Love and Other Ways of Dying (37 page)

In a way, Mr. Shi was human pathos writ large; in another, he was the smidgen of hope that caused the caesura before jumping. It struck me as odd, however, that it required a moment like this, walking with him now, to realize that while the deeper, more ancient brain was at all times in dialogue with death, and while that dialogue asserted itself into one’s conscious mind from time to time, the frontal lobe was a powerful combatant in self-denial. No matter what declivities I’d found in my own life, I’d always thought of suicide as something occurring over a divide, in the land of irrevocable people, when evidence suggested again and again—sweet Mr. Shi, right here in front of me!—that wasn’t the case at all.

We climbed the South Tower stairwell back to the bridge and found Mr. Chen again, standing sentry, and he proffered us a slight if somewhat cool nod. He seemed so alone, standing there; even his wife and daughter knew little of his life on the bridge. They didn’t know he’d once been stabbed in the leg; they didn’t know the emotional storms he’d weathered on those days when he lost a jumper. (“I want to give them a clean piece of land,” he said, using a local turn of phrase. “I don’t want them worrying.”)
Now the rain galloped harder; a sea of umbrellas popped open, moving south to north and north to south. Then, as quickly, the rain stopped and a low-lying monster cloud filled with a muggy kind of light and a crowding heat blanketed everything. One wondered if there’d ever been blue sky in Nanjing. Below, the barges glided downriver in the same stream that carried fallen trees and clumps of earth in the direction of distant Shanghai. While Mr. Chen scoured the crowd, Mr. Shi crouched under the shelter of the fort and lit a cigarette. Cars and trucks and taxis came and went, honking horns, the taste of fuel and smog thick in the air.

Another reporter appeared on the bridge. Young and wearing a flouncy miniskirt with white high heels, she held a device that looked to be the size of a pen, which acted both as her tape recorder and camera. It seemed like secret-agent stuff, but she announced herself to be a student from Shanghai, here to do a big exposé on suicide. Softened a bit by alcohol and the spectral vision of youth itself, Mr. Chen intermittently answered her questions, allowing that the hours between 10
A
.
M
. and 4
P
.
M
. were the most likely for attempts and that his method on the bridge boiled down to intuition. “I’m looking for their spirit as much as their expression and posture,” he said. Then he made a grand show of getting on his moped, kicking it to life, and put-putting off on patrol, John Wayne again on his Shetland pony.

We both stood watching him go, the young woman and I, until he disappeared behind tatters of sky-fog that had come loose. In his absence, I was buffeted again by a wave of ennui, this crescendoing sense of uselessness. But then the young student reporter turned to me, beaming with bright eyes, and blurted in broken English, “What angel is he!”

There are always two countercurrents running through the brain of someone contemplating suicide, much like the currents working at odds in the river itself: the desire to escape and the dim hope of being saved. The mind, having fixated on suicide as an option, might take signs of encouragement in everything: cloud formations or rough seas or a random conversation. In the failure of the mailman to arrive. Or the store sold out of a particular brand of cereal. As the mind vacuum-seals itself to its singular course of action, and as the body moves in concert—as suction takes hold and begins to claim its molecules—the only solution to the inevitable chain of unfolding events, the only possibility of being saved, is an intervention of some sort, a random occurrence or gesture. The hand on the shoulder. Then, the mind that has held so long and fast to the body’s undoing might shift, and unburden, and deaggregate, in some cases, almost instantly. Recidivism rates for those mulling suicide are low for all but the severely depressed. Help someone focus step by step across the bridge and he or she will be less inclined to ever return.

In my reading, I kept coming back to William James, brother of Henry, journeying across the European continent in 1867, his despair at feeling a failure, the pull of ending it all. In his Norfolk coat, bright shirts, and flowing ties—“His clothes looked as if they had come freshly pressed from the cleaners,” a contemporary once said, “and his mind seemed to have blown in on a storm”—he decamped to Berlin, and took the baths at Teplice, in what was then Bohemia. Later, plagued by intense back pain that had migrated to his neck, he took the hypnotic drug chloral hydrate as a sleep aid, and tried electric-shock therapy, which failed to provide relief. In his deepest depression, he felt he’d arrived at a terminus. And yet he withstood the urge of self-annihilation, never again contemplating suicide. A friend of his, a woman named Minny, who helped encourage him through his troubled
time (then died herself at a young age), reminded him in a letter of the proposition ever at work: “Of course the question will always remain, What is one’s true life—& we must each try & solve it for ourselves.”

Now, in the country that brought the world 20 percent of its annual suicide victims, I stood awaiting Mr. Chen’s return while breathing in the particulates and invisible lead chips of progress. Time came to a very still point in the late afternoon, and I ambled out onto the bridge with Susan, the translator, realizing that whatever vision of Mr. Chen’s heroism had brought me here in the first place, it was folly to think I’d actually ever see him save someone.

Susan was telling me about a family acquaintance who, years back, had jumped from the bridge in winter (most suicides here occurred in the fall and spring). Bundled in many layers against the elements, she had gone to the bridge in distress, climbed the railing, and leapt. One hundred and thirty feet down, at the speed of sixty-five miles an hour, she had hit the river, but if it was the angle or the specifics of her swaddling, if it was will or fate, she had lived, survived not just the fall but also the currents and hypothermia and, most of all, the killer flotsam. Every once in a while, for whatever reason, someone was indeed spit back out—but what I wanted to know was this: Having returned from the river, was she happy now, had she found in the aftermath her true life, solved the thing that had first gone missing in her? Susan considered the question. “I think happy enough,” she said, “but who knows?”

Just then, as silence fell between us, a man lurched past in a blur of green. We paid him no mind, really, until he was about twenty steps beyond, out where the bridge first met water. Once
there, he stopped, put both hands on the railing, and just like that, threw a leg up. The green man’s body rose, and now he was hooking his ankle on the top bar, then levering himself from vertical to horizontal until he lay on top of the railing. People streamed by, apparently unaware, staring down. The green man began to push his way over the railing, at which point I knew that I was not dreaming and that he was going to kill himself. I shouted, and then burst toward him, sprinting past Mr. Chen’s posters and flags.

The green man began shifting to the other side, listing as if on the curl of a wave, half of him letting go into space. Reaching him, I reflexively planted a foot against the concrete base of the railing, latched an arm up and over, then wrenched his body as hard as I could while I pushed back from the railing. His body, which was as limp and resigned as if he’d been filled with sawdust, came tumbling back into the real world, where he assumed the full proportions of his humanness again. He had a very tan face and rough hands. He reeked of alcohol. Even before we’d hit the ground, he’d blurted something in Chinese, and then repeated it as I held him in a tight bear hug, readying for a struggle that never came.

“I’m just joking,” he implored. He had the supplicant, bedraggled demeanor of a man at loose ends. “I’m okay, thank you.…”

Shocked back into the world of the living, the green man didn’t wait for the question; he just began talking, in a fit of logo-mania. “The reason I tried to kill myself,” he blurted, “is because my father was in the army.…”

His story seemed disjointed, and more so because Susan was trying to do three things at once—translate, call Mr. Chen, who was not answering, and figure out how to get the attention of Mr. Shi, who was stationed back at the fort, casually smoking
cigarettes. A crowd began to gather, an airless huddle. The man went on. “My father is ninety and very sick. We lost his documents in a fire, and we have no money to care for him. The government needs proof that he was in the army, but we are a family of soldiers. I was one, too.…”

Mr. Chen had said that people become innocent again on the bridge. They become simple and open in a way that they never otherwise were in real life. And here I was, bear-hugging a man in green coveralls named Fan Ping, trying to crush some spirit inside him that had opted to, in Mr. Chen’s words, “dive downward.” He was talking to me earnestly, though I didn’t understand a word. He was a child, needing someone to understand. His eyes swelled, and two streams of water released over his smooth, rounded cheeks. I don’t know, but it didn’t seem like crying, exactly. It was like something done less out of grief than reflex. With my arms around him, hands chained, I could feel his heart thudding into mine. His breath of stale spirits filled my lungs. When I looked down, my shoes were his, two terribly dirty, scuffed sheaths of cheap, disintegrating leather. We could barely stand as we swayed together.

Fan Ping said that he was thirty-seven years old and that his mother had died three years earlier. He worked for a gas station, Sinopec, and made $400 a month. He was one of those known as a
guang gun
, or “bare branch,” unmarried, a victim of demographics in a country where tens of millions of men went without wives. “What am I supposed to do now?” he said.

The crowd of onlookers registered their concern and curiosity. Some in the back were laughing, unsure of what indeed was transpiring, or just made nervous by it. I had an irrational second of hating those people in the back, of wanting to lash out, but all that really mattered was keeping my body between Fan Ping and the railing, in case he made another lunge. Eventually
Mr. Chen appeared and dismounted from his moped. On cue, the crowd parted while Mr. Chen stepped forward, invested with the power and understanding of all the nuances at play here. Fan Ping started his story again
—army … sick father … dead mother … gas station … so sorry to try to kill self
—and Mr. Chen asked me to let go of the man, something I wasn’t at all inclined to do. Then he pulled out a camera and took Fan Ping’s picture, which seemed at best like an odd way to begin and at worst like a major violation of the man’s privacy. Then, glaring straight at Fan Ping, who stood slumped and dirty, with bloodshot eyes, Mr. Chen spoke.

“I should punch you in the face,” Mr. Chen said. “You call yourself a family man … a son … Chinese? If your father hadn’t been in the army, and if you didn’t try to kill yourself just now, I’d punch you. You’re not thinking—or are you just shirking your responsibility? I really would like to punch you now. Hand over your ID.…”

Fan Ping seemed utterly flummoxed, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his identification card. Mr. Chen made a show of studying it, then derisively handed it back—was this a diversion, part of a new therapeutic method?—and in the same brusque tone asked what in the world was he thinking, coming up here like this? Fan Ping replied that he wasn’t thinking at all; he just didn’t have the money necessary to care for his father—and that his life boiled down to this vast, sorrowful futility.

Mr. Chen sized him up again, with a withering look. I could see part of Fan Ping’s blue sock poking through the worn leather of his shoe. “Yes,” said Mr. Chen dismissively. “We all have our troubles.”

Watching Mr. Chen face off with Fan Ping in that gray late afternoon was like watching twin sons of different mothers: They were both short and round. Mr. Chen asked Fan Ping where he
lived. A country village outside the city. Mr. Chen asked how he’d gotten to the bridge. By foot, from his job. The conversation went on like this for some time while slowly Mr. Chen’s tone shifted from outrage and aggression to a more familiar, fraternal concern, even sweetness. “I promise you that there’s nothing we can’t fix,” he said, “but first we have to get you off this bridge.” Then later: “I’m here to help you.” In his dishevelment, Fan Ping didn’t seem capable of movement, as perhaps he hadn’t entirely given up on the idea that had brought him here in the first place. And Mr. Chen intuited this. He moved in closer and clasped his hand, a special shake, a locking of pinkies that meant brotherhood, then didn’t let go, dragging Fan Ping to the fort and a bus stop there while the crowd followed. He arranged for Fan Ping to meet him at his office first thing Monday morning. He wrote the address on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into Fan Ping’s pocket. He punched the digits of Fan Ping’s cell-phone number into his own device.

“You promise you’ll be there,” Mr. Chen said.