Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct | Sonnets Made of Wood | Apres Moi, Le Deluge
This originally appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of On Spec.
by Leah Bobet
Cold wind curled around Emily's shoulders, her fingers curled around the metal railing of the bridge, and she looked down onto the highway below. Cars flashed and shivered underneath her, tiny metal blood cells hurtling through the arteries of the city. She thought about blood cells, the barely audible pumping of the heart within her, and swung one leg over the railing.
It was almost too high to get over, and her other leg slid along in a stumbling lurch that left her barely hanging onto the other side of the frosty railing. She regained her balance in one terrifying moment and leaned back against the bridge, eyes transfixed by the flashing lights of the highway. "What does it matter?" she wondered aloud. "You're jumping anyways."
Yeah, but I want to do it on my terms. My decision. My choice.
She looked back and forth along the bridge, and nobody was coming. The cars rushing east and west across the suspended roadway didn't stop for her, drivers not seeing her or - more likely - just not caring. Emily took a deep breath. Goodnight world. Goodnight Mom, Dad, school, work, apartment. A pause, a glance up: Goodnight, moon.
She let go of the railing.
Falling, so slowly falling, and there were no scenes flashing before her eyes, just speed and cold and her scarf fluttering in the wind above her as her stomach dropped and muttered. She waved her arms frantically, reflex kicking in, waved her legs in the body's last gasp for help.
And she rose.
Emily froze, hovering over the darkened Don Valley and eight lanes of impersonal traffic scoured out between the trees. She pushed with her feet, and spun upwards. She pushed with her left hand, and spun a slow spiral in the air. She looped and twirled, dipping through the air, hovering just above the treeline.
She came to a stop under the bridge, under the rattling subway tracks that traced their way through the city, and settled on a girder. Alarmed pigeons exploded away from her in a cloud of white feathers and disappeared into the woods below. A smile broke out on her face, one of wonder and joy and pain and fear and the certainty that this was just a dream and would be taken away soon.
"Well," Emily said in a husky voice, tracing flight plans in the air with one finger, "That just figures."
She went up to the bridge again, thought about trying again for a while. But something in her body felt lighter, felt like the wings of birds. It wouldn't work.
She went home.
Over the next few days she thought about pills, or even opening her wrists in the bathtub before the imagined pain of it made her shudder. But the sound of wings was in her dreams, and each step felt a little easier with the passage of time. She was still alone, still going through the motions of school-work-eat-sleep. The world was still gray, featureless, made of concrete and steel and everything unfeeling and uncaring. Her textbooks were full of battles and blood and the sins of millions, each one to blame for the grasping world she lived in and its barren, suspicious heart. When her mother called and asked how she was doing, how was school going, did she need anything at all? there was still a lump in Emily's throat, one that forbid her to speak or sob or scream.
But in her dreams, she flew, and it was soft and good like her head sinking into a feather pillow at the end of a long day.
She was afraid to try again.
What if this time, she fell?
She saw him first at work, a shuffling, thoughtful presence with shoulders that shaped defeat and a robin-red scarf around his neck. He ordered the same thing three shifts running - regular latte, whole milk - and read the paper in the wide bay window until closing time. When she put away the desserts and changed the coffee filters Emily could feel him watching her. He left when she mopped the floor and pulled down the blinds, never saying a word.
The girls at work who liked lipstick and gossip and didn't talk to her much looked at him, and looked at her, and she knew it but said nothing.
He knocked on her door on the fifth day, dark coat and blond hair and sad spaniel eyes. "I saw you jump," he said. There was a familiar pain in his eyes.
She let him in.
She cleared a space for him on the folded-down futon and brought him a glass of water. "I can't explain it," she told him, before he had a chance to ask.
"I'm not asking you to," he replied, toying with the fringes on his scarf. "I just want to take you out for coffee."
She put on her shoes and grabbed her coat. Her robin's-egg scarf fluttered as they stepped out the door.
"So." He sipped his coffee. "Why did you want to kill yourself?"
She felt herself wanting to flinch, and instead lifted her own chipped mug, bathing her face in steam and warmth and the oily-dark smell of black diner coffee at midnight. The formica table was slippery with condensation where the mug had sat. "I don't know."
He cocked an eyebrow at her. "That's not much of a reason."
She shrugged and buried her face deeper behind a veil of hair. The old man with the brown bowler hat and the book in the other booth turned his page. The neon lights of the diner burned, reflecting pink and red and green in the windows across the street. A long silence before she realized he would wait for an answer. "I don't know."
Disappointment flickered and sparked in his eyes
She swallowed hastily around the lump that had stolen her voice, searching for the truth, wanting to push the truth at him until he stopped looking at her with that hurt face. "I don't belong here. I'm wrong in this world, or it's wrong for me, or something, and I guess I didn't think I had anywhere else to go."
His gaze flickered. "I don't think anyone knows what they're doing here."
Her hands tightened around the coffee mug.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to go all Choose Life on you."
She nodded, tried to keep the relief from her face.
"I just think you've been given a gift."
"You said you wouldn't get-"
He raised a hand: it was pale and strong, with long square fingers and neat-trimmed nails. Farmer's hands. "Hear me out. You didn't think you had anything to live for. Sounds like you had nothing to die for, either. But now you have something: up to you how you use it."
"I can fly," she murmured, and the cold bridge wind crept up her spine. It had taken man thousands of years to fly. It was the greatest achievement of their time. She huddled into the battered black coat and took another sip of the burning, acrid coffee.
He pulled two dollars out of his pocket, fished them out delicate as a heron and laid them on the table. They rattled like the subway under the bridge as he slid out of the cracked plastic booth and straightened. "I think you could always fly. You just never jumped off anything high enough before."
He walked out of the diner soundlessly, like a shadow. She stared into her coffee until he was gone.
After the fifth cup of coffee started cooling in the cup, she walked east and north to the bridge and stared off the side. Traffic was quieter this late, but the city never slept and the lights still rocketed along the pavement. She couldn't look at the cars; they made her head spin and her stomach churn, the same way it had churned when she'd tried to learn to drive herself. The feeling of the wheel under her hands, the power under her feet had terrified her until she couldn't breathe. Motion sickness. She hadn't wanted to move.
The wind lifted her hair into a swirling aura, and she brushed it back harshly. The motion made her almost dizzy, and she swayed at the edge, catching herself against a sturdy steel post. Why worry about falling? She could fly. There were wings beating where her heart should be.
She started to tremble, and almost ran to solid ground.
She didn't notice the thing with the stairs until someone pointed it out: a guy who sat behind her in her Thursday morning lecture and doodled in the thin-paged history textbook, Jeremy with the spiked blond-tipped hair and a grin that looked more like bared teeth.
"Hey, Emily? Feeling bouncy?"
"Huh?" She looked up at him from the bottom of the flight of stairs. A flight of stairs. A stray feather tickled the inside of her chest.
"You keep jumping off the second stair. Every week." He frowned at her, the tight and insular frown of the person who's stuck their neck out too far, become socially awkward.
She looked down at her feet, black sneakers going down step by step by step, and then jump! onto the landing. She shivered. "I hadn't noticed."
She rounded the corner and looked down the next section of the curving stairwell, through the barred metal railings. The floor by the heavy gray door looked horribly hard, the kind that would sprain an ankle or leave week-long bruises. A flight of stairs.
She jumped from the second step, the third, the fourth.
Each time she landed hard, and the jolt of concrete shook her bones until they felt hollow inside.
They had coffee a few more times that winter, huddling out the pervasive cold in sweaters and out-of-the-way diners, late night coffee shops where the clubbers didn't go with wide open windows that didn't press her in. She talked about the intricacies of the French Revolution and her idiot managers and the mice in the kitchen and he listened, nodding his head through a wreath of steam.
The last time they went out, they shared a basket of fries even though she was on yet another diet, fingers weaving around each other between grease and puddles of ketchup. "So...why don't you ever talk about yourself?"
He shrugged. "I don't know."
"That's not much of a reason." She tried to wait him out, but he was still, infinitely patient, and the nervous fluttering of birds was still locked inside her. "Who are you, anyways? You've never told me a thing about yourself."
He plucked a broken-legged fry out of the basket with his usual delicate precision. "Maybe I'm not so important."
She wiped her fingers carefully on a napkin, staining it red all the way through. "I thought we were friends."
"We are friends. But for the wrong reasons. You stay with me because I'm safe." He spit the word out, as if it tasted bitter.
Something delicate chipped inside of her, and eggshell started to slice at her heart. "I don't pick my friends because they're-"
"You're afraid." His voice was not cold or angry; neutral, factual, hard as a bridge rail on a snowy night. "You reek of it. You're like a pigeon that's been frightened out of its nest. Keep fluttering in circles and you'll die."
She picked up her coat and left.
Winter turned into spring, and on the news they talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder and suicide rates, and how they were building a suicide prevention net on both sides of the Bloor Viaduct to keep the jumpers from jumping. The commentators scoffed at the project: the net might keep them from jumping there. They would jump onto the subway tracks and out the windows and off the buildings and from other, farther bridges. You couldn't stop someone who really wanted to die.
Emily's mother called again and again, every week or so. After another birthday came and went without celebration, 21 candles on a low-fat grocery store cake, her mother left a message on the machine: I hope you don't think this means I don't trust you. It's hard for a mother to let go of her first baby girl, and I know you've always been careful, always been cautious, always been good and done what you know is right. You've always been responsible.
Emily threw every pill she had out the window that night, just in case. The fury alone kept her up until dawn.
He knocked on her door twice during those months, a light and nervous staccato on wood. Both times she ignored them, curling up into a little ball on the wrought-iron bed, hiding in the pillows and keeping perfectly still. After a little while he went away, left her feeling wrung out and pale. She watched him go down the apartment steps the second time, walking heavy in his big gray coat.
When he reached the second-last step, he jumped. His robin-red scarf fluttered behind him.
Emily wrote her final exams and then walked along the bridge every day after work, watching the big metal struts erected as if by magic, jutting out into a sky that was blue and warm again. She got the full-time hours she didn't want at the store, but it was money, it was good, it was her being responsible for her future and a productive citizen and a proper acceptable member of society. He left her messages once in a while, but she didn't return them. The feeling of wings haunted her dreams: she woke up sweating, thinking she was airborne, terrified of being pulled out too far by a prevailing wind and swept too far from home. Sometimes she woke up with her hands reaching into the distance, hunting for the invisible bars of a cage.
A week before the nets went up he called, and she let it ring. His voice sounded canned and tinny on the answering machine: it's your last chance. The net will catch you after next week, and you'll never get enough velocity again to really matter.
She didn't sleep that night, drank black coffee to ward off the dreams until her heart raced like a sparrow in her chest. Finally, despairingly, she pulled on the coat that was now too warm for the weather, wrapped the scarf around her neck, and locked the front door behind her.
The streets were almost empty at four in the morning and the bridge was quiet, a giant burdened with construction equipment and cordoned-off shards of steel. The great and terrible teeth stabbed up into the sky, severing the beauty of the horizon.
The railing was warm beneath her hands, still leaking the heat of the day into cooler night air. The stars winked above and below, and she slid one leg over the railing. Now or never. Now or never again.
Her scarf flipped loose and she pushed it back with one hand, careful not to overbalance again. The highway below was almost quiet, and her other leg went over easily.
Standing on the edge, nothing between her and the air and the ground, Emily started to shake. Just like diving into deep water. Just count to three and go. Count one, two, three... She didn't move.
"No, no no no. I'm not gonna do this all my life, goddamnit. No," she told herself between teeth clenched tight together.
"Now, one, two, three."
And she fell.
Hair and scarf streamed behind her, wind whistled in her ears, and terror gripped every muscle. She was falling. She wasn't flying, she was falling. I don't want to die, not now, not yet!
Limbs flailed at air, and yet nothing slowed, nothing halted. You can fly. You can fly. You did it before. She flapped her arms, kicked her legs: nothing.
"I can fly, goddamnit!" she screamed into the air.
Wings exploded in her chest.
She stopped dead twenty feet above the ground.
"I can fly," she said, before she stopped shaking. "I can fly. I did it, I jumped, I can fly!"
With a scream of delight, she whirled into the air, looping and twirling like an acrobat. You couldn't stop someone who really wanted to die. You couldn't stop someone who really wanted to fly.
The sun started to rise over the jagged buildings, and the trees spread out below her like a fuzz on the landscape, the road a giant ribbon across the world. She aimed herself east, into the rising sun, up into the clouds.
She could fly. So of course, there was nowhere to go but up.
