Jumping Read online

  That's why he was willing to talk about it to just about anybody. He didn't care so much about what anyone else thought, but talking to them gave him the chance to wrestle with it again in the form of a different partner. The breadth and depth of it required a partner, if you were to gain any traction. So, I scheduled an appointment with him at his house in town, one evening after his classes had ended for the day.

  I wanted a series of interviews with him, at his house for greater familiarity, so I approached him carefully, not wanting to scare off a member of Duncan Robert's own family. He lives in a small log house on the edge of the town, not far from the woods that hold the Void. Miles is about forty-five, almost ten years older than I am. He is just shy of six feet tall, of average build, with intense dark eyes framed by strongly arched brows and a shock of dark hair liberally streaked with gray. He struck me as having the face of a troubled artist. He came out his front door onto his large porch and shook my hand. He asked me my name. “Babe Bennett,” I said, and he began talking even before he led the way to the large, old-fashioned swing suspended from the porch ceiling. We sat back on worn, comfortable cushions, and I took out my pad and pencil to try to keep up with his words.

  His voice had a weight and seriousness to it, but allowed for hints of humor and uncertainty, too. In that first visit, he didn't tell me much I didn't already know or couldn't have gotten from public records, about Duncan Robert or about the facts of the jump. I could tell he had been over this ground many times in the intervening year, constructing an understanding of the basics in his mind, piece by piece.

  “Duncan Robert was almost twenty-one when he jumped. We had his twenty-first birthday while he was in the Void,” Miles told me. “He and I taught each other everything we know about hiking and backpacking and camping. Both of us were eager novices to start, but we didn't want anybody else teaching us.” He stared off into the twilight.

  “You know the kinds of conversations you have when you're out there in the woods, watching the campfire fade, and the night gather closer around you?” he asked, looking over at me.

  I felt a slight chill on the back of my neck when he said that but said, “No. I'm a city girl myself.”

  He nodded. “Well, they're the best kind of conversations.” I could feel how much Miles missed him.

  “He taught me how to be his uncle, too,” he said. “I wouldn't have known.”

  As an adjunct professor of English composition, Miles had undertaken the work of teaching scores of entering freshmen basic writing skills, over and over, for minimal pay and no health insurance or retirement. In my mind, that takes a special kind of endurance and tenacity, as well as some kind of basic optimism, to carry you. I heard that unwavering assurance under his words as he spoke of Duncan Robert and the jump.

  During this time I also talked more to Silvia, Duncan Robert's mother and Miles's younger sister. I interviewed her at her job, over lunch, and occasionally in her home. She wanted to talk, too, to my great relief and excitement. Even Abraham Lincoln said everything he knew he owed to his mother. I was struck by her resemblance to Miles. She has the same dark eyes and defined brows, accented by her long dark hair, which she wore in one braid down her back.

  “All our lives,” she said, “people have asked if we're twins. We're not—Miles is older than I am by a year and a half. We've always been close, and Miles has always played a big role in Duncan Robert's life, too.”

  She told me about Duncan Robert as he was growing up.

  “Even when he was little, it seemed as if he knew more than he was saying. Though he said a lot!” she laughed. “He talked in whole paragraphs, long before he had the vocabulary for it. I hardly ever knew what he was saying.” She smiled remembering it. “He could look at you as you talked as if he knew what you weren't saying, too. He laughed at any old thing and was curious about everything.”

  Silvia divorced Duncan Robert's father when Duncan Robert was three. She had never re-married, though I had heard some talk around town that she had a long-standing relationship with the seventy-year-old Vietnamese town sheriff, Michael Nguyen. She never validated this, but he had been great in handling the aftermath of the jump, she said, keeping it as quiet as he could, quelling any possible real investigation.

  People feared calling the Void's energy by talking about it, but they thought Duncan Robert was going to jump. In those months of preparation, they saw the comings and goings, and they knew the character of Duncan Robert and his Uncle Miles. While they wondered if the jump might end in death, they never thought that was the intention. Michael talked with Miles and got the basis of the report that went into the official file. No one challenged it.

  Silvia had been raised Catholic, and for almost twenty years has served as secretary to the Catholic church in town, keeping records of the congregation's membership and their tithing. She has a loyalty to her employer but seems fairly indifferent to the Church's teachings.

  “Well, I've lived most of my life outside of the church's rules,” she said, “because I haven't found them very helpful!” She laughed. “Let's see. I had sex before I married and am not about to ask forgiveness for that. I used birth control, because it suited my own situation, not the church's. And,” she says with another laugh, “I divorced my husband, rather than hold him to a life that made him unhappy just to please the church. He's happier now, and I'm happier, too.”

  Clearly, Duncan Robert, not her faith, had been the center of her universe, and she loved him very much. “He was a good person,” she said, looking out the church office window one day. “And he made me better.” She didn't seem to think she would ever see him again, but she spoke of him willingly and even cheerfully. It had only been a year since his jump, and I think talking about him kept him alive for her.

  But I still needed the story or stories that could carry the crux of Duncan Robert's life. I needed to get to the why of the jump.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Duncan Robert

  SO, IN THE QUEST for someone who could tell me what makes Duncan Robert tick, so far I had three candidates. First, Silvia, in her own words:

  One

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  When he was little, Duncan Robert was very close to his Grandma Ruth, his father's mother. He was her first grandchild, and she doted on him. And I mean doted. Grandma Ruth often took care of Duncan Robert, from the time he was born, to help me out. After his dad and I had divorced when Duncan Robert was three, I think Ruth tried to make up for what she saw as the abandonment by her son. She adored her grandson, so it was no hardship for her but a clear preference. So “doted,” in my book, now means the activities of Grandma Ruth. She made whole coconut crème pies just for him, from the time he was five. She served him his favorite dinners on a tray in front of his favorite TV programs. She ironed his clothes, sheets, and even underwear. You're probably not old enough to remember when women did that. She taught him cribbage and they played endless games together. I don't know if she went so far as to let him win or not. He was first and foremost in her existence.

  She died when Duncan Robert was 17, after a brief illness, and I believe he misses her to this day. How could he not?

  He told me that Grandma Ruth had appeared to him the night before her death. She was in the hospital at the time, in a coma. “She came down the hall and sat at the foot of my bed,” he said. “She told me she was leaving. She looked great. I've never seen her look better or happier.”

  I remember I turned and looked at him, feeling a chill creep up, starting at my legs. “At the foot of your bed?” I asked.

  “Yes. She said she was on her way but just wanted me to know how much she had valued our closeness, how much it had meant to her. She said, ‘And I want you to know you're never alone. We never are.’ Then she got up to leave, giving me such a smile.” He was smiling as he said it, gazing peacefully past the newspaper he was holding into the dining room beyond. I was paralyzed, afraid to look over my shoulder to follow his gaze, in cas
e there was something there to look at. “Weren't you scared?” I asked, thinking of the dark house, everyone else unavailable in sleep, the vulnerability of bed. Of a dead woman showing up to tell you good bye.

  “What would I be scared of?” he asked. “It was Grandma.”

  I stared at him in silence, still feeling scared in the broad daylight of the bright kitchen. I didn't try to explain to him that “scared” would be a sensible reaction. But this meant I had a son who saw ghosts, something I never expected. I could see the foot of his bed from my room at the opposite end of the short hallway. Was she going to come back, or was she really gone? What was a mother to do, a good mother?

  She sat on the end of his bed and told him he was going to have a long and interesting life, and then she died the next day. He got comfort from the visit. In fact, he talked to his grandmother a lot, especially at night when he went to bed, discussing the events of his day with her. Duncan Robert and I talked of these things whenever someone in town died, too, wondering if they might get a visit from the deceased and wondering if we should share our thoughts with them. Usually we decided not to.

  “Couldn't the visits be created by his own imagination,” I asked, “driven by his need to maintain the connection?”

  “You mean, him talking to himself? Sure, I thought of that. I guess you'd have to hear him tell it.” She smiles. “I could be counted as biased, though.”

  “What does the story say to you about him, beyond the fact that he sees ghosts?”

  “That he has access to something I don't, to a world beyond this one.”

  “That he's special?”

  “Yes. And sure I want my child to be special. Maybe I wouldn't have chosen this way, but he did.”

  The second story is a bit more revealing of Duncan Robert's own belief system, and shows it in operation. It was also told to me by his mother, though Miles knew of it as well.

  Two

  BROKEN BONES

  Duncan Robert had been helping his friend Dominic move out of his house and into an apartment for the summer. Four of them were going to share this apartment the summer before their senior year in high school. All of them had at least part-time jobs and were eager to be out of the nest. While carrying a load of boxes, Duncan Robert tripped on a pile of lumber by Dominic's back door, landing with his left forearm under him. He didn't realize for a day or two that it was broken, not until he went to his job as a waiter and tried to lift a full tray with that arm. He found he couldn't lift anything. I met him at the doctor's, since he was still under my insurance, and they x-rayed and determined the outer bone, the ulna, had a clean break right down the middle. They called it a ‘nightstick fracture,’ an uncommon isolated ulnar shaft fracture. It happens to cops defending themselves against an overhead blow. “It's unlikely to heal in that area,” the doctor said. “We'll need to do a rigid plate fixation to stabilize it so it can heal correctly. Let's put a cast on it while we're waiting to get the surgery scheduled in three or four days. We'll do a pre-surgery x-ray to make sure nothing has moved and do the surgery.” Duncan Robert resisted the idea of surgery, and the doctor got a little angry. “Non-surgical treatments are prone to complications and associated with mal-union and nonunion, with the break often recurring. That's a lot of unnecessary pain!” he sort of barked. Duncan Robert didn't argue, and the doctor put the cast on and we went home.

  Duncan Robert was quiet and turned in soon after dinner that night. I stayed up doing some mending. Before I went to bed, I went down the hall to check on him, to see if his cast was causing him any trouble sleeping. As I walked down the dark hall to his door, I could see light coming from under it, brightening the hall. The light wasn't steady, it was colorful and it fluctuated. I remember thinking, “What in the world does he have going?” I was thinking video game or the small old television of his grandma's, though it's a black and white. I knocked gently and receiving no answer, I slowly opened the door to peek in. Colorful balls of light were traveling around the edges of the ceiling. Each was a different color, about eight inches in diameter, and traveling fast. I caught my breath and looked at his bed. He was lying quietly, eyes closed, his right hand over the cast on his left arm. “Duncan Robert!” I called to him. “What is going on?” He opened his eyes to look at me and said, “What?” Then he went back to sleep. I sat on the floor next to his bed until the lights stopped. It all felt very peaceful. He stayed asleep. I put my hand on his cast, and it was warm. I didn't know what to think. I went to bed.

  The next morning, he had to leave for the restaurant, despite his arm. “I need the money, and there are still some things I can do.” I asked him about the lights. He looked at me as if I was crazy. “I don't know about any lights. I just fell asleep holding the cast and thinking of healing. My arm feels great. I think it's healed.” I gave him a kiss on his way out. “I guess we'll know Friday.”

  That Friday, the doctor was all set for surgery. He wanted Duncan Robert to check into the hospital that afternoon for surgery in the morning. All Duncan Robert said was, “Let's do the x-ray.” They went into x-ray, and when they came out, the doctor was shaking his head. They had taken the cast off to do the x-ray, and Duncan Robert was rubbing his arm.

  “It's healed,” the doctor said quietly, looking at no one. “There's no sign of any break whatsoever. It's as if it never happened. I wouldn't believe it if I didn't have the first x-ray in front of me.” He looked at Duncan Robert. “I asked him what happened, but he says he doesn't know. Do you?”

  “I have no idea. I'm as surprised as you are.”

  “Well, somebody did something, because that fracture is gone. I'd like an explanation.”

  “I don't have one,” I said and looked at Duncan Robert.

  He shrugged. “It healed.”

  And then we walked out.

  She looked at me. “Don't ask. I don't know what it means. It's like seeing his grandma. There are things he does and knows that didn't come from me, so I don't know where they came from. Here's something with outside verification, and we still don't know what to do with it.”

  “What did Duncan Robert say?”

  “Nothing! He's better at accepting these things, not having to endlessly worry over them. He did say, ‘I knew I wasn't having surgery.’”

  “I've heard of other spontaneous healings, though I don't hear of them often. Usually they're associated with a religious effort. I've never heard of this flashing light phenomenon.”

  “Well, imagine seeing it in the middle of the night, happening over your son's head. If it hadn't felt so benign, I might have gotten more upset. But it just didn't feel bad.”

  I was beginning to see a pattern emerge, of openness to alternate views of death and God. The parameters of a life that could permit a jump begin to materialize.

  The third story is one that Miles told me. It involved Duncan Robert and Reggie, just after they'd finished high school, and a house-sitting job they had undertaken together in the next village over. Duncan Robert had been excited because they were sharing an adult responsibility for the care of a home, out of town, together. It was a new and empowering experience for him. They left town enthusiastic and determined to leave the place better than they found it so that they would be asked again.

  “What happened in that house was a significant event for Duncan Robert,” Miles said. “He recorded it as a story in his journal and re-wrote it over and over in his effort to settle the effect it had on him. That was probably my influence—to write it in order to understand it. He had me edit it for clarity, along with punctuation and spelling. He was compelled to tell it and to work to capture it exactly, and he further refined the details each time he re-wrote it.”

  When I heard Miles talk like this, I wondered if Duncan Robert was looking for a vocabulary that would be a faithful reflection of the alternative reality he experienced, even though he knew he was deflecting that reality as he did so, making it harder to believe. In other words, the better he captured it with
his words, the better job he did of clarifying just how outlandish it was.

  “It's a charming two-story cottage,” Miles said. “I've visited several times. It was built in the late 1700s and is still pretty much the same as it has always been. Duncan Robert's story began the first morning of their weekend stay there, when he was in the upstairs bathroom, brushing his teeth.”

  Three

  DUNCAN ROBERT'S JOURNAL

  Toothbrush in my left hand, I reached over with my right hand to open the small casement window to the side of the small sink. Pushing the window out, I looked down over the sill, expecting to see the large backyard vegetable garden.

  Instead, I was looking out on a small, carefully manicured garden from another time and place, a time closer to the origins of the house. I could see flat green fields extending far beyond the boundaries of the garden. Within the garden, I could see people strolling, dressed in clothes from that other era, talking quietly as they stopped to examine the flowers and blooming shrubs that were there now. Closest to me were a man and woman, and the first thing that caught my attention was the woman's slowly twirling parasol. It was shaped like a small white gazebo with a tassel on top. It competed in size with the swaying side bustles of her skirt, which stopped just short of her ankles, leaving her small feet exposed. I followed the flat panel of the center of her dress up to the bodice, which was fitted tightly to her narrow frame, forming slight wrinkles at each rib. The print of her dress was small enough to be almost indiscernible, but looking closer I could detect violet-colored flowers edged in pale green.