Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

He felt the terror in his knees, sparking into his thighs, trying to shock him back away from the edge. But he stepped through the alarms, away from the raised safety of the door, until he was a solitary target atop the building. The wind fired at him, whipping his kinky hair flat against his skull and a few ticklishly forward at the temples. He didn’t mind the cold: it was refreshing. His legs were in a panic and what he had eaten of the meal seemed to dissolve. His stomach felt empty and afraid. The building’s roof wall was obviously new. The simple concrete barrier, about a foot wide and flat on top, had probably replaced something more ornate that had threatened to fall, and this was the cheapest substitute that would satisfy city ordinances and the co-op’s insurance. It was four feet high, gray everywhere, except for splotches of pigeon droppings on top and streaks of tar to patch fissures on the side.

Max ignored his terrified thighs and went up to the wall, pressing his belly against it. The cold wind blew into one ear unless he turned his face north. He leaned over the wall and looked down into the frightening drop.

The window ledges were lined up symmetrically. A trick of vision separated them by shorter and shorter distances as his eyes looked down. Below, the deadly sidewalk was a bleached strip bordered by the humped charcoal street. What would have been a smooth line of ledges was broken by the occasional dirty air conditioner. His head was woozy from the sight. Max imagined himself fall, spin, and smack on impact, embedded in the roof of a parked car.

He had always been afraid of heights, of falling. His fears were clichés. Everyone had them. Everyone knew what they meant. Did that help? No.

What am I truly afraid of? Dying? Not loving my wife and son? Loving them? Who cares what the real fear is?

It was the cowardice itself that appalled him.

He stretched his arms out, flat along the top of the wall, and swung his right leg up, maneuvering so he was lying on the wall along its length, the right side of his body exposed to the great fall, the left side facing the safety of the roof. He still wasn’t completely on the wall. He kept the toes of his left foot touching its reassuring tar. He pressed his cheek against concrete, looking out at the sad red-stained water towers, the sullen blank faces of stone, the walls of hostile glass and curved above them all the dark sky, a slice of deep blue bleeding at the edge, struggling to be as vast and interesting as the New York it covered. He was inches from a free-fall to the street.

He lifted his toes from the roof and hung for a moment balanced on the wall with his belly. He raised his feet in the air. A gust of wind pushed at him. His hairs blasted off his skull. He saw one gray curl straighten over the deadly ground. His legs crawled with fear. His right eye shut against the vision of the unimpeded drop, but he fought and kept his left one open.

Get to your feet, Max.

He grabbed the sides of the wall with his hands and brought his knees up. He was clinging to the wall. A roll to the right and he would be gone.

He shut his left eye and was blind. The wind deafened one ear. He arched his back up, still holding the sides, and put both feet flat. He felt stupid, his ass high in the air like a submissive monkey. He got angry at himself and suddenly he was standing up straight, hands away, a thrill in his heart, an equal to the sky, standing beside it with nothing to hold him there.

He opened his eyes and screamed. He saw only the city flowing away from him. He was alone. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs. He screamed again. It was gobbled into silence by the raw wind.

Something hot oozed from his forehead. Blood?

A warm flow spread at his groin and down his right leg. He was peeing. He took a step forward. The mean wind blew at him, trying to knock him off.

He bent with it, swaying out over the street with his right hip. When the wind gave up for the moment, he righted himself and then he was not scared.

He scanned the slain city, standing over it, master at last of his vision. He walked on the wall, one foot after the other, walking the perimeter of the building. When the cold wind tried again to shove him off, he swayed with it, a small skyscraper that gave but did not break.

He took the corners with a smile, knowing that for a second most of him was out in the air, suspended over the fatal earth. He was glad. He moved faster on the wall, pushing back sometimes at the wind, daring it to try harder to defeat him.

I am Max Klein, he thought, death’s survivor.

The terror was gone and in its place there were calm resolutions. He would talk to Jonah about his silence. He would stop playing substitute Daddy to Byron. He would tell Debby that he would never again be the beacon for her darkened life. He would attend no more dead celebrations. He would tell Nan that her unhappiness belonged only to her and he wanted no portion.

He turned the last corner. He was ten feet from where he had begun his walk. As he stepped toward the finish the wind came at him from a new direction. For a moment he was interested in the change.

And then he realized he had stepped into the air.

He didn’t scream. There was no terror left in him to be expelled. He saw the walls of hostile glass jerk and the water towers tumble. He grabbed at them with his arms as he fell straight down.

He felt the pain in his knee first. His left shoulder was yanked hard, so hard he thought it might break off. Then he was hit in the jaw as it whacked into brick.

He had caught himself on the wall, hooking it with his left arm. The rest of him dangled in the air. He reached with his right hand for the wall and got only the tips of his fingers on it. The skin scraped off as his weight pulled him toward the street.

For a split second he saw it all so clearly: I’m suicidal and I’ve goofed and I’m about to die.

No! His body talked back. From his stomach he pushed up at the dead weight of his body with all of his energy. His left arm contracted, his feet kicked at the rough bricks. He was reminded of pulling himself out of a swimming pool in Florida when he was a child, his mouth filled with chemical water, afraid of the deep end he had wandered into. Max put everything he had into one single jerk of power in his left arm. Something punched him in the stomach.

He groaned. It hurt and made him wish to give up. He was lying on top of the wall again, spinning it felt like, and he had only a little energy left, a last bit of himself with which to decide his fate. The wind was furious and powerful.

He had to get off the wall. He couldn’t see from the pain. He pushed himself off the wall without considering that he didn’t know if he was headed for a short drop to the tar or the long battering fall to the street.

The suspense lasted only a second.

Immortal Max landed on the roof and laughed.

Max hadn’t been in Little Italy, that he could remember, since he was a young man romancing Debby. They used to have cappuccino and cannoli in the sidewalk cafes after delicious, cheap meals in Chinatown and walk north arm in arm, talking all the way to her apartment on Washington Square. Hadn’t lasted long. Only a few months later she was injured and eventually moved in with him uptown. They were no longer sixties lovers but that ungainly thing of the seventies — a relationship.

He met Perlman on the corner of Mulberry and Canal. It was late morning on a December Monday, the last week of the year before Christmas. It was cold. The therapist’s breath flowed out of him in a long arched white column of smoke, curling up past the tenements to the sky, as if he were a little chimney that had bolted from the buildings. The streets were dirty from last night’s tourists. Attached to every lamppost was a gaudy and, especially in the morning sun, tawdry white and red Christmas bell decoration. Lights were strung between the bells; sometimes they became overgrown and smothered an awning or a tenement’s banisters. On one staircase leading down to a basement, where the garbage cans would normally be, a Nativity scene of miniature figures was displayed; the steps made a steep descent for the Wise Men to Baby Jesus at the bottom. Max stepped on a green Michelin guidebook that was soggy and broken. Only one shopkeeper was out sweeping. In this cold, the quick way with a hose wouldn’t work. The other store owners must be sleeping late. Or maybe hoping the bright sun would eventually warm things up.