Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I tapped Marin on the shoulder and pointed. “You know that fella?”

Alaina followed my finger and hissed. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”

I stifled a chuckle. A fall from that height probably wouldn’t have even done the trick. It was, in fact, entirely possible that he’d already jumped, dusted himself off, and climbed back up to give it another go.

Marin waved both hands up at the shaggy, yellow-headed figure like a desert island castaway halfheartedly flagging down a propeller plane but just as happy to stick it out on the beach for another couple of years. “Duncan? Duncan, down here!”

“Oh! Look who showed up!” echoed a voice from the ledge. Suicidal, he still had the presence of mind to be snot-nosed about it.

Marin tilted her head. “I thought you said you were going to kill yourself.”

“He waited for you to show up,” I said. “This isn’t suicide; it’s vaudeville. If he really wanted to die, he wouldn’t be dangling himself over the mezzanine. He jumps from there, at best he twists an ankle.”

“Come down from there, Duncan,” she implored. “Let’s talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about!”

“What a mopey little shit,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”

I reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

“Don’t even think about it!” the kid yelled down, his back still rigid against the wall. “Marin, tell your dad to put his phone away or I’m jumping! I swear!”

Alaina snorted, relishing the slight.

“I mean it! Same goes for your mom!”

Alaina’s hands went fast to her hips. “What did that little puke just say?” Then she eyed both Marin and me. “You clowns just got the compliment of your lives.”

Marin stepped forward and began to plead, her voice high-register but too shrill to be an outright squeak. “Okay, okay. Calm down. Nobody’s calling the police.” This tender young thing hadn’t yet learned that when somebody says I mean it, the opposite is typically the case. I dropped my phone back inside my pocket.

“These aren’t my parents. These are people who are worried about you, just like I am. This is my boss, Alaina. And this—you’ll never believe it—is Freddy Tremble.”

“Who?”

“Freddy Tremble. From Tremble. The band.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Remember that song? ‘It Feels like a Lie?’ ”

He thought a moment. “No.”

“You never saw Ballad of the Fallen ?”

“No. Why are we talking about this?”

Marin was muttering to herself in rising pique. Duncan had now managed to irritate each of the devoted souls who’d convened to save him. That was bad form.

“Can I come up there?” Marin called.

“No!”

“Come on, Duncan. Why are you doing this?”

“You don’t love me,” was the bruised response.

Marin turned to us. “He’s right. I don’t. I’ve known him for three weeks. Should I just be honest with him?”

Alaina was reading an e-mail.

At that moment, a second-floor window slid open and an old lady with a detonation of white hair poked her head out. “Hey! Why are you people making such a fuss?”

I pointed, and the woman’s head twisted upward to see. “Heavens to Betsy!” she screamed. “It’s a jumper!” She ducked back into her apartment like a whack-a-mole creature dodging a mallet.

Alaina was grinning at me. “ ‘Heavens to Betsy.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Meanwhile, a pair of older gentlemen was leisurely traversing the street to take in the goings-on. Both were circling seventy and shabbily dressed. One was nibbling at a vanilla cupcake.

The old woman on the second floor was back now, having thrust her head through the window again. “Police are on their way!” she announced. “Firemen too, probably!”

And just like that, Duncan’s expo expired. With the authorities on the march, there was now a limit to how long he could perpetrate this gratuitous torture of his ex-girlfriend. He had a problem. However genuine the emotional turmoil that had brought him out here, it was nothing compared to the misery he’d endure by abandoning it like a weenie. He may not have wanted to kill himself, but he certainly didn’t want to not die.

So he did the next best thing: he leaned back against the bricks and began to bawl.

Man, was it appalling. Distraught sobbing. Sputtering noises of a grown man’s whimper. “My star is fading, man. It’s like I’m swerving out of control and there’s, like, no chance of release.” He paused to sniffle. “I know no one said it’d be easy. But no one said it’d be this hard.”

“Pathetic,” Alaina jeered.

“It is pathetic,” I agreed. “That’s Coldplay.”

Alaina and Marin stared at me.

“All that lachrymose drivel—those are Coldplay lyrics.”

Alaina looked horrified. “Why do you know that?”

“I’m not proud of myself.”

Meanwhile, the two retirees, both clad in paint-spattered overalls, I realized, had made it to the sidewalk and now joined us in the courtyard. The one who hadn’t brought a cupcake looked at Alaina. “Do you speak English?” he asked loudly.

She gave him an ice pick stare. “Not a word.”

A sudden shriek sent all eyes darting up to Duncan. So absorbed was he in his mortally aggrieved wailing that the dumbass lost his balance. A chorus of gasps rose up from the courtyard as one of Duncan’s feet slid clear off the ledge and, with a guttural yelp, he stumbled over the side.

We all braced to follow the doomed beeline of his drop and the inevitable sickening thud. But instead, there was a harsh jerk and the guy stopped falling. He’d somehow managed to slide his hand into the open window and grip the frame. Clutching a corner, he struggled to pull himself up, his legs swinging and kicking over the edge in a desperate and not altogether uncomic search for footing. By some miracle—some unnatural force inimical to the evolutionary process of natural selection—this yo-yo managed to wriggle himself back to safety, and after spasms of twitching and groping for dear life, he collapsed on the ledge. Panting and snorting, but alive.

It was all too much for Marin. She buried her head in her boss’s bosom and began to sob.

Alaina held her assistant close and pretended to console her. But I soon noticed that she’d fixed an urgent look on me. Her eyes burned into me with white thermonuclear fire. Alaina seemed to be transmitting some sort of message that I wasn’t receiving.

“What?” I finally barked.

“Go up there, Teddy.”

“What?”

“Go up there and talk to the mental patient.”

Me. The person who had the least business being there. “Fuck. You.”

She went stern. “Teddy.”

“Why would I go up there?”

“Because of that which swings in your boxers.”

“What?”

“That child needs to talk to a man, and laughable as it is, you’re the closest thing we have at the moment. He needs a heart-to-heart with someone who can relate to and bond over the cruelty of women. Are you familiar with the cruelty of women, Theodore, or do I have to introduce you?”

“Are you kidding me? If I go up there, it’ll be to lift eighty bucks from his wallet as compensation for the train ticket I wasted.”

“Go,” she insisted.

“You don’t want me to go up there. Trust me.”

Duncan did not want to be schooled on the harsh truths I was likely to unload on him. He was, to be sure, unprepared for my take on the human condition. Alaina kept on burning me with the death stare while Marin rocked and puffed in her employer’s armpit. I was unmoved by any of this, even the crumpled heap of humanity splayed out on the ledge. But we had arrived at an impasse, and impasses meant nothing if not more wasted time.