I leave work early because I have a job interview the next day. No one notices I leave. It seems no one notices when I’m there anyway. Or at least they pretend to. Not notice I mean. I know they pretend to seem.
I skip my usual route through the bus terminal. I want different things, and I don’t want to walk there this afternoon.
I read about a bus crash after I get home. A bus ran up onto the terminal platform. No one was injured, but the area I would have walked through was damaged around the time I would have been walking through it.
I make dinner. I sit. The expected before-interview jitters are absent. In their place a relentlessly quiet despair. Alien.
This is not me.
I’ve been inside too long. My world has become too small. I see enough to see I can’t see enough. Just out of reach there is more. There always is. I need to be closer. I need to know more.
Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about inexplicable physics—grand unified theories and black holes—I watch. The goal is to describe the mechanics of existence. But there’s a problem: an invisible opposition. The event horizon. The edge of the Earth.
To me, the problem is attempting to describe the entirety of the universe when you can’t see entirely what’s in it. Equations describe spacetime as we understand it reaching a point where it is no longer understood. This is the event horizon. Enter perspective.
Einstein tells us there is no perfect way to observe. Your observation is influenced by your method of observation. Bias. There is no way around it.
From the perspective of watching an object cross the event horizon of a black hole you actually only ever see the object as it was just before it crosses.
From the perspective of the object—nothing happens, except the crossing of a point which, according to the other perspective, there is no return. Whatever happens to the object will happen to it, as far as we know, but the information does not cross the event horizon.
Tyson finishes his lecture with an invitation to an out of this world journey. Seems perfect.
Quietly alien despair fills me once more. A new world. Departing adventure.
@neiltyson--just saw your lecture on Inexplicable Physics. Fascinating. Re: a volunteer to explore a spinning black hole---sign me up!
I turn off the lights and fall into another restlessly dreamless sleep. It’s the only way I sleep now. I’ve momentarily forgotten any other way how.
—
There is an edge to the morning. I feel it before my eyes are open. Indecision. I don’t even know where I am yet.
But the day is bright and blue. The cars flow by my windows and the city is as it is. In the early afternoon is my interview. I’ll be getting ready soon after I log some remote hours against the job I’m leaving.
My mind is blank. The code on my screen doesn’t make the same sense it did yesterday. The edge. I feel it pressing against my side.
This is not me.
I feel them now, the interview nerves. They’re nothing new. I expect them—welcome them—find them a spot to sit at my mind’s table. Today they’ve brought a guest. A tortured presence I don’t recognize who sits quietly. Relentlessly quietly. Alien.
I eat. I shower and dress up. I can’t decide on what pair of black pants to wear. Indecision, again. The edge, again.
Why isn’t this me?
It’s because you’re forcing this. This isn’t how it happened. This is you trying to remember how you thought it happened instead of recalling it did happen.
It’s time for me to go. I lock the door.
It’s sunny and warm in the early afternoon as I walk down the boulevard. A police car rushes past. Another. They’re in a hurry. I can smell it. Up ahead they stop. Traffic is being turned away. There’s a small crowd. I keep walking.
“Move to the other side,” the officer says to me, gesturing to the sidewalk across the street.
I’m wearing my sunglasses and he’s wearing his, but something is wrong. It’s all over him. There’s nothing wrong with the sidewalk in front of me. The danger is unseen.
“Everything okay?” I ask knowing it’s not. My gaze wanders up the side of the building in front of us.
He sees I see.
“Someone’s going to jump.”
I cross.
From this side of the road I stop and watch someone sitting on the outside edge of a eleventh or twelfth floor balcony. Maybe the fourteenth. Dressed in black with long hair blown by the wind. Almost catalogue.
“Don’t do it,” I say quietly. I stop.
Around me people are motionless—silently taking pictures and video with their phones—devices projected upward at the end of their arms, held in their hands in an eerie salute as they watch what’s happening around them through them.
Anyone who can do anything is busy trying to do something. The rest…
“What’s she doing? Is she crazy?” someone asks me, as if I’m supposed to know anything more than what’s obvious by now. I don’t answer. I don’t need to. She’s already walking away texting about something.
“Is she really going to jump?”
You’re just doing this for attention. You’ve got it now. It doesn’t matter what happens next. There’s a terrace below. You’ll never clear it. Go inside—avoid the broken legs and embarrassment.
I’m disgusted by this moment. I walk as I continue to glance. Powerless. What’s to be done that isn’t already being done. I stop and look up to watch.
Don’t do it.
It’s all that can be done. Everyone is watching. Waiting. My disgust grows. Everyone is waiting. I can’t. I won’t. This will happen how it happens if I’m here or not. I turn away and walk. For a few steps there is nothing. And then I hear it start.
I turn around to see what I already know is happening. The form has already started moving away from the building.
They’re going to clear the terrace.
I watch. Now I won’t let myself not. I follow the body as it arcs away from the building falling offensively in its ordinarity to the sidewalk below, but I see nothing past the the heads of the crowd, hear nothing but the city.
What just happened?
Wow... She jumped.
I don’t remember leaving, but I do. I arrive at my interview.
“Hello. How are you?”
I pause as my consciousness streams.
“Good,” I lie. “Beautiful day.” The truth.
The interview happens.
I walk back the way I came, back past the still-closed sidewalk. Two police cars remain on either end of the street. Traffic is building back. There is nothing else. No hint. The long lines of cars waiting to get past something they’re going to dismiss as nothing more than wasted minutes of their life as they drive home blends into the normal evening rush.
In the convenience store I’m asked how my day has been. I tell a bit more of the truth, but I don’t want to say anything.
“I’ve had a strange day. How’s yours been?”
I listen. But I become aware I’m not anymore. I’ve listened to enough people today.
At home I feel bad for feeling nothing.
Surreal today. Someone commited suicide by jumping off one of the buildings in my neighbourhood. I've never seen anything like it.
@ ...well fuck
What happened today—?
…You saw someone jump into a black hole.
