We’re just entering the courtyard to your apartment complex, and we’re talking about the difference between super heroes in American comics and Japanese comics, when Jason calls out to us. You turn your head up, which prompts me to mirror.
He stands on the railing on the second story balcony.
We both run over to him.
Gravel from the ground sticks out, embedded into the flesh of his wounded forearm, bloody and red and gross. They look itchy, like his forearm is a pomegranate: like the gravel, bloody, are ripe red seeds. He spasms in pain. I reach out to him; I just want to brush those itchy, clustery bits of gravel away. Pluck them out of his arm.
I don’t get too close.
Avery, you’re freaking out. Baby, what do I do? And Oh Shit! Oh my fucking fuck shit! I am trying best to stay calm, but it’s hard.
“Avery,” I say. Diffusion of responsibility, try to negate the bystander effect. I don’t know how to take responsibility, but I know it’s important to. “Go back inside and call 911.”
“I should call his parents,” you say, staring past me at our best friend.
“911 First!” You are not often an idiot, but right now you need direction.
You dash, up two flights of stairs and into your apartment. Jason is looking at me. I shudder. His finger twitches and he inhales painfully.
I don’t even know what’s going on anymore, I realize to myself with a morbid, uncomfortable laugh.
But he did it, he jumped. I thought he was posing at first. Like, trying to be dramatic. I expected a skit or a monologue or a comment about how fat I look today.
He looked down at us, right at you and at me, he said “This is it,” and he jumped.
He just… fell. I watched how his jacket billowed in the wind.
Oh, and just to feel how free he must have felt as the wind picked up under him. Oh, and how he must have lied to himself with pretty thoughts, believing in finality. And the sorrow that pushed him to that point.
Now, he is looking at me. He is bruised. He is broken.
Heart wrecked.
I touch his hair, I try my best to be careful.
“Jay,” I whisper. “Oh, dude.”
He gasps and it sounds painful. He trembles. I want to save him. I want to shut his eyes and let him die.
“You’re my best friend,” I tell him. “Please be okay.”
His hand twitches, he stares at me, and he looks away.
“The paramedics are on the way,” you shout at me and Jason from the balcony, before running back down the stairs to me and our friend on quick Converse All Star feet. I’m staring at Jason. You are yammering, Jason your mom is on her way the paramedics will be right here you’re gonna be okay man you’re gonna be okay.
I’m staring at his pomegranate seed gravel arm. I’m staring at him, my mouth and my eyes watering.
I wish you had taken longer. You’re here, and I can’t tell Jason the things I want to. I want to tell him that now’s his chance, close his eyes and turn off his off-switch and he could be out of here.
I am thinking about a ceremonial burial head dress, painting his corpse with war paint, dressing him to the nines in a pinstripe suit and Italian loafers for the next world. I am thinking about how you and I will cry and kiss through our tears and I’ll give you the most passionate loving and we will celebrate life. I am thinking about what the landscapers will think next time they’re here.
“Come on man, hang in,” you say. Jason’s glasses are broken, and I notice a jagged piece of glass, a shard in his cheek under his eye. It would probably be bad to pull it out, but my hand itches so much not being able to.
I pet his hair, and think if he lets go before the paramedics get here, if he should pass away under my touch...
Like when you euthanize a pet and you both know it’s dying.
I will paint my face white at your funeral, I think, feeling his gaited breathing. I will wear gauze and red shoes and I will weep.
You are holding my hand: squeezing it.
I want to be there for you, more there for you. But I don’t know what I can do. I can’t look away from Jason’s itchy, violent wounds.
Even now, I want to point out to you but don’t; even now Jason is scowling. Even now his brow is furrowed and he looks displeased. Somehow, I know he’ll be fine. If he was about to die, his face would be peaceful. His gray eyes would smile. He would cough, he would say something surreal and final. He would inhale but he wouldn’t exhale he’d just stagnate.
He would rot, he would become the earth, a cog in the natural order of things.
Right now he’s just gasping for breath. He knows.
He knows that
he has failed.
When the paramedics arrive, they tell us to back away and give them room.
I wonder if they know the person they’re saving doesn’t appreciate it. I wonder if they’d try so hard to save him if they’d seen his face, mid-fall, and the way he was smiling.
The gravel and muddy leaves he fell on, right under the Primabella Vista boarding sign, yards away from the courtyard’s gazebo. It looks crushed, it looks
impacted.
Your dad drives us to the hospital. You sit in the front, worrying with you father. I sit in the back, and as we drive down the driveway, I stare at the distance between the third floor balcony where he jumped and the ground where he landed.
I play it over and over in my head. Billowing coat, free wild hair, awkward flailing of the limbs. And how he stared at me.
How there were a hundred things I should’ve said, just in case he didn’t make it. How I couldn’t actually think of anything.
“It not his time,” your dad says, looking at me through the rear view mirror.
“He’ll be okay,” I say, just to reply. That can mean a lot of things. It can mean that he’ll get help, that he’ll be happy. But there are other roads this can lead to.
Maybe Jason will become addicted to pain killers, maybe he will try to strangle himself with his sheets in the hospital, maybe his broken bones will leave him incapacitated and he won’t be able to write or draw or turn the pages of text books. He won’t be able to cut himself.
Maybe they’ll have to amputate his pomegranate arm and Jason will paint morbid pictures of demons by dipping his stump in paint and applying it, still wounded, to large canvas. He will turn to me, his face bruised, lips swollen, glass shards still in there and he will say, “Manifestation, Riot. This is a manifestation.”
“Kid your age don’t know what is to be sad,” Your dad tells us knowingly.
I bet, if we were next to each other, we’d turn and have our own silent discussion with our eyes: one of us, blinking and rolling our eyes to point out that our neurotransmitters happen in reaction to different stimuli but our pain is still real and the other, shrugging gently and admitting that he has a point, that we can’t possibly know what loss is or what real stress is.
I roll down the window a little bit. No one says anything. I roll it back up.
We get to the hospital, and we wait. We sit in mostly silence in the waiting room. I can hear you breathing, but it’s muffled by the eerily loud buzzing of fluorescent lighting. I want to take your hand, I yearn for it. But more so, I want you to take mine. You don’t, so I don’t either. We are next to each other, but I am nowhere in your head.
I don’t need to be in there.
I glance your way. You were wearing eyeliner today because we were going to bus to Broadway and shop in thrift stores and drink bubble tea. Now the black mess is smudged. You don’t cry, but you keep inhaling through your nose and your sniffles sound all wet.
“There was a patch of moss like three feet next to him,” you say. “But he landed in the gravel.”
“He’s not going to die,” I promise. I can’t tell you how I know, how I know from the way he stared at me, from the way his pained face looked. Not now, anyways, but once we’re out of here and Jason’s diagnosis of “okay” is confirmed I know we’ll be talking about it for days and these kinds of things will come up.
Right now I’m trying to pay attention to everything I think, everything I feel, so I can tell you all about it later when it’s time. When enough time has passed that we can talk about it.
I have you hand me a Cosmo magazine from the pile on the tiny table nearby. You flip through an out-dated Teen People.
down your cheek.
“You know how, earlier, we were talking about super powers,” I start just because the silence is killing me, “What would yours be?”
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