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falling down

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about falling from buildings. It’s a problem associated, I suppose, with living in a city with a lot of tall buildings around.

But there seem to be more than our share of incidents recently. Earlier this month, a guy working construction on a new Trump building in Soho fell 42 stories to his death. Six weeks ago, two brothers fell 47 stories when their window washing platform gave way beneath them. Amazingly, one of them survived and is expected to make a full recovery.

And of course, because these things tend to haunt you, the newspaper articles and especially the miracle of that one guy’s life remind me of one afternoon in February five or six years ago when I saw a man die, just like the men in the newspaper stories recently.

It took a long time to come to grips with what I saw. I was writing more at the time, and I eventually took a stab at putting it on paper, safely writing it as “fiction.” First person narration, telling what the event was like for a man named Lhomme. (Why that name?? I like to think I’ve outgrown all that melodrama, but apparently I haven’t…)

There are a few embellishments, mostly making Lhomme out to be a cold fish. Otherwise, things happened pretty much like this:

Once, only a few years ago, on a day exactly like today, Lhomme saw a man die. The man fell off a ladder from a roof, six stories up, where he was working with his son. His son saw him die, right there on the pavement. Lhomme was standing on a sidewalk on the other side of the street, directly across from them.

Lhomme never told anyone about the death, though he thinks about it all the time. He felt he couldn’t. Shouldn’t, somehow. There was something too… real… raw… about it. He still feels this way now, but I made him tell me, against his will.

He had never actually seen someone die before. I mean, how many of us have? And this was it, right across the street, as real as anything. As real as the numbness creeping in from the ends of his fingers. As real as the strong sun shining in his face on a winter’s day.

This is the kind of day that inspires. It can even inspire someone like Lhomme. When David slew Goliath with his little slingshot, it was on a day like today. It lifts you up. But it’s not the kind of day you can describe. I try, but the right words don’t really exist. And of course, on a day like today is when Lhomme… (This is the kind of person he is. This is what I’m trying to tell you.) On a day like today, Lhomme had to deal with someone dying, right in front of him.

So it’s only natural that he didn’t want to talk about it, right? Sure. But the strange thing is, it wasn’t for the reason you would think. He did not want to talk about it because its meaning was too great, or too overwhelming. No, he didn’t want to talk about it because it didn’t really mean much of anything at all. It was there, it happened. And then? Then he just kept walking.

Here’s what happened: Lhomme was walking along a sidewalk on a day very much like today. You know this part. But he wasn’t walking from his apartment building, he was in town somewhere. On one of the cross-streets near Times Square. Dirty snow lay on the roofs of the tall tenement buildings, dripping in the strong sun. Chunks slid off every now and again, splashing onto the sidewalks below. Small drops of cold water peppered Lhomme’s head as he walked down the street.

He didn’t care so much – this was the first day of good sun in months. So he watched the snow, melting, falling off the roof as he walked along, and across the street from him he saw two men working on one of the roofs. The younger one was much younger. He was on the sidewalk filling a bucket to pulley up to his co-worker, up on the roof. The co-worker was much older, and lay flat on his stomach on the steep roof, feet perched on the top of an aluminum extension ladder, which was balanced in the rain gutter and extended up to double its height so he could reach the peak of the roof. They were like a father and son, Lhomme thought. He didn’t know why. He really wasn’t paying all that much attention to them. It was just an impression he had.

In an instant, out of the corner of his eye, Lhomme sees a flash, just like off the fuselage of an airplane. Except here, it’s the sun flashing off the aluminum extension ladder, still extended all the way. The ladder was falling, catching the sun as it went. It clattered on the sidewalk, rattling back and forth, making a great racket. So great a racket, in fact, that Lhomme almost didn’t see the man’s body follow it down. A rag doll. Hit the ground like a sack of manure and made a thud.

The man’s body landed a kilter, one leg above his head, half-hidden by the hulk of a blue van parked by the side of the street. In one second, in just one flash, the man went from roof to ground. He must have misstepped, or lost his grip. For just half a second. In that tiny slice of time, his life ended.

It was grotesque. Lhomme used that word because it fit and because he wanted to impress me with how aware he was of the whole situation. Awareness is exactly the problem. He was too aware. So aware, so in-the-moment, that nothing, not even this man’s death, could reach through to him, to the core of him. This is the problem with him and this is the part of him that no one should know about. None of us should go through life as completely aware of it as Lhomme is.

He watched all of this and then he just kept walking. He made sure that someone had called the ambulance, of course – he’s not completely insensitive. He watched several people flip open their cell phones and call 911. And he watched while this man’s son ran up to the dead, contorted body and run away just as quickly down the block. Like a movie. Like someone in shock is supposed to act, absurdly screaming and covering his mouth as he wove back and forth across the street,
dodging cars, just running as fast as he could go.

But then Lhomme just kept walking.

Walking. He needed a place to go. He already had a place to go – he had been on his way there. And it didn’t occur to him that he shouldn’t go. Of course he shouldn’t go. He had just watched a man die and he had to move and he just started walking. But he had a place to go. God forbid he doesn’t follow his plans exactly, come hell or high water, come a man dying across the street from him on a day that should be spent celebrating life. His feet just started taking him there. Because that had been the plan all along.

He walked straight to the restaurant. He did not stop. He knew where he was going.

All of a sudden, it was ten o’clock at night. And all of a sudden, Lhomme realizes that the sun has set and that he is very sober. The day he was leading was actually completely different than the one he should have been leading. It didn’t match up. How can anyone watch a man die and then go carousing with a room full of people he did not know? It is unconscionable. And Lhomme knew that.

One day there will be a reckoning, he thought. Because there is always retribution on days like today. A balancing. For all of that good, a price must be paid. And today that unlucky bastard on the roof paid it.

© 2008 pakurar dot com.