The Professionals

When gravity gets the last laugh, it doesn’t sound like a smug rumble or a hand-over-the-mouth titter. It lets out one short, deep guffaw, one order-in-the-court. I know, I've heard it myself.

Some thirty people have jumped off the Empire State Building, beginning with a laid-off construction worker who stepped off an I-beam before Hoover had even switched on the lights from behind his desk in the Oval Office. (Unmoved by this shining example of Art Deco Splendor™, the Depression, sadly, did not lay down its arms.) In the late '70s, a middle-aged woman gave it a shot and was blown back by a gust of wind onto a window ledge one floor below, suffering nothing more than the indignity of legend and a broken hip. I think it happened 3 or 4 times in the 10 years I worked in an office there, though it's hard to be sure. They prefer to keep those things quiet.

In 1998, two daredevils smuggled parachuting equipment to the top, embraced the sky with open throats, pulled their ripcords, alighted on Fifth Avenue, and disappeared into the purple of early evening, presumably affirmed and happy to keep their accomplishment between themselves. A few years later, a guy dressed up like a pirate—or at least that's what I heard—and monkeyed his way over the hooked aluminum guard fence of the observation deck, walking the plank, so to speak, and leaving a crack like a mutant snowflake in the concrete landing just below my co-worker's window. That's all I can tell you about that one. Who knows, he might have been a CIA operative toppling democratically elected governments in small South American countries you've never heard of, and replacing them with fast-food franchises. He might have talked with his mouth full, or on his cell phone while driving. He might have left behind a wife and three children, a dog, or just a piss-soaked cardboard box. I don't know.

It was an overcast Thursday afternoon, a day practically begging for rain, when I heard that laugh. I was sitting alone next to the floor-to-ceiling windows that face 33rd Street, a thin one-way where people smoke cigarettes and taxis go too fast, finishing a salad—spinach, Cajun chicken, carrots, and onions, tossed and shredded with croutons and a raspberry vinaigrette—when that gavel slammed down. There were no shrieks or anything like that, just gasps slipping through the glass. There was no doubt as to what had happened, you just knew, and after taking a moment to practice breathing in and out I walked to the revolving doors and pushed myself through to the street.

A small group—the smokers, a few children and their parents, tourists and natives suddenly difficult to tell apart—had already assembled, standing still at least three feet from it. It, a leg, only a leg, from just below the knee down, lying on the gummed sidewalk, a blue-and-gray argyle sock the only thing distinguishing it from an arm, or from something tossed aside by a butcher. The rest was up there somewhere, probably not far from where the pirate had left his mark a few years earlier. Blood was splattered on the concrete planters that line the street, not like a Pollock but like fresh tomato sauce on an Italian chef's smock, like the raspberry vinaigrette in the salad bowl. A short, round-bellied Hispanic busboy from the cafe nudged it with his foot, eliciting a few dispassionate boos from the crowd. Some guy began dialing 911, but a cop was already approaching, hoping to apply order where things were already a little too ordered. Some people couldn't stop looking up at the building, its three long, mad chords stretched out in a dirge toward the sky. Purposeless, I headed to Fifth Avenue and went in through the front door. I went back to work, and about my business.

I'd later find out he was a thirtysomething lawyer who got up in the middle of a meeting, lifted the window (there are no screens; one might say you embraced the absurdity of life just by going to work every morning), and was gone—just like that, out of nowhere and into nothing except a few column inches in the next day's tabloids.

At the end of the day, the elevator doors opened onto the lobby and I saw a custodian—African American, maybe twenty-five, with bright diamond earrings—in a white splash-protection hazmat suit, a cheap paper breathing mask loose around his neck, slowly pushing a bucket with the mop handle. He was stone-faced, like he'd seen it all, but was waiting for a thread to be pulled.