The Interrupt
by Constantine Singer
“I…” I didn’t know what to believe. I was open to the miraculous in the abstract but now, confronted with a specific miracle, I guess I was skeptical. And overwhelmed. The last twenty minutes had been surreal. This wasn’t my plan for the day. I was supposed to go to the bank.
“Here.” The man—he said his name was Matt—shifted on the bench, twisting to reach into his hip pocket, and pulled out a stack of cards held together with a rubber band. “Let me show you.”
“Uh, okay.” I didn’t want to leave him alone. Not yet. I would listen patiently. Patience and listening are the foundation of ministry.
He undid the band and handed me a card. It was thick, fancy stock, the size and shape of a baptismal card or wedding RSVP. Centered on the card and printed in a thick, plain font was:
OPEN GARAGE DOOR
BTWN 9:42 and 9:55 AM
Handwritten on the other side in blocky masculine script and blue ink: August 13th, 2022.
“That door was hard to open.” He was watching me read the card. “Had to really yank it. By the time I got it all the way up she was standing next to the car with the hose in her hand. Looked guilty as hell.” He chuckled. “I asked her what time it was, and she dropped the hose to pick up her phone from the workbench. Didn’t even ask me who I was or why I’d opened her garage door.”
“Yeah?” I handed the card back to him and looked up at the bridge we’d just come from. “Are you sure there isn’t someone I can call?”
He waved off the question with a flick of his hand. “By the time she put the phone down, she’d already changed her mind. I could tell, you know? Just something in the way she looked at me, like she was waking up. She looked scared, not like she was scared of me but like she was scared of herself, of what she’d been thinking, so I said, ‘Can I have that hose?’ and she looked at me and nodded, so I picked it up.”
“She just let you have it?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t gonna use it anymore. She wanted it gone. Thing most people don’t understand about suicides is that they’re mostly spur-of-the-moment—a window. The window’s only open for a few minutes and if the means and motive are present during the window, well…” He made a face. It indicated death. “I’d distracted her. Interrupted. It’s what I do. The window closed and the hose scared the hell out of her because of what she was gonna do with it, so she let me have it.”
“Gotcha.” The sun broke through, a sudden shift in the light and dynamic of the moment. “So, that card?”
Matt shrugged. He had a coiled energy about him. Maybe dangerous, definitely exciting. “Like I told you, they just show up. This one showed up on my breakfast plate just as I was finishing a Pop-Tart. That’s how they come. I turn away for a moment and—” He made a poof gesture with the fingers of both hands, and then sighed. “There it is.” He riffed through the stack of cards and handed me another.
RING BELL AT 11:43 PM
Scrawled on the back: March 16th, 2014.
“This one was tucked into my bathroom vanity mirror when I stood up from the toilet. I was getting ready for bed, and it was already after eleven.” He looked away, distracted by a sailboat sweeping into view on the ship canal.
“The cards just appear, huh?” I looked back at the bridge where I’d found him standing on the rail with weights on his ankles and rocks in his pockets. His story was so strange. I was scared, angry at myself for choosing today of all days to walk to the bank across the canal instead of using the ATM on campus.
Patience and listening are the foundation of ministry. It was what my father said all the time. It’s what they taught in class. This was a chance to practice it in the wild with a person in need. I closed my eyes, a long blink, a breath. “Did you make it on time?”
“Yeah. On his doorstep with two minutes to spare. Left my car double-parked blocking the street with my flashers on. Rang the bell all out of breath.”
“He answered?”
Matt shrugged, tossed his head to the side, a casual dismissal. In the sunlight he looked younger than I had thought. On the bridge and in the gloom, he’d looked to be older than my father—somewhere in his early sixties—but now maybe he wasn’t older than fifty. His hair was mostly gray, along with the stubble that coated his face, but his skin was smooth, nearly unlined, underneath. His body looked strong, thick but without much fat. He didn’t look like my father, but he felt a little like him. He had charisma. “After the second ring. Looked really irritated about it, too. Kept most of his body behind the door because he was still holding his gun in his right hand. I asked him if he’d seen my dog.”
“Your dog?”
“I didn’t have a dog. It was just something to get him thinking about something that wasn’t him, you know? It was an interrupt. He said he hadn’t seen any dogs, but then I described my dog and how I needed help looking for him.”
“He didn’t just close the door?”
He laughed. “Nah. They never do. He got a little huffy but then he said ‘fine.’ Once he came outside and we talked for a bit I saw the window close so I told him that he should give me his clip and ammunition so if he was tempted again it wouldn’t be so easy.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, eventually. He denied it all at first, but he knew he was caught. Kept asking me how I knew.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I just had a feeling. I was driving by.” Matt rubbed his face. “You knew. What I was doing. You saw.”
“You were outside, though, on a bridge. This guy was in his house.”
He rubbed his nose, sniffed. “We get a sense. Anyways, the guy believed me eventually. Gave me his ammo and clip.”
I eyed the stack of cards in his lap. “And every one of those is a card with a date and time? A suicide you interrupted?”
He pulled the stack up into the air a few inches and hefted it, examined it. “Yeah. This stack and probably twenty more stacks just like it.”
“Twenty more?”
“Twenty more.” He nodded, a single big nod, and then sighed. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you?”
“I don’t smoke.”
He looked me up and down and smiled. “Of course you don’t. You’re a student, right? Where? The Free Methodist College across the canal?”
I nodded, not totally happy I was so easily identified. “SPU, yeah.” Then: “How’d you know?”
“You’re young, your jeans are creased and you’re wearing a polo shirt when you don’t have to.” He thought a moment, then: “And it’s the only school near here.” He turned to me. “So you’re Free Methodist?”
I didn’t like his question. Most people don’t know who we are, but those who do have ideas about us. “Yeah. I grew up in the Church. My dad’s a minister.” I waited a moment. “We dance, though. And we listen to music. It’s not like you’ve heard.”
He laughed. “Kid, I don’t have any judgment.” He held up the cards and gestured at them with his free hand. “I really don’t.”
“A lot of people do.”
“That’s true.” He sniffed again. “You believe in God?”
“I’m studying for the ministry.”
He cocked his head, smiled at me. “Really? A true believer.”
I smiled, but his question made me uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess. It’s a calling.” I shrugged shyly. “It’s also a family thing.”
“That’s good, man. Knowing what you’re going to do at your age. Most people don’t.” He sighed and looked back out at the ship canal. “You think God is active here on Earth?”
I knew the answer to this one. “God knows everything and can do anything, but he gives us the power to choose.”
“You believe that?”
“I do.”
“And you’re going into the ministry to share that, huh?”
I nodded, made sure to look him in the eye. “I feel it’s the best way to act out my faith, helping others find their own.”
“Good for you, man. Seriously. Hold on to that.” He paused, looked at me. His intensity made me uncomfortable. “Why were you on the bridge? Where were you going?”
My head moved, nearly involuntary, looking towards where I’d been going. “The bank,” I said. “Across from the weird bus stop statue.”
He squinted. “Isn’t there a bank on campus?”
I shrugged. There was. I normally use it, but today I didn’t. “I wanted a walk today. It isn’t raining…” I could feel my watch on my wrist. I looked at it.
“You can go, man. My window’s closed. I’m not gonna head back up the bridge. Not today.”
I couldn’t help myself. I looked back across the canal towards school. My Chem class was starting in less than ten minutes. I was going to be late even if I left now. “I…”
“Get to the bank, man.” He smiled. “It’s really fine.”
I looked over at where the bank would be again. I didn’t need to go. I could go tomorrow. I could use the campus branch. “Can I ask you something?”
He looked at me again, raised his eyebrows, waiting for my question.
“Why were you… I mean you… It just seems, like, weird that you would…”
“Try and kill myself when I’ve spent my life interrupting suicides?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He sighed, smiled like he had a secret that was amusing. “That’s complicated.”
“You can tell me about it.” I did want to know. Before I left. “I’m a good listener.”
He didn’t answer immediately. We sat there for a little while, him watching the sailboat, me watching him. Eventually he sighed, made a face. “Call it an existential crisis.” He flipped through the cards again. “Following these for a lifetime just made me a little…” He shrugged.
I looked back at the cards, then up at him. His look had turned haunted. I needed to stay, keep him talking. “They really just show up?”
“Yup.” He cocked his head, began flipping through them again. “Just poof!” He riffed through the cards again. He stopped on one, handed it to me.
BAINBRIDGE ISLAND FERRY
TOP DECK. 3:45 PM
On the back of this one: February 23rd, 2011.
“This one I nearly missed. Showed up tucked into the rearview mirror of my Cherokee when I was on my way to Costco.” He chuckled at the memory. “Had to pull a U-ie on 1st South and run two lights to get to the boat on time.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “It was cold, too. Wasn’t dressed for it because I was supposed to be getting a 24-pack of Charmin, not hanging out in the middle of Puget Sound. The boat left at 3:25, so I was out there on the upper deck for twenty minutes before go time freezing my ass off.”
“Wow.” It was a weird thing to say. I didn’t have anything else. He didn’t seem to notice.
“The guy. In the yellow windbreaker? He was sitting on one of the sets of benches on the side of the boat, right, just sort of staring off at the water when I got up there. I was early so I didn’t say anything, just watched him. He was sitting hunched over like…” He hunched over himself, tucking his shoulders and arms in and rocking. “Back and forth. The guy was in so much pain and he was so torn and confused.” He pursed his lips, moved his head back and forth, slow and sympathetic. “I’d been doing this, interrupting, for nearly twenty years at this point, dropping all my shit at a moment’s notice so I could be present and ready for some sad sack who was about to kill himself and I was watching this guy and for the first time I thought, What if I just let him? He looked so miserable, so absolutely awful.” He sighed. “I just had this moment.”
I nodded. “That’s totally understandable. We all have moments of weakness.”
He turned on the bench to face me. “That’s just it, though. I don’t think it was. Weakness.” He shook his head. “Why did that guy who was so miserable, why did he have to live?”
“Because life is sacred. God gives us free will so we can make the hard choices ourselves. You were there helping him.”
Matt nodded, smiled sadly. “That’s what I came to, too. On the ferry. That maybe this guy was destined for something. Something better. Joy or some shit, service and goodness, whatever, so at 3:45 when he stood up and walked to the rail, so did I.”
“You think God gives you the cards?”
He laughed. “Nah. At the time maybe I suspected, but now? Fuck God. No.” He looked at me apologetically. “Sorry for the blasphemy.”
“No worries.” He was wrong, though. If the cards were real, it was clearly God. “We’re taught to love the sinner to help you choose against sin, not to judge you for it.”
He looked at me appraisingly. “Well, that’s less cruel and nonsensical than a lot of other denominations, I’ll give you that.”
“I thought you didn’t judge.”
He laughed. “Touché, man. Touché.” He sighed. “Anyways, the guy. I talked him down. His marriage was falling apart. He was drinking a lot, thought he was probably an alcoholic. He’d been trying hard to be better—didn’t want to lose the kids—and then he got drunk and he and his ex got in a fight, and he…” He shook his head, sad.
“He hit her?”
“Yeah.” Matt sighed. “In front of the kids. She said he’d never see them again. Or her.”
“How’d you talk him down?”
“Heh. I told him I’d been like him, but then I found AA and how it had helped me, gotten me through, and I wasn’t like that anymore. Seemed to give him some hope—at least enough to close his window.”
“That’s really good of you, you know? Quitting drinking. It takes real strength.”
“Thanks, kid, but I drink a ton. It was all lies in service of getting him off the rail. Interrupting is a by-any-means-necessary activity.”
I looked back at my watch. I was already too late for chemistry. I didn’t want to go. Not yet. “You said that you know it isn’t God, with the cards. How do you know?”
“How do I know?” He looked at me. “You keep looking at your watch. Do you have somewhere you need to be?” He wasn’t rude about it. He asked like he really cared about my schedule.
I sighed, found myself smiling a little. “Not really? I already missed Chemistry and…” I shrugged. “I’m curious.”
“So you believe me now? That these cards are real? What I do?”
Did I? I didn’t know. “I’m open to it. How do you know it isn’t God?” The sun was fully out now. It was warm. Warmer than it had been in weeks. I’d been cold before, only a light jacket over my shirt, but now I took it off, laid it over my lap. The slim breeze blew cold across the sun’s warmth, and I shivered. “It seems like God.”
He sighed, leaned back on the bench. “I thought you said we had free will? How is this God if he’s telling me what to do and telling me which suicides are worth interrupting? That sounds pretty direct-action for God, doesn’t it?”
“You have free will. You can choose not to interrupt. The people you’re interrupting have free will. They can choose to go through with it. God knows what you’ll do, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t your choice to do it.”
“That’s pretty abstract for me, I guess. All I know is that any God I’d want to believe in wouldn’t do this.”
“Why not?” I was invested. I had a growing sense that if I could convince him God was doing this, then he would leave his thoughts of suicide behind, maybe even, eventually, join me. We weren’t similar, would never be friends, but we could be colleagues in God. I wanted that. More time with him. I had saved him physically. I could save his spirit, too.
He stood up, pulled more rocks out of his coat pockets and tossed them on the ground before taking the coat off and tying it around his waist. He was thinner than I had thought. “If I’m not going to die, then let’s get something to eat. Can I buy you a bibimbap?”
We sat at the counter, looking down 36th from Fremont Avenue. I’d been in Seattle for two years, but my food-life was small, my palate seriously midwestern. The bowl in front of me held egg, meat, rice, a series of strange vegetables and leaves, and a sauce that smelled like sesame, salt, and sweetness.
I looked at it helplessly.
“Like this,” Matt said, holding up his chopsticks. I tried to mimic him as he showed me how to use them, but I was hopeless, and he went and got me a fork. “It’s alright, man. Takes practice.”
I ate with the fork. Gingerly at first but then with more gusto. Friends had suggested I eat more widely before but for them I couldn’t do it. For him I could. As we ate, he told me how it started with the cards.
“I was interrupted myself once.” He looked at me, gauging my reaction. I nodded. I didn’t know what to think.
“You tried to kill yourself before.”
“Yup.” He chewed a mouthful of pork before he continued. “When I was seventeen. I was depressed but we didn’t know fuck-all about depression back then, especially with teenagers, and I’d just had this huge fight with my girlfriend and she broke up with me because I’d been a dick and I knew I’d been a dick but I couldn’t stop being one, you know? Anyways, I got home late because of the fight and my parents were mad at me and started talking about how I was going to ruin Christmas.”
“It was Christmas?” I don’t know why that’s what I chose to ask. I wanted to say something, anything, that would let him know I was listening and that’s what came out. I squirmed on my stool, wishing I’d said anything else. Listening patiently. It’s harder than it seems.
“Yeah. Few days before. When they said that, I thought about how I hadn’t bought anything for anyone and I’d spent all my money on weed and a ring for Jennifer Mitas that I still had because she dumped me before I could give it to her and I just…”
“It was too much.”
“Yeah, it was too much. I went to my room and I sat there and I just… there wasn’t any future, you know? Just blackness and a sick feeling. I got totally obsessed with the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to get anybody anything for Christmas and that I was a selfish horrible person and that in a few days everyone would know how bad I was and I didn’t want to hear it, so I snuck into my parent’s bedroom while they were downstairs and I got my dad’s gun and then went out my window and walked to the park down the street.”
“Oh no.” In my mind I saw him on that bench. Young, thin and well-built, actor-handsome, in a t-shirt with a gun in his lap, crying, thinking, preparing himself, and I didn’t want him to die.
“Yeah.” He scraped up a mouthful of rice and chewed it, leaning in over the bowl. “But this guy appeared out of nowhere.”
“Appeared. Like the cards?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t see him come up, but that doesn’t mean anything. I was pretty stuck in my head. Anyways, he looks at the gun and then at me and asks, ‘Can you tell me how to get to the Seattle Center?’”
I stopped chewing and looked at him. “He asked directions? While you had a gun in your lap?”
He chuckled. “Yeah. It was ballsy. I gave him the directions, though, and he asked a bunch of follow-up questions about where he could get dinner and how much busses cost and how he could get from the Seattle Center to his hotel downtown. By the time he was done, my window had closed.”
“You didn’t want to kill yourself anymore?”
He shook his head, took another bite. When he could: “No, it’s not like that. I still felt hopeless and the future was still black and I didn’t want to face it, but I didn’t think I wanted to die right then anymore.” He pulled his napkin from his lap and wiped the corner of his mouth. “Closing the window doesn’t mean the feelings go away, it just means the moment when all the signals align passes and the act becomes impossible, at least temporarily.”
“So what did you do?”
“I went home. My parents had gone to bed, so I had to keep the gun in my room for a night and that fucking terrified me. I wanted it out of my sight, I mean it literally made me sick to look at it, but when my dad left in the morning I put it back and then went downstairs and told my mom I needed help.”
“That’s really cool.” I sounded like a dork. “I mean that you got help.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t sound like he meant it. “It sucked. Ended up at Harborview on the 8th floor—locked ward—for like two weeks.”
“It helped, though. You stopped wanting to kill yourself.”
“Yeah.” He ate fast. His bowl was empty while mine was still a third full. He looked at the empty bowl longingly, then sighed. “The first card showed up while I was there.” He reached back into his pocket for the stack, rifled through until he found it, and handed it to me.
My hands were dirty, but he didn’t seem to care, waving me off when I gestured for a napkin.
DAYROOM: CHAIR BY THE DOOR
12:11 PM
ASK ABOUT HER CAT
On the back in shaky loose letters: December 25th, 1992.
He’d been at this for thirty years. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, chasing cards, delving headfirst into the trauma. I looked up from the card. “That must’ve been terrifying.”
He shrugged. “It was weird, I’ll tell you that.”
“What did you think it was? The card? When you found it? How did you know it was for you? Did you know what it was about?”
“Nah. I found it on my desk. My room had this little desk where I was supposed to write—I had writing assignments. I’d just finished writing something and I closed my journal and turned around to get something, don’t remember what, and when I turned back it was sitting on top of my closed journal.” He made eye contact with me. “Thought I was fucking crazy. I mean, I was, I was on a locked ward and everything, but I wasn’t psychotic, at least I hadn’t thought so, but the card was real and it had come from nowhere, man. There was no way anybody’d snuck into my room and put it there in the ten seconds I’d had my back turned.”
“So you went? To the dayroom?”
He nodded. “Yeah. The girl was there. She was my age maybe? I’d seen her before but we’d never talked. She was sitting on her own, you know, a chair against the wall with nothing around it. I grabbed another chair and brought it over and sat down. I was fucking scared, man, I didn’t know if I was going crazier or not.”
“But you did it. An act of faith.”
He side-eyed me. I looked away. “I felt like I had to. I sat down and said, ‘Hey, tell me about your cat.’”
“Did she?”
“Yeah, she did. First she sobbed, though, like I’d told her her baby died—that sort of sobbing—and I felt like shit because it was clearly because I’d talked to her and I started to apologize but I stopped because I just got this sense that I shouldn’t.”
He paused, looked out the window. I wasn’t eating anymore. Too busy listening but he’d stopped talking. “So...”
He nodded, brought back to the moment. “Yeah, when she got herself together a bit, she asked me why I wanted to know and I didn’t know why I wanted to know so I said I just like cats. She seemed to accept that, and she told me her cat was named Demon and that he was black with a single white spot on his chin and that he brought her flowers.” He smiled.
“Flowers?”
“I asked about that. Didn’t know cats did that, you know? Anyway, she tells me that in the springs and summers there’s a patch of daisies and dandelions outside her building and Demon would go outside and bite off the heads of flowers and drop them on the floor in front of her and she’d give him a treat. She really loved that cat, you could tell. She smiled really sweetly when she talked about him.”
“Was she going to…” I struggled to say kill herself.
“Kill herself? Yeah.” He sat back in his stool. “She’d taken one of our little toothbrushes—we only got these stubby little things that were supposedly too short and soft to be usable for self-harm, but she’d managed to sharpen one so it was knife sharp, like a box cutter maybe, and she was going to slice her throat with it. She gave it to me, told me what she’d been planning. She cried again and said she wasn’t going to do it anymore and gave me the toothbrush.”
“What did you do with it?”
He looked at me. “I threw it away. I didn’t want that thing in my presence, either. I was still suicidally depressed!”
“Sorry.” I felt like an idiot.
He nodded, then looked at my bowl. “You done?”
“No, sorry.” I dove back in and ate the rest while he watched me. He made me nervous. I questioned my every gesture, use of fork, chew and swallow. My entire way of being felt embarrassing while he was watching. “I’m finished,” I said when I’d emptied the bowl.
Matt nodded and smiled. It was kindly and it helped me relax. He looked tired. “Thanks for interrupting me, Jordan. I’m glad I didn’t jump.”
“I’m glad you didn’t, too.” He looked like he was going to say more.
“Why were you going to the bank, though?”
Why had I been going to the bank? “I wanted the walk. I told you.”
“That’s it?” He was suspicious, like I was hiding something. “Nothing else?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Why?”
He shrugged, deflated, seemed defeated again. “Doesn’t matter. You can go now, though. I’m not going to kill myself. I know you’ve got things to do.”
I looked back at my watch. I didn’t have any more classes today. I normally spent my afternoons in the library until my Service Group met. “I don’t have to be anywhere.”
He shifted on his stool. He wanted to go.
“That first card, it had instructions on it but the others didn’t. When did it stop? Telling you what to say?”
He settled again, looked back at the cards he’d laid on the counter. “Maybe a dozen cards in? I don’t really remember. I don’t even remember the first card that didn’t have instructions…” He chuckled. “I’d have to check at home, go through the other stacks to see.”
“Can I ask another question?” It was hard for me to make eye contact with him. Every time he looked at me, I wanted to look away, but this time I held his gaze. “About that stack?”
He shrugged, looked back out at the street. “If you’ve got nothing else to do.”
“Why do you have this stack with you? You’ve got twenty others, but this one you took.”
He sighed, sank a little in his seat. “These are pretty much the heart of it, kid.” He blew out a breath. “Can we walk?”
He took the lead, walking fast up 36th towards The Troll. His height and stride were both greater than mine. It was a struggle to keep up with him. He walked in silence for a block, then two. As we crossed under the bridge where The Troll lives, I reminded him. “The stack?”
He slowed to a stop and leaned against a rail as he stared up at The Troll. I’d only been to it once before, during new student week when they took us on a walking tour of the area. It’s big, concrete with hubcap eyes. It grows out of the hillside that leads up to the bridge abutment and it has one huge hand that rests over the shell of an old VW Beetle. It’s creepy and I don’t like it.
Celebration of fantasy, of things that exist outside of God and only in human minds, was forbidden when I was young. The rest of the Church was fine with them, but not my dad. He was concerned about them, so I was the kid who’d never read or seen Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or a single Marvel movie until I went to Church Camp in Shelbyville at twelve where the youth minister showed us the first Harry Potter movie. He used it as an allegory for how to love those who sin. I felt awful during that sermon. Guilt wracked me that night, and when I got home I almost told my father I’d seen the movie, but I didn’t.
I still haven’t. It’s unconfessed and the Troll makes me think about it.
“Yeah.” He had the cards in his hand. “These are the questions, Jordan. You said you thought it was God? You asked why I knew it wasn’t? These are why. These ones.”
“I don’t…” I looked at the Troll, then at Matt. His hair was long. It had been slicked back but a lock now hung loose over his face. “Why?”
“The guy with the gun, the one I asked to help find my dog? Six years later, he killed two kids crossing MLK. He was so drunk he didn’t even know he’d done it.”
“Oh.” My mind flipped through things to say. It’s not your fault… you couldn’t have known… mysterious ways… Nothing felt appropriate.
“The woman with the hose?” He wasn’t looking at me, still focused on the Troll. “She was a financial manager, worked mainly with older people. She got busted last year. Her whole thing had been a Ponzi scheme. She was already siphoning off funds when I interrupted her. The guy on the ferry? He killed himself two days later, jumped from the Aurora Bridge onto Westlake and landed on a motorcycle. Killed the rider.” He held up the stack. “Why the fuck did I interrupt these people?” He looked at me, shook his head. “The world was made worse by them. That’s not God.”
“You don’t know that.” I said it with more urgency than I intended, though not more than I felt. “You gave them the opportunity to choose against sin, it’s not your fault that they didn’t. That’s all God provides, the opportunity to choose him. That’s what you provided. It is God.” It didn’t feel powerful enough, sure enough. I added, “It is.”
He shuffled through the deck and pulled another card.
KNOCK ON SIDE DOOR
6:22 AM
The date on the back: March 23rd, 2024.
“This is from yesterday.” I looked at him. “You can’t already know what this person went on to do.”
“I do, though.” He sighed. “I do. That person isn’t doing shit. Nothing. They aren’t raising their two children. They aren’t spending time with their husband.” He took the card back and ripped it in half. “This person is dead, Jordan. Seriously dead. I got the card at 6:10. I live in fucking Magnolia. It took me twenty-five minutes to get there and…” He held up his hands, signaling failure. “Dead. By the time I got there, she was on the floor of the kitchen with two kids screaming at her to wake up.” He coughed, cleared his throat. For the first time since he’d stepped off the rail, he was emotional. It scared me. I crossed my arms. “What kind of God would tell me about a suicide too late to prevent it but just in time for me to see two kids’ lives fall apart? That your God, Jordan? You going to go pray to that?”
“It’s not…” I was cold. We were in the shade under the bridge. The sun had slipped behind Queen Anne Hill to our South and West, draining the day. “I don’t know.” I felt like I could drown in my own weakness. I breathed against my fear, stood taller. “Is that why you were on the bridge?”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. It didn’t help, that’s for sure.” He shook his head, brought his hand up to his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean it’s, this whole thing, the interrupting, it’s been a mission. I was supposed to go to college, man, like you. I had plans. When I wasn’t wanting to die, I mean, and…” He shrugged.
“Why didn’t you? Can you tell me?” It’s what my father would ask.
“This happened, man. How the hell am I supposed to go to college? I could barely finish high school. I kept getting cards in the middle of the day, so college was out. My parents thought I was on drugs and it was easier to let them believe I was than to tell them the truth, so I…” He laughed at himself. “I pretended to be a drug addict and they kicked me out.”
“That’s awful.”
“Maybe? It was what I wanted at the time, though. I was on a mission from God. I was saving people. I was good at writing and stuff so I set myself up writing papers for kids who couldn’t write for shit. I earned enough to live in a boarding house in the U District and…” He laughed again. “Never married. No friends. No career. Nothing. Interrupting people so they could live long enough to become murderers and thieves, wondering what the hell I was doing and then that one.” He gestured at the ground where the torn card lay.
“But killing yourself?” I pushed myself off the rail and moved into his line-of-sight. He refocused on me. “You have twenty other stacks, Matt, twenty stacks of people who chose to live because of you.” He shook his head. “What about the next one? What if the next was someone like the last one? Someone good, with a family that you can protect? Someone where you get there in time? If you’re dead, they die, too.”
“Maybe that’s okay.” He pushed off the rail, too, stood up straight and closed the distance between us. He towered over me and I felt the entire weight of his presence. “Maybe getting up on that bridge was calling the bluff. After all these years, maybe it was time for me to say ‘no.’ Maybe whoever the fuck is making these cards needed to know I have a choice.”
“You do!”
“I don’t. I don’t. It’s the cards or death, man. Cards or death and I don’t want cards anymore. Not unless…”
“Not unless what?”
He waved me off.
“Not unless what?”
He chuffed, then released a ragged breath. His eyes, brilliant whites with green irises, shone with tears. This man I barely knew, a man who had lived a life of strength and courage, a life of service. This man I had interrupted was in such clear pain. It was awful and I didn’t know what to do. I felt myself reach for him, my hand extending slowly to bridge the gap, finding his arm. “Hey…”
He shook his head, but he didn’t pull away.
“Not unless what?”
He made a noise, half strangled, filled with pain. I pulled him close and he came, a giant collapsing into my arms. He was warm. His hair smelled of lavender. He heaved, sobbed. I thought of my dad, imagined what it would take for him to collapse into me like Matt the Stranger had just done. It was inconceivable, but I was also sure that there were people in Matt’s life who would find this equally inconceivable. I wondered if my father had cried with other men, not me. My gut clenched.
Matt’s sobs subsided, he sniffed and pulled away. I let him go. “Sorry.” He looked away, rubbed his face and nose with his coat sleeve. “Fuck.”
“It’s cool.” I looked back at the Troll, stared at its hubcap eyes. We stayed there, both staring at the Troll. Matt wiped his face again.
“Answers,” he said finally.
“What?” My mind had wandered.
“That’s what I needed. On the bridge.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I really wanted to die. I wanted answers and I was willing to die to get them.” He looked at me. “You know what I was thinking right when you interrupted me?”
I shook my head, fully present again. His eyes held me.
“I was thinking, Interrupt me.” He smiled. “Interrupt me. What I wanted was to be interrupted. I wanted someone to come and say, ‘Don’t do that. I can give you answers.’ And then there you were, standing there, saying, ‘Hey man, that’s not safe up there,’ and I thought, I don’t have to die! I wouldn’t, because you would tell me what it was all about.”
As he spoke, my stomach hurt. I stepped back. It was involuntary, a flight response. “I… I don’t.”
“Jordan, do you normally walk across the bridge on Tuesdays at 12:15? You already said you didn’t use that bank. Why were you there?”
“No… I…” Why was I going to the bank? “I don’t have…”
“Why did you talk to me? Most people would have called the police or pretended not to see, but you talked to me. Why?” He stepped towards me, filling the gap I’d just created.
I stepped back again, looked around for help. It was only him, me, and the Troll. “I don’t know. You’re scaring me, man.”
He paused, stepped back a half-pace and took a breath, but the intensity in his eyes did not fade. “Sorry, but you gotta see, you weren’t random, Jordan. You know something. You’ve got to. I gave you every chance to walk away and you stayed. You’ve got something to tell me.” He stepped forward again.
Why had I walked to the bank? Why not the ATM on campus like I always did? Why did I walk on that side of the bridge, the opposite of the side I usually do when I cross? Why did I stop to talk? Why did I think I had anything to say to bring this man down off the rail? “I don’t, though.”
“I can see you thinking, Jordan. I can see it. You know it’s strange. You know it’s not a coincidence. You know you know something. Tell me.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know anything.
“Tell me!” He reached out for me, his hand landed on my shoulder. I ducked my body under it and twisted. It was instinctual. His hand fell away uselessly and I backpedaled out of his range.
“I don’t know anything. I was just there, man. I was just there. I’m not special. I don’t have any message for you.” I looked behind me, back down to Fremont, towards school. “I gotta go.”
At first I jogged, but he wasn’t following me, so I slowed to a walk. Back to Fremont. Back across the bridge. Back up the street past the funeral home. Back to school. My mind was a fury of Matt, suicides and cards, faith and ministry, but the thought wouldn’t go away. Why did I decide to walk to the bank?
It’s been eight days. I walked to the bank again today, across the bridge. I wonder if it was all real. My experience. His story. It’s dream-like and strange. My dad called. I told him about Harry Potter. I don’t know why. It’s ancient history and stupid. He was confused why I told him after all these years and then he was disappointed in me for keeping such a secret. He reminded me that what I had done was a breach of my commitment to Christ.
I told him I knew that but when he hung up, I realized something: I didn’t care.
I scoured Fremont for Matt. He was nowhere to be found. I asked God to help me find him. I don’t know why. I told myself it was because I was worried about him, but it felt like it was more about me.
God didn’t answer.
Last week I prayed to find Matt. The prayer was answered this morning. It was leaning against my toothbrush in my bathroom caddie.
AURORA BRIDGE
WEST SIDE CENTER
10:49 AM
I’m sitting on the edge of my bed. It’s 9:30. My teeth are brushed. I’m clean. I’m dressed. I’m holding the card. I have class today at ten. It’s Global and Urban Ministry.
I haven’t been since that day on the bridge. Haven’t wanted to go, but I need it for my major. I need it but I haven’t felt the call.
I should go, though. Today.
Constantine Singer, a Seattle native who found his permanent home in Los Angeles, is the author of the only-briefly-in-print but still well-reviewed YA Sci-Fi novel, Strange Days. His stories also appear in several science fiction magazines and anthologies. When not writing, he teaches high school in South Los Angeles and mentors new novelists as a freelance story and writing coach. His website is in woeful need of updating, but can be found at www.constantinesinger.com.
Author’s note: “This story was inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which I read when I was 18, and which has informed much of my worldview and faith ever since.”
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