Summer Jumpers
By A.J. Brown
It’s hot out. It's always hot. No winters to temper the summer heat. Rain only makes it worse. Steam spills off of concrete in white vapors that make it terribly hard to breathe as the sun evaporates the water as it hits the ground—if it hits at all. One day we'll all be gone. Just like the jumpers. More of them take the dive during the summer months of June, July and August, when the temperatures are over a hundred degrees daily.
The first jumper plummeted to his end when I was a child. Six years old with a head full of dreams. That was the summer things came undone for the world. The sun had inched closer, notching up the heat — 108 degrees on the last day of May in Michigan. The stock market crashed and a new flu had surfaced, taking with it only a handful of people, but the media painted a picture of pandemic proportions. Many people took it as gospel. The jumpers soon followed. The entire planet decided it wanted to lose its mind.
Some say it is the heat that finally gets to them, drives them insane. Others say it is hopelessness and despair. I think it's a little of both.
Harry Taylor started the exodus. Good looks, rich, trophy wife, lots of other women to keep him company on those 'business' trips. He lost it all-money, home, cars, business and wife. It was 114 degrees outside when he climbed to the top of Fordham building — a 27 floor high rise — spread his arms and tried to fly. He didn't scream as he fell. He landed on top of a passing car. The impact shattered the windows and crumpled the roof of the vehicle. One tire blew out. Taylor and three passengers in the car died.
A child lived, a young boy.
***
The whispers call to me.
I sit on the dusty ground. Bodies lay all about. Shattered. Broken. Lives ended. People walk by as if the bodies aren't there or as if they are just part of the everyday scenery. Children play among the bones, using them as drumsticks or anything else they can think of. Some of the kids stick the bones in their mouths.
The rats and snakes have long since cleared out. Either the stench of the dead or the glutton of daily fresh meat finally ceased their scavenging ways. Flies and bugs still buzz about, nestled in corpses to raise families by the thousands.
My eyes are to the sky, focusing on the person on the ledge of the once great Fordham building. No one is going to try and coax him down. They gave that up a long time ago.
He jumps.
And I hear the whispers.
***
Many people followed Taylor. At first only one or two a week, then upwards to three or four a day. A handful of people jumped together, their arms intertwined. Even with the blood, broken bones and split bodies, their arms remained hooked together. From then on it got worse.
The police tried to stop them, but what could they do? Dying is dying and whether it's by a bullet or from landing on boiling concrete doesn't matter to those who want to end it all. Bodies began to pile up. The cops bowed out and not even the military could stop the jumpers. How could they? They were doing it, too.
The high rises closed off exit doors to their roofs, but that didn't stop the truly desperate; those who had lost everything, including hopes and dreams; those whose brains had fried with the increasing heat, whose skin had become as red as a boiled Maine lobster. Windows break easily enough when a chair is thrown into it. Or a person crashes through. Not only did bodies fall from the sky, but large shards of glass rained down as well. Some onlookers were cut up pretty bad. Others died right along with the jumpers.
They stopped removing the bodies — not enough places to put them. The morgues grew full, as were funeral homes and once vacant rooms in hospitals. Abandoned buildings became storage facilities for the deceased, especially restaurants and former grocery stores that still had working freezers. Even those ran out of space over time and not even the large freezer producers could keep up with the demand of ice boxes to house the many broken bodies. Some cities resorted to digging pits just outside town limits and burying the corpses by the masses. Others piled them like kindling wood and set them afire. That didn't last long. The smell of cooking flesh drove folks even crazier and the extra heat didn’t help.
It was almost as if the world spoke and its words were, "Everyone else is doing it, why not us?" The stupid rationale that carried from the beginning of time to now, the end of it.
***
The body crashes down less than six feet from where I sit. Blood splatters from the ruptured skull and sprays onto me. It drips down my face and body.
I sit and stare, not bothering to wipe the blood from my skin as it mixes with dirt and sweat.
One of the man's eyes lies on the ground, its socket crushed from impact and its optic nerves holding it to the pulp that was once his head. It is blue. It stares at me and I hear the whispers.
I turn from him and look toward the entrance of the once prestigious Fordham building. There is a line of hundreds making their way inside.
Another body explodes on the sidewalk. It’s a woman. She wears a dress that has bunched up around her waist, exposing her creamy white legs and red panties. A wet spot soaks her crotch and I wonder if she pissed herself when she jumped or when she landed.
I stand, the whispers urging me on, and pick my way through the corpses. I walk by the man. His eyeball pops under my boot. In another time I might have cringed at this, but now… now it’s nothing more than like stepping on a large bug. It produces a shiver and then even that is gone.
I need to hide from the heat. My brain hurts and the whispers keep telling me the summer, the heat, the whole damn mess will never go away.
Maybe they’re right.
***
There was this one guy. He haunts me to this day. Black clothes and a chain for a belt; earrings and piercings and odd tattoos donned his body. His brown unkempt hair and pale skin didn't seem to fit his clothing, his image. He had taken a running start and jumped out as far as he could. He screamed all the way to the ground and landed feet first.
Bones shattered and blood exploded from torn skin. From hips down he was a ruptured mass of flesh. He survived the jump. His eyes met mine and held my gaze while he lay broken on the concrete. The odd angles of his legs and arms jitterbugged as exposed nerves screamed right along with him. He begged me to kill him; to end his self inflicted pain. But, I couldn't.
For nearly seven hours he screamed and I watched as his life faded, as his eyes became dim and body parts ceased their twitching.
I heard the whisper for the first time just before his right thumb stopped moving. It came from him—,I'm almost certain of that.
Join us. Join us. Join us.
I walked away, found a seat in the doorway of an old department store that closed down when the jumpers began their leaps of death. For the last few years this has been the place where I sit during the days and well into the evenings. It has been my watching perch, my haven in the insanity that has become our world.
By then they had been leaving the bodies in the streets to rot, maybe even hoping to deter other people from jumping. Each day his body decayed a little more; rats dined on him and gave way to the bugs. Time and the elements wore away what flesh remained; leaving only bones among shredded clothes and a chain around a waist that was no more. And every day after that, I heard the whispers.
Join us. Join us. Join us.
***
My head aches. It always does. I run a finger along the scar on the right side of my skull. It throbs with my heartbeat. My right cheekbone hums as if there is a bee tucked underneath the skin. It's maddening and I wish for it to go away.
I follow the procession inside the Fordham building where the heat is so much worse than outside. My lungs constrict and the dry air burns my mouth and throat. Sweat soaks my body and the stench of the living mixes with that of the dead.
I make my way up the stairs, each step tearing at the muscles in my legs. By the eleventh floor I slow down and take several deep breaths, trying to suck in enough air to continue. Along the stairs are bodies. Those who didn't make it to the top. Their bones are kicked aside or stepped over like common debris. I struggle upward, the whispers pushing me on. A skeletal hand crushes under my foot, its bones turning to dust.
Weary and weak I move forward, the throngs of people pushing me further.
The whispers grow louder as we ascend. Thousands of voices sing that chorus line over and over: Join us. Join us. Join us.
But, I don't want to join them. I don't want to jump. Fear overtakes me and I struggle to turn back, to run down the stairs and go back to my seat outside. But, I can't. The people push me upward. I stumble as I fight against the flow of the crowd but I can only go up. I fear I am going to fall and get trampled under thousands of feet. I swing a fist, connect with someone's head. There is no sound of pain, no cry of anger. Only the continuous surge, pushing me forward.
They prod me up the steps. Their eyes are vacant; their mouths slack; their skin pale as if they were already dead and drained of blood. I am not like them. I am not cold to the touch or wasting away with time. I am not like them at all.
But, I am. I know the truth. I have never been any different from any of those before me or those that will come after me.
Join us. Join us. Join us.
As I reach the door to the roof I see it is propped open and people are dropping from the ledge. More and more join us at the top. As one person drops off, another takes their place. A never-ending cycle.
My head thumps and vomit fills my mouth.
***
I look down and see the bodies scattered about the street. The once small hills have formed masses of arms, legs, torsos and heads. Thousands of bones lay about, broken and shattered; blood runs through the streets. I wonder if enough people jump will the mounds of flesh rise as tall as the Fordham Building itself.
Children play within the death below. Men and women — gaunt figures of living tissue — go about their day as if nothing were wrong. Across from me, people are jumping from the Seth Building. A child is crushed underneath a hurtling body.
Join us.
My father calls to me. I can almost see him on the street, his body crumpled, glass from a shattered windshield still in his eyes.
Join us.
My mother's arm dangles from the window of the car, nearly cut in half from the steel roof's collapse with the impact of the jumper's fall.
Join us.
My older brother, James. His head ended up in my lap; his eyes staring up at me. Not much different from his face and that of the teenage punk star with the chain for a belt. They both looked as if they wanted help; release from a pain far too great to bear.
They whisper to me, calling me every day, every night.
Join us. Join us, Son.
It's hot out. My head thumps with each heartbeat, the fractured skull forever indented by a metal bar that once held the roof of a car up. The sun creeps closer each day, melting my spirits away with its intense heat. There are many people behind me. Their eyes and souls as vacant as mine feel. I raise my hands to my sides and close my eyes. I’m tired of the heat, tired of this world. I’m ready to fly…