The Ledge

I was sitting in the backseat of the car, moody and silent, when I saw him. We were driving over a bridge, the road sandwiched between two pedestrian walkways, and my thighs were sticking to the hot black car-leather. 

“This traffic is terrible,” my grandfather kept repeating, and it was true: the bridge was so packed that the cars were almost touching, so close together that I could already hear the screech of metal on metal in my head. 

So my grandpa was droning, cars were honking, and outside the window this guy, this long-haired, spandex-wearing guy, was pacing back and forth. Lining the edges of this bridge, per building regulations, was a brick wall about the height of this guy’s chest. He went up to the wall. He walked back. He came to the wall again. He lifted himself onto that ledge, only a little, with his arms, just pushed himself up so he could peer over it, then shook his head and stepped back. He stepped forward again, but then the cars surged forward too, and I lost sight of him, no matter how hard I craned my neck, trying to twist around to catch a last glimpse. 

The silence sat heavy in the car, and my grandpa, the driver, kept going. I wondered about the man. I wondered if he would kill himself, jump over the side. I wondered why, I wondered what could possibly drive someone to take their own life. Finally, I thought: what does it show about me, if I’m the kind of person who drives by a man who might be about to commit suicide, and I do nothing? People are supposed to be automatic about these things. They’re supposed to jump out of moving cars and pull the guy back; they’re supposed to offer a store of moving words: They’re supposed to say that life is worth living, even if there’s hard moments, and to keep going, no matter what. If I stay silent, does that mean I’m a bad person? 

I didn’t want to be a bad person, so I opened my mouth and said: “Grandpa, can we go back and check on that guy?”

And because I am bossy, and because maybe, just maybe, my grandfather was as worried as me, he said: “Okay.” So we turned around, drove back, and the guy was still there, still pacing. My grandpa opened the car window and, as we passed him, yelled out in a thick Israeli accent: “Are you okay?” The guy looked startled. He quickly flashed a thumbs up and said, “Yeah, yeah I’m good.” My grandpa closed the window and we kept driving until we could make a u-turn, because we still had to pick my dad up from work. I pressed my face to the window, eager to see the man again. My grandpa must have been thinking of him too because he said: “See? He really sounded all right.” But just at that moment, as my grandpa spoke those words, as we were coming back to the bridge once again, we saw the guy. He was running toward the ledge, hair flying behind him, somehow managing to reach top speed on that tiny slip of bridge-sidewalk, and then his sneakered feet left the ground. He was flying, he’d leapt into the air, the biggest jump I had ever seen in my life, the arc of it larger than any crescent moon’s. And then he disappeared. My breath got lost in my throat, and my grandpa’s voice died too, and I just stared at the space where he had been, emptily. I could hear my heart beat, and it felt like it was in my head instead of my chest. Boomp. Boomp. Boomp. 

Then the man, the guy, came back up, because he’d moved, he hadn’t been in front of the ledge, he’d been in front of some small platform, built into the side of the bridge. He’d only jumped over the stairs to the platform, and he was okay, and he was not dead. I started laughing and my grandpa did too, and we couldn’t stop, not even when we drove by the guy, standing there, still pacing. 

“I thought, I thought-” I gasped, trying to speak between relieved giggles. “I thought he was dead.” 

“Me too.”

The laughter finally leached out of me, dissipating as I realized what I’d said. I thought I had witnessed a death. I pondered that fact—my almost trauma. If he’d really jumped, I wondered, what would that mean? I’d heard that cities put nets under bridges, to catch jumpers, so maybe he would’ve ended up tangled in one of those, feet and arms in awkward positions. But possibly, if he’d jumped, he would’ve simply been gone. Forever. 

“Maybe he was just doing some weird exercise,” my grandfather said. 

“Yeah. Maybe.” 

I suddenly wanted to go back and check on him. I wanted to tell my grandpa to turn the car around, yet I’d already done that. I couldn’t ask twice. I couldn’t patrol the bridge forever. The guy had said he was okay. We’d checked. We were good people. Besides, we had to pick my dad up from work. So my grandpa kept driving, and for all I know, the guy is fine.