AT FIRST, WHEN I arrived at the Thomas’ lobby, I didn’t see Mal. Then I saw his topknot over the back of a tall leather chair. He was reading a Playboy and drinking a cup of coffee.
“Hey, man.” He grinned up at me.
“Why’d you want to meet here?”
He puffed out his bottom lip. “You’re no fun. How long did you live here? Six months? I figured you’d want to get back to your roots.”
“My roots.”
“Hey, man, you want to go back to the St. Mark’s, we can do that. But that’s not where it happened for you. It started here, right? The big contract. Money pouring in. Congrats and all that.” He poured his coffee in the planter next to the chair and rolled up the magazine. He started talking through it like a megaphone.
“This man is famous. This man has been on TV.” Embarrassed, I told him to shut up.
Faces behind the desk pretended not to hear us. Because I had been a tenant for six months, their patience ran longer for me than for others. The lounge area was a large room with low, overstuffed leather furniture and low, wide lamps that barely cast any light. The walls were covered in a mural depicting the story of Noah’s ark. Animals mated in twos marched around the room’s perimeter until they finally reached Noah’s big boat, which sat in rising water above the wide entrance of the room. Across the ceiling, beams arched up above us like the belly of an upside-down boat. I knew it illustrated a Bible story, but as Mal barked through the rolled-up magazine and other guests turned and looked at us, it turned into a mural of the circus I’d run away from. And the arched ceiling changed from a boat to a circus tent, and the groups of hotel guests, in their suits and fine dresses, seemed like my audiences, there to see the man in scars and jeans who worked with hammers and nails but no wood.
I grabbed Mal’s arm but he continued to shout invitations at guests through the magazine, sprinkling in creative obscenities, until I pushed him through the revolving door leading onto 47th Street. When I followed him through, he stood on the curb and laughed.
I walked toward Times Square. “Always trying to get attention, aren’t you?”
He stopped laughing and fell into step beside me. “And you’ve always got it, don’t you? I’ve seen a lot of you lately.”
“The magazine?”
“Not just that. You’ve been on television too. And not just the Caesar tape. Apparently they got tired of that one. There are other films of you. Or at least it looks like you. You at a bank getting hit by the revolving door.”
“Turned out later that I broke my thumb.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t go into that. Then there’s the Late Show gig, with the nail chair. And you getting hit by a bus. In all of these short films you hobble along, unaware of any injury. There’s just so many of them I wonder if they can all be you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s the deal with that contract you signed? Hiko told Karen what she knew. It sounded like anything that’s public knowledge is owned by the production company.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So what if you’re being followed? What if someone’s setting you up for these accidents?”
He stopped and we both turned slowly, eyes leading where our faces, grim, paranoid, followed, until we both had revolved in a circle, in opposite directions, looking for who or what, I didn’t know. Most likely a small man with a camera crew, a tall director’s chair, and a megaphone, real, not misused pornography, ready to yell “Roll!” at the first hint that I might break my arm or trip into an oncoming hansom cab. When neither of us saw anything Mal grabbed my arm and pulled me forward again.
I said, “You’re crazy. Why would they set me up? I get into enough stuff on my own.”
“Not enough for a movie or television. Not enough to hold the public’s attention. If you knew about your past, you might have enough there, but, well, you don’t.”
Somewhere, I knew, Michael continued his research. If he didn’t find anything, if nothing ever turned up, then…what, exactly? Would I be plagued by short films from bank security cameras and (un)lucky tourists with camera phones? More than ever I wanted my sight to turn inward, to look back through my own mind and see into what I was before I wandered through the dust and desert winds into Tilly’s arms. Just one hint, one item of what I might be to anchor myself, to throw to Michael and the movie producers, like horse meat for a lion.
We were on Broadway now, fighting our way upstream against a surge of tourists and theatergoers. We stopped and watched a cowboy in his underwear play guitar.
Mal asked, “What are you going to do about it?” “It” being my lack of control, my having signed away any and all rights without thinking it through, my stupidity, my life. “It,” as always, being limited to nothing and able to slip between the spaces from one of my failures to the next. “It” was long overdue for fixing.
“I don’t know.”
“Wow.” Mal shook his head and walked away from the audience surrounding the underwear cowboy.
I followed after him. He ducked through the crowd with his arms stretched to either side, as if surfing. He had little trouble getting through the people. I tripped twice as I tried to catch up, smashed into a woman’s shopping bag, felt something crunch and kept going.
“What should I do?” I shouted.
He answered over his shoulder. “Do anything. Run away. Buy your own camera and film yourself all day and night to make sure you know what’s true and what’s bullshit. Sue them. Just do something.”
He crossed the street to the lane divider cutting Broadway in half. He stood at the center, traffic speeding by on either side of him, waiting for me. When the cars let up, I ran out to him.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You are just like you were in the circus. So friggin’ passive. Take some control, for God’s sake.”
I realized this was what he hadn’t been able to say before, when I was nailed to Redbach’s bar. I thought he’d learned something while we had been out of touch. He had learned how to protect himself without hurting others. My friend was back. This was the man who had tried to save me from a lion, not the man who tried to wake me up by nailing me to a bar. He’d learned how to take care of himself and others, I thought. I counted myself lucky. I didn’t know how wrong I was.
I said, “Not everyone knows what they want, Mal.”
“Yeah, but anyone can take a little control until they figure it out. For instance, what are you doing about that chick who’s after you? Did you tell Hiko you’re leaving?”
He knew I hadn’t.
“You haven’t, and you haven’t told that model to leave you alone either. You’re still sleeping with her, aren’t you?”
I blushed and he laughed at me.
“You told me you don’t even really like her. Do you know why you’re doing her? Because she wants you to. Not because you want to, but because she wants you to. Just like when you moved in with Hiko, probably. Just like when I brought you to New York. You’ve never said no to anyone.”
“Well, what’s so great about your life? You’re living with a weird woman in a tiny little studio, with no job, and you look like hell.”
“What’s great about my life is I say no all the time, man. I’ve chosen a hard path, but it’s the one I chose. Did you know that Michael tried to recruit me after you signed with him? Wanted to get you a sidekick, he said.”
“You’re not my sidekick.”
He laughed. “Shut the hell up. I was. I was your friggin’ assistant. I held the nail, for Christ’s sake.” The smile fell off his face. “But I told him to go screw himself and that was the moment I realized I was angry at you for what I was doing. I decided to take some of your energy for myself. That’s what the jump’s about.”
I didn’t understand. “How did the jump help?”
Mal checked out the traffic in both directions. “No, not the one you went to. Another jump. A bigger jump. I’ll call you when we’re ready for it. You’ll have a bit part in the story that is me.” He flashed a smile and jumped into the uptown lane of traffic. A bus rumbled toward us and he moved to the dotted line dividing the two northbound lanes. He turned and raised his hands and yelled, “You can be my sidekick,” as the bus moved between us. When it pulled past he had vanished. As the bus continued uptown, I could see Mal running alongside, jogging to keep pace with it as it struggled through the heavy traffic. It was a simple and ultimately ineffective disappearing act. I lost track of him in the traffic lights and the passing taxis and I wondered if Michael would have wanted me if Mal had been the one with the great “talent” that drew attention.
When I got home I found Hiko soaking in a warm bath.
She greeted me with a kiss and a question. “Where have you been?”
“With Mal.”
I sat on the edge of the tub. She soaked navel deep. Steam coated the tiles and mirror with a film of condensation. I slid down to the floor by the tub, watching her soap her arms, rinse them off.
“Karen is really happy you and Mal have become friends again.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, she thinks you are a good influence on him.”
I watched her large dark eyes as she said this, but I didn’t see any hint of irony, so I let it go. I breathed in the soapy air and felt safe in the white room. “It’s like heaven in here,” I said.
Hiko smiled and her eyes cast about the room, not finding me.
EMILIA AND I began to meet at her place more frequently, finally climaxing with three visits on the same day, a Thursday.
At first she would welcome me at the door of her apartment, the little peephole darkening under her eye only the first two times. By the end she was answering the door naked, making me wonder if there weren’t other men or women in her life who shared this welcome, if there was a UPS driver or bike messenger, a super for the building, butt crack yawning between blue jeans and tool belt, who knocked in a way similar to me. I began to work on a secret knock in my head, one I planned to share but never did. I worried that someone else would get the greeting meant for me. What if someone else knocked and then checked their watch, and as the door latch clicked and the flesh-colored door pulled back they looked down, past the roaring second hand of their Timex, and then moved up along the long bare toes, the curve of the ankle, up over the muscular calf, up the thigh, the furred thong, specially made for my visits to “Caesar’s den,” as we called it, with a special split crotch and a three-foot tail in the back, a little puff of actual lion’s mane on the end, and the delicious rivet of her navel, the abdomen, still red from my nails (nails and nails), and up to the breasts, rising and falling with heavy, possibly embarrassed breath, and along her neck, the ruby lips pursed in a surprised little O, wide eyes all but saying, I thought it was someone else, and now I’m all naked, in a singsongy little-girl falsetto. At this sight the milkman, postman, UPS, super, plumber, one or all of these, who knows, whispers, “I tawt I taw a putty-tat.” With Tweety’s innocent blink he steps forward and the two begin to re-enact Warner Brothers’ most sexually charged animated teams, consuming each other, a sadomasochistic game that was supposed to be mine alone.
My time with Emilia was always exhausting. After we’d finish tearing each other’s flesh as foreplay, I’d lie back and she’d go to work on me. Once we extinguished our drives with what she called “traditional” positions, Emilia would roll off me and I’d stare at the ceiling. After about six weeks of this we’d fallen into as much of a pattern as I had with Hiko. No longer dangerous or exciting, it was my life.
On the other hand, Hiko and I would go to a gallery or a museum or a showing of her friends’ work. Amid drinks and small reheated appetizers we would hold hands and wander. Those shows or pieces that allowed Hiko to feel the work were, of course, more interesting for her. Otherwise it was just an opportunity to network. We’d eventually wander home with some sort of late-night takeout or we’d pick up ingredients for something we’d make ourselves. We’d end up in bed, holding each other or not, falling asleep almost immediately.
I had stopped telling Hiko any sort of excuse for my leaving. At the beginning I’d say something about shopping or Mal or even just a walk. Now I just said, “Be back later.”
Late one afternoon I found Emilia’s front door standing open and as I came in Emilia called to me from the bedroom. I walked down the dark hallway and found her sitting quietly on the bed—in a black sweater and jeans.
I’d already scripted out in my head what I would say, but before I said, Emilia, I’ve been thinking, she had both removed my belt and tied me to the bed with it. This sounds more complicated than it was. One moment I was standing, looking at her thick glasses, and the next I was saying, “Make it tighter, I can still get loose.” I thought I heard a clasp close as she connected me, rack style, to the king-sized bed, too large for the room.
She left me there and went into the living room. When she came back in she wore the lion bikini.
“I had an inspiration,” she said.
“I guessed that.” I thought she meant belting me to the bed until she showed me her new gloves. She held them in front of me and flexed her fingers. Out of the furry paws poked long, curved claws.
“Those look real.”
“They are,” she said.
“They’re so big.” I imagined the age of the lion that they had been pulled from. Some old king.
“The better to tear you to pieces with.”
“That’s not a lion in that story. I think it’s a wolf.”
“Don’t be smart, or you won’t make it home tonight.”
I was already erect. She slipped backward onto me and as she sat back she put her paws onto my shoulders and dug her claws into me. What had started with pinches and scratches and a lion bikini ended with stainless-steel forks, safety pins, and a plastic-covered mattress. Blood ran off me onto her sheets as she scratched me down the chest, into my ribs. She dug the claws deep into me around my waist. She proved more creative that evening than she had been in weeks, asking me to do things I’d never done, and doing things I hadn’t known I’d like.
“I like the love handles,” she said. “Something to hold.” She smiled her claws in deeper. I was dizzy. She did what she wanted to me and I stared over her shoulders. Strangely, I noticed that all her pictures and the mirror were off the walls, and the curtains were gone. The windows were bare and black and reflected the lights of the room back at me. Other than the bed, it was a nearly empty room.
By the time we finished, she had clawed four 3-inch valleys into each of my sides and nearly removed a large patch of skin from my back. It hung like a torn pocket. We spent a few minutes playing with hydrogen peroxide and then she started eating chocolate chip ice cream.
“I gotta turn in,” she said. She set the ice cream on the nightstand and started to strip the bed. The bloody sheets were balled up and thrown on the floor. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She smiled and turned away as she prepared to remake the bed.
As I tucked my shirt in I remembered the reason I’d gone to her place. “Emilia, I wanted to talk to you about our relationship.”
She snapped a clean sheet over the bed and smoothed it with her palms. Her face was hidden by her hair. “Oh, yeah. I wanted to mention to you. I’m moving to Los Angeles.”
I stood frozen, one shoe in my hand, stooped forward looking for the other one I no longer cared to find. When the word moving left her lips my eyes had locked onto the bloody sheets balled at my feet. Against the pale yellow of them were tiny black flecks of blood. When I’d gotten there two hours earlier, those flecks had been in me.
“What will you do in LA?”
“I’ve gotten a part in a movie.”
“I thought you were just a model.”
She stood up straight, hands on her hips. Her hair covered one eye and the other glared at me. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” I did know: I’d thought her just a model. She and I had never really talked, never heard each other’s plans. We knew nothing of successes or failures. How was I supposed to know that she had any plans beyond piercing me with sharp objects and standing half naked in front of a camera?
She finished making the bed. As she threw the dirty sheets into her closet, she said, “If you ever visit LA, you should look me up.” She had ended our relationship. Denial was my best defense. I began my rejection of this fact by remembering that we didn’t have a relationship, not in any conventional sense. We had events. Struggling efforts. Cataclysms. So this didn’t end any relationship, and if I simply walked away now, I could pretend that no such ending had occurred.
I walked into the other room. “Yeah, definitely. In fact, I think I should visit LA.” I found my shoe in the hallway but didn’t put it on until I stood in the elevator, halfway to the lobby.
I imagined Emilia in her room, relieved that I hadn’t pressed staying together or breaking up. She was like me, I thought, totally screwed up to the point of uncertainty about everything.
That evening, Mal dropped by Hiko’s brownstone unexpectedly. He had a brown box of gear that held some of the jump equipment. He asked me to hold on to it for him.
“I’ll be back in a day or so for it. Karen just doesn’t want it around her, so if you could hang on to it…?” I figured he and Karen had fought over the jump.
I took the box and he left after promising to call me the next day. Despite what he said, he didn’t call or come back. I knew I would see him because I had his harness. I went through his gear, pulled out the harness and left the rope, clasps, and unopened bundles of gauze in the box. There were six old mayonnaise jars filled with a jelly mixture that smelled like gasoline. I feared the odor alone might strip paint off the walls. I tightened the lids carefully and put the box in the back courtyard in a sealed cooler. Something told me to bury it.
I tried to put the harness on but couldn’t figure out the right way to wear it. After a while I half convinced myself it wasn’t even the same bungee harness. I hung it on the back of a living room chair. It clung there, like a pet spider, sprawled out, territorial. It scared me. I gave it a wide berth, kept my distance as if it might leap at me. The room had only one other place to sit, the sofa, and I’d covered it in DVDs and CDs and magazines I wasn’t reading, so I had no place to go to. I began to think of it as Mal’s room. Soon the harness gave me the impression Mal hid in the room, lurking in a corner, behind furniture, perhaps even browsing through books in Braille. I stopped using the front of the apartment. I didn’t disturb it. I didn’t play music. I didn’t touch the TV. I didn’t turn on the lights.
Several nights after Mal dropped the box off I sat in the kitchen, pretending to read some new reports Michael had sent me. They’d sat on the kitchen table for weeks, some of them months, as I’d worked hard to ignore them. Fewer had come lately, mostly thin, single-page notes. The envelopes were thicker the farther down the pile I worked. The older the envelope, the more it held. I tired of reading them, the tales with no ending, only beginnings that all sounded the same, with disturbed young men, histories of mental illness, disappearances, accidents, poorly copied photos, or photos clear enough that the men were obviously not me. They’d all taken on the same sad quality. Layered in with the reports were scripts from the production company, suggestions of how I might be used in a Will Ferrell vehicle or a Farrelly brothers picture. The scripts, like the reports, all sounded the same, and I flipped through them quickly, eyes wandering, always to the same place, down the hall to the living room where the chair sat with the harness draped on its back.
The metal clasps and hooks winked at me from down the hall. The danger they represented crept out into the city; it leaked from Hiko’s home, and I decided I should leave town. Emilia would be going to California. I could get there first. I called Michael with my last-minute decision that I needed to go to Hollywood. I could do a movie, I said.
“What are you talking about?” he said. “You aren’t signed for anything.”
“A TV show, then.”
“Listen, we don’t have anything right now. I’ll keep you posted. Just stay in New York.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?” I asked.
“It’s just really quiet right now. Don’t panic.” In his instruction to not panic I thought I heard his panic. Selling me was proving harder than he’d anticipated.
The next day I still didn’t hear from Mal, but I did hear from Karen. She came by just before lunch and Hiko invited her to stay. Hiko left Karen and me alone in the kitchen for a moment. I was cutting turkey breast and Karen sprang on me as soon as Hiko was out of the room.
“Mal’s having an affair, isn’t he?”
At the word affair my hand slipped and the knife slid through the side of my left hand. Blood spilled out of my newest wound and I grabbed a towel.
My guilt about Emilia kept me from looking Karen in the eye as I said, “I really don’t think he is.”
“He’d tell you, though.”
“I don’t know. But I don’t think he is.”
“You don’t think. You can find out. Call him and find out.”
I no longer even tried to look at her, so I just watched the blood run from the back of my hand onto the cutting board instead. It calmed me. “I’ve been waiting for him to call me. When he does—”
“Don’t wait. Call him. Call him today.”
I could hear Hiko coming back down the hallway. I whispered, “Have you mentioned this to Hiko?”
“She doesn’t think he would either. But she’s too trusting.”
“What does that mean?”
Hiko returned and Karen pulled bread from the cupboard and brought it to me. When she put it down her eyes fell on the cut in my hand. She tore some paper towels from the roll and pressed it against the wound. The small fiber quilting of the towels turned red with blood. Karen’s long nails flashed at me. She didn’t seem concerned about touching it. I focused on her hand.
She said, “I mean that for some reason she always picks the losing side.” She looked up at me, face hard as stone, not a hint of a smile or levity, and then cleaned the knife to cut the bread.
I went into the other room and found my stapler and sealed the wound shut. It was too tight and wouldn’t heal well. I didn’t care.
I never did call Mal for Karen. Instead, I pretended she hadn’t said a thing and I waited for him to call me. He never did, but he showed up at eleven two nights later.
“Tonight’s the night. Have you got my stuff?”
I had spent days with his equipment reminding me of our conversation on the street, his hint at a bigger jump, one that would make him the star of the story. I had to know what he meant.
I told Hiko I was going out and we ran out to the cab he’d brought, the cooler between us. The harness jangled from my pocket; the clasps flashed in the headlights of the cab. When we got inside I told him about Karen’s suspicions.
Mal shook his head. “She knows something’s up but won’t believe it’s not another woman.” On his lap rested the box of gear.
“So she doesn’t know about the jump?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding?”
“Does she know about any of this? This gear? What you did before? The test jump?”
He sighed and said, “Sometimes telling people too much is like giving them control over you, like attaching a leash to yourself and handing it to them. Sometimes it’s just better to keep some things hidden. You understand that, right?”
I shook my head. I didn’t understand, not then, maybe not even later. By way of explanation he whistled and pantomimed an hourglass shape with both hands—the international gesture for a curvaceous female—and I realized he meant Emilia.
I said, “That’s completely different.”
“Is it? So Hiko wouldn’t be mad? She’d be pleased? Like Karen would be to find out that you’ve been holding on to bungee gear for me?”
We rode in silence. I stared out the window. Mal checked the gear. We arrived at the bridge and found what I thought was an odd press scene. Fifty people, maybe more, on the bridge. Three had cameras. One, an enormous actual reel-to-reel film camera, knocked into people as the goat-faced adolescent holding it pushed through the crowd to find Mal. A fuzz-faced boy grinning at everyone held a cigarette-box-sized digital video camera. Cell phones flashed everywhere. Last was a boring old camcorder held by a large, slightly pigeon-toed woman whose horn-rimmed glasses reflected the lights of the city. Lenses swung left and right as the individuals filmed the crowd filming the individuals. No one had a light of any kind. I pointed around us and said, “Too bad there’s no lights. No way any of these films turn out.”
Mal laughed. “Yeah, but this way the cops won’t see us.”
The crowd started up the bridge. I moved off by myself. After a solemn march we reached the high point of the bridge. Redbach, already stationed at the same spot as before, pulled back the fencing and tied it in place. The wind roared. The last time we’d been there it had turned calm. The wind died down as we came to the apex, but this time Redbach almost looked afraid he’d blow off the bridge. He gripped the rail as he waited for Mal to get ready.
Mal prepared himself in front of the crowd. He put the harness on. With the final strap adjusted, he stood with his arms stretched out and Jerry and Redbach pulled out a heavy gray cloth and began to wrap it around him, as if preparing a mummy. Jerry wrapped his arms and legs first, followed by his chest and stomach.
I walked over to them. “What is that?”
Jerry didn’t stop wrapping. “Fire-retardant wrap.”
Mal watched my eyes as he pulled a tight gray covering over his head. His tall topknot just a bulge underneath, he tucked the strands of loose hair around his face and at his neck under the wrapping. Only his long goatee was visible when he finished. He then smeared what looked like petroleum jelly over his face and into his beard. Someone remarked that it was another fire retardant.
Gray fabric wrapped double-thick, Jerry opened the cooler and began to apply jelly from the mayonnaise jars. Even in the high wind the odor clung to us, threatened to erupt into flame despite the absence of fire. They applied it to his legs and back, with a little on the backs of his arms.
Mal grinned at me and said, “We want fire, but not too much.” His eyes flashed as someone took a picture. At his feet were the coils of the rope and bungee cord. He looked like a jellyfish at the end of a fisherman’s line.
I stepped close to him so only he would hear me. “Mal, is this safe?”
He laughed and raised his arms to allow for more jelly to be painted onto his sides. I couldn’t stop him any more than he could have stopped me outside Caesar’s cage. I’d have to support him as he’d supported me. “You let me know if you want to leave, and we can just leave.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. These people want to see something burn, and I’m it.”
Black shadows of metal coils and girders reached out above us, and the main support beams shone in bright spotlights. I suddenly realized that the real centerpiece out here was the bridge. No matter what Mal did, the bridge would remain. The pillars seemed to hold up the sky. Mal would do what he wanted, and, whatever the result, the bridge would remain. Then someone else would try something else, and success or failure, the bridge would remain. Mal was wrong about finding some space to claim as your own. You never claimed any space—it claimed you. Tilly’s circus had claimed me, as had Redbach’s bar, Hiko’s studio, Emilia’s bed. I heard Los Angeles calling for its shot at me in the wind coming up the East River.
Mal addressed us, his throng, lackeys and worshippers. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad you all came here tonight. Some would say that what I’m about to try is the act of a madman. Others might say it’s an act of stupidity. Yet others just want to see a guy set himself on fire. To all of you I say, kiss my ass. But you will have to jump off this bridge to do that.”
He climbed onto the rail. Unlike at the previous jump, I felt him taking the story from me. He wouldn’t be forgotten. I would. He would not.
He reached out and called to Redbach. “Scissors.” A pair with bright blue handles appeared and in a series of jagged cuts he removed the goatee that reached down to his chest. He held the braids out and handed them to Jerry.
“A keepsake for the lucky lady,” someone said, and people laughed.
I could feel it in the crowd. Mal wasn’t jumping in as much as we were throwing him off. The crowd demanded it. I almost sensed a cage around us.
A spotlight popped on. It was held by the reel-to-reel operator. The large camera with the great wheel of film clicked away in one hand; in his other a small klieg threw light over Mal.
Somewhere behind us Karen imagined Mal in the heat of an affair. He’d spent time practicing all the steps to this with Jerry and Redbach. She never would have allowed it. He’d hidden everything related to it with me. He’d not been with another woman. He’d been with something that could kill him. She had been wrong on the details, but it had still been an affair.
Redbach lit a torch with his lighter. He stood about ten feet away from Mal, far enough not to light him too soon. Mal faced us, his arms raised. Everyone moved to the rail, fanned out to his left and his right. I stood next to Jerry, almost twenty feet from Mal. Redbach stepped up and touched Mal’s boot. Immediately blue flames licked up his legs and, as Redbach yelled, “Go,” Mal erupted in a column of orange fire. He jumped off backward and for a moment his arms stayed out at his sides, but then he began to swing them and his legs kicked.
The time I’d seen him jump before, he had disappeared into the darkness beneath the bridge and everyone had been forced to imagine him swinging beneath us, but this time he screamed his way down and, like a comet, he left a phosphene trail in the air behind. He reached the end of his line, began to slow, and finished as a small orange dot that broke the surface of the water and was extinguished. The burning light he had been left grand, sweeping arcs in my vision. I blinked at them and listened to the others. No one knew how to react. A few started to applaud. From the opposite end of the crowd, barely audible, someone said, “Oh God!”
Far below us, swinging slowly, a small fire burned its way up the line. Either the line they used wasn’t fireproof or jelly had spilled onto it, but an orange line hung below us like a fuse, and trapped at the end waited Mal. He had dipped under the water for only a few seconds, just long enough to douse the flames, but hanging in the air now, suspended above the river’s rolling surface, nothing kept the flames from creeping to him. He reignited into a fireball.
“Motherfucker. He’s still on fire,” Redbach said. Someone else yelled to cut the line. No one did anything. People moved away from the rail. The camera continued to click, and Jerry started to scream down to Mal.
Finally able to let go of the rail, I moved to the knotted rope at the buttress. Redbach stood there, staring at the bridge’s girders, unsure what to do. I grabbed the rope and shouted, “Help me get him up here.”
He looked at me as if just realizing he wasn’t alone. “No,” Redbach said. “We need to cut him loose. The water will put him out.” He searched through the bag at his feet and found a large butterfly knife.
That’s when the spotlights from the chopper snapped on. Redbach looked at me and said, “Do we stay?”
I looked over the edge of the rail. Ahead arched the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond it Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty. I looked down. Mal swung into view, then under the bridge, a small, burning match. I saw a reflection of him in the water beneath. Both were struggling.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “He’s still burning.”
“Yeah,” Redbach said. “Jesus Christ.” He kept repeating that as he began to cut through the line.
We stood and waited for the police. The chopper swung around in the air, its engine laboring to keep the unflyable shape suspended in the air above us, the pilot clearly working against the high winds and afraid to approach tree-thick bridge cables. Bug-eyed searchlights danced toward us.
“Do they know he’s down there?” I said.
“I don’t know.” Redbach’s sweat dripped onto his hands as he got through the last part of the line. He’d cut himself in his efforts and, unfeeling, worked despite it. Blood dropped onto the bridge deck beside his knees. I looked back over the handrail and watched as once more the small orange dot at the end of the line dropped into the water. This time it wasn’t moving. He’d stopped his struggle.
Pounding of feet and the lights from police cars. Six or seven uniforms, heavy in the middle, hanging over gun belts, made their way to us. They took turns asking us questions and peering over the edge. One of the cops squinted down at Mal and said, “This guy lit himself on fire and jumped off the bridge?”
“Yeah,” Redbach said.
“What a fucking moron,” the cop said as he turned away. He shouted into his radio and the chopper swung away from the bridge. Beneath us, lost in the new darkness that had rolled in after Mal’s second loss of fire, a police boat circled, small floodlights trained on the lettering on its side. One larger light swept the water ahead and another popped on behind as they looked for my friend.
Redbach and I were arrested and booked for trespassing and disturbing the peace. In the processing station, one of the officers eyed us carefully.
“Hey,” he said, “you that guy?” He pointed at the palm of his hand, finger cocked like a pistol, and made a nail gun sound. “You are, ain’t you? My kid has downloaded stuff about you off the Web.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
He stamped a form and wrote something above the smeared red ink. “I couldn’t believe that last thing my kid downloaded. That sex tape of yours is sick.”
I stood there, not sure what to say. I could feel my back curving as my knees wobbled.
He looked at Redbach. “And you, you’re his pal, aren’t you? Put the nails in him?”
Redbach turned pale. “No,” he said. “Not me.”
Another cop walked in as they took our mug shots. Mine is now famous. It ran in Time and Newsweek and was eventually named one of the fifty most recognizable images of the year. My eyes, swollen half shut from crying, are red, and sweat and tears run down my cheeks. The photo was taken just as the cop said to me and Redbach, “Sorry about your friend. He was DOA.”
Redbach and I both became sick in the small plastic wastebasket in the corner behind the police cameraman, who kindly waited for us to finish before saying we could help ourselves to coffee or water before we headed to our cells.
Released from jail the next day, I went to Hiko’s apartment and made our home happily devoid of any modern conveniences. God help me if Hiko heard about the film the cop had seen, heard about it on the radio or my television. I had no idea what it was and didn’t want to find out. I had also discovered that the videos shot the previous night were being shown on the news. I wanted none of my films to enter my home. I felt them rising outside, like a tide, and I kept expecting to hear thunder and catch flashes of lightning from the corner of my eye, as if the flood of information were a real storm raging outside my window. The cab ride home had been horrific, as the cabbie spent most of the trip, eyes on the mirror, smile on his face, trying to engage me in conversation about the reports rising from his radio. I’d only just escaped his questions about my “talents” and the “tragedy” of my friend. Did self-immolation equal tragedy? Since then the constant radio chatter and television reports from other buildings and cars on the street had pattered on my ears like rain. A storm, a flood.
I circled the living room. The television and electronics equipment sat around me. Some might say, though not me, that I had “earned” them. Mal had deserved more than he’d gotten, had actually worked toward something, however ridiculous, and died. He’d killed himself to get what I had gotten without trying. The electronics, my prizes, buzzed even when turned off, hummed with the need to repeat reports and videos of Mal’s death. They dared me to listen. They dared me not to.
I could have sold the equipment, the electronics. Instead, I threw them away. To be more accurate, I threw them out the window. It started with a couple of CDs that I decided would never be listened to again. They had both been Mal’s. Out the window.
It felt good, holding them out there and letting gravity do its thing. I sat by the window and dropped one after another of the disks from our metal rack bought at an overpriced, trendy furniture store. After a while I ran out of CDs. What good is a CD player without any CDs? Out the window. DVDs and DVD player followed. The TV proved the bitch of the litter—it just didn’t want to fit—but with a tremendous cracking sound part of the window frame gave way and at last it went. I found that there is a beautiful, quiet moment when something falls. The television, like the other items before it, hung there for a second, not appearing to move but instead only getting smaller. It looked as if it might never hit bottom, as if it might just shrink silently to nothing. At last it, as the other appliances had, exploded into a reminder that everything is only a collection of parts, no matter how solid the shell. In this way the items of my life had been shrunk down to nothing, rendered incomplete in their collapse to parthood, parts only now adding up to more refuse instead of useful items. Beneath me, in the back courtyard, about ten feet from where the cooler had sat for weeks with Mal’s fire jelly, scattered my exploded life.
As I leaned out the window, looking down, I felt blood on my face and a salty taste in my mouth. Drops fell from my chin and shrank until they splattered below on the television, CDs, and DVDs. I had no idea how I had hurt myself. Cut myself on the window, maybe, or bitten through my lip. It wouldn’t be the first time. On my way to the bathroom to get to the mirror, I wiped my palm across my face to find the cut and stop the flow. I pulled my hand away to see not blood but water. I tasted it and recognized it for tears. I hadn’t cut myself. I was crying.
When Hiko got home, I waited in the living room, facing where the television used to be. She called and I answered, and she felt her way toward me.
She said, “My God, how did this happen?”
She’d heard about the jump from Karen. I wanted to call it “the accident” but couldn’t. Accidents are things that aren’t meant to happen. There was no avoiding this.
“I’m fine,” I said. “By the way, we were robbed. They took my TV.”
“Oh God.”
I told her it was fine. That everything would be all right. I didn’t need a TV, I said. I never wanted another. Not while films of Mal were being shown. I said all this while she held me. Inside I thought, Not while sex tapes of me are being shown.
MAL’S FUNERAL WAS small and quiet and Karen cried through the entire ceremony. Deep into fall, the sky hung low and the leaves were gone. The cemetery was surrounded by a gray haze of barren trees that refused to move despite the wind. Afterward, as everyone else began to leave, I stayed beside the grave, safer and calmer there than anywhere I’d been in weeks.
Karen was comforted by her mother and Hiko. She pointed at me and then separated from them. I thought she would go to the car, to leave the cemetery, but she came directly to me. “We need to talk.”
“Of course.”
“Not here. Tomorrow, come to my place. Bring anything of Mal’s that you still have.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“Just look around. You might have something. It’s mine now and I want it. Even if you don’t have anything, come to my place tomorrow at two.” She walked away without looking back.
This left me rattled. I’d always thought that Karen didn’t like me. Much the same way that I thought Hiko didn’t like Mal. We formed an odd circle, Mal to Karen to me to Hiko. Neither woman trusting the other’s man, neither man quite trusting the other. What had kept us together, what kept us from pushing the others away, was an emotional gravity that keeps people in orbit despite so many reasons for them to tear free and float by themselves. Now, without Mal, Karen would probably break free, and there was nothing to keep her from ripping into me on her way out.
There had been something in her voice, I thought. Something present in its lack, something that told me she’d decided enough was enough.
Later that afternoon I made up another lame excuse to Hiko. I said I was going to do some research at the library or a bookstore, looking for information on my “condition.” I went to Emilia’s.
At first she didn’t want me to come up to her place. I ignored the fact that she had ended our nonrelationship, I ignored the fact that I had convinced myself that the ending hadn’t happened. I stood outside her building and pushed on the buzzer over and over until she finally let me up.
She met me at her door, no smile on her face and no clothes on her body. There were packed boxes throughout the apartment, small spaces barely left for a chair here or a pile of magazines there. She took my hand and with a sad resignation took me to her bedroom and lay down with me.
Afterward, feeling the sweat roll off my sides and mix with the pale bloody spots on her sheets, I realized that my patterns and habits revolved more and more around Emilia, with fewer of my moments spent around Hiko. Hiko demanded more somehow, and I was ready to move away from that. I drifted between two islands, it seemed. One was more dangerous but was closer, and so I tried to reach land. Even though Emilia and I didn’t really talk, I thought there must be some sort of security there.
Emilia got up and left the room.
Still lying on her bed, I said, “So, I’ve been thinking about California.” I hadn’t been, but I grew more scared by the moment that an ending, a bad one, approached. Mal gone, Karen demanding something from me. I drifted.
Emilia sat in the bathroom, gasping as she dripped hydrogen peroxide into the small cuts and bite marks I’d just left on her body. I’d once offered to clean them for her, but she’d laughed and said that I only needed to worry about what I did to her, not what I could do for her. I didn’t understand the difference.
I said, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I was thinking, I could go with you.”
She didn’t respond, so I rolled off the bed and went to the bathroom door and repeated the offer.
“I heard you,” she said. She didn’t look at me. She sat on the closed toilet lid, dabbing a cotton ball over a cut on her thigh. When had I done that? I couldn’t recall. The white panties she wore had a drop of blood on them. I wondered at how many articles of clothing might have been ruined during our time together.
“So,” I said, “what do you think?”
“Why are you asking?” She concentrated on her wounds. Mine could wait.
“I guess I’m trying to figure out where I might be in the next few years.”
She smirked and her eyes flashed at me. She stood and tossed some bloody cotton balls into the garbage. “Jesus. You actually, what, see us settling down somewhere? With some little house and a yard and a fence?”
My stupidity rushed over me and I felt suddenly sweaty. I walked back to the bedroom. “Where are my clothes?”
The medicine cabinet snapped open and shut as she pulled out a box of bandages. She followed me into the bedroom and threw them on the bed. “We don’t even live together, for God’s sake.”
I pulled my jeans on. Before pulling on my shirt I realized that I hadn’t cleaned my newest wounds from the afternoon spent bloodying her bed. They still wept blood and should have been cleaned and bandaged. Instead I pulled the shirt on. The blood would show through it, probably ruin it, but I had to get out of her apartment.
Emilia stood in the doorway, watching me. She was skinnier than I remembered, thinner by a hand’s width.
She said, “I mean, what were you hoping for?”
I grabbed my shoes and pulled one on. “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. “I don’t think I hope for anything.”
“Well, you must. You asked the question, and you’re upset at my answer.” She disappeared into the bathroom again.
I tried to imagine she was right, but I couldn’t decide what I hoped for, if anything. Somewhere beneath my annoyance at her answers, my fears about Hiko discovering my relationship, my distrust of Mal and Michael and others who cheered on my performances or claimed rights due to friendship, somewhere under all of that there must have been some sort of hope or expectation. There had to be. Mal would have known what he wanted. He would have demanded and gotten an answer from her.
I tried to find a path back to her front door, but boxes blocked me in. I looked over the walls of stacked cartons, wondered what they were filled with and how I’d gotten past them. Emilia stood in the hallway and watched me try to go.
“I know you’re upset about your friend dying, but that doesn’t mean that you and I have something more than whatever this was.”
I shut the door behind me. I was left with little consolation other than the fact that she would take some small part of me with her to California. It would be the little black flecks of blood sprinkled over her sheets and clothes, unless she managed to do some laundry before leaving.
The next day I went to the tiny apartment Karen and Mal had shared and which Karen now haunted alone. New pictures peppered the walls. Karen let me walk around for a moment, as if in a museum. I examined each picture and, sadly, found most of them were of Karen and Mal. He looked happier in the pictures than I remembered him to be in person. Many were taken at parties or bars, with dark crowds behind and lighting that caught the sweat and exhaustion on him and Karen. There was one black-and-white photo taken in a park. They were walking away from the camera and looking at each other, smiling, clearly happy in a way only they knew. The picture caught and held me. I fingered the scar on the back of my hand where I’d stapled my most recent cut shut.
Karen circled through the room, unsure what to do with me there. “So you didn’t find anything?”
“No, sorry. I had some stuff, but Mal took it.”
“The jump equipment, right? I had a feeling he was going to do something incredibly stupid, so I made him throw it out. I believed him when he said he had. But you had it, right? You held it for him.”
Karen stood in her kitchen and tried to avoid looking at me as she put dishes away.
I said, “I looked around, but I didn’t have anything else.” She waved my comment away.
“I really don’t care about that anymore. Until last night I wanted to get a hold of everything of his that I could. I didn’t know what I wanted it for, but I knew I wanted it. Then I suddenly had an idea. I literally thought, I’ll take all the bastard’s stuff and I’ll burn it. Can you believe that? For a second I didn’t remember how he died. I was just so mad I thought, Burn it.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she put a chipped blue dish on the counter and walked away. I’d never been in the apartment during the day. Brilliant sunlight poured through the windows. Outside, kids filled a basketball court with pleasant screams. I longed to be out there. I wanted to be near laughter, anywhere I could find it, even on a basketball court filled with strangers.
I said, “Why don’t we go outside for a quick walk?”
“No. I just wanted to talk to you for a moment, then you can go.” She sat down on the threadbare sofa and searched around a second, then found a pile of papers and flipped through them. “I just wanted to let you know that there’s some stuff of you online.”
I didn’t know how this related to Mal. “Some of the old videos? Me with a lion?”
“No, new stuff. You having sex.”
She pulled a page from the pile and held it out for me. At first I couldn’t figure out what angle to view the grainy image from. Finally, I realized it was a shot of a window and through the window were two people on a bed.
Karen leaned back, the pile of papers on her lap. “I was doing research on you and found this. About two days ago.”
“This doesn’t look like me.”
“Not that shot, but that’s only the still that I printed out. The film is pretty clear, actually. Some guy sneaking around on fire escapes and he gets that. He recognized you and now it’s out there for the world. It’s you and some model. She’s wearing tiger gloves.”
The paper got terribly heavy. Had there really been someone on the fire escape and wouldn’t I have noticed? As I remembered everything that Emilia had done, I realized that I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all.
Karen stood up and took the paper back. “You two do some pretty twisted shit. You I understand, you can’t feel it. But her?”
She walked to the kitchen. When she came back she had a glass of water. She sipped at it cautiously while I tried to get my brain to work.
She put the glass down. “I wanted to tell you so that you can do the right thing and break up with Hiko.”
I blinked hard a few times, to regain focus I probably never had. “How is any of this your business?” I crinkled the paper but knew I couldn’t really destroy the image it had left in my head or the dozens of other images tied to it from my many visits to Emilia.
“She’s my friend. As her friend, I will keep her away from people who will do stupid things that might hurt her. You’re doing that.”
I tried to call her bluff. “I’ll tell her.”
“No, you won’t.”
It was final. The way she cut the words off shut my mouth and held it closed, almost as if it had been stapled shut.
She walked back to the kitchen sink and refilled her glass. As she dropped ice cubes into it she glanced over her shoulder and finally looked fully at me. “You’ve done nothing but stand by and watch as people self-destruct around you. Now I’m going to make sure that you don’t drag my friend down like Mal did me.”
“This will hurt her.”
“You hurt her. You hurt me. You hurt Mal. You could have stopped him. All he wanted was everything you fell into. You just stood there and watched him kill himself for something you don’t even want, apparently.”
“I didn’t do anything to Mal.”
“No, and I’m probably not being fair, but I don’t care. What I’m going to do is tell Hiko. So get the hell out so I can make a phone call.”
I thought I should be angry, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel it. Instead I had shame, and lots of it. I felt shorter than Karen, like a child caught doing horrible things and knowing that soon punishment would fall, punishment deserving and terrible. I stumbled for the door and when I turned to look at her, to make one last attempt to stop her, I realized I couldn’t. I had done nothing to stop Mal, and maybe that amounted to pushing him. I’d not stopped him and he’d died. So I left the apartment, and as I pulled the door shut I thought that I was making my leap, just as Mal had, only mine was in the faith that Hiko wouldn’t believe the news that Karen was going to tell her. I made that leap. And as I did I knew that Mal had known the moment he left the bridge that he was a dead man.
Karen kept her promise. When I got home, I found Hiko crying in the living room. I stood by the door for nearly an hour as she cried, just watching her, waiting for her to talk to me. The only thing she wanted from me was to feel the cuts and bruises Emilia had left on me. She demanded, not requested, this.
“Why do you want that?” I asked. “You don’t want that. It’s perverse.”
“No more perverse than being taped fucking some bitch who stabbed herself with a fork.”
I was amazed at how much information Karen had shared. Apparently nothing had been left out. I said, “How was I to know I was being taped?”
“You’ve been complaining about being taped doing everything else. Now you’ve been taped screwing someone. What the hell did you think? Her windows were open, for God’s sake.”
She sat rigid, her back straight. Her body quivered. She said, “I always thought I would lose you when you got your memory back. I never thought it would be to some bitch with claws you met at a photo shoot.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. “For a blind woman you sure know a lot about the tape.”
She threw her glasses at my voice. She stood there with her eyes wide. I felt like I’d just punched her in the stomach. Her face screwed up as her anger tortured her.
I apologized and took off my shirt and pants. “Come over here,” I said.
I took her hands and guided them to my sides. Her fingers played over my cuts, the raised welts of the scratches. On her face played the pain from them that I hadn’t felt.
After running her hands down my thighs and across my back, she stood before me and I reached out to touch her face. She pushed my hand away.
She said, “I never want to see you again.” She said it without any edge or tone. It was the most perfect thing anyone had ever said to me. I remained surrounded by strangers who couldn’t get enough of me, and intimate friends who couldn’t stand the sight of me.
“Get out.”
I’d already thrown most of my belongings out the window, so there was little packing. I left with just a bag of clothes. I moved back to the hotel.
About two weeks after I left I tried calling. She wouldn’t answer.