I closed my eyes.
But when I reopened them the man was still there, now reaching into the air with his right hand. His face held a smile of such splendor it made my heart ache. I remembered one of my more lucid moments, when I’d worn that very same smile as I placed my five-year-old son upon the bus on his first day of school.
Above me on the stepladder, the man’s gaze alternated between joy and sadness, all the while spotting the concrete sidewalk with tears. He mumbled to the air, threw back his head and laughed.
I slowed, curious about a man whose dementia seemed to match my own. My city-raised instinct for tragedy was well-honed and I knew that behind the precariously perched man atop the ladder in the empty city morning there was a story. Still, rather than disturb him, I would have stood there and allowed the man his privacy as I tried to imagine what thing could have driven him to such an end.
Ultimately, he over-balanced and fell hard to the ground. I hurried over and offered my hand, but jerked it back as he began first giggling, then laughing, until his uproarious guffaws echoed down the empty street.
Although my empathy was strong, I have to admit that discovering somebody on the higher end of the Fucked Up Scale made me feel better. Sandy-haired, blue eyes, slim with a blue pinstriped button-down shirt and blue jeans, he seemed to be just an average Joe.
He could be me.
He could be an accountant.
Just goes to show, I suppose. The domesticated were so terrified of the squeegee men, the homeless, and the crack heads. It would rock their world to know that death and insanity preferred not to dress down.
Although I felt guilty staring at this spectacle of a man as he fought with his personal demons, I was unable to move on. I was too curious. So I stood there and empathized, my arms askew and ready, not knowing if in the next instant I would be helping or warding off an impending blow. He saved me from my indecision.
“Have you ever seen what happens to a body after a long fall?”
Before I could answer the strange question, he continued.
“People think that skin is such a weak and tender thing. A husk too fragile to contain the incredible miracle of life. Sure, we all remember the skinned knees and the stitches of our youth, but falling is so much different. God or whatever malicious being created us knew what He was doing. One would think a person would explode, you know?”
He rolled into a kneeling position. His hand caressed a section of the sidewalk as if it were a child’s cheek, and he stared at a spot high in the air, seeing something I couldn’t. I was uncomfortable, embarrassed, and the humanity in me demanded I walk away. But the voyeur within took charge and held me fast.
“I used to be a father,” he sighed. “There’s something special about being a father. The perfect love you see in the most casual glance of a child. The knowledge that your every word, every action, has tremendous consequence. Being a father is all about love. It’s a scary love, you know?”
“Yes,” I said before I even realized the word had escaped.
He turned and stared at me as if he was just realizing he had an audience. The pained icy-blue of his eyes pierced me and we shared an intimacy that sliced far deeper than love. I didn’t even breathe.
Why had I spoken?
Why?
It was the Scary Love comment, of course—such a perfect description for the terrifying reality of fatherhood. So much could go wrong. You didn’t need to be there. A father’s influence transcended time, space, and reason. Scary Love indeed. The tragedy, of course, was that the child didn’t know enough to be scared as well.
The man’s eyes were now focused firmly upon me as if he was reading my thoughts. He smiled wistfully and nodded, then gazed up at the high windows of the thirty-story building behind us.
“You really never know what’s going to happen. You can plan. You can sign them up for the best schools. Buy them the finest clothes. Partition them from the vulgarities of life. But after all that, you better be sure to pray that whatever fickle entity is in charge of the universe that day is busy enough to leave you alone.”
He leaned over like a Moslem at prayer and placed his forehead against the sidewalk. Softly, he rubbed his cheek against the rough surface and cooed. Anyone else might have laughed. I could not. More than empathy, there was a similarity of pain. I no longer wished to leave. I ignored the muscles of my right calf as they began to twitch in anticipation of a fast run.
“It was one of those days when everything went wrong, you know?”
Didn’t I, though. I’d survived a thousand days like that. The day after tripping through the pulsating halls of Forever Never Land where I was God and God was me and my spleen was splashed across the sky. Each of those days had been a drop from the glory of divinity into the malicious depravity of humanity.
“Emily, my wife, awoke late for work. So late, she didn’t even have time to take Jericho to the sitters. When she left, I was still mostly asleep. Hell, I’d only been home for a few hours. A business trip, you know?”
A giggle escaped the man. Stifling the sound with the back of a hand, he stood. He picked up the fallen stepladder and set it back into place. There were only five steps, but as he ascended each, it looked like he left a small piece of his unsteadiness behind, until with his feet perched upon the next to the top step, he rose to his full height and his face turned beatifically sane.
“I can feel him here. Right here,” he said, holding a hand out into the air. “A part of him is in the pavement, but that’s only his sad part—the part that felt the pain. It was as if his soul paused while his body bounced. The rest of him is here. Sometimes, when I’m standing up here, I can see him. Especially in the mornings, because that’s when it happened. Yes, in the mornings when there’s nobody else around and all is silent. Sometimes,” the word was almost garbled in a sob, “he speaks to me.”
The man and the ladder and his son and the story suddenly coalesced and the reality of it all drove me to my knees. Heaviness filled my heart and moved outwards, locking my body in a breathless grip.
I’d heard enough.
Too much.
I wanted to stand and run. Like a bad trip, however, I was locked within the progression of events.
A door opened in the building and a woman skipped down the stairs, a briefcase in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She sidestepped the ladder, her gaze sailing across our spectacle. My mouth and hands were unable to work so I reached out with my mind and begged her to free me. She paused as if she’d actually heard my pathetic psychic plea, then shook her head and continued on her way.
It seemed that our world was only meant for two.
I tried to ignore the man when he started speaking again.
I tried to blot out his existence with happy memories, but I had none.
As he spoke of his dead son, I remembered my own.
“Days like this, I can almost hear him laugh. Jericho had the most wonderful laugh, but then I suppose all sons do.”
Yes, I thought. All of them do. Right up until the point where they discover their father is a beast.
“I used to be a day trader, watching the computer as if it were a crystal ball. I was good at it, too. Sure, I made some small mistakes, but by the end of each week I was far enough ahead they were forgotten. Sometimes, while feeding Little Jerry and watching the numbers slide by. I’d jab his cheek with a spoonful of food. Instead of being irritated, the fool kid would laugh at me. It was as if he understood my embarrassment. To get me back on track, he’d yell, ‘Crash’.”
Every molecule of my body cringed at the word.
Crash.
It was one of the few words in the English language that sounded just like the event it stood for. A split-second impact, the crunch of metal, the shattering of glass, the screams of the dying, all woven together in the incredible static hiss of a Crash.