by Sean Ferrell
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.”
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nbsp; “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.
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nbsp; 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.”