Russell Banks - The Angel on the Roof

Several drinks later, night had arrived. From my window, I saw the lights of the town come up — strings and chains of lights brightening rooms and lobbies and public spaces and along streets and alleys, illuminating in strips and spots the lives of the people who lived with one another in the cramped tenements and worker-hotels, the boardinghouses and restaurants and outdoor cafés of Gbandeh. My gloom lifted somewhat then, and, for the first time since the previous night, solitude and difference eased their grip on my sense of myself. I left my hotel for the street, and made for the café.

At the crowded bar, I signaled to Andrew, who broke off his conversation with an attractive young woman, Japanese or Korean, in jeans and T-shirt and, without being asked, he brought me an opened Rhino and glass. “Welcome back, sir,” he said.

“Andrew, I have to ask you something. About Djinn.”

“No problem, sir. What about him?”

I said that I had been shocked by what had happened to him. And shocked even more that no one had objected or even seemed to care when he was shot and killed. “Killed for what? For climbing the wall of a building? For refusing to come down when the policeman ordered him to? Andrew, that hardly deserves shooting,” I said.

“He broke the rules, sir. He never should have climbed the wall.”

“But he’s a madman! That could have been you!” I said. “Or me! Any one of us could be mad. Maybe we are mad, and he’s the sane one. Who can say for sure?”

“Doesn’t matter, sir. It’s the rules that matter, and he broke them.”

“But they were small rules that he broke. He was killed for it!”

Andrew shrugged, then abruptly asked me how I had enjoyed my meat and vegetable pie.

“What? Well, fine,” I said. “I mean, it was actually delicious.”

Did I wonder about the meat? he wanted to know. He no longer looked at me, but seemed to be trying to catch the eye of the Asian woman at the far side of the bar.

“What has this to do with Djinn, may I ask? And by the way, Andrew, I don’t want this beer, I want a whiskey. Neat.”

He smiled graciously and poured from the best bottle in the place, and when he set the glass before me, he said, “I hope you’re not upset there was no bush meat for it, sir. No chimp.”

“Upset?” I laughed. “Certainly not!”

“Green monkey can taste just as fine, you know, if you cook it right. But you probably noticed the difference, since you are a smart man mighty familiar with our nation. So my apologies, sir, for having to replace the bush meat with the green monkey.”

I backed away, staring at him in disbelief. He kept a thin smile on his face and poured my untouched beer into the sink, wiped the counter, and returned to his pretty Asian customer.

I didn’t feel it, but I must have been drunk, because I have difficulty otherwise explaining my actions then. At the time, though, everything I did made great good sense and had a strict purpose. It was only afterwards that it made no sense and seemed purposeless. By then, however, it was too late. By then, my actions had filled me with feelings that would not leave me, just as a dream will, and those feelings I would eventually be forced to act upon, for they had already begun to act deeply upon me.

I walked through the crowded café directly to the place where Djinn had started his fatal climb the night before. Reaching up, I grabbed onto the wooden support of the balcony and swung myself up onto the balcony itself, and from there, just as Djinn had, shinnied up a rainspout and inched my way along a secondary drain to a further balcony on the left and just above me. By now, the café and bar customers had spotted me and were watching from their tables, giving me the same rapt attention they had given Djinn the night before. I quickly scanned the crowd for the policeman, but didn’t see him. With one hand, I grasped the bottom rail of the balcony overhead, and, with the other, clung to an adjacent ledge, and in that way managed to swing myself from the drainpipe up and onto the balcony. I was three stories high now, over forty feet from the cobblestoned street. I was sweating, but it was more from excitement than exertion, and breathing in rapid gulps, like a tiny, trapped animal, and my heart drummed loudly against my ribs. This was the strangest, most unpredictable thing I had ever done in my life, and while it thrilled me to be doing it, it also terrified me. I had no reason for doing it, only a compulsion.

I climbed atop the upper rail of the balcony, as Djinn had, and, balancing there, turned and looked down upon the people, many of whom had left their tables and had gathered excitedly below me, staring up with the same awestruck, slack-jawed gaze they had given the madman, as if they saw in me tonight what we had seen in him the night before, as if I were transforming them into beloved subjects.

Now I saw the policeman — not the same man as last night: this was a taller, darker man with a nearly bald head. He wore the same blue shirt and retrieved his pistol from under it. Slowly, almost casually, he aimed the gun at me and called out, “Sir, you must come down now! You cannot climb these walls!” I laughed in response, a laugh of sheer hilarity, of great good humor. I felt nothing but warmth and affection toward this man with his gun, and for that reason alone the absurdity of his command delighted me.

I was three stories from the ground now, with only the tile roof above and, beyond that, the African night sky. I turned away from the crowd and, exposing my back to them, reached up and grabbed hold of the lip of the roof, swung both feet onto a narrow wall molding, where I managed a toehold, and drew myself slowly into the air, moving my body inch by inch toward the roof. I was dangling from the edge of the roof, with my shoulders and head above it, but just barely, and most of my weight still suspended out there in the air. I heard the policeman call to me, “You must come down, or I’ll have to shoot you!” Then he said, “Come down, Djinn, or I’ll shoot.” I know he said it; I know he called me that. It meant many things, but at that moment, it meant to me only that, if he could kill me, he would.

It was impossible now to turn back. If I groped blindly in the air behind me with my feet, trying to find the railing of the balcony below, in seconds I’d surely lose my grip on the roof tiles and fall, as good as shot. It was taking all my strength just to hold on to the tiles, just to stay where I was. Somehow, though, I found enough strength in my hands and arms to draw my body slowly, agonizingly, up and over the lip of the roof — first my chest, then belly, pelvis, and thighs, and finally one knee — when I heard the crack of a gunshot. The bullet ricocheted off the tile closest to my face, stinging my cheek with bits of clay, and I made one final lunge to safety, over the edge entirely and onto the sloped roof, out of the shooter’s line of sight.

I scrambled to the high ridge of the roof and over, turned, and made my way along the far side of it, out of sight for the length of the roof to the gable at the end, where I finally stopped and sat, hunched like a large bird with my legs crossed beneath me and my arms wrapping my shoulders like feathered wings. In the distance, I could see from my perch the crowd at the café, still milling about, peering up at the place where I had disappeared from sight. In the other direction, I overlooked the park. Palm trees clattered dryly in the night breeze. A strange weightlessness and euphoria had come over me. I checked again at the café and saw the policeman put away his gun, and he and the others returned to their tables and to the bar and resumed their normal evening activities. Andrew, with feigned delight, was serving an Asian man who had joined the Asian woman at the bar. A great thing had been inflicted upon me, but it was clear, nothing had happened to anyone else.