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Fall From The Tower

John Liptow
[published in ROSEBUD #59 | spring 2015]

    On his way to the tower this morning he observed every detail, but particularly he was looking for her. A song played on the radio: “Open Arms” by Journey. If fate had a message for him it might have been found in the lyrics of that song and the fact that it played at all on this particular fall morning. During that commute, Harold felt as if the ability to breathe had left him.
    Now, from the tower, he looks down and sees the atrophied decades of his life.
    He stands far above the street, his shoes slipping along the ledge. His fingers, frantic, dripping sweat, are feeling for the solidity of the building. Warm autumn air smothers him.
    A tide of leaves is sent rolling across the street and into the park, where they pause and enter a long, fallow sleep. Harold watches down. The traffic is slow. It moves in eddies and pulses, dawdling as if time is of no import. But up here it buzzes around him like an annoying drone of insects.
    In the park women are pushing strollers, while couples with fingers locked stroll along the path. Old men with their thin shoulders hunched over Chess boards engage in silent conquest. Office-workers are taking in an early lunch. It is just another one of those October mornings: air unseasonably warm, the last of the bronze leaves clinging to their branches and flapping in the eager breeze, soft-edged clouds billowing across a quilt of azure.
    Who would think of death on such a day?
    He works on the tenth floor of a banking multinational, a low-level assistant to an asset manager, just another greased cog in the machine of the Olympians. A pedestrian position. He’s a bookkeeper essentially. He knows he yields little value to the company. But he has never felt encouraged to go higher. Why should he consider those passing him on their way to upper management? Why should that irk him? Let them, he says. Let them go ahead. Can he not be satisfied here? The fact is he is relieved to be able to sit in his office drinking in the view, entranced by this routine and the simplicity of life in the park below.
    Yet there are those, of course, claiming that he is in revolt against success, as if he, Harold, must be sacrificing himself on the altar of some humility.
    Take Mertha, for instance.
    She’s not afraid to use her tongue, always alleging his lack of concentration. In the middle of a workday he would sometimes begin strumming his fingers on the desk, the morning scene before he left for work running wildly through his head, that hawkish screech metastasizing into something like a boiling volcano.
    “Oh Harry. Oh yes,” Mertha might seethe with an astonishing amount of hatred, “there were entire docks of laborers I might have had. Any of them could have taken me with their hard, sweaty bodies. Any of them could have pushed their erection deep into me like I was the royal fuckin queen. Yes, Harry, oh yes, any of them could have satisfied me. But what did I get? Why, I get excuses from the low-level clerk who apologizes for not being a fully functional man!”
    So on an autumn morning looking down on the unhurried people in the park he realizes it’s not just today that he’s decided to take this plunge. Certainly he had fallen long before this.
    Down in the park, a golden puppy rustles between the legs of a small boy. Harold is transfixed by it. The boy trips over his own tiny shoes, landing in grass and leaves while the dodging puppy circles back and attacks him in leaps, sprinting up the boy’s wriggling body.
    Harold’s knees want to give way, to buckle, as he watches the boy. The street is a long way down. The sun on him raises beads of sweat on his face and under the pits of his arms where it stains through his shirt. He thinks of another boy he met in the park not long ago, a shy, ginger-haired boy who was in the park with his mother. Harold remembers how that day the boy’s mother would softly touch his head and how the boy’s eyes would fill with love. As she spoke, Harold considered how it was an easy a life she had. She spent many minutes talking about the man she married and as she did she would often stop in the middle of a sentence and smile, and Harold found that he was able to somehow produce one as well.
    She told him she was a nurse. Told him she could not love her job more.
    “What do you do?” she asked.
    “I work with numbers,” he said quietly, then left it there and said nothing else. No, he didn’t want to talk about how sedate it was for him; he had no interest in thinking about Mertha. What he wanted was to hear about her. What he wanted was to know how her life had been.
    He didn’t want to tell her that he had waited for her, waited a long time, before he finally moved on.
    Harold had been eighteen, she had been twenty-one, and at the time they hadn’t begun to understand the course the years might take. So when they kissed they did no wondering whether it could last; when they made love the bed they did so in might’ve been a monument to young love; when they talked what they talked of was of an impalpable future.
    That, Harold closes his eyes and thinks, was what we had done then.
    Those ten months spent together had seemed to be fixed on a mere point of time and when the inevitable began and she had grown away from that mere point of time, a kind of claustrophobia began to envelope Harold, the kind that would appear late in the evening as he watched out the window and knew she wouldn’t be coming. Harold hadn’t planned for that part, had never expected it. It had come as a fog out of nowhere and subsumed him. How, he’d wondered desperately, was he supposed to move through it?
    In the end, though, he had no choice.
    By the time the wheels of his life had found traction he’d almost completely forgotten about her and how miserable he had felt at the time. He spent those years building a career, doing little wondering about his meager life. Co-workers taking him for a drink — whether to celebrate a promotion, a birthday, an anniversary, a new baby, or a drink to the upcoming holidays — almost always became an occasion to forget how alone he was.
    Then he met Mertha. He was unsure at first and took his time. But when he finally called it felt right; it felt as if she was the only key that could answer the locked door, as if she was the logical conclusion to the ennui he had long been feeling. Coming from a family of ambitious men, men of single-minded aspiration, she was the most self-assured woman he had ever met — and who, it seemed, was fully acquainted with a myriad of esoteric practices in bed.
    They were married in three months.
    The most important things, all the moments that mattered and could not be lived, you put in a strong box and sank down into a subterranean well of your heart. He thought about it later, when Mertha became more disenchanted with him. They’d been married a year, just a little background noise at first. He thought it would pass. But she was used to affluence and his provisions for her had to be regularly adjusted. By the fifth year — just after the annual Christmas banquet had ended, while going home in a honking congestion of holiday traffic — her speech became shrill and prolix. Had she married a clerk? Is that what he was? Did he have ambition only to tally the worth of other people’s lives? So, was that satisfying him? Yes, yes, he answered, quite satisfying. Besides, he reminded her, his position and the money that accompanied it did satisfy her tastes for grand clothing and, he added, provided her with a good aesthetician. But at any rate, it was where he wanted himself to be, and if a Rockefeller was what she wanted... well, she married the wrong man. He watched Christmas shoppers and wondered how simple it was to be them. A Rockefeller! Not a Rockefeller!? He despised Mertha. More like a Fred Flintstone, if you ask me!
    So that was how he passed the years, biting back not what he hated but how he let the years slip away. His tawny brown hair that once seemed to melt across his pate was now a medley of gray and what almost looked like peach. His face was stretched and his eyes narrower than what he thought they used to be. His gums had fled inward and white teeth had less of a shine. Now in the mirror when he looked at himself he possessed a cold affection for the man he saw.
    Then one day, while walking through the park...
    He looked at her. He just stood there on the path, and looked.
    She was holding the waist of a boy as he tested his center on roller skates. She was talking to him in simple, short sentences, and the boy, looking fragile, was probably believing he could do this one thing. She rose on her skates, holding the boy’s arms up. They moved together in a slanting kind of motion. While watching he tried to remember the last time he’d spoken to her. He guessed it had been years and they had been so much younger. It was unbelievable how much time had gone by.
    Then he remembered. It was an inconsequential encounter in January, not yet a year after they had stopped seeing each other. She’d just gotten off from work and was in the mall shopping for her mom. She wore a pristine blue pant suit, her hair cut short. They talked first of moments quaint or pedestrian, avoiding the bitter crust between them. They did not talk for very long. Then with no preamble she confided to him that she was comfortable with being single and was in no hurry to start dating. He noticed a confidence in her he was sure he hadn’t seen before. He asked her if she had loved when she with him. He waited, silent as a painting, for her to answer, but she left it alone and instead said goodbye, then walked away into the busy morning mall.
    In the park he noticed her eyes were not as clear and radiant as they had been on that long-ago January day; and her fingers, though having become less lissome, no less fluent in their language of love. She held her boy close as if she could protect him from every hurt.
    He decided then to not stay, to keep walking.
    Yet...
    Harold continued to watch as they rolled by and for that one second she looked. Her gaze touched his. The boy looked too... he seemed to paddle on his idle skates, his legs realizing that motion came easy and stopping was hard. She gently tugged on her little boy’s hand as they made their way to a bench. He knew he should not have stayed, should not have fallen back into an emotion from the past, but as he watched he felt pleasantly conflicted. He went over and sat on the bench with her. They looked closely at each other, looking at each other from different ends of a lifetime. He observed the gold in her hair was fading. She asked him how his life was.
    Harold started to remember just how nimble and facile she’d been in bed, how gently she had moved in his hands, how powder-soft her quivering skin was. It was a slow-building earthquake, in which the present crumbled beneath him and left this chasm of the past that Harold fell helplessly into.
    And so on these delicate subjects she did not linger. She hurried past and carried the conversation forward. She kept it from brushing with a poetic past and pulled it into the pragmatic now.
    Her boy was watching how they talked together.
    “Hey, I want you to meet a friend,” she said, leaning her head into the boy.
    He shyly tilted his body toward her.
    She wrapped the boy’s head in the crook of her arm.
    “Henry’s quiet around people he doesn’t know.”
    “Reminds me of someone,” Harold said smiling, “who was shy like that when we first met.”
    She blinked and looked quickly at him, her smile breaking: “Oh, you know, Henry is—”
    He tried not to study her, tried to look elsewhere. He looked at his lap, took note of the creases of his trousers, stared at his hands, stared at the liver-colored age spots that had begun to appear a few years ago. He felt the pull in his chest and wanted the conversation not to end. He wanted her to remember a time when it was the two of them.
    “He’s just — he’s our sweet little prince,” she went on. “Michael and I — we got lucky.”
    Henry cast a sidelong glance at her.
    Harold looked down at Henry. So much of her was in the boy. Harold wondered if he would see that as he grew up.
    She was combing her fingers through Henry’s ginger hair. “He has Michael’s hair: so Irish.”
    “Look,” said Harold. “I think he has your eyes.”
    “He has Michael’s ears.”
    “But your dimples,” Harold put forth.
    “He has Michael’s chin.”
    Harold found himself flailing. “That certainly is your nose. Admit it.”
    “I admit nothing,” she demurred.
    As Henry was watching the verbal jujitsu, his face sank into the safe depths of her arms.
    She pulled Henry to her. Pulled him closer.
    “Henry is a prodigious boy,” she told Harold.
    Harold nodded, wanting to savor every moment, to later remember every detail.
    Wanting to remember what it was like today.
    “We love our life, Harold, though it wasn’t always this way.” She seemed to lean closer to Harold as she told him this. “There... was a time,” she said. “Michael and I felt having a child was not going to happen. We discussed our life of growing old without children and that it might be a barren — a cold house. That it might be just us and no sound of little footsteps scampering across the floor or skinned knee coming to me so that I could make it all better, no tears to dry. It was hard to imagine that, but we thought it was what we had to.
    “Then,” she added emphatically, with a long gaze that strayed across the park, far away from Harold.
    Then she turned back and spoke as if it was not easy but the words had to be spoken: “I have to believe that we can want all the furtive things and we can hope for what we think we might get, all that we might get by the time we are old, Harold, yet it is to be at peace right now, today, that will truly give you hope. No one has been promised anything. Tomorrow, we just don’t know. Michael and I truly got a gift in Henry, but had nevertheless come to the conclusion it would be okay if it was just the two of us. After that we were no longer worried about the future.”
    It was a month ago when he saw her. It was hard to forget and there was nothing to go home to. Mertha wasn’t there in the evenings, which was just as well, he supposed.
    There were many nights Harold would go out on the balcony to sit and watch the city. That day in the park would always come back to him. He’d remember the light, cool breeze, the marbled brown leaves dropping to kiss the sidewalk, the blue sky and clouds that seemed to skim across the top of the buildings. He’d watched as she got up and took Henry’s hand. He had watched as they skated off.
    So many sleepless nights. Harold ached to see her one more time and with that he could be happy.
    He would listen to Mertha come in the room and then go into the bathroom. She’d be in there rearranging the disorder that displeased her. Finally, he’d hear the toilet flush and she would come in, get in bed and pull the covers up.
    It had become routine.
    He laid awake listening to the bedroom, and felt the tense silence that had long been established between them. No sound was coming from her.
    Had she already fallen asleep? he wondered. Or was she there listening to him? What would it be like had he not married her? Would he have found and married someone else? Or would he have gotten old and been happy to be alone?
    On the bench that day in the park there was a fleeting moment, just before she left, when he asked if there was any chance they could see each other again. Henry looked up. She warmly cupped Henry’s hand in hers; she touched Henry’s hand as if to console him. She didn’t answer right away. Then she said: “No, there’s probably no point.”
    But what point was there? Here on the edge of the world and uncertain what happens? How will the story go on? Would he ever see her again? He is now finding it hard to hold on. Will she remember him as the years advance and Henry grows up? No one below is looking, no one is pointing up. What did he expect would come of this? Of any of this?
    As Harold looks down on a world in motion, it is the past that is all he can think of.
    So close, Harold thinks. He looks into the park and notices the boy with the puppy is gone. It blurs, all the past and all the present, it seems to fade. She is married and nothing, Harold thinks, has been left for him to hold onto. It’s becoming difficult. But to hold on to what? As he stands on the ledge, and his fingers are sweaty and nervous and his heart racing, he hears Mertha: “Your life is such a wasted effort, Harold. No one would miss you. Just a little tin man with a little dick. Just a clerk!” Not true, not true! Harold tries to hold on. Long ago... long ago there was someone, he thinks with a rash of yearning for a past that wrests itself away the more he reaches to grab hold. No. No no no — he wasn’t always this awfully alone.
    Harold stares down.
    Such a terribly small thing, really, to fall.
    His foot slips...
    That day, the day Harold looked down into the park, the dry autumn breeze blew up at him carrying the scent of a million restless odors, tugging Harold forward. It is hard to imagine it. Hard to understand.
    When Harold fell that warm autumn morning, when his body left the ledge, crashing to the pavement below, whatever world he had tried to craft was gone in an instant. So he was not aware of the next morning and the cold dim day that arrived. He didn’t see how everyone went to work — went off in their bundled and rushing and impatient and inconvenienced demeanor. He wasn’t there and so did not see the little cracks in their routine.
    And so Harold left when the world was perfect.
    She never heard what happened to him. Instead, she went on and lived a good life, loving her husband till the end of her days. And of Henry? He entered the ministry at nineteen, spent a decade in India, after which he came home. Today he lives not far from that park. Occasionally when he is passing through that neighborhood he will hear about a man who one autumn morning fell from a tower. A shiver creeps into him at the thought of that man, alone up there, wrestling with demons, believing there was no one in this world who loved him.
    And Henry wonders what it was could have happened that he became that man.

 

note from the author:

    “Fall from the Tower” was written in California at a time when every night I went to a certain location in West Los Angeles, unrolled my sleeping bag and tried to purchase a few hours of sleep. To be quite candid, I had gone to Los Angeles to bury myself; a burial of the spirit. I was running away from a life without focus, a life without love. I think it was because I felt, like Harold, that I stood on the precipice of a tower and was looking down and thinking about why I was there, and that was why I wrote this story. It was my way to emerge from a dismal place.

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