodbye, to Melanie, to himself, and raised his arms above his head.

An answering whisper came to him then.  It said, Wait, please wait.

He refused to open his eyes again, refused to seek the source of this voice and be disappointed by the empty air; yet he stopped, poised on the edge of life, and waited for the voice to speak again.

Wait, it said.  Don’t jump.

“Why?” Lee said.

The other voice was silent for a minute.  “Just don’t.”

Lee opened his eyes, let his hands fall to his sides.  He looked next to him, expecting to see nothing, to have conjured up the voice out of drunken fear.  Instead he saw a woman, standing beside him on the edge of the bridge.

For a second he thought it was Melanie, then a second later he knew it was not.  Her hair was blond, lighter than Melanie’s.  Her face was very much like Melanie’s: thin, pale, innocent.  She stood on the edge of the bridge, facing Lee, staring intensely into his eyes.  She said Please again, and Lee took two steps back.

His chest rose and fell in sudden exhilaration and embarrassment.  To be caught in this moment, in this condition, nearly naked, to have his privacy violated and at the very moment when, one moment later, no such interruption would have been possible -- Lee was shaken, physically affected, torn.  Should he jump?  How could he, without at least finding out who this woman was, what she was doing here, why she had stopped him – without first ascertaining for sure that she was, in fact, a real woman and not a prolonged hallucination, a desperate creation of his desperate brain?

He stepped toward her.  She shrank back.

Words could barely escape his lips.  “Who are you?” he said.

She shook her head

Who was she?  She had come to the bridge, had climbed onto the edge as he had -- why?  Why did anyone?  She had come to die, too.  But, walking along, she had come across the strangest of visions, a man frozen in a diver’s stance on the edge of a bridge, about to plunge to his death, and she had called out to stop him, a reflex of kindness. 

He held his hands out in front of him, showed that they were empty.  “My wife died,” he said, simply, “and I couldn’t live without her.”

The woman shook her head.  “My God.  That’s beautiful.”  She came forward and took Lee’s hands.  “I’ve never been married.  I’ve never had anyone.  Today’s my birthday.”

They stood in silence.  The black river churned and rolled beneath them.

“Happy birthday,” Lee said, finally.

***

They helped each other back onto the walkway, then walked unsteadily off the bridge.  They walked into Manhattan, toward Delancey Street.  No one stopped to help them.  A few heads turned.

“I don’t even know your name,” Lee said, as she led him toward her home.  He ran his fingers nervously through his hair, darted looks left and right to make sure each street was empty before walking onto it.

“Tina,” she said.  She stopped in front of a brownstone and dug in the pocket of her dress for a key.

Lee stopped behind her.  His fingers itched suddenly for a cigarette.  “Do you smoke, Tina?”

“No.  I hate cigarettes.”  She looked back at him.  “Why, do you?”

“I used to,” he said.  “A long time ago.”

She found her key and took him inside.

The End