The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  She sat down on the floor, also un-mommyish behavior. Her flowing blond hair was so, so pretty. She looked like a movie star, almost.

  “So I’m moving to Boston,” she said, as if she were saying, I’m going to the store.

  Aaron nodded. He knew better than to ask why. There were questions you didn’t want the answer to. Instead, he just said, “Oh.”

  “You’ll come to visit. Like all the time. Probably in the summer. Maybe half the summer. At least a month, probably. I don’t know. We’ll see.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sometimes you change things up. Something’s gotta give. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  And Aaron nodded and nodded, and she told him he was such a good kid, and he knew that he was. But he wondered: Would he one day understand? Because he fundamentally didn’t, but he knew better than to ask.

  Nine years later, he doesn’t, really. Understand. Or he does, kind of.

  There are levels of shininess in the world. There’s glitter, like the kind that shocks your eyes when you glance at it and it’s like looking into a million pieces of the sun, glimmering. There’s the shininess of a chocolate cake in a patisserie window, the chocolate frosting seemingly lacquered on, and you think it’s almost too shiny to eat but boy would you like to. There’s normal shiny, like people in Central Park, and depending on the angle of the sun there might be a glint off a forehead or there might not be, there might be shade and shadow showing their fundamental unworthiness. And then there’s dull. The things, the people, upon whom the sun never shines. The invisible, really.

  His mom loves shiny things. The world does.

  He is invisible. He will become shiny if it kills him.

  Facing an outcome that’s simply not tenable, he tries a different tactic with Darrell.

  A bubble appears again. Aaron’s heart lurches. The bubble disappears. His heart drops.

  Whatever you want I’ll do, he texts.

  No bubbles, no nothing.

  His dad calls him. It’s weird, because his dad doesn’t call him during school hours usually. Aaron stares at the phone. Gingerly with his index finger, he declines.

  Another call. He closes his eyes and does to the phone what’s just been done to him. Declined. His fundamental lack of sheen pulses within him, and he knows it goes unnoticed on the New York street, with all the New Yorkers New Yorking.

  A text: Aaron where are you? School says you’re not there. I’m worried. Please tell me where you are I’ll come get you I won’t be angry I promise.

  A tear falls from Aaron’s left eye. He’s on the steps of a brownstone where he shouldn’t be, where he wouldn’t be if he wasn’t so unshiny and hopeless and gullible and … every good feeling from the past forty-eight hours seeps out of his bloodstream until he is empty.

  And he’s lower, even. Lower than before.

  He thinks of Tillie and it’s like he gets it. Gets how she must have felt when she jumped. How it was just ever so slightly more than he felt at the moment, and now he knows the feeling. He knows.

  The empty stomach pain, the one that feels like it could swallow him whole, is back with a vengeance, and this time there’s an anchor tied to it, and he cannot move. Like his legs are stuck and why is he so fucked up? And everyone knows at school, and—oh man. He went on and on about how he was about to be a famous singer to those kids yesterday, and hubris, and they know. They know. He was probably opaque in the cafeteria when he couldn’t shut up. Unlistenable. Unwatchable, which is worse. And his dad knows exactly who he is, and the words about how great he is, how special? Just a tactic to keep him alive, and it’s so embarrassing. To be Aaron Boroff is to be humiliating at a cellular level.

  But there’s no help for him to be had. It’s too late. There are no real options. Asking his dad for help is not an option. He doesn’t deserve help.

  The world deserves to spin on without the atrocity that is Aaron Boroff.

  Michael finally gets to speak with Aaron’s doctor.

  “So you’re thinking the Petralor kicked him into a hypomanic state?” Dr. Laudner says.

  “Manic, hypomanic. I have no idea. I just … what I’m seeing is not normal. I’m worried. He skipped school today.”

  “That’s … very worrisome. If you had to guess where he was, where would he be?”

  Michael cannot answer. He can’t say the words.

  Oh my god.

  The bridge.

  Molly stares into the bathroom mirror.

  She wants to rip her face off. Or more like, she wants to rip her face back.

  Back to before.

  Before the stupid video. Before she lost her friends, her standing.

  What if she—no. She doesn’t want to die, exactly.

  What if she could almost die? Like take enough pills to pass out and her mom would find her after Pilates and—

  She looks in her own eyes and realizes how messed up that idea is. And how messed up she is. And she wants it to stop. She needs it over.

  She grabs her phone.

  Aaron stands on the subway, wondering what’s next.

  After he gets to the bridge. After he jumps, submerges. He shivers. He almost moans out loud, thinking of the moment when he goes from on to off. The moment when the unknown overwhelms his being. What happens? Will Tillie be there, waiting for him?

  And what happens to the people around him? His heart hurts, thinking about his dad. It’s not his fault that Aaron’s matte, that he doesn’t deserve to live, that he has no options left. And his dad’s gonna feel pain. So much pain.

  An old, gray woman gets on the train. Her eyelids droop all the way to her ankles. She looks like Aaron feels. She needs a seat, so obviously. There are young people all around the train. People his age, sitting. Some playing on their phones, some zoned out on headphones. No one looks up to see her, or they do see her and they don’t care. They are New Yorking. As you do in New York. The subway car is so far underground that there can be no shine, and this is the endgame of no shine. No one cares.

  He wraps his jacket around him for one of the last times ever. The world is a cold place. It’s all just so unacceptably mean.

  Frank returns home for the first time since his daughter’s funeral. He swings open the door and doesn’t even close it behind him.

  “Hello?” he calls out.

  Winnie saunters into the living room and walks toward him, calm as can be. She’s wearing a cream-colored turtleneck and her best skinny jeans. When he texted he was coming home, she put on eyeliner and blush and lipstick. She calmly showered and made herself pretty. Just for this moment.

  “Where’s Britt?” he asks, looking behind her.

  She pounds her fist down on the top of his head.

  He grabs at his head and shrinks away, but she’s not letting him get away this time. She grabs him by his filthy shirt and throws him onto the floor behind her, and then she gets on top of him and pummels down, down, with fists, with hands, onto his face, onto his torso, everywhere.

  He doesn’t fight back. It’s like he gets it. He knows that he deserves this, and he’s almost grateful for the physical release, because at least it’s something.

  She hits and hits until she’s tired, and then she rolls off him and crawls over to the wall, where she sits.

  “It’s over,” she says. “Everything’s over.”

  Aaron’s walk up the stairs to the bridge is almost too easy. It’s like he can’t believe no one’s stopping him, but there’s no one there to do so. Every step, every grasp of the dingy fading gray banister is a last. The last time he feels chill through his gloves. The last time he gets a little winded walking up stairs. The last time he pushes off on his toes while ascending to the top step.

  In the after, what replaces the feelings of body? The mundane? What if he never feels his lungs take in air again? How is that possible?

  And how is it avoidable? This is me on medicine, Aaron thinks. There’s no cure.

  He feels T
illie Stanley’s presence. Calling for him. Calling for him to join. To come to the land of the unsustainable. Those unshining souls with not enough going to make it, not in this world. Not in the world as it is.

  The world in which he’ll never be a star, because—didn’t he see it? The looks on their faces? Marissa and Wylie and all them? He saw it but he chose not to take it in. Their embarrassment for him.

  He’ll never be a famous musician because he’s not a good musician. And those who become famous for music without being musicians are hot and popular, and he’s neither. He’s weird and stupid and shameful—and who was the last weird, stupid, shameful superstar? That’s not how it works.

  He stands at the very same spot where he stood nine days ago, when he was so sad and the girl, Tillie, beat him to the jump. He looks south, all the way down to the new World Trade Center, the one that replaced the one where all those people jumped because it was on fire and about to collapse, back before he was born. He shivers, thinking that they’d be so angry, seeing him voluntarily do what they didn’t want to have to do. But they had life force. Something he lacks. He thinks about Wylie and Marissa and all them, and how they’ll always wonder. It’ll be like, the day before, he was laughing and alive. Then he jumped. What the fuck? How does that—he thinks about his last conversation with his dad, and how his dad was worried for him, and he told him not to—and Aaron thought, yeah. Worry about me being too happy. Worry about—

  Jesus.

  I’m worried you’re manic.

  Manic.

  He honestly always thought of manic as a joke. It’s funny, really, if you think about it. Who gets so happy they jump off a bridge? Aaron, standing there at the ledge, shivers from his toes to the tips of his hair.

  He’s too tired to deal. Maybe he should just—

  But what if—

  What if it’s just my brain? And what if this is the worst, biggest, awful-est mistake I ever make? And the last?

  Shit. And what if I have to live even more of this because of this one thought? And living it is so, so painful?

  Exhausted by the combinations and permutations, Aaron reaches into his pocket and fishes out his phone. He does so while looking at the impossibly blue New York sky, and the alley of green-blue below him, the Hudson, teeming with workboats and kayaks and what is that, the Circle Line? People enjoying the world while he stands there, twisted beyond what is humanly possible.

  On his phone, there’s one last text from his dad:

  That’s all it says.

  It’s the lowercased-ness of it that gets Aaron. The meekness.

  His hand shakes and he braces the banister in front of him, like he’s securing himself so that he doesn’t fall, and he leans all the way the other way, so that his phone doesn’t drop, either. And with one finger while still grasping his phone like it’s his life, he types:

  And he walks, slowly but surely, away from the saddest place on earth. The place that was almost his end. To the unknown, which he knows will be all kinds of painful. Because it always is. But what’s the alternative?

  CHAPTER 9A: APRIL 27

  Quite a Lot and Very Much, indeed.

  Aaron is tempted to avoid these two responses to the questions on the new test Dr. Laudner gives him, but the part of the directions written IN BOLD LETTERS on top of the form makes it impossible.

  DURING THE LAST WEEK, it reads.

  So the responses to My mind has never been sharper and I talk so fast that people have a hard time keeping up with me can’t be Not at All, which is how he feels at this particular moment.

  He’s certainly not manic right now. That’s for damn sure. In fact, he feels worse than before, if that’s even possible.

  The statement that really gets him, though, is number fifteen: I have special plans for the world.

  Were the writers of this test actually living in his brain?

  He used to have special plans, and now he feels stupid and simple thinking about that. He believed what was up in his brain was special and good, and in fact it was so typical that psychiatrists he’s never met know exactly how he felt.

  That’s like the definition of not special. Of unshiny.

  When Dr. Laudner scores the test, Aaron finds out that he wasn’t quite as manic by the numbers as he once was depressed; sixty-nine as compared to that first eighty-two. Nevertheless, it’s enough to put him in the severely manic range.

  “It’s fairly uncommon,” Dr. Laudner says, his voice a little subdued. He’s come into the office on a Saturday because of Aaron’s emergency, and it’s pretty clear he’d rather be watering his plants, or whatever shrinks do on their time off. “Very rarely patients are kicked into what we call a manic or hypomanic state when they’re put on an antidepressant. Especially an SSRI, which Petralor is.”

  “Aah,” says Aaron, thinking: Maybe that would have been a good thing to tell me so I wouldn’t have gone through this not knowing what was up with me.

  As if reading his mind, Dr. Laudner says, “I’m so sorry, Aaron. When you called in yesterday, I called your dad but I should have done more. It’s okay if you’re angry with me. Are you?”

  Aaron shrugs.

  “Well, it’s okay if you are. And what’s most important is you’re here, and you’re safe now. I’m so glad you texted your father when you did, Aaron. That shows an incredible maturity on your part.”

  The story is too embarrassing to go into when Dr. Laudner asks him to talk about things, so Aaron skirts around it a little. He goes a little hazy on the reasons he wound up on the bridge, preferring to mention how he was at school and with his dad.

  Dr. Laudner seems aware there’s something missing.

  “You know, what you tell me in here is confidential. I won’t tell your dad. Did something happen, Aaron? Something beyond what you’ve told me?”

  Aaron stares at the carpet. “Maybe. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Dr. Laudner nods. “Maybe over time you’ll consider telling me?”

  “Maybe. Not today.”

  “Fair enough. Though I need to ask: Did you put yourself in any trouble legally or health-wise? Anything we need to deal with?”

  This snaps Aaron out of his carpet stare. “What? No.”

  “Well, that can happen. During a manic episode, people do all sorts of things that can jeopardize their lives. Gamble away fortunes, have unprotected sex, make new enemies.”

  “None of those. I was just stupid. I’m embarrassed, okay?”

  “I get that. And, Aaron, there’s really nothing that you need to feel embarrassed about. It was your brain chemicals. They acted in a way they normally don’t.”

  “And don’t you think that’s embarrassing? I’m fucking humiliated. I acted like an asshole at school and at … never mind.”

  “I hear you. What we’re going to do today is put you on a different antidepressant. One that works for people who are bipolar.”

  Bipolar. Aaron has heard this word many times before. Mostly as a punch line, really. Saying someone was bipolar was a way of saying they were a little off, a little out of their minds. Now he knows. Not so much a punch line.

  “So this could happen? Like, anytime?”

  “Probably not, with proper medication. We’ll watch things very carefully, okay? I’m going to give you my cell phone number and ask that if something isn’t feeling right, you call me. Anytime, okay? You’ve been through a lot, Aaron. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can tell you that I care about you. And your father … he’d be so very sad if something happened to you. So please. Let’s work closely together on this, okay?”

  Aaron puts his hand over his face. What he wouldn’t give to erase these past forty-eight hours. And he can’t, which is the worst thing.

  Winnie can’t bear to imagine what her monthly bill from Marie France will be. Enough to buy a small country, she guesses. And totally, utterly worth it. Where would she be without Marie France? And anyway, Frank can worry about that.

&nbs
p; She sits on the couch that’s beginning to have a permanent indentation from her ass, and she fills Marie France in on all the insanity of the last two days.

  “So you lost it,” Marie France says.

  “Yes! I lost it. And I feel like maybe I should keep losing it.”

  Marie France smiles at her. “Good. I think so, too.”

  “I just … I need to know how to get past this grief.”

  “So you want the secret code.”

  “Yes, please.”

  “You don’t, Winnie. You don’t get past this grief. You rearrange your life around it. There’s this Mary Chapin Carpenter song. I don’t remember what it’s called, but she says she feels ‘quietly rearranged.’ That’s the key here, Winnie. Time doesn’t actually heal all wounds.”

  “Well, that’s bleak,” Winnie says, staring at the well-traveled checkered floor below her.

  “Grief is hard. But here’s the thing about time: It doesn’t heal, but it allows you to reassemble your life around the wounds.”

  Aaron is back in bed and that’s a mixed bag.

  He’s bone-tired of the bad feelings that have him there. That’s for sure. If he never again felt this empty hole in his chest where his heart’s supposed to be, it would be very, very nice. And now the new pill. He took the first one an hour ago, and damned if his head doesn’t feel a little spinny. Which makes sense because his head has been on a roller coaster these last few days. It would be weird if his head wasn’t spinning, maybe.

  But it’s also safe there. He feels safe. He’s in his bed, his dad is back in that chair, and that means he’s not on the bridge.

  He lies there, knowing this will be his home for the foreseeable future, because at least it’s safe, and maybe he can’t be trusted right now to keep himself protected.

  He thinks about what he wants in life. The thing that comes to him isn’t an answer he’s ever had before.

  What Aaron wants more than anything in life is realness. For the thing he feels, the joy, the pain—for it to be as real as the pimple on his chin, to be as true as the fact that he wants to write songs that make the whole world sing, but for now he probably needs to focus on learning how to play actual notes on the piano, not just chords.