Stranger

How should I tell you that I’ve seen a man jump off a building? How would you like to hear something like that? Should I lower my voice? Should I look into the corners of the room? There are a few ways. Take your pick. (But why would I want to tell you? And why would you want to know? Let’s not pretend our motives aren’t suspect. Mine most of all.)

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Imagine I am speaking to you in a voice just above a whisper. Imagine I want to keep this between us.

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Sometimes in the middle of a meeting or while I’m waiting for a train, I’ll think, I’ve seen a man jump off a building. Sometimes I’ll look up and think, I’ve seen a man jump off that building. I don’t like calling him a jumper although I have called him that before. Jumper is a convenient term. It helps you know what I mean. But I don’t want you to know what I mean. I want him all to myself. (Except of course that isn’t true. I’m writing this.)

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The man who jumped off the building was a stranger to me. I just happened to be nearby. (I almost called this essay proximity.) I was in my 10th floor office and he was on the rooftop next door. A parking garage. It was lunch time, a little past noon, the Thursday before Easter. Holy Thursday. The man and I talked for maybe five minutes through an open window before he jumped over the edge, on the east side, toward the train tracks.  

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I watched a man jump off a building. It’s one of the two or three things that’ve happened to me. I could tell it was important by the way everything (even the color of sky and the quality of sound) seemed to be coming at me in super ultra high-definition. 6k. Maybe that’s why, as the man paced back and forth near the guardrail, I took out my iPhone and started recording.

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A snuff film.

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My decision to start recording was automatic. I don’t know if I wanted to document what was happening or if I just wanted something between me and him. A camera. Anything.

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The video I took of a man jumping off a building still exists somewhere, I assume, on the Dallas Police Department server archives. They sent the video to his mom so she could see what happened. When she called me the next week she recognized my voice. We didn’t talk long. My voice bothered her. It confirmed, I think, that I was real. That the video I took was real. And that her son really had jumped off a building in Downtown Dallas. She’d called to ask if, at the last minute, he’d reached back for the railing. 

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Someone in the comments section of a local news story titled “St. Paul Station Closes While Police Investigate Suspected Suicide in Downtown Dallas” ⎯ a story that a few hours later would be re-titled, “St. Paul Station Reopens After Police Investigate Suspected Suicide in Downtown Dallas” ⎯ claimed they saw him reach back for the railing. The details were unclear. He had, apparently, made several attempts to jump before I noticed him. After each attempt he’d caught himself and pulled himself back up. Had he, in the end, been resolute? Or had he, in midair, changed his mind? His mom asked me. I couldn’t remember. The video at that point ⎯ like all amateur videos at the moment the impossible thing happens ⎯ becomes a blur. 

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It seems incredible to me that he could have gone over the edge multiple times, caught himself multiple times, and ⎯ multiple times ⎯ pulled himself back up. Incredible, but these are the reports. Filed in the comments section of the local paper. Had he been a gymnast? Did he have experience on a beam? I know almost nothing about him. I know these things. 1) He was from Houston. 2) He’d been in the Air Force. 3) He was super high on heroin or something. And 4) He was 27-years-old: my age. I’ve tried to go back to the comment section of that article (the only article I can find about his death) but the website was redesigned at some point in the past two years and the comments have all been lost. I’ll have to make do with what I can remember.

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Someone said they saw him begging for a Slurpee inside 7-Eleven that morning. Someone said they saw him reading a Bible on a DART station one-seater metal bench. Someone said they saw him pacing on the rooftop, talking to someone in an office building across the alleyway. Someone said they saw him reach back for the railing. I know he haunts a few of us. But do you know what I mean when I say I want him to haunt me most? 

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The man I saw jump off a building was not a loved one of mine. Was not a friend. Was not even an acquaintance. He was to me whatever a person becomes when you’ve talked to them for five minutes and they are high out of their mind. He was that to me. And then he was nothing. I asked him what his name was. He told me it was Birdman. I know his real name now, of course, but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the man I watched take long, athletic strides toward the edge of a 10-story parking garage and then, at the last minute, push off the railing for a little extra boost.

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In most ways this man’s death means nothing to me. Most. But not all. Even now, two years later, when I walk across the section of sidewalk in front of 7-Eleven where his body landed ⎯ where I stood next to his body because, for some reason, I had to (I took the elevator down in a trance, like a sleeping cartoon character floating along the scent of fresh-baked pie (a tone-deaf image, I realize, but it’s the one that comes to mind: I was drawn.)) ⎯ I feel struck like a tuning fork. I hunch up. Like he’s coming down on top of me. Like this moment keeps echoing inside this slab of sidewalk. Fading, I think, but still audible. I’d take you there. I’d see if you could hear it too.

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A few days after he jumped, his family held a funeral for him in San Antonio. His mom texted me the details. I thought about going. But who was he to me? And who was I to him? (Who is one stranger to another?) I didn’t know, and a few weeks later I realized I hadn’t gone.

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I heard two women talking about it on the train one day. They’d been walking to lunch. He landed behind them. They heard the scream (his scream, shocked to find himself falling rather than gliding), and then the thud (a much emptier sound than you might expect a body to make: like an oil drum). They kept walking and didn’t look back. What kind of person doesn’t look back? I wanted to know, pretending to read my book. I’d like to know that still. It would help me understand myself. A case-in-reverse.

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Things I remember about him: his dirty grey clothes (he wasn’t homeless but he looked that way); his oversized t-shirt; his tiny teeth (unnaturally straight, presumably from orthodontia); the way he squinted into the sun while we talked across the alleyway (forcing him to smile, like a child saying “cheese”); him scolding himself (almost comically) for not having the courage to jump; the way his body looked on the sidewalk after (his t-shirt rode up and I could see the brand of boxers he was wearing that day); the plastic tarp the police laid over him (semi-see-through, like the ones painters use) which kept blowing off, revealing his bare feet.

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I wish I knew what it is that I’m trying to tell you.

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I called my dad. I told him what I’d seen. I spoke about it softly because that seemed like the correct way to speak about it. I could have spoken about it in other ways. I could have joked around. I could have sounded fine. But I spoke softly and he asked if he could tell my mom. I pretended to hesitate. An act. The truth is that I wanted everyone to know that I’d seen a man jump off a building. That’s why I called.

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If it were up to me I would be the only person in history who has seen a man jump off a building. A world expert.

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What can we learn from watching a man jump off a building? I might ask in guest lecture at some university. And what can we learn from jumping off a building ourselves? 2% survive. One of the most effective forms of suicide, reserved for those who are 98% not fucking around. The academic literature calls them jumping deaths, leaping deaths, falling deaths. What can we learn from falling? I might ask, adjusting the microphone, making eye contact with the EXIT sign at the back of the room.

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There’s nothing natural about a falling body. We’re not built for it. Orbiting astronauts, in a perpetual fall, come back noodle-legged and useless. Unearthly. It’s not just the landing, sometimes it’s the falling that changes us. Or haven’t you felt the fundamental shift in your body at the peak of a trampoline jump, when you first begin to drop. (What is that feeling? La petite mort? It’s almost pleasurable.)

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Or consider our bewilderment at watching the tenants of the north and south towers jump out the windows rather than stay inside with the flames. Could we do the same, we wondered? We could. The jump is in all of us. At various times, in various manifestations. We pretend not to understand. An act.

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A body in the air is like a whale in the water. Its shape unknowable. Like smoke.

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Around that time, a friend of mine went on a fishing trip with an acquaintance, a man he barely knew, and that man drowned when the tide came in and he got tangled up in his own fishing line. My friend tried to save him but nearly drowned too. He held the man’s body in his arms and then, at some moment ⎯ the moment: the tipping point between something happening and not ⎯ he let the body go. I wondered what I understood about holding a body and then letting it go. I wondered what my friend understood about seeing a body go over a railing. We’d each had our own little traumatic experiences. Had they given us access to the whole? Some privileged pool of wisdom? (i.e. What do we get out of the deal?) A year later I sat next to that friend on a ski lift in Breckenridge. Neither of us said much, and nothing about what we’d seen. He just pointed to all the bras in the trees (it was the week after Mardi Gras), smiled, and said, shaking his head, “They must have been freezing.”

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I find, on Reddit, this scrap from the news article’s comment section, copy/pasted before it vanished from the source: He jumped from the parking garage roof. 10th floor. He took a running start then stopped. Someone tried talking him out it from a neighboring building that had windows which opened but he then took a second running start and didn’t stop this time. Once he was over the rails he changed his mind but it was too late. He tried grasping the railing but it was too late.  

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I click a link to his obituary. I’d never read it. The link is expired. (Digital memory fades, too.) But I find it via the funeral home’s website search bar. On the page (a kind of Facebook for the dead) there are comments from his uncles, aunts, cousins, friends. Photos of him as a kid in Houston, a shaggy teenager in San Antonio, a clean-cut Marine (he was in the Marines, not the Air Force), with what looks to be a girlfriend. A picture of him on a beach with his mom. His obituary mentions dancing, drawing, music, magic.

My fondest memory of _____ is when He came up from Texas to my mothers, his grandmothers place in Iowa. The first morning he came to wake me to show me his cowboy outfit. I told him he made a great looking cowboy, he corrected me saying “I’m not a cowboy! I’m a cowMan!” 

I have to force myself to keep reading. The information feels morbid. Knowing things feels morbid. His mom didn’t want to believe he’d died. I guess I didn’t want to believe he’d lived. I waited two years to check and see.

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Or have I still not come to terms with the fact that every single person around me has a whole entire life?

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I thought I’d have more to say about all this. I thought that’s what I got out of the deal. Something to say. How far will I go to infuse a random event with literary significance? How far will I go to make a piece? Further than I’d like to admit. I found another comment on Reddit, identical to the women I heard talking on the train. “He hit the ground behind me right as i walked by. I didnt turn around after hearing the sound. Didnt want to see.” Did I read this comment years ago and create a memory around it? A scene? An attempt, once again, to insert myself into a story that really has nothing to do with me?

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I’ve left out a few details. I’ll add them here. Like the fact that I wasn’t the only one in my office who saw him jump (I wanted you to think I was). Brielle was there too. So was Elizabeth. Elizabeth called the police. They didn’t come fast enough. Later, when we went downstairs to give our statements (we met the detectives at Subway) we all burst out laughing on the elevator. We didn’t know why we were laughing. We got ourselves together and acted like people who had just seen a man jump off a building. I tried to email one of the detectives my video but the file was too big. He set my phone face up on a table and recorded a video of my video. I listened to myself talking to the man. I listened to him jump. An instant replay. I was offered free counseling from the city but I never called. Where do these bits go? What do they have to do with anything? Am I supposed to know?

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He jumped on Holy Thursday. He was my age. He called himself Birdman. His teeth were small. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. He fell ten stories. His body sounded like an oil drum. They covered him in tarpaulin. He liked dancing, drawing, music, magic. He wasn’t a cowboy he was a cowman. I shot his snuff film. His mom asked me if he reached back for the railing. Which facet of all this would you like to reverse-project some kind of meaning onto? What pieces should we glue together into an art object? 

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What is the point of writing non-fiction. I can’t remember.

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The body recollects itself on the sidewalk. Flesh to smoke and back again. Twice transmogrified. Nonexistence refuted thus. 

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Do you wish you’d seen a man jump off a building, too? Are you, like me, thrilled by the very worst things? (Do my motives disqualify my grief?) Don’t worry you will find your man soon enough. He might lay down in front of a train for you. He might step in front of a bus. He might drown in your arms. He is out there and you are out there. You are moving toward each other. But be warned. It might be very hard, when the moment comes, to tell which one of you is which.