Antsy Does Time

Howie looks up at Gu

“Thanks, Gu

’Yeah,” says Gu

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 Gu

Gu

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 wa

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 wa

All the while, Gu

“For the past few months I’ve been coming to disasters,” Gu

“Why?”

Gu

Coming from anyone else, this would be like a serial-killer warning sign, but from Gu

Gu

“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 Gu

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 Gu

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 Gu

“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 Adventures of Roadkyll Raccoon and Darren Headlightz, I always found it suspicious the way Roadkyll got flattened at the end of each cartoon and yet was back for more in the next episode. It didn’t mesh with any reality I knew. According to the way I was raised, there are really just a few possibilities of what happens to you in the hereafter.

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 go

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 su

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 you’re sizzling on the grill—but it’s not accidental like my dad last summer. And the thing about it is, you cook like one of them Costco roasts that’s somehow thicker than an entire cow, so no matter how long you sit there, you’re still rare in the middle for all eternity.

My mother, who I’m sure gives advice to God since she gives it to everyone else, says the fire talk is just to scare people. In reality, it’s cold and lonely. Eternal boredom—which sounds right, because that’s worse than the roasting version. At least when you’re burning, you’ve got something to occupy your mind.