by Junot Díaz
A few days later Nathan returned to Ballona Creek on a road bike. He did not expect to find Sofia, and he glided quickly past the point where they had last spoken. He was going to follow Ballona Creek to the ocean. There was a bike path the last few miles.
Fed by several more tributaries, Ballona became a creek worthy of the name in its final stretch. He reached the beach, and then pedaled past it, because the path continued on a breakwater that jutted into the sea. When the path ended, Nathan stopped and took out his phone. He read more lines from the poem—The heaving speech of air, a summer sound / Repeated in a summer without end . . . The meaningless plungings of water and the wind. The words unsettled him and he decided not to read them again.
Nathan preferred the certainty of maps, and he imagined the place where he was standing as represented on a map: the fixed black line of the bike path, and a dot for the path’s terminus. Below his feet the cold Pacific swallowed up the freshwater from Ballona Creek. He thought of the thin flow of El Arroyo del Jardín de las Flores swirling and dissolving in the estuary, transformed into foam and green droplets laden with algae. When he looked up at the horizon, the sea was as big and blue and welcoming as he remembered it. The ocean swayed, it rose and fell, and it played with the light and the moving air. Nathan realized, suddenly, that he was seeing Sofia’s poem and its “plunging waves” and “gasping wind” come to life, and this thought caused him to laugh out loud. He felt surrounded by a presence that was feminine and circular, as if he were standing inside the warm and soothing whirlpool of a woman’s thoughts. Nathan stared at the water and allowed his mind to drift. When he looked down at his watch again, he realized he had been standing there, looking at the ocean, for an hour.
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Williamsburg Bridge
FROM Harper’s Magazine
TO BE ABSOLUTELY certain I rode the F train from my relatively quiet Lower East Side neighborhood to 34th Street and set myself adrift in the crowds around Penn Station and Herald Square. Short subway ride uptown in dark tunnels beneath New York’s sidewalks, twenty-five, thirty minutes of daylight above ground, among countless bodies hurtling ahead like trains underground, each one on its single-blind track.
Quick trip yesterday, so today I’m certain and determined, though not in any hurry. Why should I be? All the time in the world at my disposal. All mine the moment I let go. How much time do you believe you possess? Enough perhaps to spare a stranger a moment or two while he sits on the Williamsburg Bridge, beyond fences that patrol the pedestrian walkway, on an extreme edge where a long steel rail runs parallel to walkways, bikeways, highways, and train tracks supported by this enormous towering steel structure, sky above, East River below, this edge where the bridge starts and terminates in empty air.
I heard Sonny Rollins play his sax on the Williamsburg Bridge once and only once live one afternoon so many years ago I can’t recall the walkway’s color back then. Definitely not the pale red of my tongue when I wag it at myself each morning in the mirror, the walkway’s color today at the intersection of Delancey and Clinton Streets where I enter it by passing through monumental stone portals, then under a framework of steel girders that span the 118-foot width of the bridge and display steel letters announcing its name. Iron fences painted cotton-candy pink guard the walkway’s flanks, and just beyond their shoulder-high rails much taller barriers of heavy-gauge steel chicken wire bolted to sturdy steel posts guard the fences. Steel crossbeams, spaced four yards or so apart, form a kind of serial roof over the walkway, too high by about a foot for me to jump up and touch, even on my best days playing hoop. Faded cross-ties overhead could be rungs of a giant ladder once upon a time that slanted red up into the sky, but now the ladder lies flat, rungs separated by gaps of sky that seem to open wider as I walk beneath them, though if I lower my eyes and gaze ahead into the distance where the bridge’s far end should be, the walkway’s a tunnel, solid walls and ceiling converge, no gaps, no exit, a cul-de-sac.
Tenor-sax wail the color I remember from the afternoon, decades ago, I heard Sonny Rollins the first and only time live. Color deeper than midnight blue. Dark, scathing, grudging color of a colored soldier’s wound coloring dirty white bandages wrapped around his dark chest. It was a clear afternoon a sax turned darker than the night. Color of all time. Vanished time. No time. Color of deep-purple swirls I mixed from ovals of pure, perfect color in the paint box I found under the Christmas tree one morning when I was a kid. An unexpected color with a will of its own brewed by a horn’s laments, amens, witness. That’s what I remember, anyway. Color of disappointment, of ancient injuries and bruises and staying alive and dying and being born again all at once after I had completed about half the first lap of a back-and-forth hump over the Williamsburg Bridge.
Walking the bridge an old habit now. One I share with numerous other walkers whose eyes avoid mine as I avoid theirs, our minds perhaps on the people down below, people alive and dead on tennis courts, ball fields, running tracks, swings, slides, jungle gyms, benches, chairs, blankets, grass plots, gray paths alongside the East River. Not exactly breaking news, is it, that from up here human beings seem as tiny as ants. Too early this morning for most people or ants, but from this height, this perch beyond the walkway’s fences, this railing along the edge of the Williamsburg Bridge, I see a few large ants or little people sprinkled here and there. Me way up here, ants and people way down there all the same size. Same weight. Same fate.
So here I am, determined to jump, telling myself, telling you, that I’m certain. Then what’s the fool waiting for? it’s fair for you to ask. In my defense I’ll say I’m aware that my desire to be certain is an old-fashioned desire, “certain” an obsolete word in a world where I’m able only to approximate, at best, the color of a bridge I’ve crossed thousands of times, walked yesterday, today, a world where the smartest people acknowledge an uncertainty principle and run things accordingly and own just about everything and make fools of the vast majority of the rest of us not as smart, not willing to endure lives without certain certainties. I don’t wish to be a victim, a complete dupe, and must hedge my bets, understand that certainty is always relative, and not a very kind, generous, loving relative I can trust. Which is to say, or rather to admit, that although I’m sure I’m up here and sure this edge is where I wish to be and sure of what I intend to do next, to be really certain, or as close to certain as you or I will ever get, certainty won’t come till after the instant I let go.
Many years passed before I figured out it had to be Sonny Rollins I heard one afternoon. Do you know who I mean? Theodore Walter Rollins, born September 7, 1930, New York City, emerges early fifties “most brash and creative young tenor player.” Flees to Chicago to escape perils of NYC jazz scene, reemerges 1955 in NYC with Clifford Brown, Max Roach group—“caustic, often humorous style of melodic invention . . . command of everything from arcane ballads to calypso.” Nicknamed “Newk” for resemblance to Don Newcombe, star Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher. Produces string of great albums (1956–58). Withdraws again, no public performances (1959–61), practices on the Williamsburg Bridge “to get myself together” after “too much, too soon.” Brushes up on craft and returns with album, The Bridge. Another sabbatical, Japan, India (1969)—more time “to get myself together . . . I think it’s a good thing for anybody to do.” Returns (1971) to perform publicly, etc., etc. All this information I quote available at Sonny Rollins website; cocaine addiction, ten months he did at Rikers for armed robbery not in website bio.
Once I decided it had to have been Sonny Rollins playing, my passion for his music escalated, as did my intimacy with the Williamsburg Bridge. Recently, trying to discover where it ranks among New York bridges in terms of its attractiveness to jumpers, I came across alexreisner.com and a story about a suicide in progress on the Williamsburg Bridge that Mr. Reisner claimed to have witnessed. Numerous black-and-white photos illustrate his piece. In some pictures a young colored man wears neatly cropped dreads, pale skin, pale un
dershorts, a bemused expression, light mustache, shadow of beard, his hands curled around a rail running along the outermost edge of the bridge where he sits. Water ripples behind, below, to frame him. His gaze downcast, engaged elsewhere, a place no one else on the planet can see. No people there, no time there where his eyes have drifted, settled. His features regular, handsome in a stiff, plain, old-fashioned way. Some mother’s mixed son, mixed-up son.
If I could twist around, shift my weight without losing balance, rotate my head, and glance over my left shoulder, I’d see superimposed silhouettes of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges downriver, grand cascades of steel cables draped from their towers, and over there, if I stay steady and focused, I could pick out the tip of the Statue of Liberty jutting just above the Brooklyn Bridge, Lady Liberty posed like sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winners’ stand at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, her torch a black-gloved fist rammed into the sky: We’re number one. Up yours.
Dawns on me that I’ll miss the next Olympics, next March Madness, next Super Bowl. Dawns on me that I won’t regret missing them. A blessing. Free at last. Not up here because I didn’t win a gold medal. Not up here to sell shoes or politics. Nor because my mom’s French. Not here because of my color or lack of color. My coloring pale like the young colored man in website photos who sat, I believe, precisely on the spot where I’m sitting. Color not the reason I’m here or the reason you are where you are, wherever you happen to be, whatever your color. Ain’t about color. Speed what it’s about. Color just a gleam in the beholder’s eye. Now you see it, now you don’t.
On the other hand, no doubt color does matter. My brownish skin, gift of the colored man my mother married, confers added protection against sunburn in tropical climates and a higher degree of social acceptance generally in some nations or regions or communities within nations or regions where people more or less my color are the dominant majority. My color also produces in many people of other colors an adverse reaction hardwired. Thus color keeps me on my toes. Danger and treachery never far removed from any person’s life regardless of color, but in my case danger and treachery are palpable, everyday presences. Unpleasant surprises life inflicts. No surprise at all. Color says, smiling, Told you so.
Gender not the reason I’m here either. A crying shame in this advanced day and age that plenty of people would tag my posture as effeminate. Truth is, with my upper body tilted slightly backward, weight poised on my rear end, arms thrust out to either side for balance, I must press my thighs together to maintain stability, keep my feet spread apart so they serve as bobbing anchors.
Try it sometime. Someplace high and dangerous, ideally. You’ll get the point. Point being of course any position you assume up here unsafe. Like choice of a language, gender, color, etc. A person’s forced to choose, forced to suffer the consequences. Like choosing which clothes to wear on the Williamsburg Bridge or not wear. I’ve chosen to keep my undershorts on. I want to be remembered as a swimmer, not some naked nut. Swimmer who has decided to swim away with dignity intact in homely but perfectly respectable boxers.
Just about naked also because I don’t wish to be mistaken for a terrorist. No intent to harm a living soul. No traffic accidents, boat accidents caused by my falling body, heavier and heavier, they say, as it descends. No concealed weapons, no dynamite strapped around my bare belly. I’ve taken pains to situate myself on the bridge’s outermost edge to maximize the chance I hit nothing but water.
And contrary to what you might be thinking, loneliness has not driven me to the edge. I’m far from lonely. In addition to my undershorts I have pain, grief, plenty of regrets, and prospects of a dismal future to keep me company, and when not entertained sufficiently by those companions I look down below. Whole shitty world’s at my feet. My chilly toes wiggle like antennae, chilly thighs squeeze together not because of fear or loneliness but like my mother’s hands when they form a steeple, and you might think she’s about to pray, but then she chants: This is the church / Here’s the steeple, a game Mom taught me in ancient days. I can’t stop a grin spreading across my face even now, today, when she starts the rhyme, steeples her pale long elegant fingers. I’m a sucker every time.
Yes, Mom, one could say I drink a lot, Mom, and drink perhaps part of the problem, but not why I’m up here. Drink a bad habit, I admit. Like hiring a blind person to point out what my eyes miss. But drink simpatico, an old old cut buddy—I gape at his antics, the damage he causes, stunned by the ordinary when it shows itself through his eyes. Only that, Mom. Nothing evil, nothing extreme, nothing more or less than the ordinary showing itself as a gift. The ordinary revealed when I’m drinking. You must know what I mean. I’m the hunter who wants to shoot it, wants to be eaten.
French my dead mother’s mother tongue and occasionally I think in French. If another person appeared next to me sitting on the steel rail where I sit and the sudden person asked, What do you mean mother’s tongue? What do you mean thinking in French? I would have to answer: To tell the truth, I don’t know. Carefully speak the words aloud in English, those exact words repeated twice to keep track of language, of where I am, to keep track of myself. Desperate to explain before we tumble off the edge. Desperate to translate a language one and only one person in the universe speaks, has ever spoken.
What words will I be saying to myself the instant I slip or pitch backward into the abyss? Will French words or Chinese or Yoruba make a difference? Will I return from the East River with a new language in my head, start up the universe again with new words, or do I leave it all behind, everything behind forever, the way thoughts leave me behind? East River behind me, below me. River showing off today. Chilly ripples scintillate under cold, intermittent sunshine. Water colors differently depending on point of view, light, wind, cosmic dissonance. Water shows all colors, no color, any color from impenetrable oily sludge to purest glimmer. Water a medium like white space yet white-space empty—thin ice, a blank page words sprint across until they vanish. White space disguises itself as spray, as froth, as bubbles, as a big white splash when I fall backward and land in the East River, my ass-backward swan dive, swan song greeted by white applause, a bouquet of white flames while deep down below, white space swallows, burps, closes blacker than night.
With my fancy new phone I googled the number of suicides each day in America. By speaking a few words into my phone I learned 475 suicides per year, 1.3 daily in New York City. With a few more words or clicks one could learn yearly rate of suicide in most countries of the civilized world. Data more difficult obviously to access from prehistory, the bad old days before a reliable someone started counting everything, keeping score of everything, but even ancient numbers available I discover if you ask a phone the correct questions in the proper order, answers supplied by sophisticated algorithms that estimate within a hairsbreadth, no doubt, unknown numbers from the past. Lots of statistics re suicide, but I could not locate the date of the very first suicide or find a chat room or blog offering lively debate on the who, when, why, where of the original suicide. You’d think someone would care about such a transformative achievement, or at least an expert would claim credit for unearthing the first suicide’s name and address, posting it for posterity.
Suicide of course a morbid subject. Who would want to know too much about it? I’m much more curious about immortality and rapture. If a person intent on suicide is also seeking rapture, why not choose the Williamsburg Bridge. Like the young man in the website photos who probably believed his fall, his rapture, would commence immersed within the colors of Sonny Rollins’s tenor sax, Sonny’s music first and last thing heard as water splashes open and seals itself. Rapture rising, a pinpoint spark of dazzle ascending the heavens, wake spreading behind it, an invisible band of light that expands slowly, surely as milky-white wakes of water taxis that pass beneath the bridge, expand and shiver to the ends of the universe.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve been sitting up here forever. An old, weary ear worn out by nagging voices
nattering inside and outside it. Other times I feel brand-new, as if I’ve just arrived or not quite here yet, never will be. Lots to read here, plenty of threats, promises, advice, prophecies in various colors, multiple scripts scrawled, scrolled, stenciled, sprayed on the walkway’s blackboard of pavement. I’ve read that boys in Central Asia duel with kites of iridescent rainbow colors, a razor fixed to each kite’s string to decide who’s king. Clearly my kite’s been noticed. Don’t you see them? Bridge crawling with creepy cops in jumpsuits, a few orange, most the color of roaches. Swarms of them, sneaky fast and brutal as always. They clamber over barriers, scuttle across girders, shimmy up cables, skulk behind buttresses, swing on ropes like Spider-Man. A chopper circles. One cop hoots through a bullhorn. Will they shoot me off the bridge like they blasted poor, lovesick King Kong off the Empire State Building? Cop vehicles, barricades, flashing lights clog arteries that serve the bridge and its network of expressways, thruways, overpasses, and underpasses that should be pumping traffic noise and carbon monoxide to keep me company up here.
With a cell phone, if I could manage to dial it without dumping my ass in the frigid East River, I could call 9-1-1, leave a number for SWAT teams in the field to reach me up here, an opportunity for opposing parties to conduct a civilized conversation this morning instead of screaming back and forth like fishwives. My throat hoarse already, eyes tearing in the wicked wind. I threaten to let go and plunge into the water if they encroach one inch further into my territory, my show this morning.
Small clusters of people-ants peer up at me now. What do they think they see tottering on the edge of the Williamsburg Bridge? They appear to stare intently, concerned, curious, amused, though I’ve read numerous species of ant and certain specialists within numerous ant species are nearly blind. Nature not wasting eyes on lives spent entirely in the dark, but nature generous too, provides ants with antennae as proxies for vision and we get cell phones to cope with the blues.