Time stretches out on a long fall.
In Stride’s brain, he knew that it was one hundred and twenty feet to the black water and that he would plummet through that distance in about three seconds. Even so, his thoughts accelerated like shooting stars, giving him enough time to watch himself fall and be acutely aware of his sensations. He had no time at all to be afraid.
As he was thrown into midair, he thought he heard Serena cry, but her voice was gone instantaneously, and the only noise around him was the deafening roar of the wind. Air hurtled against his body, cold and fierce, as fast as a bullet. Its wail sounded like a scream, shouting out from his chest. He hoped it wasn’t. He didn’t want to die screaming.
He caught a last glimpse of the bridge as it disappeared above him. Its lights were a half-moon of blurry white, and then the lights blinked out, and he was enveloped in blackness. He saw nothing below him, no water, no light, and he realized he had squeezed his eyes shut. He forced himself to open his eyes, to take advantage of the strange elongated sensation of time to orient himself. When he did, he could see the lights of the Point, where he lived, and something about that glimmer on the narrow strip of land made him want to see it again.
He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t. His lungs had been hammered by the impact of the hood of the car, and they refused to swell to take in the speeding oxygen around him. He felt light-headed, swimming, dreaming, as if he were already underwater.
Three seconds.
He had time to think about the fact that he wasn’t seeing his life pass before his eyes. No clickety roll of images like film on an old movie projector. No recollections of Cindy, Maggie, or Serena. No voices, sounds, memories. No angel caressing his arm and showing him the loved ones who had gone before him. He was in a vacuum filled with air, about to hit water that was not soft like a knife cutting through butter but was solid like concrete and would savage his bones and tissue and kill him instantly, the flicking of a switch from alive to dead.
That was the first conscious thought to penetrate his mind in that first long second.
He was about to die.
He thought about people jumping from towers. People in planes about to crash. They must have had that same brilliant moment of clarity. You are alive now, and in another moment, you will be dead. He was almost curious about what it would be like, and he realized that death had a strange seduction to it.
But he had time enough to realize that he didn’t want to die, not now, not for a long time, and he had time enough to remember that the Golden Gate Bridge was a lot taller than the Blatnik Bridge, and people had been known to survive the big drop into San Francisco Bay, even when they didn’t want to. Not a lot. But a few.
And those that did went in feet first.
Feet first.
His brain began screaming at him. Feet first.
If he hit the water with his head or his shoulder or his chest, he would die hitting the water as if it were made of brick. His only hope was to cut a little tear in the liquid concrete and slip through. With his eyes open, and that odd, elastic time stretching out like a pink roll of taffy, Stride uncurled his body into the straightest line he could make it, pointed his toes toward the water, lifted his arms straight over his head, and tilted his chin toward the sky. In the lightning span of less than a second, he twisted himself into an arrow heading for a bull’s-eye.
Don’t tense. Let it happen.
You’re going to die.
No, you’re not.
He exhaled the last gasp of breath that was left in his chest and let his muscles go soft. He closed his eyes again, and just as he did, time finally caught up with him. His toes parted the seas. His body fired through the water like a rocket. He was conscious of pain, bones breaking, clothes ripped from his skin, water flooding his lungs. He saw the lights of the world wink out into night. He felt hot agony turn cold, felt himself descending and descending and descending, as if he could travel right through the earth and wind up in hell.
Except the deep channel was not bottomless, and after he had gone down as far as he could go, he hung suspended, a moth enrobed in a cocoon, before his body began to coil and climb. The bay that sucked him in found him hard to swallow and decided to spit him out.
Later, he would remember none of it. His last memory would be of running toward Rikke Mathisen on the bridge. There, the film ended. He would have no recollection of the car that hit him and drove him from the bridge, of falling, of time stretching out, of the impact that broke his left leg and collapsed both lungs, of bobbing to the surface on his back, of the searchlight of the Coast Guard boat bathing like a warm glow over his body. No recollection of ever thinking to himself that if he had made it this far, he was going to live.