Her heart began to thump. He might well be planning to jump. After all this time, finally.
She leaned forward in her chair, intending to stand, to go over and talk to this man, then sat back. It would be a long, awkward walk over there, and all the things she’d imagined saying to a potential jumper now seemed absurd.
The man glanced at her yet again. Veronika rotated her chair so she was facing away, toward the water, then discreetly opened a screen up in the rafters of the bridge.
When the man saw she was no longer facing him, he pulled a handheld from his pocket, worked it for a moment, spoke a few words into it.
Then he dropped it over the railing and watched it tumble, growing smaller until it splashed into the Hudson. He looked around, lingering on Veronika, evidently making sure she wasn’t about to turn around. He grasped the railing with both hands.
Shit, he was really going to do it. Barely able to breathe, Veronika leaped from her chair and rushed toward him. The deafening bleating of a microbus horn startled her; she’d stepped right into traffic, was nearly clipped by the bus as it sped by. Shaking both hands impatiently, she waited for a break in traffic as the man struggled to get over the railing.
“Wait,” Veronika called, waving at the man, whose front leg was on the outer girder, his back foot still hooked by the rail. Veronika skirted across a thin opening in the traffic and sprinted down the curve of the bridge. She reached him just as he set his second foot on the girder.
“Wait. Hang on,” she said, breathless.
The man turned. His entire face was trembling. “What do you want? Get away from me.”
She grasped the rail with both hands. “Don’t do this. It’s a mistake. I know you’re feeling hopeless right now, but that feeling will pass.”
The man gaped at her. He was a black man, with a boyish, innocent face that seemed out of place on his tall, powerful frame. “Leave me alone. This is personal.” He looked over his shoulder, down at the river.
Veronika was taken aback by his reaction. She’d expected sadness, despair. That she understood. But he was angry. He also seemed embarrassed.
“What’s your name?” Veronika asked.
He reacted as if the question startled him. “I’m not telling you my name. Go. Leave.”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee. Let’s talk. You can always come back later.”
“What is wrong with you?” he growled. “Just get the hell away from me. Do you understand? I don’t want you here.”
Veronika took a step away, feeling foolish. “I’m sorry.” She wanted to go, wanted to escape this man’s angry glare, but her feet wouldn’t move. He was going to jump. How could she walk away from another human being, knowing he was going to kill himself? She held her ground. “If I was the one standing where you are—and that’s not totally inconceivable—I would hope someone would care enough to try to stop me, even if I didn’t want them to.”
“Well, that’s beautiful. Why don’t you go write a book of beautiful platitudes?” He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Look, I’ve thought this through very carefully, and I’m at peace with it. Every moment you stay here, you’re just stretching this out for me. So please, I appreciate your good intentions, but give me my privacy.”
She’d known this was going to be hard, but this was hard in a way she’d never anticipated.
“I can’t,” she said.
A screen popped up, out over the water a dozen feet from them. It was a middle-aged woman with raccoon-eye tattoos. She didn’t say anything, just hung there, watching.
The man glanced over his shoulder, noticed the screen, just as another popped up. And another. Rubberneckers. Someone passing on the bridge must have alerted her friends.
The man looked back at Veronika as a dozen more screens popped into existence. “You’ve made my last few minutes on this planet even more intolerable than they would otherwise have been. Thanks a lot.”
Then he turned and jumped.
An icy, paralytic shock filled Veronika as the screens shifted as one to face the river so they could watch the man plummet. Veronika was left staring at the thin slices of the tops of the screens—a hundred of them now—her mouth still cranked open to beg the man to stop, to wait, to think about how beautiful the world was, if you could just get out of your own head.
The screens began to disappear. The show was over.
Her paralysis finally lifted, Veronika ran, her breath coming in tight gulps that threatened to turn into sobs as she avoided looking between the slats, afraid she might catch a glimpse of the man floating on the river, the man she’d been speaking to just a few seconds earlier. She didn’t ever want to set foot on this bridge again. While she ran, she sent a message to Nathan. She needed to see him, needed his confidence. Only he could convince her she hadn’t just done an awful, unforgivable thing.
18
Rob
People glided by on the sidewalk. Rob could feel a slight breeze as each passed. He felt like a big, dopey lunk, plodding along in his Low Town shoes. The two hundred dollars he’d gotten for his gliders didn’t help the Winter cause much, but Rob could imagine what people would think if he glided by in High Town shoes while claiming that he was taking a vow of poverty to make reparations for what he’d done. He wasn’t afraid to admit it: part of his reason for doing this was to redeem himself in the eyes of his friends and family. It wasn’t the only reason, or even the primary reason, but it was part of the reason.
As he walked, he kept reaching back to massage his neck. It ached, sent bolts of pain into his shoulders if he turned his head too quickly. Spending ten-hour shifts bent over discarded electronics was wreaking havoc on his back and neck. His fingertips were finally developing calluses, so at least he was past the point of walking around with raw, bleeding fingers.
Club Aishiteru wasn’t hard to find. The entrance was raucous, pulsing, brightly colored—like a silk-gloved fist that grabbed you and tried to pull you inside.
They wouldn’t let Rob in without a system, so he had to rent one. He watched ninety precious dollars roll off his bank balance, on top of sixty for the cover charge. He sure hoped this guy Nathan showed up. He hadn’t sounded eager to meet.
It was a cheap system, and since it wasn’t custom-fit nor did it have a body-adaptive function, it hung from his arms like an old man’s sagging skin.
Then Rob had to create at least a minimal profile before the greeter would let him in. Did he want kids, or have any that he knew of? Was he interested in women of any ethnic mix? If not, he had to specify the maximum tolerable percentage of whatever ethnicities he found undesirable in a mate. Then he had to report his own ethnic makeup (fifty-four percent Asian, twenty-eight Anglo, eighteen Latino, not that it was anyone’s damned business).
As he passed through the checkpoint into the bar, his height and weight (evidently he’d lost nearly twenty pounds since the accident) were measured and added to his profile automatically. Rob was surprised they didn’t insist he drop his pants so they could measure the length of his dick.
A singles meetup was not the sort of place Rob would have preferred to meet, but Nathan had made it clear that if Rob wanted to talk to him, this was where he’d be. It was difficult to tell how big the place was, because the walls had been replaced with visual links to sister bars in other cities, which gave the impression that it stretched out almost to infinity in every direction. The idea was if you saw someone interesting in one of the other bars, you could pop over remotely and say hello.