Jumping Read online

  Further up, I could see her neck and the lower half of her face, both powdered white, and her narrow tinted lips. As her lace-gloved hands shifted the parasol, I got a profile view of a tower of tight blonde curls topped by a tiny-brimmed straw hat, adorned with deep purple grapes, shiny red miniature raspberries, overlaid with a trailing of honey suckle vines that bobbled at her slightest movement. Fascinated by the combination of the hair and the hat, I wondered how both were attached—the hat to the hair, the hair to her head. My attention could not have left her if the man had not moved to take her arm, guiding her toward another display of flowers, and the couple stopped, now directly beneath my window.

  Before I could do more than get a quick glance at the man's muted yellow waistcoat and matching knee-length pants, I froze. She was lifting her head to bring her slightly slanted blue eyes to mine. I turned my head and looked at her, through the opening between the small glass double doors of the casement window, my hands on the round knob handles, my toothbrush clasped tightly, toothpaste suds in my half-opened mouth, dribbling down to my blue and white striped Eddie Bauer pajamas. I hung there, breathless, between worlds. Could she see me, I wondered, without comprehending how I could see her. She stopped, her lips slightly parted, her eyes not fully catching the sight of me.

  Whether or not she saw me, I saw her. I saw directly into her eyes. I didn't think I could break my gaze away. She looked away first, turning to her partner, searching his face questioningly. Still, I stood, toothpaste suds dripping down my chin, bare feet feeling the cold tiles of the bathroom in this world. A breeze through the window lifted the ends of my hair. I saw the same breeze gently move the tassel on top of her parasol. Both of them turned their faces up toward my window and then away. My eyes didn't connect with hers again. He held her arm, steering her along the path. The parasol again hid her face from my view. I stood there a moment longer, watching them. I looked out at the larger scene, seeing a flock of birds rise from the far field and move low over it. Finally, I closed the window, leaning my head against it for a second, quieting my breath, wondering if I would open it again.

  “When Duncan Robert did open the window again,” Miles said, “all was normal outside, the usual vegetable garden there, along with the owner's cat, lying in wait for unsuspecting birds. Duncan Robert didn't know how to understand what he had seen or why he had seen it; all he could do was record it.”

  When I commented on the quality of Duncan Robert's writing, Miles said, “Duncan Robert would never have considered himself a writer. He was just recording what he saw, like a court reporter would record what he heard. The incident changed Duncan Robert, though. The best way I can describe it is to say that it matured him in some way. He seemed more thoughtful, more introspective, even, than before.”

  I asked what Reggie had thought. He said, “Well, Reggie, like the rest of us, didn't know what to think. I know she had some other-worldly incidents herself over the years, but she wasn't given to talking about them. She didn't question or doubt Duncan Robert's experience, which I think must have meant a lot to him.”

  “I guess it's pretty elaborate for an hallucination,” I said. “How would you explain it?”

  “I have no idea. There are spiritual writers who call it a ‘bleed through,’ from one time and place to another. They say they've been written about for centuries—comparable to what people saw in crystal balls—pasts, futures, what-might-have-beens. I don't know the whys. I just think it says something about his sensitivity or his willingness to experience.”

  “Did he come to terms with it?”

  “I think Duncan Robert understood the world and its possibilities and his place in it,” Miles said. “I could see that. It was a world in which life didn't end, it just continued in another still-connected way, occasionally over-lapping with other times and places. It was a world that made more sense to him, an expansive world, without old, inhibiting rules that always told him who he should be, based on circumstance—that and no more. It was a world that he felt a recognized, valued part of. He wanted that kind of world, not a continually limiting one. He couldn't see how to create a life or future within such limits and didn't want to. I think this is what made the adventure of jumping possible.”

  That's what Miles calls it—the adventure of jumping. Like boarding a sailing ship in days of old, jumping seemed to make other things possible—for yourself and your world. In other words, maybe “the Void” meant something else to Duncan Robert than it does to most of us. Maybe he saw it as a portal to another place or time, because he knew such portals were possible. Maybe it seemed right. He might be jumping to some place better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jumping

  I FELT I WAS narrowing in on the jump, but I would need Miles's help. I continued my interviews with him, on the porch of his little log house, which I had grown quite fond of. The house was so organic, so rooted to its spot and embraced by the trees and undergrowth around it, that it seemed like something out of a fairy tale. “That fits,” I thought, “with a Void story.” I found there was nothing I liked better than sitting on that porch, with a table in front of us, mapping out the Void and the jump, sipping Miles's good coffee, tasting his homemade cheese crackers with a slice of crisp, sweet apple.

  So, one night not long after I had put together the three stories and sent them to my editor Henry, I sat on that porch with Miles and started reviewing things as they happened after the jump, since we knew as much as we were going to know about the jump itself (which is to say not much without hearing from Duncan Robert himself). First, I asked Miles about the immediate aftermath of the jump, for him and the other residents of the town, especially those who had been close to Duncan Robert.

  “In the days following the jump, we were all a little dazed,” Miles said, reflectively, “as if part of us had jumped, too. Silvia and Reggie were inseparable, wondering where he was and how he was faring. They dropped in to see me almost daily, but I had nothing to tell them. I knew no more than they did and I wasn't interested in speculating. I remember that Reggie and Silvia told me they visited the Void regularly, because it was the last place Duncan Robert had been. Sometimes they went together, sometimes separately. “Silvia often took flowers, dropping them carefully into the Void. It scared her less that way, I think, to treat it like a marked grave. And she knew he had liked flowers, just about any kind. She hoped he still did, wherever he was. It seems clear to me she believes he's not coming back, though she never mentions suicide.

  “Reggie said she was more likely to sit near the edge of the Void and talk to him. She couldn't help herself. She wanted to be near him. She had tried sitting on the edge, even dangling her legs into the Void, but the sensation of tingling and tugging she would feel in her ankles and calves stopped her. She then spread out a blanket over the wild, un-mown grass and lay on it, either on her back, gazing at the sky, or on her stomach, gazing into the Void, for as long as she could stand it, before feeling as if she was somehow becoming the Void.

  “In the beginning, she'd talk intensely to Duncan Robert, at times crying into the Void—you know, all the usual things, like ‘why’ and ‘how could you’ and ‘what about me.’ Later, Silvia said Reggie did more listening, and I think she found more comfort then. Not that she said she heard anything, just that she'd worked her way through her questions and had finished asking. Sometimes she'd even sleep there, on her blanket. I think she felt closer to him then. I say that because I did some of that, too, and that's how I felt. Then she moved away, to Idaho, I think.”

  “You never talked to her about what she thought happened to him?”

  “No. It was too fresh for us to have much to say about that. We'd sit together, over here on my porch, for an evening, drawn together by the magnetism of the jump. I say ‘magnetism’ because we did feel pulled together by the fact of it, but we'd mainly just sit there, shut down by the immensity of it, the finality of it. We'd lost our words in the face of it. It occupied our heads endle
ssly, but it was like playing on an old pinball machine, where you pulled levers and watched balls carom around the course, willing them into their proper holes, if they'd go. Sometimes we'd lean against each other on the porch swing, communicating that way, feeling each other's emptiness. By the time we might have talked about it, she had left.”

  “What about everyone else?” I asked. “What were they doing, saying?”

  “Well, you had the usual array of responses that we get with any happening in town, from a presidential election to a bar fight to a new movie at the Hillyard. Some criticized it, some wanted to pretend it hadn't happened, and a few tried to find the positive in it.

  “Among the critical, most remained angry or annoyed about it. It was unseemly, even cowardly, they thought, to have jumped that way. Those who didn't want to talk about it left it as God's will. Some talked of it in relative terms, which is so common nowadays, saying it's everyone's own choice and there are no right or wrong choices.

  “Those few who wanted to find the positive in it said he might be in a better place now, or wasn't it commendable that he'd had the courage of his own convictions. They were confused, too, because they weren't sure he'd chosen an acceptable way to get to that better place, and they weren't convinced courage was the determiner of his act. They wanted to believe ‘everything is always okay,’ but they knew a jump suggested otherwise. If I'd had to choose a group to belong to, I'd have been closest to that group.”

  “Why? You sound like you thought they were too Pollyanna.”

  “Because I knew him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I believe the only reason he would have jumped would have been that he believed it was for a good purpose.”

  I pondered that a minute, then asked, “What about you, right after? What did you do?”

  “I missed him terribly, as I imagine I would miss my own life after death. I was that lost. The jump, though we had planned for it, hit me unaware. Every night I paced a circle in my yard, from the front of the house to the back, from the back to the front, again and again, chain smoking. I wasn't a chain smoker, but I wanted an addiction, to dull the sense of there being no escape from it. One of my students said, after going through a recovery program, ‘There's no substance that has addictive qualities. The need is in us.’ He believed that and so do I. The need was in me. Sometimes I talked to myself, sometimes to him, sometimes to whatever power I thought was responsible for everything.

  “At first, it hurt beyond expression, and I felt as if I walked without breathing, because breathing wasn't possible. I was like a lightning bug trapped in a jar—not enough air, nowhere to go and no way out, though you can see the world the way you left it, just beyond the transparent walls of your prison. I had lost all the things that mattered most—a friend, a confidant, a moral compass—and could do nothing about it. It was a while before I could begin to formulate my questions and a while after that before I started putting them down on paper, to organize them and see where I was.

  “That's when I discovered I was angry.”

  “What?” I said, surprised to hear this from such a thoughtful, quiet man. “Angry? At whom? Or what?”

  “At him!” he said, surprised at my surprise. “Isn't that textbook? One of the stages of grief? I talked to him, and he didn't talk back. No sign he was around. Just such a loneliness for him that it drove me to anger at his being gone. I'm not saying it was rational, for god's sake. I'm just saying I discovered I had it. And I was surprised, because I thought I understood all the reasons for his jumping and even supported him in doing it. I thought understanding it was my ‘get out of jail free’ card, as far as any suffering was concerned. But not so. Also, I consider myself a nice, peaceful guy, so it's not often I look at something like anger.”

  “What did you do with it?” I asked, wanting to know.

  “I sat with it, for many nights running. That's advice from Duncan Robert's therapist, and he and I used to say there couldn't be any harder advice to follow.” He saw the look on my face and said, “Yeah, he had a therapist for a while, to talk about what she called his ‘free- floating anxiety.’ You know, he tried just about everything, before he turned to the Void.”

  “Okay,” I said, intrigued by his admission of his own vulnerabilities and failings. “Tell me about what happened to the anger.”

  “Well, I finally figured out that anger was the front man for the real ring leader of my emotions. The ring leader was fear—such a large fear that I would lose myself in the loss of him.” He paused for a moment, studying me. I sat, uncomfortable, and let him. This kind of scrutiny often happens in interviews, and I know it's not really me they're studying. They're looking for a reflection of themselves in my expression, or lack of eye contact, or unease. So I held steady.

  “I haven't loved that many people that deeply in my life, so I haven't experienced this kind of loss. I couldn't be sure of the ratio of its power to mine. I couldn't be sure I could survive the loss and go on.” He coughed past the emotion in his voice, while brushing at his eyes. He laughed self-consciously. “I've become a weeper! Maybe that surprised me the most. I'm definitely in touch with my emotions, thanks to Duncan Robert!”

  “So, how did you know you could survive it?” I asked, moved by this level of honesty.

  “By realizing I had. One day I saw that I was surviving and knew that I could,” he said, with a smile. “It was that simple.”

  I smiled back and said, “Thanks for sharing that.”

  “De nada,” he said, looking down at his hands.

  I laughed at that. “Sure. So, where are you with it now?”

  “Well, jumping. I thought about jumping first. I don't mean I thought about going out there and jumping myself. I thought about his jumping—because it was Duncan Robert's essential act. I see jumping as an act of life—jumping rope, jumping into water, jumping into someone's arms, jumping from the frying pan into the fire, jumping for joy, even jumping from a plane.

  “Often jumping involves some energy, at least a little excitement, a little (or a lot of) courage; and a change—from no movement to movement, from being in one place to being in another. Seeking that change is part of why we do it. It's like learning a new skill, doing what the bigger kids do, and finding the secret of belonging in that. You feel good because you could do it and you did do it.”

  I had to stop him and ask, “Are you trying to say that Duncan Robert's jump is like this? A normal, everyday, harmless jump that you're glad you did? A small risk with a big reward?”

  “Well he did start with the normal, everyday act of jumping,” he replied. “True, he was jumping into the Void, and true, we can only imagine Duncan Robert's actual jump. We're assuming that jumping into the Void would be scary. Agreed?” He waited for my nod, then continued.

  “When I imagine it, I imagine that Duncan Robert would be so scared that he would immediately be brought to an intense state of awareness of himself, every inch of himself, as he experienced the initial sensation of free falling. He's probably more present to himself in that moment than he's ever been. He feels himself, inside and out, quickly. Emotionally, the excitement must be building to an incredible pitch. Could he sustain that? Who could keep hold of him- or herself in those moments? What can he do but let go? He's forced to. There's nothing to hold on to. Surrender to it, as they say.

  “But wouldn't you go out of your mind? I've asked myself that many times. Or maybe you'd go in, to some still place in your mind that holds you at intense times like those. Maybe it would be like in other intense moments—car wrecks, battle, prolonged child birth, natural disasters—time would slow down, diminishing the scarier sensations, or some naturally protective mechanism would kick in, and you just wouldn't be present to or remember the whole thing.

  “But maybe, for those few moments that he's profoundly aware of himself and the physical and emotional sensations of his situation, he's permeated by such a sense of wholeness, of connection to everything
happening as it happens, that he transcends his fear. So fear isn't the only thing he feels. Maybe in that moment, when he knows it's all out of his hands anyway, like when we're on a roller coaster and it starts that great and long descent and we can't do anything but give ourselves over to it and scream and scream, he experiences a kind of gratitude for the Void and is even glad he's in it.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, not very professionally. “I can't follow this. I haven't spent a year thinking about it. You have to help me. How could he possibly be glad, plummeting into nothingness and completely out of control?”

  “I don't know this. This is just where my thinking takes me sometimes. I try to stay positive. He could be thinking that if this is the way it's all going to end, better with a bang of a feeling than a whimper. Better to ride such an incredible high that you're thankful to have experienced this level of knowing and feeling of yourself.

  “I think of those men who went beyond the charted courses, because somebody did, who sailed to what they thought was the edge of the Void, and came back less afraid and were willing to do it again. And some of those women who endured countless hours of childbirth and who could choose, kept having babies, with no assurance that they or the baby could manage it or would always survive it.” Miles got up off the porch swing and paced as he talked.

  “I can understand the act of child bearing as some kind of biological imperative, and you have relief when you act according to it,” I said, “but, glad?”

  “Well, what about that feeling—that excitement and aliveness he feels the moment he jumps and feels his feet leaving the ground, knowing he's made the commitment? Doesn't it sound like a kind of happiness? It does to me. The kind that's heart-poundingly, breath-shorteningly real? The kind you know is brief, and more precious because of that? The kind that makes you feel as if you've suddenly entered territory, in and outside of yourself, that you didn't know existed? And you like it?”