At the moment the first kid jumped off a library balcony I was on the phone in my office. In what I eventually saw as more uncanny than coincidental, my friend Alex and I were trying to remember the last time either of us had seen the guy who called himself the King of the Big Night Hours.
Alex lives out in Jersey now but years ago he worked with me at the university. “Is the gym still open late?” he asked and chuckled at the memory. “That’s where I remember him. He was hot looking.”
My answer was, yes it was still open. I remembered the big West Indian who did a lot for the university security uniform he wore. His bearing as much as looks defined the King.
At that instant, shouts echoed in the atrium and I heard a big, hollow thud like a quarter ton of laundry had hit the marble floor.
I did not immediately rush out to see what had happened. It was the Friday of the first week of the fall semester and the library hummed with kids. I thought it was one more damn student thing.
The screams got me off the phone and onto the ninth floor balcony. The center of the university library is a twelve-story atrium. Balconies line each floor and flying staircases connect each balcony with the ones above and below it. Railings of four-and-a-half foot tall vertical brass spikes were all that separated those balconies and stairs from the wide, empty interior space.
Right then those railings were lined with spectators who stared down in silence. The atrium floor is polished marble decorated with in an intricate gray, white, and black geometrical pattern. A man lay sprawled face down on the marble floor surrounded by a splatter of impact blood.
Seeing him, I visualized his downward path, saw the floor flying towards his face. From above, the pattern on the floor can create the illusion it’s coming towards the viewer. Staring down at the still body, the pattern seemed to fill my vision. I managed to turn away before I was mesmerized.
At times like these, it helps to have a function, something to do. Some of the students who stared were wide eyed, hypnotized by what they had seen. Right then, acting on impulse, violating university protocol, I touched the students, tapped each one on the back, then put my hands on their shoulders and turned them around. “Don’t look,” I said. “It doesn’t help.”
Sirens sounded outside. Uniformed police and EMS medics came through the front doors with their radios blasting.
One kid whom I’d turned around stared straight ahead looking horrified; tears stood in her eyes. “I was on the balcony talking on my cell phone,” she told me. “And I saw him climb onto the railing up on the tenth floor. I yelled at him, ‘What are you doing?’ Then he went over the side. I could have run up those stairs and stopped him.”
She repeated this a few times. She told me her name was Marie Rose. Glancing over the railing I saw the medics at work on the body. I kept telling her I knew how she felt but that she had done everything she could.
When the silent crowds on the balconies stirred I looked again and saw they had the jumper on a stretcher. Everyone watched in absolute silence as he was rolled across the atrium and out the door.
“Come sit down,” I said.
Yellow crime scene tape was being strung around the area of the floor with the spattered blood. A nursing student who came upstairs said she had heard the EMTs say the kid’s heart had stopped but that they had gotten it beating before they took him away.
The Science Reference desk is through a glass door opening from the ninth floor balcony, and it’s where I usually worked. The librarian who had been on duty through the whole incident badly needed to get away for a while.
So I sat at the desk with Marie Rose and asked about her studies. She was taking a masters in French lit and I got her to talk about that.
While she did, I found myself wondering what would have happened if I’d jumped up at the first shouts and gone out on the balcony. Could I have gotten to the man before he went over the railing? What if I’d begun moving at the first mention of the King?
Police began to appear on the upper floors. A couple of detectives went through the building asking for witnesses. I looked to Marie Rose. She nodded and went over to them.
A very young uniformed cop had been sent upstairs to find the jumper’s personal effects. I took him to the tenth floor and we looked at piles of books and papers, backpacks abandoned as people ran out to see what had happened. Many of them had yet to return. Nobody was even sure if the jumper had been studying on the floor.
The cop was nervous and a little pale and I wondered if maybe he’d been given this assignment because he was having trouble with the blood downstairs. After a while, we found a blue backpack with a bunch of suicide poetry: books by Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath. And I said, “I’m afraid this is what we’re looking for.”
When I was back at the desk, a young man asked me very quietly, “Is there another way out? I want to leave but I don’t ever want to cross the atrium.” Flashes came from where the technicians were taking pictures of the spot where the body had landed. Looking down I could see reporters at the front door questioning the people who left.
I asked aloud who wanted to go out the back way. Half a dozen patrons responded and I brought them down in the freight elevator and out past the trash and garbage on the loading dock.
Guard George Robins, who had been at the university as long as I had, was leaning back against a wall with his hand over his eyes breathing hard. It occurred to me as we passed him that Guard Robins had known the King.
I had been working in the building since it had opened almost exactly thirty years before. Even though it was against university regulations, no one thought to stop me when I opened the back door and let out everyone who had followed me.
When I got back upstairs, another bunch of students wanted to leave and I took them down, too, and let them out. Robins was drinking coffee one of the secretaries had brought him. He’d been the first to get to the body. “I just heard he’s dead in the emergency room,” he told me. This was not the moment to ask him about the King.
The police were through with the site where the kid had landed. I stood at a door that led out into the atrium. The building maintenance foremen spoke in Spanish to one of the porters who refused to look at him.
Hector was the porter’s name and he trudged out onto the floor with a water cart and a mop and started to clean up the blood. It was obvious this bothered him.
I saw the head of Reference standing with other administrators and went and told her I’d been letting people out the back way. She said it was fine. I had been there so long that when I did things like this it was assumed somehow I was following precedent.
University grief counselors appeared just as they had on 9/11. The day of the suicide was, in fact, September 11, 2003. We mulled this over, stood in clusters around our information desks, and gathered in corners of the atrium. I made sure Marie Rose got to see the counselors, but I didn’t go to them myself.
The one who died, as we learned more about him, as a photo was found in the computer system, turned out to have been someone I half remembered, a silent guy who sometimes used the computers on my floor. Just before the reference desks shut down for the evening, a big, goofy kid who was a regular in this part of the library rushed in and asked, “Did anyone see my backpack?”
When I asked what was in it, he said, “My notebooks, a calculus text. And books for a twentieth century American poetry class I’m taking.” I told him the police had it.
The suicide’s personal effects, when we found them at closing time, were in a basement study area. They were piled neatly and clearly identifiable as his, as if he was making things easier for us before he went up to the tenth floor and jumped.
Then work was over and there was nothing more to be done. Usually, when I left for the day, I left work behind. That evening walking through the atrium I felt like threads still connected me to the building.
I was supposed to attend a friend’s reading in the East Village, but I didn’t go. I went home and first sat down, then lay down, aware that I was in a kind of minor shock from the blood and the body.
Sometime later that marble floor came up and hit me in the face with a dull smack and I jerked myself awake in my bed. It was after nine o’clock, too early and too late at the same time.
My last lover and I had broken up the year before. I thought of calling an old friend then thought of something better. I grabbed my bag and got to the university gym just before 10:00 p.m. in the very heart of the Big Night Hours.
The place is often half deserted at that time on Fridays. Passing through the lobby I could look down on a few swimmers doing laps in the pool. A couple of three-on-three basketball games were almost lost on the vast gym floor. From somewhere in the distance I heard a racquetball ricochet and, for a moment, I almost expected to see the King leaning against a wall taking everything in with a little smile on his face.
The spell was broken in the locker room. Students were pulling on their clothes. Their talk was all chatter about missed shots, a girl someone knew from high school and just met again today, an accounting exam, the frat party on Saturday night.
These straight kids are very modest. They rarely take off their garish, shapeless boxer shorts and wrap towels around themselves before they do. Mostly they go back to their rooms to shower.
Some of my friends complain that these boys are puritanical. I think they’re just polite and trying to ignore certain activity taking place around them. At times I feel like I’m part of an alternate world, semi-invisible but occupying the same space.
In this other world some of us are older and some are still students. It is a world of fleeting encounters in stairwells or steaming shower rooms, appointments to meet again outside.
Here men walk to the showers wearing nothing but the towels around their necks, whistle Sondheim, check each other out. In this other world when one catches a glimpse of a bare ass, one turns casually to see more, meets a gaze with eyes wide open.
I was looking for some other guys who had been around for a while. I found Ben and walked the treadmill next to his. Kenny was there too. The last time I’d noticed, they were an item. Now, I seemed it wasn’t so.
Just after eleven, we were drying off from the shower. Ben is about my age, a tenured professor in the School of the Arts. Kenneth is much younger, a poet, working on a doctorate and teaching freshman composition.
In the distance someone yelled, “Closing time.”
“Today on the phone, a friend mentioned the King of the Big Night Hours,” I said.
“Oh my,” said Ben. “Your friend must be so old. I barely remember the King.”
“Who?” Kenneth asked.
“Once upon a time when this was a sweeter scene and everyone was hot and available, there was this incredible guy,” I said.
“Some security guard who managed to get himself assigned here on the evening shift,” Ben said in a bored tone. He pulled on white briefs and black trousers, ducked his shaven head into a Hermes sweater. “He was the one who cleared out the men’s locker rooms and the showers at closing time and he did it slowly and very . . . selectively. He had this smug little smile like this was his game preserve.”
It bothered me that Ben was so dismissive. I remembered the King holding me and how comforting he was.
“You called him the King of the Big Night Hours,” Kenneth said. Why?”
“It was his joke. One to four were the wee small hours in Sinatra territory. Around here, when the King ran things, nine to twelve were the big night hours.” As I said this, I realized that nothing about this scene now evoked the King.
Just then a youngish man, a Russian experimental film director with piercing eyes and several days’ worth of facial stubble glanced our way.
Ben who lives right around the corner said, “Excuse me, I see my ride.” He stepped into Gucci loafers and followed the Russian.
Kenneth looked a little lost but not surprised. “I heard what happened in the library today,” he said. “I taught the kid who jumped.”
We sat for some time in an all-night coffeehouse on MacDougal Street. Two years before Kenneth had taught the suicide freshman English. He said the boy was straight, a little withdrawn, and quite smart.
“I suppose I should have been able to spot something,” he said.
“His friends, people who saw him earlier this afternoon, had no idea,” I said. But I was getting tired of being reassuring. I wanted someone to try to make me feel better. When I got home, the caffeine meant I couldn’t sleep much. But considering my dreams, it was also a bit of a plus.
Saturday was a work day for me and I was mildly stupefied as I crossed the atrium the next morning. The whole floor had been cleaned. I couldn’t pick out the exact spot where the kid had landed.
The place was quite empty. The students were staying away. Various administrators were on hand to greet the staff as we arrived and ask us if we were okay. I told them Hector was very upset about having to mop up the blood and that they needed to be nice to him.
When I got up to the ninth floor, I went over to the balcony and looked down. Great long windows cover the front side of the building. The light that morning was soft. The patterned floor stayed where it was.
I remembered an old European woman, a Jungian psychiatrist whom I’d gone to back even before I started working for the university. When I talked about suicide, which I sometimes did back then, she said, “My dear, there’s no future in it.”
When the library was being built in the early seventies, the university was still poor. Construction went on for years: funding problems interfered; the quarry that provided the sandstone exterior went bankrupt and had to be purchased by the university.
I could remember being sent over to the building to measure out spaces for offices. I was young and adrift, one of those bad companions parents warned their kids about. Kind of expendable.
In the building I wore a hardhat. The stairs weren’t finished; the passenger elevators hadn’t been installed. Work elevators open on all four sides, rose and descended in the atrium, carried me up to balconies without railings where I’d hop off.
The building had no electricity. Sunlight came through the long windows, turned silver in the brass and marble atrium. Once I came into the building when a broken pipe on the sixth floor had created a sheet of water that poured down like a miniature Niagara Falls. The construction workers paused to admire the sight.
When the place first opened, I gave tours. Most of it was by rote: “The pattern on the ten thousand square foot floor is based on the design of the floor of a Renaissance church.”
More often than not, when we were up on one of the top floors looking down, someone would ask if there had been any suicides. And I would say no and there had been no reported attempts. I’d point out the bronze horizontal railings all along the balconies. I’d mention the security guards on patrol on the upper floors and the fact that in the week, the month, the semester, the year since we had opened, there had been no trouble.
I wouldn’t mention the university employees who were unable to work on the upper floors when we moved into the building. There were people who had vertigo each time they got off the elevators. They had to sidle along near the walls, careful not to look over the edge and see how the glass and brass interior swept down to the marble floor. Some got used to it. Some were unable to continue in their old jobs.
Among the tour groups, some thought the geometric marble patterns made the floor appear to come toward them. Others thought it seemed to retreat as they stared. I would retell the university approved legend of how the geometric patterns were intended to appear like spikes and pyramids and how this was supposed to dissuade anyone from wanting to jump.
I would not mention the campus folk tale, the one in which those same shapes would draw you in if you looked at them too long.
Giving tours was a task they could find for a long-haired young man with no academic background and a bad attendance record. It was known that I lead a tumultuous private life and packed a switchblade. I was granted many second chances.
Around me, things were changing. The dozens of little libraries and departments stuck in various spots around the campus had been consolidated into the main building when it opened. All of us who had worked in those small and idiosyncratic situations had to find new places for ourselves in this huge building.
After a false start or two I got my life into some kind of order and was sent up to the science library on the ninth floor. The staff was a librarian who stayed in her office, and me out at the information desk. Thirty years later the department had grown and I had an office, but my job was much the same.
By then I was a kind of anomaly, a clerical who had written books which were in the collection, someone who was said to have institutional memory. One use they had found for me over the years was as the token non-professional, the union member at the table of faculty and administrators.
The week after the suicide there were email memos reminding us of the grief counseling services the university offered and announcing the formation of various committees. I didn’t go for counseling, but I was appointed to a panel examining what the library could do to improve student life.
On the committee were a serials cataloger and a programmer, an assistant administrator, a brand new paraprofessional from electronic resources, and a woman from the personnel office. We sat around and conjectured about student alienation and loneliness. I think I was the only one in the room who actually dealt with the patrons. I had even spoken to the one who killed himself, though I never guessed his intent.
A week or two after the suicide, Marie Rose came to see us at the reference desk. Marie Rose’s last name was Italian. She was a pleasant young lady who told us how the Saturday after the suicide she had to go to the wedding of a cousin in New Jersey and be happy and cheerful when all the while she was seeing the guy hit the floor. She thanked us and said she thought she was okay now.
Exactly four weeks after the suicide, I was on my way back from lunch when I met library staff and patrons walking away from the building quickly, looking straight ahead, never glancing back. They told me someone else had jumped a few minutes before.
This time it went almost by rote, like everyone knew their part. The EMS and police were already rolling him through the front door on a gurney when I arrived. His face, what I could see of it behind the oxygen mask, had a dark flush like the skin was full of blood.
He, too, had jumped from the tenth floor. Just as with the first suicide, he was still alive when they took him out and died in the emergency room.
This time there was very little blood. And this time Hector’s supervisor came along and helped him clean it up. Then the dean thanked them. An etiquette was being worked out.
Later in the day I saw the jumper’s picture and stared at the face. He was very young. He had only been at the university for a few weeks and I doubted we’d met. But he looked like dozens of other students past and present whom I had known.
That night, the kid fell past me in my dreams, looked up with large doomed eyes as I stared over the balcony and he fell onto the marble patterns.
Saturday I went to a grief counseling group session held right in the library. Everyone said where they were and what they saw when the boy jumped. A very serious young woman from the Legal Council Office on the eleventh floor spoke in tears about hearing him scream as he fell. I told about my dreams of the floor coming up to smash him. The therapist led us in breathing exercises, tried to get us to let go of memories and images like the young woman’s and mine.
The next week at the committee meeting, we read reports and safety protocols for suicide prevention at large universities around the country. It seemed to us that each jumper marked a failure on the part of our community.
Privately though, I began to wonder about the building itself. The architect, an American, had been a Nazi sympathizer and had lived in Germany in the thirties. Speaking about his past at the time the library opened, he said he had been young and foolish and had been fascinated by the uniforms.
The benefactor who had donated millions for the construction of the library bearing his name was a pharmaceutical tycoon, a self-made man. He had helped Nixon into the White House. The president himself was supposed to dedicate the building. But by the time of the official opening, he faced impeachment and was not making public appearances.
Many years later, one of the benefactor’s granddaughters picketed in front of the library claiming he had molested her. Back and forth in all weather she went, carrying a sign. It was something everyone got used to. Then she was gone. Some said he had settled money on her, others that she had been hospitalized.
Recollecting things like these made it easy to spin stories of a building that killed kids. But the unease fueling my dreams involved personal and more elusive memories, ones on which I wasn’t willing to dwell.
The students certainly stayed away as if they knew the place was accursed. It was half deserted in the middle of the day. Staff working the reference and circulation desks, hauling book trucks in the stacks, editing the computer records, cataloguing books, all listened for the screams and the muffled thump.
All the available security guards were in the building. They patrolled the upper floors, stood on the flying staircases warned students away from the rails and discouraged anyone from hanging around on the balconies.
Some of them were normally on duty in other parts of the university and I’d not seen them before. Others I’d gotten to know over the years. Guard Robins was up on my floor one day and I found a chance to talk to him.
He had been in the army and in hotel security in Jamaica. His youngest kids had worked on my floor as shelvers when they were in high school some years before and I had liked them a lot.
“Lots of overtime, but it all goes in taxes,” said Robins. “I will not die rich, I am saddened to say.”
Robins and the King of the Big Night Hours had been friendly. I’d seen them talking long ago.
He was older and liked a bit of formality so I still addressed him as we’d been told to do when I first started work.
“Guard Robins you knew someone from a while back. Fortnum was his name.”
Campus Security in its own small way is a police unit and as such is closed and secretive. There was a distance between us now that I’d asked this. “Charles Fortnum?”
“Yes. Someone was asking what happened to him.”
“We came from the same town in Jamaica, Fortnum and I. He was younger and I didn’t much know him there. But his mother knew my family and when he came here, they asked me to recommend him for a job.
“When he got sick, he went home to his mother. My old aunt was a nurse and she told me when Fortnum died. It must be fifteen or twenty years ago.”
So now I knew what had happened to the King and it wasn’t unexpected. He was very much a part of my reaction to the young jumpers. But I was poking around the periphery of my memories, reluctant to think about the two of us and what had brought us close.
Something in my expression made Robins add, “Unless it’s in my job, I do not meddle in what others do.”
In the days after the second death, men and women in suits and with blueprints stood in the atrium and on the upper floors and talked to men in work clothes. Then it was announced that tall, clear plastic baffles were going to be put up on all the balconies and stairs. No one would ever again have access to railings.
While this work was happening, all the balconies were closed except for seven. The elevators operated by the guards went directly there. Patrons would then be escorted into the stacks by staff. From there they could go to the cement fire stairs buried inside the walls of the building and get to whatever floors they wanted.
The first Saturday this construction was underway, I sat almost alone in the science reference center. The doors out to the balconies were all locked. Muffled drilling and workers’ shouts could be heard from the atrium. An occasional student would climb the fire stairs and emerge onto my floor.
Marie Rose was one. She made her way upstairs to tell me, “I wanted to say goodbye. I’m not coming into this place ever again. My friend Julie has agreed to come here and take out any books I need. I’m transferring out next semester.”
It seemed to me Marie Rose might well have been one who had looked down from these balconies and thought of death.
What I said, though, was, “I’d be sorry to see you leave.” And I realized how bound I was to this place and how it seemed that when I was gone nothing would remain but one or two people asking, “What happened to the white-haired guy who used to sit at this desk?”
“After the second death,” she said, “I started seeing the first one go over the side again.”
Looking for something to say, I told her, “Julie sounds like she must be a wonderful friend.”
“She is,” Marie Rose nodded
“You have that, you’re solid,” I said.
In the strange weeks following, crews worked twelve to eighteen hours six or seven days a week. Slowly metal frames and plastic baffles grew along the balconies.
On the seventh floor, the elevator doors would open and a guard would step out. Patrons would be herded off the elevator and into and the stacks where library staff would direct them.
Staff would also line up the patrons who wanted to go downstairs, and when an empty elevator was ready they were herded aboard. None of them got to walk unescorted out onto the balcony.
Because people weren’t asking reference questions, I signed up for this duty and stood on the seventh floor for hours each day. Often, late in the evenings, it would be just one security guard and me. The trickle of patrons mostly looked unhappy and wanted to know why we were doing this.
Once in a while that autumn, in no pattern or rhythm I could discover, I would fall from an immense height and jerk myself awake as I smashed into the floor. The breathing exercises the counselor taught me helped. I refused the offer of sedatives.
Finally one day in my office, I talked to Alex on the phone. “What made you think of the King of the Big Night Hours?” I asked. “You were talking about him just moments before the first kid jumped.”
“You brought it up out of nowhere as I recall,” said Alex. “Suddenly asked me if I remembered him. I hadn’t thought about the guy since, maybe, the last time I saw him. And that must be twenty years ago.”
When he said this, I remembered sitting at this desk a couple of months before and feeling hands on my back. It had been so real I’d looked around and found no one else in my office. I was reminded of a time the King had done that and I had asked Alex if he remembered him.
Realizing all this brought back a memory of standing on a high balcony one night not long after the building had first opened. Everything had felt black. I was broke and strung out and saw no place for myself in the world.
I had fallen silent on the phone. Alex said, “Are you okay? Listen, I’m going to come into the city and we’ll get together this weekend.”
I didn’t tell him not to bother. But I did think of myself as having survived for a long time and to no real purpose.
When I was young I read Graham Greene’s account of playing Russian roulette as a kid. When he was in a black depression, he’d get the revolver out of his father’s desk. Each time he spun the barrel and pulled the trigger and lived, the depression cleared.
It had seemed such a distinct and reasonable thing to do back then that I never even thought to wonder why.
The guard on duty with me for my stint on the seventh floor that night was young and seemed uncomfortable in his uniform. He told me he wasn’t used to it. He took classes at the university and looked so much like one of the students that they mostly had him in plainclothes.
I was getting old and wasn’t used to standing for hours on end. It had begun to catch up with me, and my legs ached. While he talked, I looked around the atrium at the places where they still didn’t have the baffles up.
After work, I considered going to the gym. Instead I sat on a park bench in the big night hours and thought about the time I’d stood with my hands grasping the rails.
Then I went back to the library. It was after closing time and Guard Robins was on the front desk. I told him I had lost my keys and had a spare set in my office.
I know he watched me cross the atrium and go to the fire stairs. The climb up all the flights was brutal, but I didn’t care. I went out onto the seventh floor balcony and then went up the stairs. Earlier, I’d spotted a place on the eighth floor where the railings were still exposed.
Work had halted for the night. No one even noticed me step out on the balcony. This might be the last time I could do this.
Once, thirty years before I had stood with my hands on the brass spikes just as I did now. Back then my life was a hopeless and humiliating shambles. At work they were tired of my absences and tardiness. I’d alienated anyone who’d ever taken up my cause.
Earlier in the day I’d given a tour and someone had asked whether anyone had jumped. I’d said no. That night I grasped two of the brass spikes and pulled my weight up. My palms would get slashed as I vaulted over the side but that wouldn’t matter when the marble floor rushed up.
Right then I felt a tap on my back. Two huge hands grasped my shoulders and turned me a hundred and eighty degrees. When I focused my eyes, I saw the King step over to an open elevator door and beckon me.
Decades later, remembering all this, I heard the elevator behind me, and felt as if my ritual had evoked the King. When the door flew open I turned and saw the familiar uniform.
“Get in here, you stupid bastard,” said Guard Robins. “You know the kind of trouble you would get me in?” he said as the elevator descended. “You have no thought of that? What is it in you people that you all want to become dead?” I knew he meant the King and the jumpers and me and wanted to tell him I hadn’t been going to jump, couldn’t even have scrambled over the side.
I wondered if the ones who jumped had been enacting their own ritual. Had they tried to see how far they could go before hands reached out to hold them?
“At your age,” Robins said, “You should know that it will happen soon enough that we don’t need to hurry it.”
He saw me out the door. I knew he wouldn’t report this since it would implicate him. Walking home, I felt alive, revived. My legs didn’t hurt.
I thought about when the King of the Big Night Hours had found me. Ben was right that the King always looked pleased with himself. But I felt he had reason.
He moved so quickly for a big man, kept his hand on my back guiding me along to a little empty office in the subcellar. The “throne room” he called it. He had a key. The place, I remember, smelled like spice. As did the King himself. He laughed once when I asked what cologne he used. “It is my essence,” he said.
Without the uniform, he looked even larger than with it. There was a silver scimitar of a scar along his ribcage. “A mean old man did that when I was young,” he told me once when I asked.
If I got naked now and screwed on an old wooden desk I’d be in traction for the rest of my life. But I was young and the seventies were a bacchanalia. Death avoided, or at least postponed, made everything vivid and exhilarating. When we were finished he stood over me and said, “If you do anything like this again, I will keep you locked bare ass in my throne room for good.”
We got together other times but it lacked the intensity of that first encounter. In an era of abundant opportunity we faded out of each other’s lives. Possibly neither of us wanted to drain all the magic from that moment.
When I noticed he was never around it was in the plague time. The ones I asked only said he was back in Jamaica and I followed it no further.
Maybe the King had come back to the university after death. Or some part of him had never left. Had he tried to reach me in time to save the jumper?
If so, he failed or I did. But enough of him got through that I had known to tap those shoulders and turn those kids around when they stared agape. Minor good deeds like those may have helped his soul and mine.
That weekend Alex came into the city and stayed with me. I was happy to see him but my crisis had passed. Later, Kenneth—the poet I’d known from the gym—called and we got together.
When the grief therapist contacted me, I said I felt fine and thanked her. I was glad to see them erect the baffles and seal off the atrium.
The job got finished early. One afternoon in late fall it was suddenly over. The elevators started to work again and we could walk safely on the balconies and stairs.
The sun now reflected off the plastic panels. This changed the light in the atrium, made it seem far duller. It felt as if the building had been tamed.
Remembering the King had reminded me that there was no need to hurry death. Kenneth and I were having a minor affair. By January when the new semester began I had decided I didn’t need to die in this place. I set a date for early retirement.
It was a bright winter morning when I reached my decision. I was walking to work when I saw Marie Rose with a plump dark young lady.
Seeing my surprise, Marie said, “Julie and I decided it made no sense to run away.”
“You’re going to stay and I’m going to leave,” I said and told her about my plans.
“I’ll miss you,” she said. “I’ll remember you.” And that’s all one can hope for.
Guard Robins was on duty that day. Our eyes never met now and we hadn’t spoken since the night he ordered me off the balcony. Each time he ignored me I felt bad about what had happened.
I think about the King a lot and I miss him, but I haven’t felt his presence since that September afternoon. Maybe nothing has happened that would bring him back.