Hailey's War

become something of a habit of mine to come up here when I didn’t have any big plan for my day.

If you’ve driven in California and visited the Bay Area, the bridge you most likely drove on was the Bay Bridge. It connects San Francisco to the East Bay. It is heavily trafficked, double- decked, beautiful in an industrial way. But it isn’t an icon. The Golden Gate Bridge is, largely due to its location: It serves as a kind of borderline between the enclosed waters of the Bay and the open water of the Pacific, between the American continent and the rest of the world. It is open to cyclists and to pedestrians, many of whom are dazzled tourists. In its most mundane sense, it is the bridge between the city and the Marin headlands. But to twenty or more people a year, it is the bridge to eternity.

The Golden Gate Bridge is America’s foremost suicide destination.

The first suicide off the bridge was a WWI veteran who appeared to be out for a stroll until he told a passerby, “This is as far as I go.” That was three months after the bridge was opened; it was still in its infancy. Sometimes I wondered: If that man had stayed home and stuck his head in an oven instead, would it have changed the bridge’s destiny? Without his precedent, would the next person and the next have reconsidered, until it was understood that jumping off the Golden Gate just wasn’t done? There are other bridges in America that are as accessible and potentially fatal but have virtually no history of suicides, apparently because it just didn’t become a tradition.

Psychologists know there is a contagious aspect to suicide-not merely the destructive impulse itself, but also the where and the how of it. In Japan, they’ve had to close public attractions because they’ve become magnets for suicides. One person jumps into a volcano and more people get the idea. In other countries, the authorities intervene. In America, land of the individual destiny, not so much.

Cops who try to prevent suicides up here will tell you that they’ll see a pedestrian with that end-it-all look and ask them if they’re thinking of jumping. The pedestrian denies it and the cop has to take their word for it and move on. Then they’ll look back and the guy is just gone. It’s that quick. You don’t even hear anything. I know, I’ve seen it, too.

I asked a patrolman once how he recognized someone with the suicide look. He told me, “You’ll know it when you see it.” And I do. It’s in what they’re not looking at. Unlike the tourists, they’re not looking at the city skyline or the Marin headlands. They’re looking at the water. Or at nothing, because all their attention is directed inside, replaying the past and seeing the bleak endless nothing of the future.

That’s the thing I don’t understand: How exactly do they choose their spot? What says to them, This far but no farther? I’ve never asked a potential jumper how they choose their spot. It’s too flippant, and when I’m up here, I’m very, very careful. It’s probably the most careful I ever am.

There was a man standing by the railing ten feet ahead of me. He wasn’t even a particularly hard guess. He was pretty obviously homeless, skin leathery from sun and wind and maybe drug use. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, and he was too caught up in his internal weather to notice me approach.

The men were usually easier than the women. They could usually be softened by a young woman taking interest in them. The women were sometimes hostile. They told me that someone like you couldn’t understand their problems. It was never quite clear what they meant by someone like you.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

He was a big man, maybe six-foot-six, with shaggy hair and a shaggy beard. I could imagine him, at a happier point in his life, dressing as a pirate for Halloween, scaring little kids and then making them laugh.

“Are you hungry?” I said.

He looked at me flatly. “No,” he said.

So much for the easy way, getting him off the bridge first, under a pretext. I said, “I thought you might want to get something to eat.” I paused. “You know, instead of jumping.”

He blinked, startled.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” I said, “but that’s the plan, isn’t it? Jumping?”

“So what?” he said, and it wasn’t hostile. He was probably too depressed to get really angry anymore. At least I hoped so. He was big enough that even if he wasn’t in shape anymore, he could still pick me up and throw me off the bridge without much effort. I thought of the edged ripples of iron-colored water below, of Jonah’s prayer: You cast me into the deep, and all the flood surrounded me.

I said: “I’m not here to tell you I understand all your problems or that everything’s going to be okay. But I’m hungry, and I’ve got enough money to buy two breakfasts. If you’re hungry, too.”

And then, at the worst time, my cell phone began to ring. I really should shut it off when I’m up here. I knew who it was: work. Someone had called in sick, or just hadn’t shown up. I was needed. And normally I’d have answered, except that right now the guy in front of me was about to make a life-or-death decision and I couldn’t just say, Hold that thought, I have to take this.

The man in front of me was curious: “Don’t you want to answer that?”

“Not really,” I said, and it stopped ringing, going into voice mail. I persisted: “What do you say? Breakfast? And you leave the bridge alone at least one more day?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”

I’d like to tell you that Todd’s story-that was his name-was original and fascinating. It wasn’t. I’d heard it before: A good and happy life in an average way, until the onset of a chronic illness, exacerbated by drink. He went on disability until the money ran out. His marriage failed. He was unable to pay child support, so his wife saw no reason for him to know where she’d moved with their two kids. He’d stayed with a buddy until the buddy’s wife wouldn’t have it anymore. That left no one to care that he was standing on the bridge, ready to jump.

Todd and I made a plan for him that involved having only one drink and going to the VA to look up the brother he hadn’t seen in twenty years, but who just might take him in. To level the playing field a bit, I told Todd part of my story-the part about going east to school and why I came back. Without that, the potential jumpers usually looked at me like some idealist who’d read a few too many inspirational books. Like if I weren’t doing this, I’d be at the mission feeding the homeless, or in Africa doing medical work.

In someone else, what I did on the bridge would be philanthropy. For me it wasn’t. A shrink would probably have a field day with it, trying to put the pieces together, how it fit with the reason I came back from the East Coast, and the reason I had to leave L.A. Those are two different stories, by the way. I’m getting to that.

I hadn’t left Todd behind at the diner for more than three minutes when my cell rang again, and with a stab of guilt, remembering the call I’d ignored on the bridge, I immediately brought the Motobecane to a stop.

“It’s me.” Shay Clements was the owner of Aries Courier. “Fabian just radioed in. His crank’s busted, he’s stranded on Market Street. Can you go meet him, pick up his packages, and make his drops?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, right now?”

Shay wasn’t being pushy. A courier service stood or failed on its on-time performance, and that in itself gave me a twinge of confusion: The hour that had passed between the phone call on the bridge and this one was far too much time for Shay to wait. But there wasn’t time to wonder about that. “I’m on it right now,” I said. “I’m literally standing over my bike.”

“Thanks,” Shay said after giving me the intersection where I was to meet Fabian.

“It’s no problem,” I said.

And it wasn’t. This was my work now, and I did it with the great humility life has taught me since I washed out of the United States Military Academy at West Point, just two months before I would have graduated and become a second lieutenant in the United States Army.

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