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All summer had been a medley of jumpers and fallers. The previous spring, simple dismemberment, and the winter before that, freakish hurricane-related deaths and injuries—deaths by debris, Leonard, Howard’s immediate supervisor and cubicle-mate, called them.

“You’re lucky. All I ever seem to get are the old folks,” Leonard said, when Howard pointed out that his claims had been following these discrete and eerie patterns. “All natural. Nothing fishy—except that one old gal. One hundred and two years old, survived a fire in the nursing home only to die from a penicillin reaction in the hospital.”

“What a shame,” Howard said.

“Still. One hundred and two. That’s beyond ripe. I’ll bet she drank Boost or something.”

Howard pushed his glasses up onto a tiny groove on the bridge of his nose. With all the power bars, energy drinks, and vitamins Leonard consumed, Howard was sure he would push a hundred at least. Before he started at Hope and Life Insurance, Howard had never met anyone as fanatical as Leonard about the maintenance of his own body, not even the gung-ho insurance sales staff on the second and third floors who formed weekend running clubs and circulated back issues of Runner’s World on the break tables.

*  *  *  *  *

Despite his discovery that death was not as random as most people thought, a notion that for some reason gladdened Howard, he still found his job disappointing. When he’d transferred from medical data coding to investigations, Howard had entertained visions of dusting for fingerprints at crime scenes, determining whether or not his deceased policyholder was the victim of a poisoner or a strangler based on the friction patterns, those delicate whorls and swirls a simple piece of adhesive tape could pick up from doorknobs and medicine bottles. He thought at the very least he’d get to look at police reports, maybe even interview the bereaved. He had thought somehow he would be more necessary, able to see things others couldn’t, for most problems came from being unable to see, not from not knowing or feeling. And so for these last nine months Howard had been processing claims, waiting for something to catch his eye: a murder disguised as suicide or a manslaughter passed off as a careless accident, large term policies taken out on people whose net worth didn’t warrant insuring.

“You’re an investigative assistant. So, it’s not brain surgery. It’s not like you have to do any real investigating,” Leonard informed him on his first day. “It’s pretty ordinary stuff really. Suicides—always the pink forms. We don’t pay out unless the policy is at least two years old. We usually get a police report confirming it’s a suicide and not, say, a homicide made to look like an accident. If it’s one of those . . .” Leonard tapped his pen against a mini-file cabinet nearly hidden under his desk. “We wait for the coroner’s report and for the police to clear any kin expected to inherit. Natural and accidental deaths—goldenrod—we pay out. Still, all you got to do is wait for the appropriate reports and file them with the policy. No big deal.”

Howard’s shoulders slumped and he could feel a space widening inside his rib cage. He had hoped for something more exciting. A little more murder. He wanted to study with practiced suspicion the beneficiaries. He wanted to know if they would glide, vapor-like, walking around as if undressed. He wanted to know how tragedy hung on the face and what he would say when he saw it.

The only excitement he’d found on the job was working with Ritteaur, the coroner’s assistant. Occasionally, Howard couldn’t read his handwriting and would have to call for clarification. Though he knew it was morbid, he couldn’t help being curious about everything that went on in the lab and would pump Ritteaur for all the grisly details of the cases that came across Howard’s desk. Sometimes when he was bored or, like today, wanted to dodge Carla, his wife, and her noontime phone calls, he phoned Ritteaur even when he could read his handwriting just fine.

“Ritteaur, it’s Howard. I got a question on an older file, Pietrzak.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember him. This one you would’ve loved.”

“So was he dismembered before or after death?”

“Both. But mostly after.”

“Was the ‘before’ dismemberment accidental?”

“Sort of. It started out that way. Then the wife got ideas, seized an opportunity, if you know what I mean, and finished him off.”

Howard felt his stomach tightening.

“They found most of his body cut into tiny pieces and stuck in a sump. The wife tried to flush him down the toilet, one flush at a time. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I can’t find it just yet. Ka-toosh!” Ritteaur laughed, making a flushing noise. “You tell me the human creature isn’t one sick animal,” Ritteaur continued.

“Yeah. Pretty sick.” Howard nodded his head in a mixture of disbelief and horror. He hung up the phone and studied the Pietrzak file. It never failed to amaze him how many husbands and wives, ordinary and sane people who’d sworn to love one another, killed each other. Before he started at the company, Howard had been optimistic about both hope and life, sure that life was good and so were most of the people in it. It never occurred to him that he might have to fear Carla, or she him, someday. And this made him sad, knowing that there were mysteries, little pockets of darkness people kept from each other. He wondered what it was that had set that woman off if it wasn’t something small, very very small—that had bugged her for years.

At 12:05, Howard’s phone rang and the white button indicating an in-house call began to blink.

“Lunch?” Carla also worked at Hope and Life, fourth floor, in the medical coding department. When they had first married, they always ate their lunches together in the break room. Now Howard made a point of being on the phone or out of the office during the lunch hour. Not out of malice. In fact, there was no particular reason why he wanted to avoid his wife. He just got tired of their regular lunches that over time began to feel forced, wearing on him like a habit that needed breaking. People need space, he reminded himself, though he knew she’d never let him get away with such a flimsy reasoning.

“Not today. I just got back from the coroner’s lab and I haven’t got much of an appetite left,” Howard lied. “You know, all those smells.”

“Right,” Carla said, drawing out the word the way she did when she wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him.

“Another bridge-jumper,” Howard said, leaning forward to read the file label on the blue folder Leonard had deposited on his desk that morning. “Johnson, Svea.” Howard tapped the edge of the unopened file with his ball-point pen.

“She’s dead, right?”

“Very.”

“Good. Because if I thought, even for a minute, that you were screwing around, your stuff would be out on the lawn, Howard. You know that. Right?”

“Right,” Howard said, wondering if Carla had really wanted to eat lunch with him at all.

*  *  *  *  *

Howard believed in human kindness, felt it was up to him to perform small acts of it whenever he could. But he wasn’t kidding himself. He desperately hoped his good intentions would bring back to him some small act of kindness in return, he didn’t care how small. Besides, life was too short not to try, he reminded himself. That’s why before he was hired at Hope and Life, Howard had volunteered at a suicide hotline where he tried to talk people out of taking those fatal doses, out of pulling the trigger. I know how you feel, he had wanted to say. I’m just like you.

After a few weeks of doling out modulated and appropriate responses, Howard improvised, telling his callers about his grim high school summers spent chicken picking, about how he had worked at twilight, in that blue light of his grandparents’ broken-slatted barn, picking the unsuspecting birds up by the feet where they sat in their own dung and dust. Sometimes, in the kicked-up dust, he thought he could smell their fear as he loaded them in cages on the back of the flatbed truck. That’s when he’d hear them start talking, begging for mercy. “Help,” they’d squawk, “Please,” or worse, “We’ll come baaaaack.”

Though he hated that job, hated what he had to do, somehow sending those birds to their deaths validated his own life. This was hard to explain, even to himself. But he’d tell his callers anyway, desperate to make a connection. Smelling their fear, knowing their desire to live had worked for him, he’d tell them. Hearing a smaller animal plead, beg for the grace of just one more day, and these insignificant birds with brains the size of a pea. If a chicken could cling to life, then why couldn’t he? This was what got him through each shift in the barn, each miserable night spent lying on his bunk with dung-lung, his voice split and cracking, frayed to a hoarse whisper.

There must be something to get you through, he’d urge. Maybe buy a pet, a goldfish. Invariably the callers hung up then and Howard would get that feeling, always accompanied by the taste of acid in the back of his throat, that he’d failed again. He had this same feeling about that Svea Johnson woman, for a cursory glance at her stats revealed she was his age, had lived in the same neighborhood he had grown up in. No doubt they’d gone to high school together, and yet he could not remember her.

Howard drummed his fingers on top of the blue file. It unnerved him how the fact of time and location forced a commonality between him and this woman he should have known but didn’t. He leaned back in his chair and wondered, had she known him? Had she been one of those dumpy girls hiding behind a stack of books in the library, one of those disappearing girls with a disappearing face so nondescript it blended with anything? Or had she been beautiful, so beautiful Howard had decided she was unattainable and had thus relegated her to the deep pocket of his forgetfulness, for he knew his memory was like that: he could forget anything if he decided there would be no occasion to know it later.

*  *  *  *  *

Leonard pushed back in his chair and cracked his knuckles. With his conical buzz-top haircut, even his head looked muscular. As Leonard leaned over his keyboard, Howard noted how minute activities like typing brought into sharp focus the muscles in his forearms. Leonard pushed back in his chair again, this time to rifle through the lower drawers of his desk where he kept a large stash of energy bars. Then he unpeeled the metallic wrapper off a Tiger bar and took a bite.

“Want some?” Leonard offered the rest of the bar to Howard.

Howard shook his head and pointed to the unfinished cinnamon roll gummed to the corner of his desk.

“Treat your body like a temple, and it’ll take care of you,” Leonard said, his mouth full of energy bar.

Howard blinked and pushed his glasses back onto the deep groove at the bridge of his nose. He didn’t know what to say when people discussed their own bodies. A body was what it was. Then he thought of Svea Johnson’s body, falling head over heels perhaps. Or floating for a brief second before plummeting. He wished he could remember her, had some shred of recollection, for it was hard to conjure a faceless body, hard to imagine telling her what he wished he could have said: how unforgiving water really was, that of all the ways to jump off a bridge, none of them were good, this much he’d learned from Ritteaur.

Howard’s phone rang. The white button blinked and he sighed before he picked up the receiver.

“Don’t be late for dinner tonight, Howard.” It was Carla again. “I’m cooking a Martha Stewart recipe.” Howard knew that meant she’d spent too much money on hard-to-find ingredients, and would spend too much time trying to make the dish look like it did in the
Martha Stewart Living magazine. “Presentation is everything,” Carla had explained when he asked what difference it made if a salad had radichio or endive in it or not.

“OK,” Howard said, sliding the phone into the cradle. He pressed on his sternum. Before working in the coroner’s office, Ritteaur had interned for a mortician. Ritteaur had told Howard how corpses, once pumped full of embalming fluid, tended to bloat overnight and it was necessary to push on their torsos and vent the gases through a plastic plug inserted in their abdomens. Howard thumped on his chest with the heel of his palm and wondered if he might not benefit from just such a hatch incision to let bad air out.

*  *  *  *  *

Sometimes Howard imagined himself utterly split, a ghost Howard, his consciousness hovering next to the corporeal Howard sitting there now, his fingers gripping the ribbed steering wheel of his blue Skylark. For it seemed clear to him that in all things there were two Howards at work: the Howard who wanted to arrive home in time for dinner so as to please his wife and the Howard who knew even as he promised that he would, he wouldn’t. The Howard who knew he shouldn’t leave work early, would have no good excuse should Leonard notice his absence, and the Howard who secretly hoped he’d be missed, knew that questions would be asked. How else could he explain it? For here he was, four o’clock, his foot heavy on the gas pedal, driving toward the Laurelhurst neighborhood where both Howards knew he would troll the old streets, the one Howard not sure what it was he thought he’d find over there at 745 Madison—hoping, in fact, it was a vacant lot of thistle and beer bottles, the other Howard knowing it wasn’t so, knowing too that neither Howard would rest until he saw the house Svea Johnson had once lived in.

As he drove, the hills in the distance turned smoky under the late afternoon August heat. Howard rubbed his forehead. He should be at work. He should be inputting data, he said aloud even as he turned onto Weidler. He told himself he had no idea why he was doing this, though the other Howard knew this drive had more to do with making reparations, with jostling a faulty memory to reveal something of Svea Johnson. For Howard had either never known her or had forgotten her, forgotten her completely, and it bothered him that this could happen, that the same thing could and would happen to him someday.

You could read a lot about people from the houses they lived in, he reminded himself as he drove past the Laurelhurst park, past the huge iron posts, the remnants of an ancient gate marking the Laurelhurst neighborhood from the Rose district. And then he wondered, could sorrow leave its mark on the brickwork? Would he read the traces of grief in the troubled surface of stucco, in the
warped panes’ suggestions that theirs had been a family full of secrets and hidden hurts?

Howard nosed the whistling Skylark onto Madison. He circled the block, even numbers on the left, odds on the right. In his squeaking car, idling at five miles per hour, he was as obvious as a headache and he didn’t like the oily feel of what he was doing, felt he was trespassing, though in truth he was idling along the very same streets over which he’d once ridden his bicycle hundreds of times as he delivered newspapers in the inky darkness of night. Still, it didn’t feel right and he drove away, willing himself not to read the house numbers. He looped past the park three times, drove by the house he had spent his boyhood in, past all the houses along his old paper route. Then, delinquent both in fact and intention, Howard turned toward home, toward Carla and her dinner.

When he pulled into the driveway, he turned off the engine. From his car he could see Carla’s shadow at the kitchen window, her dark form moving behind the scrim of the lowered window shade. Howard thought of the Johnsons again, tried to imagine their shapes moving from room to room, and he felt acres and acres of empty space growing inside of him, pushing everything else out of the way. His heart, his lungs—none of it mattered—and he could swear he felt them shrinking to the point where he could see himself reflecting pure sky, the vastness of that inner space.

*  *  *  *  *

“Where’ve you been?” Carla met Howard at the door, a spatula in hand. “You missed my Capillini pasta with red caviar. Endive salad and marinated artichoke hearts.”

“I got held up.” Howard pulled the door closed, felt the bolt slide home under his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, his mouth tasting like he’d swallowed a fistful of change.

“I called at your desk and left a message with Leonard. He said you left early.” Carla set the spatula down on the stove and followed Howard to the bathroom where he pulled down his pants. Carla crossed her arms over her chest. “If there’s something you need to tell me, you can just tell me. You know that. Right?”

“I’m OK,” Howard said, flushing the toilet. “I just feel a little different, that’s all. Like there’s an itch in my arteries.”

Carla went back to the kitchen where Howard heard a whole battery of kitchen noises: savage rips on the roll of tinfoil, garbled choking from the garbage disposal, all the sounds women make in a kitchen when they’re angry. After a while Carla came back to the bathroom. Howard hadn’t moved except to pull the lid of the toilet down and sit on it. She wanted a scene, he could tell, and here he was, full of guilt and too many character faults to count. For starters, Howard did not have the energy to give his wife what she wanted and rightfully deserved: a real fight, something, anything to prove to themselves they still felt the way people should.

“An itch in your arteries?” Carla rocked back on her heels and studied him. Then she turned on the tap, pulled out her tooth brush, and began scrubbing her teeth so vigorously Howard knew she couldn’t really hear him.

“Like how you feel when you hang your head out a car window, how all that wind crowds your throat.” For a moment it scares you, and then it’s purejoy, he wanted to add.

Carla spat, turned off the tap, put the toothbrush away. “You’re so late, I already sent Kevin to bed.” Kevin was Carla’s eight—year—old son from a failed marriage. For an eight-year-old, Howard thought Kevin seemed strangely devoid of life, ghosting the hallways, ducking past Howard when he’d stretch his hand out to rumple his hair. Kevin spent most of his time holed up in his room, fiddling around on his computer, and Howard sincerely hoped he’d do something risky one of these days, get into some trouble, sniff rubber cement at school, smoke a cigarette, anything. Just to be on the safe side, Howard had tried to tell him a little about the birds and the bees a few months back. Kevin had sat cross-legged, looking at him and blinking rapidly. The point is, he’d told Kevin, life and love are ultimately cruel but fair, breaking each and every one of us down to bits, “and disappointment, just get used to it.”

“Can I go now?” Kevin had asked, still blinking, and Howard realized then these were things you did not say to an eight-year-old.

Carla pulled her ratty yellow nightgown over her head. “He needs you, Howard. More than you know. Boys need a strong male role-model.”

Howard stood and stepped out of his pants. “They need fresh air, too.”

Carla sighed, climbed into bed. “Kevin’s got that karate test at the Y tomorrow night. 7:30. Don’t be late, OK?”

“OK.”

She turned her back to Howard and switched off her bedside light. In a matter of minutes, he knew she’d start mumbling data codes. Her favorite: 99803: Venipuncture. He used to think it was cute, her bringing her work home with her. When they both worked in the coding department, they’d spout codes over dinner dates, during commercials, a sort of foreplay and mounting evidence that they shared the same sense of humor: 66701, Bipolar manic depression; 39099, Male pattern baldness. All one of them had to do was pick a person out of a crowd or in a restaurant, point and recite a code, and they’d both bust up laughing. 41000: Liposuction. Now he had to work hard nor to smother Carla with the pillow when she began her nightly litanies, and remind himself that once he had thought her funny. But then Howard recalled his own quirks: his wearing the maroon-striped tie every Tuesday and Thursday, wearing the brown paisley every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Maybe they were all just forgetting how to live.

*  *  *  *  *

Howard spent most of the next morning avoiding the Svea Johnson file. By 10:05, when the exodus for the coffee pots had died to a trickle, he duckwalked his squeaky-castored chair closer to Leonard, who had his fingers laced behind his neck. Leonard grimaced and twisted first to the right and then to the left. Oblique crunches. Leonard did these every morning during their allotted ten-minute coffee break.

“People always overlook their obliques,” Leonard explained.

Howard nodded. “I’ve got this strange feeling,” he said, thumping his chest with his knuckles. “Like I’m gulping sky, can’t get enough of it. Other times I feel I’m drowning on air. Can a person do that?”

“Fish.” Leonard flapped his hands at the side of his neck, indicating imaginary gills. “They do it all the time.”

Howard pressed on his sternum again, then untucked his shirt and lifted it to show Leonard his chest. “No, really. I think there’s something wrong with me,” he said.

Leonard leaned forward in his chair and narrowed his eyes. “No kidding. Your obliques have completely disappeared. If your ribs weren’t there, your insides would be sliding all over the place. Too many beers, Buck-o.”

“No, that’s not it,” Howard said, tucking his shirt back into his waistband. “I think it’s more serious.”

Leonard shrugged. “Nothing more serious than a bad case of underdeveloped obliques.”

“Right,” Howard said, adopting Carla’s habit of drawing the word out as she exhaled.

*  *  *  *  *

For over an hour Howard sat at his desk trying to work up the courage to process the Johnson file. But the mere sight of it, of knowing that she was most likely a jumper because it was August, the month of jumping, depressed him. Howard looked at the blue file and felt that space expanding, pushing against his lungs. He laced his fingers behind his neck as he’d seen Leonard do every morning. Maybe his problem could be isolated, squeezed into form by a series of isometrics. Maybe this was why Leonard worked out so much. Howard grunted and leaned to the right, then to the left, repeating the movements until he could feel a tingle in his armpits, the first signal that his deodorant either would or would not fail him. After five minutes, he gave up. He pushed on his rib cage, lightly fingering the spaces between the bones, feeling as spacious inside as before, if not spacier.

Outside, the sky was a cloudless blue, so pure Howard had to look away. He picked up his phone and dialed the coroner’s office.

“Ritteaur, it’s Howard calling on the Johnson autopsy results.” Howard had his fingers crossed. He was hoping against all odds that she had been a faller and not a jumper, feeling that either way, he was responsible for her.

“Come take a look for yourself. We’ll get a beer after,” Ritteaur said.

Howard grabbed his keys. He knew it was against company policy to drink on lunch hours, but it was a Friday and he was feeling that space again, was hoping Hope and Life would catch on fire, was hoping every office worker would steal staplers and envelopes, hoping every beneficiary got paid in full.

*  *  *  *  *

When Howard pulled open the metallic doors of the coroner’s lab, he walked into the sharp smells of formaldehyde and antiseptic, thick in the air and carried as a stinging slap to the nose. On a table lay the body of a woman, a white sheet peeled back to her feet. The yellow laminate toe-tag read Johnson, Svea. Even though her skin was bluish and dark circles ringed her eyes, Howard could see that she had been a beautiful woman and he regretted he’d come.

Ritteaur pressed a forefinger into the woman’s arm, leaving an indentation. “The body’s a glorified sponge,” he said, pulling out a skinny measuring wand that looked like a cocktail swizzle stick. He measured the depth of the pitting, then tossed the tiny ruler into a stainless steel sink. “At first I thought it was suicide. The bridge and all. At any rate, she got to the morgue quicker than most of our water-victims do and we had to wait a while to see if any bruising would appear. Anything suspicious—ligatures or marks around the neck or on the arms. Bruises don’t always appear on the body right away, especially on submerged flesh. So we let her dry out in the cooler.”

“And that’s when you found bruises?”

“That’s just it. None. Zippo. So I’m thinking suicide. Then I look at her fingernails and I see tiny bits of moss under the nails and two of the nails on her right hand broken off.”

“She fell.” Howard felt a surge in his chest.

“Or she intended to jump but at the last moment had second thoughts.”

Howard closed his eyes, imagining what he would have said if Svea had called in on the hotline, feeling again that maybe he owed her something, should at least be able to locate her in a dim memory of a school assembly, the taking of a photo, but there was nothing.

“So what’s the verdict?” Howard swallowed, tasting metal in his molars.

Ritteaur shrugged. “I still got to do the Y-incision, poke around in the stomach, run some blood tests.”

“Do you believe in dignity for the dead?” Howard draped the sheet over Svea Johnson’s body.

Ritteaur laughed. “Are you kidding? In this business? You think this is bad,” Ritteaur poked the dead woman’s big toe, “wait until the mortician gets ahold of her.”

Ritteaur pulled the sheet back and looked at the woman’s face. Her eyes were open, but chilled and empty, the way the eyes of fish look when set out on ice. “She’s in pretty good shape, all things considered.” Ritteaur forced the eyelids closed with his thumbs. “We had a decapitation in here a month ago. The family wanted an open-casket funeral, if you can believe that. But I’m telling you, those embalmers can work miracles. They trimmed the ragged edges, splinted and sutured the head to the neck, and painted liquid sealer over the stitching. Then they threw a turtleneck and some makeup on the guy, and I swear to God, if I hadn’t seen him on my table just a day before, I wouldn’t have even suspected.”

“No.” Howard put his palms on the examining table and leaned on it. “That’s not what I meant.” He adjusted the sheet to cover Svea Johnson’s pitted forearm. “I mean on the paperwork, ‘accidental death’ sounds more dignified than ‘botched suicide,’ don’t you think?”

“Hey. I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. I just wanted you to see for yourself what we got here. My opinion is it could go either way.”

“But your report—”

Ritteaur pulled off his surgical gloves with a loud snap. “It’s still incomplete. But judging by what we got so far, I vote for accident.”

“OK.” Howard patted down his stomach, his hands fluttering. “OK,” he said again, backing out of the two-way door, away from the smells of the lab.

“How ’bout that beer?” Ritteaur untied his scrubs, pivoted, and tossed them into a steel clothes hamper at the far end of the lab.

Howard shook his head and waved his hands out in front of him. “Another time.” He felt his throat seizing tight, like a draw-string being pulled, and he didn’t know if the formaldehyde was getting to him or if he had brushed against a true sorrow for this Svea Johnson, a stranger.

Howard checked his watch. Though Leonard would be back from the gym any minute now and Carla would have called and left messages, Howard could feel that other Howard unpeeling like the silver and felt backing from an old mirror and his heart began to beat faster. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Before he knew it, he’d eased the Skylark toward the Laurelhurst neighborhood, past the long and low elementary school, one six-year complaint of noise and misery. Howard turned onto Madison Street and sat two doors down from the Johnson house, considering how he’d purposefully forgotten all those years, grade school and junior high. He’d willfully, willingly forgotten the awkwardness of his body, his body a menagerie of flawed parts as he had only been dimly aware then of what he knew now: how the body’s mysteries lay not in the parts themselves, nor their shapes and functions, but in the naming of them, and in the particular nomenclature for how those parts could and would fail. And whether the naming came in the form of medical coding or as scribbles from a forensic pathologist, Howard was continually astonished by the subtleties, the lies such language imposed.

*  *  *  *  *

As Howard walked down the narrow corridor to his cubicle, he could hear his phone ringing and knew, again, it was Carla.

“Howard. Just a reminder: Kevin. Y. 7 P.M. Green belt karate test.” Carla sounded like she was calling out a fast-food order. “Sure. OK,” Howard said and slid the receiver in the phone’s cradle. He hated these Friday night karate tests. It took forever to get through the hordes of White belts, all of them bad. Yellow and Orange belt tests were a little better; at least when the instructor counted, you could bet half of the students would execute the same move at the same time. With White belts, you could never be sure of anything. And Howard hated the parents, crowding the mats, the metallic flash and pop of bulbs, the edgy whining noise of film rewinding.

Howard leaned back in his chair and palmed his heart, beating down on his chest with the heel of his hand. He hoped his internal organs would just disappear and he could give himself over to his internal gases and float, balloon-like, up and out of the office.

*  *  *  *  *

On Fridays, beautiful Fridays after everyone else had left early, the hours emptied and a calm filled the office, a liquid quietude welling along the corridors, around cubicles, lapping over the tops of Howard’s shoes. Howard loved this quiet startled from the eventual lack of noise: the gradual winding down of the phone’s nervous rings around five, the flurry to the elevator and the rubbery sound of its wobbled stop and the door bumping open. The copy machine, switched off, lid open as if cooling itself, made trickling noises like the ink was pooling somewhere. On Fridays after five, Howard felt he could think a little more clearly and he rolled in his chair, dreaming of policies that were never cancelled, claims never rejected, families redeemed by the carefial and sympathetic coding a man with Howard’s sensibilities could extend. In these moments of calm, the two Howards, his will and his action, neatly fused. This is what he was telling himself anyway, why he would even consider going back out to Madison Street. For this combined and profoundly optimistic Howard, the Howard who believed in doing the right thing, believed he could do right by everyone if only he tried a little harder, found himself once again, before he could fully comprehend the consequences, behind the steering wheel of his temperamental Skylark.

Howard sat in his car, drumming his fingers along the curvature of the wheel grip. He would knock on their door and with confidence, he would apologize for his intrusion. “But it would help if you could tell me a little about your daughter,” he’d say, “anything that goes to character or state of mind.” He would of course be professional, take notes, politely look at photos. And he’d be careful to give nothing away. They’d never know Ritteaur suspected suicide, never know of Howard’s dilemma. He’d ask them, carefully, about high school. Perhaps he’d mention that he might have been their paperboy.

Outside the car, Howard could hear the crickets rubbing out the music of their long legs. The air was cooling and the sun dropped behind a thick grove of oaks at the end of the street. Howard started the engine, kept his foot off the pedal and allowed the car to idle past the Johnson house. Idling at this speed, moving in a straight and true line toward the darkness, he knew that the earth moved as well, turning in the opposite direction, moving entire continents and everything on them, including Howard and his whistling Skylark, turning so gently, so surely not even a dog stirred. Howard braked suddenly. He sensed more than saw motion behind him and glanced in his rearview mirror. He felt his stomach shriveling, for there in the mirror he watched Carla’s blue Impala fishtail at the end of Madison and turn the corner.

*  *  *  *  *

At 7:30 Howard’s desk phone rang. Howard straightened in his chair.

“I saw you.” It was Carla calling from the Y.

Howard thought again of the woman of a thousand flushes. He moved his mouth, formed the beginnings of words on his lips. At last he settled, “I know.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Howard.” Carla let her breath out in spurts. “But this has got to stop. People count on you.”

“I know it.” Howard pressed on his sternum, then followed the ridges of each of his ribs with his fingertips. He was feeling expansive again, like if he took a big enough breath of air, he might up and float.

“I forgive you,” Carla said at last, but Howard could hear the mercury rising in her voice and knew that though he might in fact be forgiven, his transgression would be remembered on a long long list of grievances. “Whatever you were doing over there, I forgive you. But you had better stop. And you better be here for Kevin’s test.”

Howard swallowed. “I’ll be there,” he said.

*  *  *  *  *

Howard opened the driver’s side door of his car and slid in behind the steering wheel.

He started for the Y, but as he approached the bridge, he slowed and parked in the soft sand shoulder. Overhead, August’s moon, round as a month full of fallers and jumpers, glowed against the deepening sky. He walked to the bridge, ran his hand over the rough cement siding. His maroon-striped tie flapped in the wind, slapping his right shoulder. He didn’t know where Svea Johnson had jumped or fallen. He knew now that there were five ways to fall off a bridge, according to Ritteaur, but as Ritteaur admitted, he was only an assistant, and there could be many more ways of falling than either of them had ever dreamed of. Howard knew that Svea Johnson had not been drinking, had not taken pills. She had probably stood first behind the spot where she would later sit. Maybe she had even held her arms up, like Howard was doing now, testing the air for flight. Maybe she was just having a bad day, a very bad day here in this extremely vexed land, and, like Howard, was looking for that one gesture, that break in the monotonous tide, the necessary grace to fall.

Howard planted his elbows on the cement and leaned over the railing as if to read the water. If a body is exiled, he thought, it’s because it is contained by skin. Is that how she felt? Did she give herself over to the collapsing arms of the air, to all that space within and without, a falling between the ribs and then here between the arms, between fingertips and sky? Was hers an ordinary sadness that brought her to this bridge or a more resonant sorrow lodged behind the breastbone? Did she sit swinging her legs back and forth and then finally say, “Oh, the hell with it,” and push herself over? Did she scream as she fell, or plug her nose?

Howard removed his shoes and in his stockinged feet balanced up on the thick cement handrail. Parsing through these borrowed thoughts, he could see now how easy it was. It wasn’t so hard to imagine, no, not at all. A murmur of resignation washing over you, the body spinning in a full revolution between hope and despair. Howard felt light, giddy in this feeling of anti-gravity, and for the first time in months, Howard felt like laughing.

“Stop it,” he muttered, climbing down from the ledge with caution, much more tentative about this minor action than any other in his whole life. He’d been right all along in feeling like he’d failed people, only they weren’t jumpers and fallers, and it amazed him what he’d allowed himself, the lapses, what he hadn’t learned yet. And for all of his empty spaces, this is what pulled him back. There was his Tuesday/Thursday God-awful maroon-striped tie, for starters. Kevin’s Green-belt test and the knowledge that he should and could probably try a little harder with the boy, try to manufacture some genuine feeling. He could tell Kevin his chicken-picking story. And then, of course, there were all those things he hadn’t lived to see: the appearance of new suns, distant limbs of the galaxy, the relief of intolerable urges, and other small kindnesses. This was something he could have told Svea Johnson. Howard slid his shoes on then, still feeling that lightness, but with it a sense of forward motion propelling him to his car.