Gary jumped off. If it wasn’t for the wind, he thought, I
think I would feel totally weightless, like floating in a pool.
Gary had never floated in a pool, but he had always wanted
to try. There were lots of things he hadn’t done. But when one considers how
many things there are to do, how many lives that could be lead, how many
different people we could be – one realizes that even considering them all
takes a considerable amount of time, and time is the only part of the equation
that is not infinite, at least not for Gary.
Earlier in the day he flipped through lists on the Internet
to avoid making phone calls. A week before he had called in sick to spend some
time with his brother in the hospital. He had moved into a new studio one-month
prior, when his roommates told him it wasn’t working out. Almost a year had
past since he dropped out of business school because he didn’t get along with
his teachers. And twenty-three years ago his mother forgot her birth control.
Gary’s parents wouldn’t have fell in love, if his father
hadn’t needed someone to bail him out of jail. All his grandparents had
survived the poverty that had taken the lives of a half dozen siblings. To
continue down the tree was to embrace stories of chance encounters, war
endurance, heartbreak, perseverance and blind luck.
Yet Gary thought of none of this as he stepped from the
ledge. He thought of Hawaii 1982 and a fish that skirted his ankle and made him
scream pre-verbally for his mother. He wanted to call for her now, but it would
do no good, no good at all. So instead he though of past, but this time he
inserted himself in the memory. The sun overhead, the sand in his toes, the
sound of families playing where the waves greeted the shore and murmured
...hello…goodbye…hello…goodbye… He picked up the screaming child, himself at
age two and spoke in a tone he did not know he was capable of. There now, it’s
okay. In the glaring sun, he did not immediately recognize the woman with the
sunglasses and hat.
-You have quite a way with children, his mother said.
-Thanks…I just- he was crying…
-If it’ll stop him from crying, you can kidnap him.
