despair that melts girls in his path. And if that doesn’t work, the slight accent he puts on when he’s around girls does the job. Never mind that he’s been living in Brooklyn since he was six. Not that I’m jealous or anything—I admire a guy who uses what he’s got.
“Hi, Gunnar,” I said. “Where you headed?”
“Where else? The Roadkyll debacle.”
“Excellent,” I said, and filed the word “debacle” in the special place I reserve for words I will never know the meaning of.
So Gunnar’s sitting there, all slouched and casual, his arms across seats on either side like maybe there’s a couple of invisible girls there. (Don’t get me started on invisible. Long story.) Then he takes one look at Howie’s book and says, “The dumb guy dies at the end.”
Howie looks up at Gunnar, heaves a heavy sigh that can only come from a lifetime of ruined endings, and closes the book. I snicker, which just irritates Howie even more.
“Thanks, Gunnar.” Howie sneers. “Any more spoilers you care to share with us?”
“Yeah,” says Gunnar. “Rosebud’s a sled, the spider dies after the fair, and the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth in the distant future.” He doesn’t smile when he says it. Gunnar never smiles. I think girls must like that, too.
By the time we got off at Thirty-fourth Street, the parade crowd had all gravitated to the Empire State Building, hoping to experience the thrill of watching someone they don’t know plunge to his death.
“If they don’t survive,” said Gunnar, “it’s our responsibility to witness it. As Winston Churchill once said,
Gunnar always talks like that—all serious, as if even stupidity has a point.
All around us the police are screaming at the crowds, one hand on their batons, saying things like, “Don’t make me use this!”
Up above, the Empire State Building was still wearing a coonskin hat, and the three unfortunate balloon handlers were exactly where they were when we left home—still clinging on to their ropes. Ira handed me the camera, which had a 500X zoom, just in case I wanted to examine one of the guy’s nose hairs.
It was hard to hold the camera steady when it was zoomed in, but once I did, I could see firefighters and police inside the Empire State Building, trying to reach the men through the windows. They weren’t having much luck. Word in the crowd was that a rescue helicopter was on its way.
One guy had managed to tie the rope around his waist and was swinging toward the windows, but the rescuers couldn’t get a grip on him. The second guy clung to the rope and also had it hooked around his feet, probably thanking the New York public school system for forcing him to learn how to do this in gym class. The third guy was the worst off. He was dangling from a stick at the end of his rope, holding on with both hands like a flying trapeze once it stops flying.
“Hey, I wanna look, too!”
Howie grabs the camera from me, and that’s just fine, because I was starting to get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I started to wonder what had possessed me to come down here at all.
“How much you wanna bet those guys write a book about this?” says Howie. It seems Howie assumes they’re all going to survive.
All the while, Gunnar just stood there quietly, his eyes cast heavenward toward the human drama, with a solemn expression on his face. He caught me watching him.
“For the past few months I’ve been coming to disasters,” Gunnar tells me.
“Why?”
Gunnar shrugs as if it’s nothing, but I can tell there’s more to it. “I find them ... compelling.”
Coming from anyone else, this would be like a serial-killer warning sign, but from Gunnar it didn’t seem weird at all, it just seemed like some profound Scandinavian thing—like all those foreign movies where everyone dies, including the director, the cameraman, and half the audience.
Gunnar shakes his head sadly as he watches the souls up above. “So fragile ...” he says.
“What,” says Howie, “balloons?”
“No, human life, you idiot,” I tell him. For an instant I caught a hint of what actually might have been a smile on Gunnar’s face. Maybe because I said what he was thinking.
There’s applause all around us, and when I look up, I can see the swinging man has finally been caught by a cop, and he’s hauled through the window. The helicopter has arrived with a guy tethered to a rope like an action hero, to go after the trapeze dangler. The crowd watches in a silence you rarely hear in a city. It takes a few hair- raising minutes, but the guy is rescued and hauled away by the helicopter. Now only one dangler remains. This is the guy who seemed calmest of all; the guy who had it all under control. The guy who suddenly slips, and plunges.
A singular gasp from the audience.
“No way!” says Ira, his eye glued to his camera.
The guy falls. He falls forever. He doesn’t even spin his arms—it’s like he’s already accepted his fate. And suddenly I find I can’t watch it. I snap my eyes away, looking anywhere else. My shoes, other people’s shoes, the manhole cover beneath me.
I never heard him hit. I’m thankful that I didn’t. Yeah, it was my idea to come here, but when it comes right down to it, I know there are some things you just shouldn’t watch. That’s when I saw Gunnar—for all his talk about witnessing disaster, he was looking away, too. Not just looking away, but grimacing and covering his eyes.
The gasps from the crowd have turned to groans of self-loathing as people suddenly realize this wasn’t about entertainment. Even Howie and Ira are looking kind of ill.
“Let’s get out of here before the subway gets packed,” I tell them, trying to sound less choked up than I really am—but if I’m a little queasy, it’s nothing compared to Gunnar. He was so pale I thought he might pass out. He even stumbles a little bit. I grab his arm to keep him steady. “Hey... Hey, you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. Just a part of the illness.”
I looked at him, not quite sure I heard him right. “Illness?”
“Yes. Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia.” And then he says, “I only have six months to live.”
2. Heaven, Hockey, and the Ice Water of Despair
The idea of dying never appealed to me much. Even when I was a kid, watching the
Option one: It turns out you’re less of a miserable person than you thought you were, and you go to heaven.
Option two: You’re not quite the wonderful person you thought you were, and you go to the other place that people these days spell with double hockey sticks, which, by the way, doesn’t make much sense, because that’s the only sport they can’t play down there unless they’re skating on boiling water instead of ice, but it ain’t gonna happen, because all the walk-on-water types’ll be up in heaven.
I did a report on heaven for Sunday school once, so I know all about it. In heaven, you’re with your dead relatives, it’s always sunny, and everyone’s got nice views—no one’s looking at a disgusting landfill or anything. I gotta tell you, though, if I gotta spend eternity with all my relatives, everybody hugging and walking with God and stuff, I’ll go crazy. It sounds like my cousin Gina’s wedding before people got drunk. I hope God don’t mind me saying so, but it all sounds very hockey-stickish to me.
As for the place down under, the girl who did her report on it got all her information from horror movies, so, aside from really good special effects, her version is highly suspect. Supposedly there are like nine levels, and each one is worse than the last. Imagine a barbecue where
