Jamie Minkivitz and the angel climb higher and higher, the moon rises vast and colossal before them, and they are held momentarily in its lambent light, with the darkness of space stretching all about them, and the angel lifts his face and smiles and his eyes are the color of basalt.
Jamie stares into that face, which appears so beatific and strangely illuminescent and charged with the best and most human of qualities—benevolence, empathy, kindness—that he is entranced and captivated by it, held in its divine light as if he were glimpsing some small part of the face of God, and then the face is suddenly transformed.
Now the thing that looks down upon him, even as it pulls him ever skyward, higher and higher so that the wind is ripping the air from his lungs and he can feel the cold knotting his muscles, a cold paralysis seeping down through him like ink, seems absent of anything human. It stares at him and nothing is reflected in its blank eyes, and then it lets loose its hold and he wonders how he could have mistaken what he’d seen. And even in that moment before it lets go of him and he falls into the darkness, Jamie Minkivitz stares at the fine avian bones of its knuckles and wrists shining white as it squeezes him tighter and tighter so that for one fleeting moment he thinks that his fear is misplaced and that something wondrous is about to happen.
He is six miles up and alone, falling at 120 miles per hour, and in three minutes he will strike the surface of the bay. From pain, cold, and lack of oxygen he is buffeted into unconsciousness. He falls incredibly fast for the first fifteen seconds or so then the air thickens about him—atmospheric drag resisting gravity’s acceleration—and his plummet begins to slow. With every foot, he slows even more. He wakes, sputtering into consciousness, at about twenty thousand feet, and vomits. This is the final part of his descent, which will last about two minutes.
He knows that he is going to die but does not feel peace in this, no strange comfort calms him, rather he feels rage and incredible fear, and the longer he must wait to die and see the bay emerging fully before him, the more this fear increases, and he begins to wail and cry. Tears force their way from his eyes and freeze on his cheeks. Snowflakes swirl in brief, random orbits down from the sky and he raises his face to them as he falls, feels them melting slowly on his skin. The air is sharp and crystalline and the moon so bright that he is momentarily blinded.
For a moment it feels as if he has slowed again, and things come much clearly into focus; everything appears incredibly sharp and distinct, as if a veil had been lifted from his eyes. Below him now the lights of San Francisco, in dazzling, wind-blurred heliographic quadrants, the flashing red warning beacons atop the Golden Gate Bridge, to the cars, minute streamers of white and amber lights, and the water, a serrated silver and gray, which when he strikes will be as hard as concrete.
There is so little time, he knows, and he wants to hold on to something, something that he can hold to his heart, some happy memory, of his life, of his family, of his loved ones, but all he can think of is the fear that very soon he will be dead and he is powerless to prevent it.
The water looks like fractured glass, hard and sharp and unforgiving. Once he strikes it, whatever is left of him will be swallowed up and carried out to sea on the wake of the barges humping slowly through the sound. But there will probably be very little of him left. Small whitecaps stir the tops of waves as freighters and tugs pass beneath the bridge’s massive pylons and cables.
He stopped struggling long ago and gave himself over to the talonlike hands that had carried him ever upward, and when they were rising through the clouds and he was looking into its wind-sheared face, he knew that it was hopeless to argue, or plead, or fight any longer. Now he opens his mouth to say something, a prayer perhaps, or to call out to his mother or father or brother—perhaps it is a name—and his lungs fill up with rich, briny air so cold and clear it is as if he is drinking it, gulping it down, and then he strikes the water and explodes.
San Francisco Chronicle
TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 1985
SAN FRANCISCO—COAST GUARD ID
BODY FOUND IN SF BAY
At about 7:30 a.m., the U.S. Coast Guard recovered the body of James Minkivitz, a worker on the San Padre underwater tunnel project, off Brooks Island. An autopsy conducted Monday found that Minkivitz died from multiple blunt-force injuries, a county deputy coroner said, most likely, from a high fall onto the rocks. Speculation as to where Minkivitz’s fall occurred remains but there is no suspicion of foul play and the cause of death has been pronounced accidental.
Brooks Island Regional Preserve, a 373-acre island off the Richmond inner harbor, is a nesting ground for terns, herons, and egrets. It is also the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, with shell mounds as old as 2,500 years, and lies approximately six miles north of the San Padre underwater tunnel project currently underway and scheduled to be completed in four years.