“I hope so,” she said and turned her back on him, walking away in her ex-ballerina’s posture, dignified and disapproving.
Max left the apartment without any more goodbyes. The farewells were worse than staying.
The halls smelled of all the Thanksgiving feasts. Max ignored the elevator, attracted by the interior fire stairs. The games of his childhood took place on a similar set of stairs: hiding behind the banisters and shooting at his friend Gary, from whom he drifted apart when they had to move to the Upper West Side after his father’s death. He couldn’t remember Gary’s face. But he could still hear the sound of Gary’s feet rushing up behind him on the tiled hallway floor firing his water pistol and screeching, “You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead!” And his own, as he wheeled and fired back, spraying Gary’s chest. “You missed, you missed, you missed!” What a banal memory. I wasn’t a very smart kid, Max thought, comparing himself to Byron with his ambitions and his awareness of the grown-up world. When did I ever get the idea I was more than an ordinary person? Max wondered. From Ma? Because my father died and that made me unusual?
He sat down on the steps while thinking all those dead-end questions. They weren’t really his own questions; they were asked or provoked by his psychiatrist. His shrink’s medicine used to work so well. You’re entitled, Max. You have a right to be happy. You’re a good son and a good husband and a good father. Good, good, good. I am Max Klein: I am empowered and glowing with self-esteem. I am worthy and deserve to be middle-class in a society where being middle-class is the nearest thing to godliness.
He wondered about his in-laws’ roof. He had always wondered about their roof. It must have a great view, he thought. Not only of the river (the view he knew from his in-laws’ living room window) but also back toward the city itself. The sun, on this cool November day, was already going down, and Max climbed up the two flights, hoping to get on the roof and see the colors spread across New York.
He reached the top and found the roof door’s lock broken. The metal door squealed and tottered at his touch. The city was right there as it opened, glowing pink and red, just as Max had imagined. He stepped out. New York shimmered at him: glistening glass and dignified stone. Here was the criminal who had perverted Max. Not his father’s death, not his mother’s Oedipal transfer of sex into ambition for him, not his own rampaging id. No, Doctor, I didn’t get the idea I should be more than a second-rate, gray-haired balding Jew from your villains. I got it from this beautiful and evil city I love, this floating strip of greedy and defiant buildings.
His feet didn’t want him to be on the spongy tar surface. He had lived afraid of height, skin crawling in retreat if he advanced toward the edge of any precipice. He had almost fainted when taking a cousin of Debby’s up to the observation floor of the World Trade Center even though he had stayed inside, a good ten feet from the barricaded glass windows. He was sixteen stories up now, out in the open.
He felt the terror in his knees, sparking into his thighs, trying to shock him back away from the edge. But he stepped through the alarms, away from the raised safety of the door, until he was a solitary target atop the building. The wind fired at him, whipping his kinky hair flat against his skull and a few ticklishly forward at the temples. He didn’t mind the cold: it was refreshing. His legs were in a panic and what he had eaten of the meal seemed to dissolve. His stomach felt empty and afraid. The building’s roof wall was obviously new. The simple concrete barrier, about a foot wide and flat on top, had probably replaced something more ornate that had threatened to fall, and this was the cheapest substitute that would satisfy city ordinances and the co-op’s insurance. It was four feet high, gray everywhere, except for splotches of pigeon droppings on top and streaks of tar to patch fissures on the side.
Max ignored his terrified thighs and went up to the wall, pressing his belly against it. The cold wind blew into one ear unless he turned his face north. He leaned over the wall and looked down into the frightening drop.
The window ledges were lined up symmetrically. A trick of vision separated them by shorter and shorter distances as his eyes looked down. Below, the deadly sidewalk was a bleached strip bordered by the humped charcoal street. What would have been a smooth line of ledges was broken by the occasional dirty air conditioner. His head was woozy from the sight. Max imagined himself fall, spin, and smack on impact, embedded in the roof of a parked car.
He had always been afraid of heights, of falling. His fears were clichés. Everyone had them. Everyone knew what they meant. Did that help? No.
What am I truly afraid of? Dying? Not loving my wife and son? Loving them? Who cares what the real fear is?
It was the cowardice itself that appalled him.
He stretched his arms out, flat along the top of the wall, and swung his right leg up, maneuvering so he was lying on the wall along its length, the right side of his body exposed to the great fall, the left side facing the safety of the roof. He still wasn’t completely on the wall. He kept the toes of his left foot touching its reassuring tar. He pressed his cheek against concrete, looking out at the sad red-stained water towers, the sullen blank faces of stone, the walls of hostile glass and curved above them all the dark sky, a slice of deep blue bleeding at the edge, struggling to be as vast and interesting as the New York it covered. He was inches from a free-fall to the street.
He lifted his toes from the roof and hung for a moment balanced on the wall with his belly. He raised his feet in the air. A gust of wind pushed at him. His hairs blasted off his skull. He saw one gray curl straighten over the deadly ground. His legs crawled with fear. His right eye shut against the vision of the unimpeded drop, but he fought and kept his left one open.
Get to your feet, Max.
He grabbed the sides of the wall with his hands and brought his knees up. He was clinging to the wall. A roll to the right and he would be gone.
He shut his left eye and was blind. The wind deafened one ear. He arched his back up, still holding the sides, and put both feet flat. He felt stupid, his ass high in the air like a submissive monkey. He got angry at himself and suddenly he was standing up straight, hands away, a thrill in his heart, an equal to the sky, standing beside it with nothing to hold him there.
He opened his eyes and screamed. He saw only the city flowing away from him. He was alone. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. He screamed again. It was gobbled into silence by the raw wind.
Something hot oozed from his forehead. Blood?
A warm flow spread at his groin and down his right leg. He was peeing. He took a step forward. The mean wind blew at him, trying to knock him off.
He bent with it, swaying out over the street with his right hip. When the wind gave up for the moment, he righted himself and then he was not scared.
He scanned the slain city, standing over it, master at last of his vision. He walked on the wall, one foot after the other, walking the perimeter of the building. When the cold wind tried again to shove him off, he swayed with it, a small skyscraper that gave but did not break.
He took the corners with a smile, knowing that for a second most of him was out in the air, suspended over the fatal earth. He was glad. He moved faster on the wall, pushing back sometimes at the wind, daring it to try harder to defeat him.
I am Max Klein, he thought, death’s survivor.
The terror was gone and in its place there were calm resolutions. He would talk to Jonah about his silence. He would stop playing substitute Daddy to Byron. He would tell Debby that he would never again be the beacon for her darkened life. He would attend no more dead celebrations. He would tell Nan that her unhappiness belonged only to her and he wanted no portion.