I closed my eyes, stunned. I counted to fifty, knowing, just knowing that the man and the ladder would be gone. But when I reopened them the man was still there, now reaching into the air with his right hand. His face held a smile of such serenity it made my heart ache. I remembered one of my more lucid moments, when I’d worn that very same smile as I placed my five-year old son upon the top step of the school bus on his first day of school.
Above me on the stepladder, the man’s gaze began shifting between joy and sadness, all the while spotting the concrete sidewalk with tears. He mumbled to the air, threw back his head and laughed.
I slowed, curious about a man whose dementia seemed to match my own. My city-raised instinct for tragedy was well-honed and I knew that behind the precariously perched man atop the ladder in the empty city morning there was a story. Still, rather than disturb him, I would have stood there and allowed the man his privacy as I tried to imagine what thing could have driven him to such an end.
Ultimately, he over-balanced and fell hard to the ground. I hurried over and offered my hand but jerked it back as he began first giggling, then laughing, until his uproarious guffaws echoed down the empty street.
Although my empathy was strong, I have to admit that discovering somebody on the higher end of the Fucked Up Scale made me feel better. Sandy-haired, blue eyes, slim with a blue pinstriped button-down shirt and blue jeans, he seemed to be just an average Joe.
He could be me.
He could be an accountant.
Just goes to show, I suppose. The domesticated were so terrified of the squeegee men, the homeless and the crack heads. It would rock their world to know that death and insanity preferred not to dress down.
Although I felt guilty staring at this spectacle of a man as he fought with his personal demons, I was unable to move on. I was too curious. So I stood there and empathized, my arms askew and ready, not knowing if in the next instant I would be helping or warding off an impending blow. He saved me from my indecision.
“Have you ever seen what happens to a body after a long fall?”
Before I could answer the strange question, he continued.
“People think that skin is such a weak and tender thing. A husk too fragile to contain the incredible miracle of life. Sure, we all remember the skinned knees and the stitches of our youth, but falling is so much different. God or whatever malicious being created us knew what He was doing. One would think a person would explode, you know?”
He rolled into a kneeling position. His hand caressed a section of the sidewalk as if it were a child’s cheek, and he stared at a spot high in the air, seeing something I couldn’t. I was uncomfortable, embarrassed, and the humanity in me demanded I walk away. But I couldn’t. The voyeur within took charge and held me fast.
“I used to be a father,” he sighed. “There’s something special about being a father. The perfect love you see in the most casual glance of a child. The knowledge that your every word, every action, has tremendous consequence. Being a father is all about love. It’s a scary love, you know?”
“Yes,” I said before I even realized the word had escaped.
He turned and stared at me as if he was just realizing he had an audience. The pained icy-blue of his eyes pierced me, and we shared an intimacy that sliced far deeper than love. I didn’t even breathe.
Why had I spoken?
Why?
It was the Scary Love comment, of course—such a perfect description for the terrifying reality of fatherhood. So much could go wrong. You didn’t need to be there. A father’s influence transcended time, space and reason. Scary Love indeed. The tragedy, of course, was that the child didn’t know enough to be scared as well.
The man’s eyes were now focused firmly upon me as if he was reading my thoughts. He smiled wistfully and nodded, then gazed up at the high windows of the thirty-story building behind us
“You really never know what’s going to happen. You can plan. You can sign them up for the best schools. Buy them the finest clothes. Partition them from the vulgarities of life. But after all that, you better be sure to pray that whatever fickle entity is in charge of the universe that day is busy enough to leave you alone.”
He leaned over like a Moslem at prayer and placed his forehead against the sidewalk. Softly, he rubbed his cheek against the rough surface and cooed. Anyone else might have laughed. I could not. More than empathy, there was a similarity of pain. I no longer wished to leave. I ignored the muscles of my right calf as they began to twitch in anticipation of a fast run.
“It was one of those days when everything went wrong, you know?”
Didn’t I, though. I’d survived a thousand days like that. The day after tripping though the pulsating halls of Forever Never Land where I was God and God was me and my spleen was splashed across the sky. Each of those days had been a drop from the glory of divinity into the malicious depravity of humanity.
“Emily, my wife, awoke late for work. So late, she didn’t even have time to take Jericho to the sitters. When she left, I was still mostly asleep. Hell, I’d only been home for a few hours. A business trip, you know?”
A giggle escaped the man. Stifling the sound with the back of a hand, he stood. He picked up the fallen stepladder and set it back into place. There were only five steps, but as he ascended each, it looked like he left a small piece of his unsteadiness behind, until with his feet perched upon the next to the top step, he rose to his full height and his face turned beatifically sane.
“I can feel him here. Right here,” he said, holding a hand out into the air. “A part of him is in the pavement, but that’s only his sad part—the part that felt the pain. It was as if his soul paused while his body bounced. The rest of him is here. Sometimes, when I’m standing up here, I can see him. Especially in the mornings, because that’s when it happened. Yes, in the mornings when there’s nobody else around and all is silent. Sometimes,” the word was almost garbled in a sob, “he speaks to me.”
The man and the ladder and his son and the story suddenly coalesced, and the reality of it all drove me to my knees. Heaviness filled my heart and moved outwards, locking my body in a breathless grip.
I’d heard enough.
Too much.
I wanted to stand and run. Like a bad trip, however, I was locked within the progression of events.
A door opened in the building and a woman skipped down the stairs, a briefcase in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She sidestepped the ladder, her gaze sailing across our spectacle. My mouth and hands were unable to work so I reached out with my mind and begged her to free me. She paused as if she’d actually heard my pathetic psychic plea, then shook her head and continued on her way, indicating that we were none of her business.
I envied her.
I tried to ignore the man when he started speaking again.
I tried to blot out his existence with happy memories, but I had none.
As he spoke of his dead son, I remembered my own.
“Days like this, I can almost hear him laugh. Jericho had the most wonderful laugh, but then I suppose all sons do.”
Yes, I thought. All of them do. Right up until the point where they discover their father is a beast.
“I used to be a day trader, watching the computer as if it were a crystal ball. I was good at it, too. Sure, I made some small mistakes, but by the end of each week I was far enough ahead they were forgotten. Sometimes, while feeding Little Jerry and watching the numbers slide by, I’d jab his cheek with a spoonful of food. Instead of being irritated, the fool kid would laugh at me. It was as if he understood my embarrassment. To get me back on track, he’d yell Crash.”
Every molecule of my body cringed at the word.
Crash.
It was one of the few words in the English language that sounded just like the event it stood for. A split-second impact, the crunch of metal, the shattering of glass, the screams of the dying, all woven together in the incredible static hiss of the word Crash.
“We used to play the old landing of the plane game, with me making motor sounds and swooping in with a full spoon. For a while, it was the only way he would eat.
Motor, swoop, land.
Motor, swoop, land.
“When I wasn’t paying attention and the spoon missed his mouth, I’d smile and tell him that Daddy crashed. Pretty soon, even that was a game. He’d beg me to do it, yelling Daddy Crash.”
Oh, God, please let this stop. Of all of the streets in the city, why had I chosen to walk this one?
“I felt so cool when he said that. So in charge.”
Didn’t I know it? Drugs could make you feel that way. Like an earthbound God, your every movement was an attempt at release, because you know that if you were ever freed, you could become part of existence itself.
“That morning I ignored his cries. I kept telling myself just a few more minutes then I’ll get up. Just a little more sleep was all I needed. I remember rolling over and wishing he’d stop making such a racket. Then I heard a real crash.” He giggled. “I thought he’d tipped over a glass or something.”
I closed my eyes.
“Funny thing. He’d never seemed to notice the windows before. He didn’t even realize what a tremendous view we had. I mean, seriously. Four bedrooms and floor-to-ceiling windows are what most couples dream of. My wife loved the view.”
As I listened to him, I remember that my own wife had begged me not to drive that day. She told me I was fucked up, and I remember smiling at her, admiring the way the purple and yellow hues swirled just beneath her skin. She was so beautiful with the psycho-paisley addition. I remember reaching out to touch the electric colors, not in fear of her voltage, but looking forward to an electric sting. To this day, I could swear I was using just one hand, but when she screamed and I looked down, I noticed I was using both of them. I remember wondering who was driving the car. The doctors and the police and the judge insisted it’d been me, but I told them, how could I have been driving when my hands weren't even on the wheel?
The man continued. “When I heard the third crash from the living room, I finally pulled myself out of bed. Like always, the Little Man was in his walker. He was in the living room and when he saw me, he laughed and screamed, Crash. Jericho had gotten to the point where he was almost ready to walk, you know? He’d stand up in the hard plastic walker and boy those little legs could move. He’d propel himself from one side of the house to the other like a little Mario Andretti with a death wish. I was wiping the sleep from my eyes when I noticed the cracks in the living room window. I just couldn’t move fast enough, you know? He headed straight for it laughing and screaming crash the entire way, you know? This time, he went right through. I ran and fell to my knees and leaned out, watching him fall the last five stories. I watched as he struck the pavement and bounced. It seemed like such a huge bounce. I remember my screams as he hit again. That time his bounce was so small.”
His words sent my brain twisting me back to the day everything changed. They said I’d driven our Mazda off the fourth story of the parking garage. They said that my son and I were lucky to be alive. When I rolled my wheel chair into his room that night, I no longer felt lucky. It’s a terrible thing to be condemned by a ten-year old, and the glare of blame and hatred he sent my way was too much—probably the reason why I didn’t fight when my mother-in-law took me to court for custody.
“And do you know what’s really funny?” the man asked, as if he didn’t even know I was there.
Life is.
“My first instinct was to spank him. Can you believe that? I was going to spank my dead son!”
The suddenness of reality throws us all off track, I noted.
“Our priest told us that my little boy was in Heaven now. The doctors said that he never felt the bounce...that he was unconscious before he hit the ground. I think the both of them are clueless,” he said, an edge shading his tone. “I still remember Jericho’s screams...and I remember when they abruptly stopped. And there is no Heaven, either. If there is, then why is my boy’s soul still here?”
I jerked my head up and stared.
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling his answer was somehow important.
“You ever been to a Civil War battlefield? Ever notice how quiet it is, as if the birds and nature itself is somehow subdued. Battlefields are somber places. It’s almost as if you can feel a certain heaviness about them. The reason’s simple, really. When people die, their souls remain in place. They don’t enter a fucking white light. They don’t transcend. Hell, nobody even comes back as a silly Hindu cockroach if their karma is all skewed. People die and their soul stays where they die. Simple.”
“So then graveyards?”
“Are nothing more than a place for the living. I betcha people all over the world know this, but it’d be crazy as hell if there was a headstone in every place a person died. Imagine that. Why, the interstates would be fucking impassible.”
His words had a certain logic. During my peyote days, I remember some of my Navaho friends telling me about their belief in what they termed A Sense of Place. I remember driving though Arizona and New Mexico and seeing shrines all along the roads, each one a crazy syncretic mixture of Catholicism and Old Time Religion, each one a place where someone had died.
“So when I die, it means that there will be no great reunion where all of my family greets me at the pearly Gates. Wherever I die, I’ll be alone, unless of course some other poor schmuck died in the same place. What would your choice be--spending your death with a stranger, alone, or with your family?”
People were beginning to make their way to work. More than a few passers-by gave us strange looks, glances of domesticated reason I hadn’t seen since my days of psychedelic roaming. Even more cursed our impediment to their paths. High up on the building the sun was winking off the glassy surfaces of the windows. The man squinted as if he was seeking one window in particular.
“Funny thing about death, something I never in a million years would’ve guessed. Even if it’s your fault, the dead forgive you. Like it’s a rule or something, you know? When Jericho speaks with me he never mentions my mistake.”
The words speared me.
When Jericho speaks with me....
The man shook his head, as if everything he just said was still so unbelievable, and backed down the stepladder. He folded it, gripped it sideways, and turned toward me, standing as straight as if the burdens of life had been lifted from his shoulders. His face, previously a blend of sad reminiscence and happy insanity, was now stoic with determination.
“Hold this, will you? I’m not going to be needing it any longer.”
I stood there, gripping the rough wood as he entered the building. I imagined him almost whistling as he pressed the UP button on the elevator. This stranger had solved the equation I’d spent the better part of my life trying to figure out. This man understood...as my own son understood. No longer would I ask the empty heavens why.
Two years to the date of the accident, I’d received a call from my mother-in -law. For some peculiar reason, I was sober, acid-free, and only experiencing the second day of a cocaine glide—coincidence, really.
“It’s all your fault,” she’d screamed.
I thought she was talking about her daughter, again. I thought she was going to lay some more blame on me for killing my wife, but it was a terribly different message. Amidst her tears and raw rage I heard the very worst.
My son had committed suicide.
At sixteen, he was dead.
My sweet boy had taken the elevator to the fourth floor of the parking garage that had changed all of our lives and leapt head first to join his mother.
And now I knew why.
“Even if it's your fault, the dead forgive you,” the man had said.
I turned, the weight of the ladder awkward against my side. Other pedestrians shuffled out of my way, no doubt wondering why a man was carrying a ladder down the sidewalk. I could see their lac
k of understanding in their eyes.
I was half a block away when I heard the glass shatter. A second after that, I heard screams and the fleshy impact of a body bouncing. I didn’t turn back. I didn’t have time. I had an appointment with my family...and if their souls had indeed crashed, I knew a way to be with them.
Forever.
And maybe in death they’ll forgive me.
Maybe in death I can forgive myself.
About the Authors and Artists
Glenn Chadbourne is a freelance artist specializing in the horror/dark fantasy genres. His artwork has appeared in over fifty books as well as numerous magazines, comics, and computer games. His trademark pen-and-ink illustrations have accompanied the works of today’s best-selling horror writers, most notably Stephen King. He created the extensive artwork that appears in both volumes of King’s The Secretary of Dreams, as well as PS Publishing’s edition of The Colorado Kid. Chadbourne has a longstanding relationship with Cemetery Dance Publications where a great body of his work can be seen in various books published by the company. He lives in Newcastle, Maine, with his wife, Sheila. For more information, visit his website at www.glennchadbourne.com
___________It’s said that you can count your real friends—your true friends, the kind that would search frantically for water if you found yourself afire (up here that's pronounced a-fiya)—on one hand, and I buy that bit of sage wisdom. Rick was that for me, a real true friend. He was the best man at my wedding, and I can't recall a day we didn't talk on the phone. Even now I catch myself picking up the phone to critique some stupid flick or rant about the right wing. In a sense I suppose you could say I'm haunted. But if so, it's a pleasant haunting from a much loved familiar spirit.
Neil Gaiman has written highly acclaimed books for both children and adults. He has won many major awards, including the Hugo and the Nebula, and his novel The Graveyard Book is the only work to ever win both the Newbery (US) and Carnegie (UK) Medals. His books for readers of all ages include the bestselling Coraline, also an Academy Award-nominated film; Odd and the Frost Giants; and The Wolves in the Walls. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
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