100TWC - Day 53: Future

The last of the bridge walkers moved out of sight behind the main tower. Steve had already slowed almost to a stop to let them get ahead. Now he did stop. Below him, the East River flowed sluggishly, an oily black slick of freezing cold water more than 150 feet down. At this time of year that water would kill you in under two minutes. He stared. Less than two minutes, plus falling time his mathematician's mind insisted, between him and who knew what?

The current of the river swam before his eyes, screwing with his balance and threatening to tip him off the bridge. Before he was ready, that is. Because there was only one way Stephen Jordan was leaving this bridge today, and it wouldn't be on foot.

He didn't know where he was going when he stepped onto the nothing at the side of the cable. Didn't have that religious certainty of heaven, or the sinner's fear of hell. He sometimes wished he did. Something to look forward to in the one case, or try to avoid by doing the right thing in this life in the other. Ha! The right thing. What the fuck was that? What did that mean to a man like him? He might not know where he was going, but he sure as hell knew where he was coming from, and he wasn't going back to it. No sir. A belly full of lies and cheating, the scum he had to deal with every day, all dressed up in their fine thousand-dollar suits and their silk ties. Their Berluti shoes and their crisp white shirts. New one every day. Perfect on the outside. Respectable. Upright. Living the American Dream. But their insides? Steve imagined them looking something like one of those apples he used to have to take to school for his lunch. All red and ripe and shiny from the outside. Gonna be all sweet and juicy when you bite into it, but it would turn out brown and stinking rotten all the way through to the core. That was like them. Rotten insides, all of them. Souls as black as the icy water flowing under his feet right now.

He changed his grip on the suspensor wire, taking hold with his warm hand and rubbing his cold one against his thigh before ramming it into his pocket. Wouldn't have to worry about cold hands or frostbite where he was going. Wherever it was. Fiery or idyllic or something else that the prophets had never foreseen. Or the black nothing of non-existence that his few atheist friends insisted was all that waited for mankind on the other side of the veil.

A few flakes of snow blew past, sticking to his coat, one or two melting quickly on his lips. Where they caught the suspensor cable they lived a little longer and Steve could almost make out a hint of their hexagonal crystal beauty before they blew off or melted under the sudden warmth of his breath. He coughed a bitter laugh into the fading light. Beauty never lasted. Either it was another façade over a rotten core -- like Justine had been -- or it got chipped and worn away by time and life and too many margaritas. He swayed against the cable, his vision momentarily blurred by unexpected tears. She'd been the one. How did the song go? "You are the one I'd wait my whole life for." And he had waited. All through High School and college, all those years without a girlfriend because his ever-calculating mind would always find a reason not to make the first move, or respond to an approach on those rare occasions a woman would be brave enough to ask. Tumblers clicking, gears whirring, his subconscious would estimate the chances of a relationship working, factoring in height, weight, dress sense, any friends visible on the occasion, smoking, drinking and a hundred other bits of information, and then it would push them all through its filter and come out with no.

Until Justine. He couldn't consciously have explained why she was a yes. His first ever yes. Didn't even like to question it, in case he should scratch the polished surface of her yesness and find there was really a rusty no underneath. He shivered. The wind was stronger now and the snow flurries thicker. Pretty soon he wouldn't be able to see the East River at all. He'd be stepping off into nothing at the side of him and nothing below too. But that was OK. His mathematical mind took less that a millisecond to calculate that nothing into nothing was nothing. And he wanted to be nothing. To cease. To end the pain of the no she had turned out to be, and being surrounded by the rotten suits, and the endless gnawing certainty that there would never be anything more than this. Day after day. Blackness, blackness dragging me down. He looked down. But where before there had been the blackness of that old favourite song now there was only whiteness. Billowing flurries of whiteness, spiralling past and obscuring the river completely.