Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“I’ll go, Farber,” I said, wearily. “But only because you guys are all yelleeew.”

Naturally, the elevator was out of order, so I had to slog it up three flights in the equatorial swelter of the stairwell. At least the apartment was unlocked.

Inside, a panoramic scan of the room revealed little in the way of furniture, save for the obligatory flat-screen, a device that, with today’s programming, was a reliable vehicle for stories and images capable of sending even the sunniest among us into the tar pit of despondency, and ultimately, out onto the ledge.

I ambled through the open room. Upon poking my head out the window, I spied Duncan seated against the wall, the slack embodiment of defeat. He jolted to life at the sight of me, then evaluated through bleary eyes whether my presence foretold good things or bad.

“Why don’t you come inside?” I proposed unkindly, shooting for a swift and economical resolution.

“Of course I’m not coming inside. What do you think I’m doing out here?”

“Being ridiculous, for one. You’re also humiliating yourself—which is something I happen to know a little bit about.”

I suppose the last thing he’d expected was an antagonism. If somebody was going to be dispatched from the ground to try to talk him down, it would logically be the most compassionate of the lot, the one whose eyes would go all soggy when imploring him to choose to live! Someone who’d say, You don’t want to do this, son. Really. I’ve been there. I, however, seemed to be taking a slightly different approach, that being the hurling of insults. Perhaps Duncan viewed my show of insensitivity as some sort of tough-love tactic. This was just my style. Harsh, but skillfully so. I’d done this a thousand times, never lost a jumper.

“Humiliating myself, am I?” he said distantly. “Well, maybe my pride fell with my fortunes.”

“Oh sweet Jesus. If that’s more Coldplay, I’m going to get a stick and nudge you over that ledge.”

He reddened at having been called out on all that plagiarized heartache. “Shakespeare,” he muttered, his eyes cast out to the horizon.

I looked at this afflicted mess, the red face and puffy eyes, and all I could think was, Why wasn’t he dead yet? Here’s why: because he was an attention-seeking little twerp, oh so much deeper and more complex than the rest of us. A quote always at the ready, one whose relevance eluded you, but you nodded anyway and convinced yourself it was spot-on illuminative. He was the dweeb in college who sat around on the fraternity house sofa flicking a lighter. He didn’t smoke, but you never knew when someone might start playing “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”

“Get on up and come in. You can read me passages from the Norton Anthology of English Literature inside.”

With a sniff, he went groping around in the front pocket of his baggy pants. Then he tossed something in my direction. Reflexively, I caught it. It was a pack of matches with a black and orange logo that read Mimi’s Hothouse.

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s where we went on our first date,” he wailed. “See that Marin gets it.”

I tossed it over the ledge. It ruffled toward the ground like an injured sparrow. “You don’t fucking need that.”

He gaped at me like I was evil incarnate, as if I’d just thrown Marin herself, and not a stupid pack of matches, out the window.

“Duncan—is it Duncan? Listen, I don’t know you, I don’t know why you think your life is so hopeless, and—I won’t lie—I don’t care all that much. But you’re not as far gone as you think. I know people who are so much more fucked up than you could ever be, and I don’t see them throwing themselves off buildings. If you do this, do you know what happens?” I pointed down at Marin. “She moves on. She’s bummed for a little while, freaked out more than anything, but she goes to a therapist for a few months, or maybe just to her mom’s for the weekend, and then she’s past it. She’s past you, and by Christmas she’s giggling and squirming around in someone else’s bed. Maybe by Thanksgiving. That’s where this is headed. You die for nothing, Shakespeare.”

We all die for nothing. That was something Duncan could learn later.

“You’re not exactly restoring my will to live,” the kid sneered.

“Good, ’cause that’s not what I came up here to do. If you really wanted to kill yourself, you would’ve done it already. This is nothing more than a matinee, a lame one at that. The only reason you’re out here is to upset that girl down there. And I can’t have that.”

I don’t know why I said “I can’t have that.” Sure I could have that. What did I care? I was getting carried away.

“How many relationships do you think go on to flourish after a stunt like this?” I continued. “Do you think Marin—is it Marin?—is down there falling back in love with you? Do you really think this is good for business?”

He looked up at me with washed-out eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

At that, I couldn’t help but smile. It was a bitter smile. “I’m afraid, my little drip, I know exactly what I’m talking about.” I heaved a sigh. “A long time ago, I made a bad decision and fucked over my friends, people I cared about. I know you’ve never heard of me, but I used to be in a pretty big band. We were no Coldplay, mind you, but we did have our moment.”

I scratched the back of my head, considering how far to go with all of this. “My band was offered a huge opportunity. You know the Junction?”

“Yeah, man, they rock.”

“That they do. Well, the Junction invited us out on tour with them. That invitation was like winning Powerball. Sold-out stadiums all across North America. Our music being heard by literally hundreds of thousands of people. Radio promotion. T-shirts. And all of this happening at the precise moment that our second album was being released. It was not the kind of opportunity that required a whole lot of consideration.”

The kid had parked an expectant gaze on me.

“But you know what I did?” I said. “I turned it down.”

Duncan snorted. “Dude, that was stupid.”

“That it was. Everybody thought I turned it down because I was an egomaniac. We’d had a monster hit, a platinum-selling album, a song in a movie that won an Oscar—beat out Sting and Randy Newman, I’ll have you know—and a phenomenally successful tour of our own. So everybody thought I passed on this golden opportunity because I’d be damned if I was going to be somebody’s opening act.

“But here’s the thing.” I paused. Letting the truth out into the world meant I’d have to face up to it. “I didn’t turn down the Junction because I thought we were too big to warm up their stage for them. I turned them down because I knew that Simon Weathers wanted to get his greasy hands all over my bass player.”

“So?”

“So. I was in love with that bass player.”

I felt Duncan’s stare on the roof of my skull.

“It was pure jealousy,” I went on. “I nixed the whole thing because I was jealous. I pissed away the band’s future and the livelihoods of my friends, people who depended on me, all because I wanted to keep hold of something that was never even mine.”

“So, what did you do?” Duncan asked.

“I chose for us a slow, painful death. I insisted we hit the road by ourselves, and just as everyone had predicted, our crowds were disappointing, our record sales were disappointing, and our label soon dropped us—which was disappointing. I’d made a huge misjudgment and it cost all of us our careers.”

I stopped talking, ensnared as I was in this miserable memory.

“Do your friends know?” Duncan asked, still looking sluggish and flimsy against the wall.