Jonas glanced about. No one else had opened their windows. No crowd was gathering on the street below. Looking one way he could just make out the river, and when he turned the other way he saw a corner of the Chrysler building rearing up between the other buildings. He fixed on this, on the way the building’s distinctive spire sat directly behind the would-be suicide’s head, like a sort of crown or a jester’s cap.
‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man repeated, more firmly this time, turning his head towards Jonas for the first time as he did so. There was something about that face, a look there that he could not interpret, which cut through all talk of banality and made Jonas see that he had to do something, although he had no idea what.
‘Don’t jump,’ Jonas heard himself say; words that seemed to have been engendered by some genetically determined impulse, a moral instinct. But he could tell how hollow it sounded, wondered whether it might not, after all, be better to let the guy jump, so he could prove that he had the courage and could perhaps die a happy man.
‘Give me one reason, just one good reason, not to jump,’ the man on the ledge said, thereby indicating that his decision was not — Jonas found himself involuntarily thinking: unfortunately — altogether inflexible, and that this was going to be tricky. Into Jonas’s memory flashed something that Alva had once said, or maybe it was one of the other Nomads: There is only one really serious philosophical dilemma: suicide.
I am not going to trouble you with the details of the man’s full name or the reason for his profound despair, his wish to die. I will simply say that, as far as that goes, he had as plausible, which is to say ‘as good’, a reason to jump as any other suicide.
Jonas had been about to say something but thought better of it, because even as an unspoken thought he could tell it was a no-go, a ludicrous platitude. After all, what was this man asking? He was asking, quite simply and with horrible directness, for an answer to the meaning of life. He stood out there on a narrow ledge, ten storeys above the ground, asking for a reason to live, and Jonas Wergeland did not know, had not the foggiest notion, what to say. There had been times in his life when he could, with reasonable conviction, have come out with some relatively fine words on the meaning of life but sadly not now, ten storeys above the ground, in such an extreme, unbelievably unlikely situation — a real B-movie cliché! — at a time when he also had to think fast, and find something straightforward and simple. Some indisputable value. A turtle that was solid enough, a ground that would not shake, not too much at any rate, when you set your foot on it.
And yet he realized that he had to say something, his whole body was telling him so; something that would stop the man from jumping. He at least had to try to give this man an idea, a hope. Jonas hated the situation, found it hard to believe that it was actually happening, but there was a man out there on the ledge, with his face turned to him, and he, Jonas Wergeland, was the only person to be making any contact with the man, to see that face, and he had to say something, if nothing else he had to try. But what? What do you say to a man — a desperate man, robbed of his last fragile hope — to prevent him from jumping to his death?
Jonas Wergeland was in New York to make a programme for NRK TV about the Norwegian artist Per Krohg’s large mural in the Security Council chamber at the United Nations, a programme about art. Jonas had always wondered whether in some way Per Krohg might have had an influence on the political decisions made by the Security Council, due to its members having gazed at his mural during their deliberations.
Once they had finished shooting the programme Jonas had, however, stayed on in New York. He was totally burned out; he needed a break. Jonas Wergeland had made something of an impact at NRK — the so-called cognoscenti had taken a particular liking to his programmes — but the major breakthrough and ditto viewing figures had so far evaded him. The way Jonas Wergeland himself saw it, he still had not come up with a truly earth-shattering idea, one that would change everything, send him off down a new track. Up to that point, his programmes had mainly taken a negative slant, whereby he demolished, criticized, poured scorn on his subjects, but in the long run something in him reacted against this as if he knew in his heart of hearts that these were shoddy and, not least, unsatisfactory, tactics.
Earlier that day, he had stood on the deck of a ferry bound for Battery Park, after visiting Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was almost as if he thought that the sight of the copper lady, that colossus, might jolt him into a state that would trigger the great idea. Instead, he fell into conversation with a man, a history teacher from London, who was also leaning on the rail, gazing across at the financial district, which was slowly coming towards them, like a barge loaded to the gunwales with rectangular boxes. As soon as he learned that Jonas was Norwegian, he asked: ‘Do you know who the greatest Viking of them all was?’
‘Harald Hårfagre?’ suggested Jonas.
‘Harald Hardråde,’ the man said firmly.
‘How come?’
The Englishman held his arms out to Manhattan, rearing up into the air straight ahead of them, more like a warship now, an armoured vessel bristling with cannons and missiles. ‘Because he tried to conquer York, the old York that is, tried to conquer the whole of England, come to that,’ he said. ‘A pretty harebrained scheme, but had he succeeded, it could have changed the whole course of history.’
The man knew a great deal about Harald Hardråde; Jonas listened with interest, sensing that there might be something in this, the germ of an idea.
‘Just imagine,’ the Englishman concluded, his face turned to the conglomeration of buildings in front of them, “the new York”. The sheer ambition of it. Coming in from the sea all set to conquer a place mightier than your own land. It’s a while since any Norwegian had such a thought, eh?’ The man gave an ironic smile.
Jonas had picked up some groceries before going back to the apartment — an apartment belonging to someone he knew, situated in the part of town between the UN headquarters and Park Avenue. He had been sitting thinking about Harald Hardråde, jotting down some fragmentary words and headings in a notebook, when he heard the cry from outside, and now there he was, standing at a window on the tenth floor, charged with saying something inspirational about the trials and tribulations of life to a man who wanted to die.
‘Come back inside, please,’ Jonas said.
‘Can’t think of anything, can you?’ the guy said threateningly, again making as if to jump.
Helplessly, or perhaps in order to draw strength from it, Jonas gazed at the Chrysler building, taking in its vertical lines and being struck yet again by the juxtaposition: the beautiful building in the background and the desperate face in front of it, aesthetics and ethics in one shot. So what lies at the heart of life? he thought, and even as he was thinking it he realized that the question had been wrongly formulated, because there was not just one heart to life, there were several hearts, lots of turtles, both within and outside of oneself, and possibly this was the very thing that so dismayed and confused people and prompted them to call for just one heart, so they would not have to choose. Here, in the middle of Manhattan, looking into the face of a suicide, and with the Chrysler building in the background, for the first time in his life Jonas understood why it was so difficult to say what the meaning of life actually was: because there were many meanings to life, a whole host of indisputable values. So one might as well start, he thought, by selecting one of several that were all equally good, begin with that rather than die of frustration.