New short story: The Ledge

The thing about killing yourself is that it's ultimately embarrassing. It's pure cringe just thinking of all the blood and gore on your clothes or the foams coming out of the mouth in weird angles, or maybe just the awkwardness of the family without you. But still, there you are, on the ledge.

The wind was doing something theatrical with my hair. Of course it was.

Down below, a small crowd had gathered with the specific energy of people who wanted to witness something but also needed to be able to say, later, that they hadn't wanted to witness something. A man in a yellow jacket was filming on his phone. He'd already adjusted the angle twice for better composition.

Great, I thought. I'm going to be vertical video content.

A woman in a hijab was eating a shawarma. She caught me looking and gave a small, apologetic shrug, as if to say: I was already eating it when you climbed up there. It would be wasteful to throw it away now.

I appreciated the honesty.

The building's edge was narrower than it looked from the ground, which is something nobody tells you. The architectural details that seem decorative from below - the concrete lip, the ornamental ridge - are, up close, aggressively hostile to human feet. My left heel had gone numb. My right shoe had a small hole in the sole I hadn't noticed until this precise moment, and now I couldn't stop noticing it.

I'd worn these shoes to my brother's wedding. I'd worn them to three job interviews, two of which went well and one of which the interviewer had sneezed directly into my face and then pretended it hadn't happened. I'd worn them to the hospital when my father had his procedure, and we'd waited in plastic chairs for six hours watching a television mounted too high on the wall playing a cooking competition nobody in the waiting room had asked for.

These were, objectively, significant shoes.

It seemed wrong to die in them.

A megaphone crackled somewhere below. "Sir. We'd like to talk to you."

I looked down. A police officer was holding the megaphone with the exhausted expression of someone who had attended a workshop on this exact situation and found the workshop deeply insufficient.

"It's not a sir situation," I called back.

A pause. Some radio static. "We'd like to talk to you."

"You said that already."

"We have a counselor here."

I looked. Standing next to the officer was a woman with a clipboard, squinting up at me. She was wearing a lanyard. The lanyard seemed, at this distance, to have a little cartoon sun on it.

Something about the lanyard made the whole thing feel like a workplace onboarding exercise.

The shawarma woman had finished her shawarma and was now watching with her full attention, arms folded, like a theater critic settling in for act two.

Here is what nobody tells you about standing on the ledge: it's enormously boring. You've made a decision, presumably a large one, and now you're just... standing. The pigeons don't care. One of them was extremely close to my left foot, investigating the situation with the blank professionalism of a health inspector.

I had thought - and I recognize this is embarrassing in its own right - that there would be more clarity. That the ledge would deliver the thing ledges are supposed to deliver, which is perspective. That from up here everything would resolve into its essential shape. The noise would fall away. Some true thing would emerge, luminous and irrefutable.

Instead I was thinking about whether I'd left the stove on.

I was thinking about a TV show I hadn't finished, and whether that meant it would now end on a cliffhanger, forever, for me, specifically.

I was thinking about the pigeon.

"Can I ask what brought you up there today?" The counselor had the megaphone now. Her voice was very calm. Professionally calm. The kind of calm that is itself a technique.

"That's a large question," I said.

"We have time."

"Do we?"

Another pause. Down below, the man in the yellow jacket had been joined by a second man, also filming. They were comparing angles. One of them gave a thumbs up.

"I'm going to come up," the counselor said. "Is that okay?"

I thought about it. "The elevator's slow," I said. "It stops on every floor. Someone always gets on with a bicycle."

"I'll take the stairs."

She disappeared. The officer with the megaphone stood very still, the way people stand when they've been told to stand very still and are taking the instruction perhaps too literally.

The pigeon pecked at my shoe. The hole in the sole, presumably.

I looked out at the city. It was, from up here, undeniably itself. All those windows. All those people behind the windows doing whatever people do behind windows - eating cereal, watching videos of other people eating cereal, having quiet arguments about things that started as conversations about something else entirely. The whole organism of it, breathing and grieving and occasionally glancing up.

I thought: I know exactly three people who would come to a funeral on a weekday.

I thought: One of them would be late.

I thought: They would still come.

The stairwell door opened behind me. The counselor stepped onto the roof, slightly out of breath. She still had the clipboard. Up close, the lanyard did have a cartoon sun on it. Below the sun, in small letters: YOU MATTER.

She didn't say anything. She stood a few feet back and looked out at the same city I was looking at.

After a moment she said, "The elevator really does stop on every floor."

"I told you," I said.

"Someone got on with a bicycle."

We stood there for a while. The wind did its theatrical thing. The pigeon left, apparently satisfied with whatever data it had gathered.

"The shoes," she said finally, looking down at my feet. "Are those the ones with the hole?"

"You can see that from there?"

"I'm very observant."

"They were significant shoes," I said. "Originally."

She nodded, like this was a completely reasonable thing to say. Like she had a form for it on her clipboard.

"You want to tell me about them?" she asked.

And somehow - this is the embarrassing part, the truly cringe part, the part I will never be able to explain to the man in the yellow jacket or the shawarma woman or the police officer standing very still below - somehow that was the thing that did it.

Not perspective. Not clarity. Not the city resolving into its essential shape.

Just someone asking about the shoes.

I stepped back from the ledge.

The cartoon sun on her lanyard said YOU MATTER and I thought: well. That's laying it on a bit thick.

But I stepped back.