“Would you like to watch me die?”

   I listened for more, unsure I had heard the question correctly. His voice was quick and annoyed, as though I had called him rather than the other way around. I pulled the phone from my ear, checked to ensure that it was indeed a number I didn’t recognize, then put it back to my ear. 

   “No, I don’t want to extend my car’s limited warranty,” I said with the most sarcasm I could muster. 

   “You’re going to let a man kill himself alone?” the voice on the other side said, almost cutting me off. 

   There was such sincerity in his words, such truth, and as much as I hated to stereotype, he didn’t sound either like a robot recording or someone from out of America, working in a sweaty call center attempting to scam old women and men with hard hearing and loose grasps on their checkbooks. He sounded like a man speaking to me as though the phones and distance weren’t between us, as though we were sitting face to face. 

   Of course, that would be impossible. For there was no one in front of me, no one who possibly could be. 

   Twenty-six years ago I took the job of concrete finisher at Colossus Construction, before it became Apollo Building, before it became Colossus Construction Group, then Colossus Investments, and then The Colossus Group, and finally Colossus Unlimited. In between all of those mergers and acquisitions, only two employees had remained; myself and Donald Haugh, the right hand man of Merril Haugh, the old man who started it all. Donald was his son and the one who got me the finishing job twenty-six years ago, and as the company grew and changed, I moved to foreman and small machines operator and sight coordinator and crane operator and systems manager and CFO, and then back to crane operator. I found a truth in all of those changes, that a steady hand and time alone ninety feet above the ground was much better than a steady heady in a room full of investors and board members and deadlines and budgets and stress. The crane was almost like a game, and besides, who could beat the view. 

   The worst part was the climb, and though my friend Donald, Mr. Haugh to everyone else, insisted we upgrade our sites to elevator cranes, I insisted I needed the exercise, even though I hated it. It wasn’t as if I was climbing a thousand rungs of ladder every morning, the crane frame was wide enough to house zig zagging stairs, but something about those untethered ascending heights got to me every time. I was also turning fifty-two in December, only four months away, and I would be lying if the hike to the top didn’t get to me a little bit, even if I knew I needed the exercise. I loved the top, the cab as we called it, sitting there with my wide screen of glass surrounding me, nothing before me. Which is why I knew this voice on the other line couldn’t see me, as conversational as he sounded, for there was nothing on the other side of the glass save ninety feet to the work site below. 

   “Who is this?” I asked, really the only thing that could be asked. 

   “At six fifteen tomorrow morning I will jump from the Milver Road overpass.” 

  “Who is this?” I repeated. “What are you calling about?” 

   There was a bit of dead silence on the line and for a moment I thought perhaps he had hung up. I had another hour before the shipment of I beams would arrive on site, and until then my radio wouldn’t squawk and there was nothing else to do but enjoy the time to myself. This man could sit on the other end in silence for the whole hour and I might let him. 

   He didn’t wait, however, perhaps only taking up a minute. “Everyone’s hung up by now,” he said. “Those who even answered in the first place.” 

   “You’re going to kill yourself? And you want people to come watch? Sounds nutty.” 

   There was a light chuckle, surely not the sound of a man counting down his final hours. “You aren’t interested in the slightest?” 

   I shook my head, a motion that wouldn’t translate over the phone. “Why would I be? This sounds fake enough as it is, but even if it didn’t what would keep me from calling the suicide hotline or the police even, and giving them your number? Why would I drive across town to the Milver overpass to see something so morbid?” 

   “Why do we watch car crashes and can’t look away when someone falls off a bike? We’re all a little sick, aren’t we?” 

   “What’s your name?” I asked, torn so much between wanting to hang up and the curiosity of knowing more of who this man was, what he was searching for. 

   “No, no, no,” he said, a little darker than before. “You don’t get that. What, so you can give more info to the police? I have a Springfield Hellcat in the top drawer of my dresser, just two steps away from where I’m sitting now. I could give the ol’ thing a kiss and forgo the jumping, if I slightly get the idea that you’re phoning me in. Of course, it wouldn’t be very ‘self defense’ of me.” 

   I could gather that he was talking about a gun by his language, but Springfield and Hellcat meant next to nothing to me. I had only gone hunting once with three of my cousins when I was sixteen, and though I tried I didn’t shoot a single pheasant. Unless this guy on the phone had the world’s largest top dresser drawer, I didn’t think he was talking about kissing a shotgun. 

   “I just asked your name, pal,” I said. “Listen, I don’t have time for this, I really don’t, and though it sounds like you’re not a scammer, I just don’t think I’m interested.” 

   “What if you could save me?” 

   I didn’t exactly freeze at his words, I was already pretty relaxed, but I certainly tensed a little and my breath caught just for a moment. “What do you mean?” 

   “What if you show up to watch me die, and talk me out of it? What if you could save someone?” 

   “Is that what this is?” I asked. “You’re trying to see how many people would talk you off the ledge?” 

   “No,” he admitted, “I’m curious to see who has that spool of darkness in them, see who is willing to let it unwind a little.” 

   I didn’t know what to say to that, and he broke the silence for me. “You like watching people die?” 

   I was beginning to feel a little fear, mounting over the discomfort of the call. I wanted to hang up, but something felt dangerous about this man, and I was worried in some way I couldn’t really grasp. 

   “I’ve never done it,” I answered. 

   “Neither have I,” he said, and I didn’t quite believe him, “not in real life, of course,” he added. “I’ve seen movies, and tv shows but I don’t think all that counts. It’s not the same. I don’t think.” 

   “So you want to kill yourself to see what it looks like?”

   “I want to kill myself because there’s no point. Never has been. There’s no connection to anyone in this life and though some people fake it, friends and lovers and family and whatever, everyone is ultimately alone. We are born by ourselves, we die by ourselves. And everything in between is no different, we just pretend that it is. People are selfish, you know? They pick themselves always.” 

   “Pretty bleak,” I said, digesting his words. 

   “You have a family? Friends?” 

   “This isn’t about me,” I said sharply, annoyed that he would dig for my information. 

   “It is about you,” he pushed. “It’s about whether you are alone or not.” 

   I didn’t answer and found myself looking at my left hand, resting on the arm of my captains chair, the fingers hairy and wrinkled, more work worn than a man who had once been CFO of the largest construction firm in the midwest, but the age in the veins and the storied scars on the fingers meant almost nothing to me compared to the little white tan line on my ring finger, just below the last knuckle. 

   “You are alone,” the man went on, and I thought I could hear a mix of joy and camaraderie in his words. “Who’d you lose, or who lost you?” 

   “I’m going to hang up and call the police,” I said, grit in my teeth, an ache in my belly. What a peaceful day it had been, what an easy week. The last month was smooth, really, I felt like maybe I could heal, maybe I could find another way out of the tunnel.

   “Do that and you kill me,” the man said, defiance coating his words like ice cream on a baby’s face. 

   “I don’t even know who you are, man. You could be a kid just trying to have a laugh with an old man, bored without school. I don’t have to listen to this.” 

   “I’ve called one thousand six hundred and ninety people, you being the last of that number. Almost all of them haven’t answered, most of those who did hung up right away, but twelve of them told me to kill myself. They heard what I said at the start and then told me to go kill myself. That’s our world; that’s where we are.” 

   “I don’t want you to kill yourself,” I said, “but I don’t see this going anywhere else.” 

   “Come to the bridge tomorrow morning and don’t let me jump.” 

  “Do you want to live or do you want to die?” 

   “I want to have something,” he answered. 

   He sounded almost more real than he had up to that point. My father always told me that a man says most when he isn’t talking, and the silence surrounding the caller’s words boomed with more emotion than the words he spoke. 

   I lifted my left hand to my Colossus hat and popped it off, running the base of my palm over my forehead and then setting the cap down in my lap. I made sure not to look at the space my wedding ring had left. 

   “How old are you?” I asked. Then quickly added: “That can’t be too prying, age doesn't’ mean much if I called the police, does it?”

   “Twenty-five.” 

   There was something I could work with. A sliver underneath the skin that might fester enough to get inside this kid. For that’s what he was, just a kid with some crazy idea of loneliness. 

   “I was that exact age when I started the job that would change my life,” I said. “Might be a coincidence you called me after all.”

   “I just used a number randomizer,” he admitted. “I’ve called all over the country. Can’t be much of a coincidence.”

   “Twenty-five,” I started, not paying attention to what he had said. “I could have died right then, same as you’re planning to do, but then I wouldn’t have done what I’ve done, and met who I’ve met.” 

   And loved who I loved until I lost her, I thought, but didn’t add it. 

   “Yeah, you wouldn’t have been around to answer my phone call.” 

   “That’s right. Listen kid, I don’t think you want to kill yourself, I think you want to move yourself. You’re stagnant, you’re doing nothing and humans aren’t meant to do nothing. You’re so desperate for motion that you’re willing to give in to gravity, just to go somewhere. You’re right about being alone, I’ve never felt more alone in my whole life, even though I have so many people I can talk to at a moment’s notice.” 

   My eyes started misting before I could stop them, but no halter came into my voice and I plowed ahead, scraping the bottom of any inspiration I could impart. Perhaps, I wasn’t talking just to this kid. 

   “Who cares what anyone else does or thinks? You’re going to blow your brains out or jump off a bridge and get crushed by a mac truck just cause you don’t have any friends? Pretty soft if you ask me. We’re not guaranteed anyone in life, so who are we to feel sorry for ourselves when we don’t have anyone. You think we’re born alone and die alone? Sure, we’re the only one’s being born at that moment in that place to those parents, but we have parents and aunts and uncles and even a doctor, people ready to catch us when we fall out of that womb. And when we die we die with others as well. Even if we don’t, it doesn’t change anything, we all end up for the worms anyway.” 

   I stopped, realizing I had run on and on, likely talking to the wall. He didn’t respond and after waiting a while I pulled the phone away to see if he had hung up. He didn’t, but I set the phone to speaker mode and placed it on my thigh, letting my shoulders relax into the captain’s chair, not aware of how tense I had become. 

   “So what then?” his voice came back, clearly broken with emotion now. There was pain and anger and confusion, but overall there was loss. Abject and total loss, the end of man. “I just accept the misery and go on with it? Every day the same thing, over and over until I die? I can’t take it, I can’t keep doing this.” 

   “Then do something else,” I said. “Who said you have to hate your job? Who said you have to hate where you live or the people around you? You put a whale in a fish tank and he’s gonna hate every second of it until he’s back in the ocean. Sure he has water, but it’s not the same. If you don’t have anyone now it’s even easier to do something else, go somewhere else. You can change yourself or change the environment, and that means physical change, most of the time.” 

   “You’re Dr. Phil or something,” the kid said on the other side of the phone, a little half laugh half sob coming through as well. 

   “What are you gonna do? I asked, still wishing the kid hadn’t called, annoyed he made me think of my wife again, annoyed I had to look at that chasm she left, the dark precipice always looming around the corner. 

   Another long silence. This kid was good at those. I almost asked again but he spoke up.
  “Milver Overpass, tomorrow morning, six fifteen.” 

   And he hung up. 

   I sat in silence, staring at the hat on my lap, eyes misty with tears that wouldn’t come or go, and finally the walkie squawked and Mr. Filgrin, the foreman on site, gave me the instructions for the steel delivery, and for a few hours the phone call was gone from my head, but my wife remained. 

   My alarm would go off in twelve minutes, but I lay in bed wide awake, staring at a white ceiling patterned in swirls, a decorative touch I didn’t care much for but didn’t hate enough to have redone. I checked my watch again. 5:20. 

   I sighed and rolled over, tossing the sheets back and sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at my feet between my knees, seeing them for just a moment before my eyes lost focus and I was staring at nothing. I sat that way until my phone beeped and beeped on my nightstand, waiting till my hand came down on it and swiped the screen away, clearing the alarm with a shaky finger. The shakes always came in the morning. I had given up coffee nearly two years ago at the behest of the good Doctor Randall Pickerson and while the shakes had improved since then, dying out each day by the time I made the seven o'clock drive to work, I always awoke with them and wondered when the day would come when they stayed longer and shook the steering wheel, then when they shook as I climbed the stairs to the top of the crane and then when they shook as I moved levers and dials, and then shook as I was forced to retire and sit and do nothing. 

   They were foolish thoughts, nothing could be known of the future, and I forced myself to stand and shuffle to the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later I backed the Lincoln out the driveway and onto Bircham St, watching the world wake up as I began the drive across town. 

   As I drove, I measured the time on the dash with the deadline. I didn’t want to be late, that was certain, and I wished I could have arrived a little early but the morning hadn’t gone quite as I wanted so I was a little behind. It would be as it would be. 

   There was a small gravel pull over a block or two before the bridge and I parked the Lincoln, beeping the fob twice before striding away down the sidewalk, walking toward an empty cement structure spanning the busier roadway below. Concrete walls framed the sides of the two lane bridge, barely waist high, and an iron railing protected the sidewalk from the fall below. I walked out to the center of the bridge and looked down. 

   I never thought about suicide, never once, and as I stood over that rushing road below, cars going both ways in four lanes of traffic, I wondered why. It was the easy answer, that was sure, and Angie had been everything, every breath, every shine of light, and sure Mark and Dean and Callie, our three adult children, would be sad if I was gone as well, they weren’t the same as Angie, and the pain was more. But I never thought about it. I thought about just pushing on and on until I couldn’t feel the pain anymore. I thought about relaxing my duties at Colossus and taking the crane job again. I thought about reading more and going for a walk along the river when I had the time after work each day. I thought about dying, sure, but I guess I always thought I would just wait for it. 

   “I lied.” 

   I turned, scared of the voice and scared that I didn’t hear him walk up. The man stopped short of me and raised a hand, just chest high, a small gesture of hello. He was hunched with high elbows close up to his chin, with a face more leather than skin. If I was fifty-one, he was a hundred and one. White hair combed back over a fierce widow's peak, thick lens glasses with thin black rims. When he spoke, his voice sounded much younger than he looked, but not nearly as I thought he sounded on the phone. 

   “Six sixteen,” the old man said with a smile, looking up at me. “You’re late.” 

   I tapped a hand on the railing, nearly chest high. “You weren’t going to jump, were you?”

   He shrugged, just a small motion as his shoulders were already so high up. “You weren’t going to come.” 

   “Why did you tell me that lie? Why did you tell that to everyone you called?” 

   He turned and faced the road and I followed suit. We stood there at the railing, watching the cars flow beneath, a river of organized chaos. 

   “Each little life, going and going and going, living in their little worlds. I grew up in New York, not the city but the state, pretty far from the Big Apple, and our hometown was quiet until they rebuilt the road and added two more lanes and a grassway down the middle and suddenly it wasn’t so quiet anymore. I would sit outside my pop’s oil shop and watch cars sail by, all in a hurry and nowhere to go. I just couldn’t believe there were so many of us out here, all with our own little worlds.” 

   He stopped talking and only when I turned to look at him did I see that he had been watching me. 

   “I buried all six of my children, accidents and old age a mix among them. Then I buried my sweet Eveline. She had cervical cancer sixteen years ago, after our oldest son Frederick died, but she beat that only to fall last year and break her hip. Too much pain, too much stress, she just wasted away in the hospital. I buried my seventh dog four days ago, a little basset hound named Dutch. He wasn’t even four years old, but ate something bad I think and just kicked it one day.” The old man gave that little non-shrug again. “What’s it all mean?”

   He had poured so much information upon me in such a short time, and I was still processing the fact that my mystery caller wasn’t a young kid but instead a man older than me. We might have a near thirty year age gap, but it was in the other direction. 

   “Why did I come here?” 

   He shook his head and looked back to the road. “You wanted to save someone from dying. Someone you never met. You think there’s more than just loneliness?”

   “Didn’t you love your wife and your children and your dogs? Was that all loneliness for all those years?” 

   “It’s loneliness now,” he answered, a bitter sad weight pulling at his words. He looked back up at me. “I just wanted someone to talk to,” he whispered, either ashamed or too choked up to really speak loudly and clearly I couldn’t tell. “I started calling random numbers, the Google generator part wasn’t a lie, but when I asked if they had a few minutes to talk they always hung up. So I tried the other end of the aisle.” His smile was more sad than his words. “That didn’t work either.” 

   “What’s your name?” I asked the man, not for the first time. 

   He stared at me for a while, eyes roving over my face, trying to sleuth something that wasn’t there. I wasn’t hiding anything, wasn’t trying to steer the conversation in any specific way. God knows I had my own grief and loss and though I was dealing with it in the way I knew how, I knew how lonely it was most of the time, even with my children and other family around.

   When he didn’t answer, I spoke. 

   “Angie died in a car accident, two years ago,” I began, but before I could go on the old man raised a hand. I stopped. 

   “Does it get any easier?” he asked. 

   I snorted. Couldn’t help myself. “You’ve had much more loss than I have, sir, and a lot more time to absorb it all. I haven’t buried any children.” 

   He shook his head. “No, but you’ve laid your wife. They’re worth more to us than anyone else, aren’t they? You’ve had two years, I've only had one, and I’ve lost all desire to breathe. She was everything.” 

   It was my turn to have tears in my eyes and I found I couldn’t say anything. We stood in silence, watching the world pass by beneath us. No cars had come across the overpass behind us yet; we entered and remained alone. All of the life was below us, out of reach, a thousand faces beneath their safety glass windshields, flying along to wherever they were going, away, away, away. 

   Without a word to each other we turned and walked back to the road, then down the several hundred yards to the gravel pull in where our cars were parked. 

   “Going to jump next week?” I asked, standing in the open door of my car, he at the door of his.

   His back heaved a sigh and he turned slowly, back toward me. There was still that sad loss in his face, the ancient features wrinkled and carved in a leather mask, but I thought I could see a fraction of a spark in his eye. 

   “Unless someone stops me,” he answered.