~ After ~

by

Jeremy R. Benjamin

I’ll close my eyes, she thought.

Her eyes would not close.

She felt a tickling sensation on the insides of her eyelids, and the only way to scratch it was to look down periodically. At this height, the wind was a fine spray, and it tickled not unpleasantly. The air did not exert pressure on her, but seemed to be harvesting something from her body like ants hauling off morsels of lunch from the picnic blanket. Whatever it was inside her that had killed several men, jumped out the window of a speeding train, scrambled through squalid alleyways, and raced up sixty flights of stairs over the course of the past two hours, it was escaping her a little with each shiver. That was somebody else--she could not have done those things, any more than she could summon blood to the muscles that operated her pupils. Besides, there was no reason to look down. How did she get here? It didn’t matter. She still had no name.

In the span of time it took her to catch her breath, take her shoes off and walk down an imaginary aisle to where she now stood, the plan--if she’d had one at all--ceased to matter, and an empty euphoria now filled her. This was the literal edge of the world, was it not? This was not a personal summit, not a metaphorical anything. This was it. In a moment of giddiness, she envisioned her life as a rapidly forming ocean bursting through a dam, branching into rivulets and converging again in her adolescence, eroding layers of bedrock and expanding to its full potential only to drop off into a sudden unknown. Keeping her eyes open seemed significant somehow, as though it were an act of defiance. She had already defied authority, defied any cultural or physical disadvantages associated with her sex, defied all manner of social structure, defied locked doors, defied glass windows, defied she was pretty sure gravity; the only thing left to defy was that which she was not ready to see.

The wave of emotion that had chased her through the streets and up the stairs now caught up to her in a converged flood. She wept, reduced to the question every child asks, a question of pure submission; now what? Now, she could keep her eyes open, that’s what. Jumping was not so much a viable option as a... what? An indulgence? A fantasy? A philosophy? A means to reality? Reality was down, and down did not exist so long as she did not look. Even so, seeing wouldn’t mean grasping it, grasping it didn’t mean believing it, and believing it would yield no advantage. Jumping was not so much a considerations as... she was going to jump. But not yet; her toes were numb. She would have to get some blood circulating to them.

Her lungs inflated like epicures at a feast, respiring so rapidly that her ribs ached. Her diaphragm seemed to have gotten the impression that air was illegal and the police were on their way. Standing rigidly at the tip of the unfenced concrete border, she relished a moment of self-pity, but could not find the inspiration to sustain it.

Think; now what? There was nowhere to go, and there was no when to go there, and neither was there anywhere or any whence to stay, and that was perfectly okay. She couldn’t remember what deity was en vogue this week, or what article of clothing was the new hype, or the current political state of the world, but at this height none of that mattered. The world before her was no less discomposed than she was; if she was preparing to jump and plummet into that world, to romantically collide with it, then it would meet her half way. The entire landscape was perched at a metaphysical cliff of its own, trembling and daring itself to dive into her. She continued to look straight ahead.

Tears flowed casually from her bloated lids, and when it got to the point of obscuring the view, the idea of looking down became more bearable. Blurred decimation was not decimation. In its present state, the ruins were not quite a landscape yet they were far from a cityscape. Ruins... yes, ruins. Viewing the panorama through a lens of either tears or sweat--she wasn’t sure anymore--she tried to picture the sensation of falling, the sights and sounds, the screeching blur of motion that could not be separated into colors and shapes, the rush of wind making her pubic hair stand on end. She tried to imagine falling so fast that there ceased to be any difference between up and down. All at once there was no jumping. It was not a question of whether there was an option of jumping; there was no such thing as jumping, just as there was no such thing as falling--these were words that had no meaning. Yet, the mental utterance of those words had the peculiar effect of stopping her lungs from taking in air. She forced herself to breathe, and the breath she took was weak and unsatisfying. Since the words no longer referred to a physical action, perhaps the mere thinking them was to fall and plummet into her own body; she shrank.

She gulped and opened her eyes. There was a beast inside her. She had been promised to a beast months ago and had evaded it, and now, there was a beast inside her gnashing its teeth that she couldn’t locate. She gulped down hard, wishing for the first time in her life that she could make herself throw up, knowing that even if she could she still could not bring herself to watch the vomit fall, a ballet of consumed breakfast cereal choreographed by the wind’s artistic temperament...

AP496XX stood on the roof of the DyneHurst Center, a building she had never set foot in before, a building that had once had running elevators, temperature control, a state-of-the-art security system and a purpose. She had selected the DyneHurst Center not because of its prestige as the last testament to commerce and the dying light of civilization, and not even because it was the tallest building in the skyline (which could only be seen in daylight). She had chosen the DyneHurst Center because it was the first arbitrary hiding spot that presented itself.

AP496XX stood at the very edge of society’s tombstone, anchored by the pleasant throbbing of her calf muscles. She held her shoes in her hand dangling by her side.