Person on the Page

A police officer stood in the road ahead signaling for me to stop.  I had just left the campus of the community college where I taught and had driven less than half a mile when I saw him standing under the freeway overpass. He seemed to be stopping traffic for no reason.  No one else was on the road at the time, and I saw no signs of an accident or an impediment ahead.

At first, I was simply annoyed. I would be late for lunch.  I was on my way to meet a friend at Ginger’s Asian Kitchen, a little café that served a fusion of Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese dishes. In my typical fashion, I was ahead of myself—in my mind already there at Ginger’s watching steam rise from my spicy basil chicken, dipping my summer roll into its amber sauce, feeling its hot and sweet sting on my tongue.  I was already worried about having lunch and getting back to campus in time for my afternoon classes.

Then I saw movement on the overpass above.  A young man, moving slowly, almost lazily to the guardrail, sat down and leaned out, looking down onto the road below. Near him but not within reach, a police officer talked animatedly, his arms outstretched toward the young man.  The two seemed to be at a standoff. The officer in the road ahead of me was there to keep traffic out of the area, in case the young man jumped.   

He could have been one of any number of my students, this troubled person on the bridge—thin, medium height, hunched shoulders, longish, lanky brown hair. One of many at a community college who occupy the uncomfortable territory between childhood and adulthood. He was just the age at which suicide is the mostly likely cause of death.  One among the small percentage of people of any age who make a decision to act on their self-destructive impulses.  But as I watched the drama playing out above, I thought I recognized him as a student from my Wednesday evening advanced composition class, Jonah.  

I lived in the small town of Cumberland, Maryland, at the time.  Small towns are not accustomed to such high-tension events—a possible jumper on the I-68 crosstown overpass. People in a small town are not as likely as those in larger cities to gather and gawk when someone’s angst is so heightened that he leans out over the guardrail of a bridge and contemplates letting go.  Such an occurrence is so unusual that most might fail to recognize what is happening.   

Another  police car arrived on the bridge, stopping behind the officer who was trying to talk the young man away from the edge.  A single ambulance pulled in quietly, with no flash or siren, near where I was stopped, waiting.  Meanwhile I watched the young man, trying to tell for sure if it was Jonah. 

It would make sense. Jonah had shown up at my office late one evening after class last semester and confided in me that he was depressed.  He was a quiet young man, about twenty, intelligent, and I had suspected that there was something troubling him—something not quite right. I had seen him shuffling pathetically down the halls of the humanities building and noticed how he dozed, barely there, in a desk in the back of room H-18 during my class. When he arrived at my office he sat in the chair across from my desk, slumped forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at me.  I noticed that he was thinner than he had been at the beginning of the semester, pale, and that he appeared to be exhausted.  He told me he needed help.

During the time that I was a community college professor, I had my share of students come to me for advice or comfort. Young women who arrived in a torrent of chatter then suddenly burst into tears over a bad boyfriend or some terrible secret that they had chosen to share with me.  Young men whose tears over what seemed an insurmountable problem came slowly, painfully, and with an abundance of shame. The drug addicted, those struggling to pass classes—I listened to many stories. But somehow Jonah’s despair seemed more urgent, his plea for attention more desperate. He told me that he felt as if he were fading away. At times, he just wanted to die. 

I followed the college’s protocol for aiding students with possible suicidal depression.  I took him to the college’s counseling center and introduced him to its director. I left him there in good hands, I was sure. I didn’t hear anything further from Jonah. He stopped attending my class.

As I watched the scene on the overpass, cars accumulated behind mine. The police officer in the road ahead continued to hold up his hand as he, too, watched what was happening above. The young man turned toward the officer on the bridge. As he did, I thought that those were almost certainly Jonah’s shoulders, their width and slope matching what I remembered about his when he was in my class. He spoke to the officer; he shook his head repeatedly. That surely had to be Jonah’s hair, long and disheveled as it had been when I last saw him.  The young man and the officer continued to talk while we below waited.

As I sat in my car watching and waiting, I did what I typically do. I got ahead of myself. In my mind I began moving the scene forward, anticipating what might come next.  He might not actually jump, I thought, might not thrust himself up and out into the air in an aggressive act of self-destruction. He might simply allow his body to become fully limp as he leaned out from the bridge’s guardrail, relying on gravity to accomplish his goal for him, allowing himself to fall.  His body would be airborne only momentarily, hurling downward clumsily as a mannequin might, limbs bending unnaturally from the air resistance. When I imagined it making impact with the blacktopped street, my vision ended. I couldn’t bear to imagine how the body would look, lifeless, broken, on the ground. 

I also thought about the height of the bridge. It struck me that it might not be high enough for a successful (if such an act can be regarded as successful) suicide.  Would a young man falling from such a height plunge to his death, or would he suffer an array of broken bones, ruptured organs, disfiguring injuries with which he would then have to live?

For the moment, though, there was only a person on a bridge. As I watched, I forgot about my lunch date. The young man and the police officer were nearly motionless.  The scene was a kind of tableau vivant—living actors capturing a tense moment in almost perfect stillness.  

Again in my typical way, I moved the scene forward. I wanted to know if that was Jonah up there. I thought that perhaps I, his English professor, might be able to help the police. Could I offer some comfort?  Could I convince him at least to postpone the dreadful act he seemed to be contemplating until someone, I and the police, I imagined, could offer him some alternatives.  Perhaps he would remember that he had come to me for help before and see me as someone he could trust again.

Finally, though, I realized that the young man on the bridge was not Jonah.  His shoulders were not quite as broad, the hair not quite as dark as his, the arms that hung unnaturally at his sides thinner and more delicate than Jonah’s arms. This was some other young man, enduring his own tragedy, whatever its details.   

Seeing the cars lining up behind mine, the policeman in the road waved toward a freeway entrance, motioning for drivers to detour around the scene and be on their way.  I got on the freeway and took the next exit so that I could head toward the restaurant. I had been delayed only a few moments.

The last thing I saw on the bridge was the young man still leaning out over the guardrail and the police officer standing just out of reach.  No reports of the incident appeared on the news that night; the college made no announcement that one of our students had been the young man I saw.  All I knew was what I witnessed, some kind of a turning point, surely, in someone’s life—a moment between life and death, perhaps, or between one problem and the next. All I saw was a moment on a bridge.