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I watch people die nearly every week, if I’m lucky anyway. Sometimes it’s two or three times a week, but during the holidays the numbers go up which evens out the average. Just off the middle seems to be the best place to sit and wait, right between two blue signs asking people not to take the plunge and to call the special suicide number instead, free of charge. After my first month spending the morning here every day, the suicide patrols began ignoring me, casting me off as some voyeuristic vulture. They probably figured that there was no helping me.

It happens mostly in the morning, I’ve found. It used to happen at night the most, but then they closed the bridge to pedestrians which effectively stopped it. It seems that no one wanted to park their car, lock the door and take the four second dive into the black water. Didn’t want to hold up traffic and cause a fuss.

I’d expected more of them to cry up here, or to look out of the ordinary in some way. But nearly all of them are calm, casual even, not even treating it like a ceremony. A few of the younger ones will stand on the railing first, spread their arms wide and tip their heads up to the sky so that the horizon rises up to them as they topple over. The older men tend to sit on the railing for a minute first, swinging their legs, maybe taking their expensive watches off and putting them in their jacket pockets like they do when they need to fiddle with something in an engine or about to play ball with their kid. That last moment of pointless familiarity endears me to them. I love them all.

At first I just wrote down what time and which lamp post marker they were closest to, but that wasn’t specific enough. I couldn’t find out anything about them, of course. That would ruin the seductive quality of it all: the enchantment of being privy to their sacred last moments. I gave them names. Red Cap Guy. Grey Mac Woman. Captain Greybeard. I wrote their names down in my book and did a little sketch of them. Some of them, the hesitant ones, hung around long enough for me to make it a colour drawing.

What they chose to wear on their last day fascinated me as much as the time or whether or not they took their jewelry off. No ceremony in it. No clues for anyone who saw them leave their house or their apartment. They wore good but not exceptional suits, the bad ones obvious from a long way off because the shoulders shone synthetically. Polyester jogging clothes were in. That seemed to be a popular one. Literally running to deaths, but sitting down to catch their breath before they jumped. A few collage kids. The girls tended to take their bags with them. The men put it down carefully against the railings as if they were going to pick it up again later and wanted to memorise exactly where they’d put it before they left. I guessed that there were a few mothers but I’ve never seen anyone take a child down with them. I like to think I’d stop that, draw the line at murder, but it would break my role as an impartial witness, so I don’t know.

Maybe the police will start interviewing me. There rarely seems to ever be any witnesses to these jumps. Everyone looks straight on the bridge, or just glances out at Alcatraz before they get back to the road. Even the cyclists don’t take in the world they’re apparently saving. Just get on with it. Like the jumpers. No marching band; no screaming; no heaving, tearful phone calls. They just take a minute to compose themselves, choose feet or head first, and jump.

On their way down, runway models don’t look as good as they do.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Flash Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.