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Mal addressed us, his throng, lackeys and worshippers. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad you all came here tonight. Some would say that what I'm about to try is the act of a madman. Others might say it's an act of stupidity. Yet others just want to see a guy set himself on fire. To all of you I say, kiss my ass. But you will have to jump off this bridge to do that.”

He climbed onto the rail. Unlike at the previous
jump, I felt him taking the story from me. He wouldn't be forgotten. I would. He would not.

He reached out and called to Redbach. “Scissors.” A pair with bright blue handles appeared and in a series of jagged cuts he removed the goatee that reached down to his chest. He held the braids out and handed them to Jerry.

“A keepsake for the lucky lady,” someone said, and people laughed.

I could feel it in the crowd. Mal wasn't jumping in as much as we were throwing him off. The crowd demanded it. I almost sensed a cage around us.

A spotlight popped on. It was held by the reel-to-reel operator. The large camera with the great wheel of film clicked away in one hand; in his other a small klieg threw light over Mal.

Somewhere behind us Karen imagined Mal in the heat of an affair. He'd spent time practicing all the steps to this with Jerry and Redbach. She never would have allowed it. He'd hidden everything related to it with me. He'd not been with another woman. He'd been with something that could kill him. She had been wrong on the details, but it had still been an affair.

Redbach lit a torch with his lighter. He stood about ten feet away from Mal, far enough not to light him too soon. Mal faced us, his arms raised. Everyone moved to the rail, fanned out to his left and his right. I stood next to Jerry, almost twenty feet from Mal. Redbach stepped up
and touched Mal's boot. Immediately blue flames licked up his legs and, as Redbach yelled, “Go,” Mal erupted in a column of orange fire. He jumped off backward and for a moment his arms stayed out at his sides, but then he began to swing them and his legs kicked.

The time I'd seen him jump before, he had disappeared into the darkness beneath the bridge and everyone had been forced to imagine him swinging beneath us, but this time he screamed his way down and, like a comet, he left a phosphene trail in the air behind. He reached the end of his line, began to slow, and finished as a small orange dot that broke the surface of the water and was extinguished. The burning light he had been left grand, sweeping arcs in my vision. I blinked at them and listened to the others. No one knew how to react. A few started to applaud. From the opposite end of the crowd, barely audible, someone said, “Oh God!”

Far below us, swinging slowly, a small fire burned its way up the line. Either the line they used wasn't fireproof or jelly had spilled onto it, but an orange line hung below us like a fuse, and trapped at the end waited Mal. He had dipped under the water for only a few seconds, just long enough to douse the flames, but hanging in the air now, suspended above the river's rolling surface, nothing kept the flames from creeping to him. He reignited into a fireball.

“Motherfucker. He's still on fire,” Redbach said. Someone else yelled to cut the line. No one did anything.
People moved away from the rail. The camera continued to click, and Jerry started to scream down to Mal.

Finally able to let go of the rail, I moved to the knotted rope at the buttress. Redbach stood there, staring at the bridge's girders, unsure what to do. I grabbed the rope and shouted, “Help me get him up here.”

He looked at me as if just realizing he wasn't alone. “No,” Redbach said. “We need to cut him loose. The water will put him out.” He searched through the bag at his feet and found a large butterfly knife.

That's when the spotlights from the chopper snapped on. Redbach looked at me and said, “Do we stay?”

I looked over the edge of the rail. Ahead arched the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond it Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty. I looked down. Mal swung into view, then under the bridge, a small, burning match. I saw a reflection of him in the water beneath. Both were struggling.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “He's still burning.”

“Yeah,” Redbach said. “Jesus Christ.” He kept repeating that as he began to cut through the line.

We stood and waited for the police. The chopper swung around in the air, its engine laboring to keep the unflyable shape suspended in the air above us, the pilot clearly working against the high winds and afraid to approach tree-thick bridge cables. Bug-eyed searchlights danced toward us.

“Do they know he's down there?” I said.

“I don't know.” Redbach's sweat dripped onto his hands as he got through the last part of the line. He'd cut himself in his efforts and, unfeeling, worked despite it. Blood dropped onto the bridge deck beside his knees. I looked back over the handrail and watched as once more the small orange dot at the end of the line dropped into the water. This time it wasn't moving. He'd stopped his struggle.

Pounding of feet and the lights from police cars. Six or seven uniforms, heavy in the middle, hanging over gun belts, made their way to us. They took turns asking us questions and peering over the edge. One of the cops squinted down at Mal and said, “This guy lit himself on fire and jumped off the bridge?”

“Yeah,” Redbach said.

“What a fucking moron,” the cop said as he turned away. He shouted into his radio and the chopper swung away from the bridge. Beneath us, lost in the new darkness that had rolled in after Mal's second loss of fire, a police boat circled, small floodlights trained on the lettering on its side. One larger light swept the water ahead and another popped on behind as they looked for my friend.

Redbach and I were arrested and booked for trespassing and disturbing the peace. In the processing station, one of the officers eyed us carefully.

“Hey,” he said, “you that guy?” He pointed at the palm of his hand, finger cocked like a pistol, and made a nail
gun sound. “You are, ain't you? My kid has downloaded stuff about you off the Web.”

“Yeah, that's me.”

He stamped a form and wrote something above the smeared red ink. “I couldn't believe that last thing my kid downloaded. That sex tape of yours is sick.”

I stood there, not sure what to say. I could feel my back curving as my knees wobbled.

He looked at Redbach. “And you, you're his pal, aren't you? Put the nails in him?”

Redbach turned pale. “No,” he said. “Not me.”

Another cop walked in as they took our mug shots. Mine is now famous. It ran in
Time
and
Newsweek
and was eventually named one of the fifty most recognizable images of the year. My eyes, swollen half shut from crying, are red, and sweat and tears run down my cheeks. The photo was taken just as the cop said to me and Redbach, “Sorry about your friend. He was DOA.”

Redbach and I both became sick in the small plastic wastebasket in the corner behind the police cameraman, who kindly waited for us to finish before saying we could help ourselves to coffee or water before we headed to our cells.

Released from jail the next day, I went to Hiko's apartment and made our home happily devoid of any modern conveniences. God help me if Hiko heard about the film the cop had seen, heard about it on the radio or my television. I had no idea what it was and didn't want
to find out. I had also discovered that the videos shot the previous night were being shown on the news. I wanted none of my films to enter my home. I felt them rising outside, like a tide, and I kept expecting to hear thunder and catch flashes of lightning from the corner of my eye, as if the flood of information were a real storm raging outside my window. The cab ride home had been horrific, as the cabbie spent most of the trip, eyes on the mirror, smile on his face, trying to engage me in conversation about the reports rising from his radio. I'd only just escaped his questions about my “talents” and the “tragedy” of my friend. Did self-immolation equal tragedy? Since then the constant radio chatter and television reports from other buildings and cars on the street had pattered on my ears like rain. A storm, a flood.

I circled the living room. The television and electronics equipment sat around me. Some might say, though not me, that I had “earned” them. Mal had deserved more than he'd gotten, had actually worked toward something, however ridiculous, and died. He'd killed himself to get what I had gotten without trying. The electronics, my prizes, buzzed even when turned off, hummed with the need to repeat reports and videos of Mal's death. They dared me to listen. They dared me not to.

I could have sold the equipment, the electronics. Instead, I threw them away. To be more accurate, I threw them out the window. It started with a couple of CDs that I decided would never be listened to again. They had both been Mal's. Out the window.

It felt good, holding them out there and letting gravity do its thing. I sat by the window and dropped one after another of the disks from our metal rack bought at an overpriced, trendy furniture store. After a while I ran out of CDs. What good is a CD player without any CDs? Out the window. DVDs and DVD player followed. The TV proved the bitch of the litter—it just didn't want to fit—but with a tremendous cracking sound part of the window frame gave way and at last it went. I found that there is a beautiful, quiet moment when something falls. The television, like the other items before it, hung there for a second, not appearing to move but instead only getting smaller. It looked as if it might never hit bottom, as if it might just shrink silently to nothing. At last it, as the other appliances had, exploded into a reminder that everything is only a collection of parts, no matter how solid the shell. In this way the items of my life had been shrunk down to nothing, rendered incomplete in their collapse to parthood, parts only now adding up to more refuse instead of useful items. Beneath me, in the back courtyard, about ten feet from where the cooler had sat for weeks with Mal's fire jelly, scattered my exploded life.

As I leaned out the window, looking down, I felt blood on my face and a salty taste in my mouth. Drops fell from my chin and shrank until they splattered below on the television, CDs, and DVDs. I had no idea how I had hurt myself. Cut myself on the window, maybe, or bitten through my lip. It wouldn't be the first time. On my way
to the bathroom to get to the mirror, I wiped my palm across my face to find the cut and stop the flow. I pulled my hand away to see not blood but water. I tasted it and recognized it for tears. I hadn't cut myself. I was crying.

When Hiko got home, I waited in the living room, facing where the television used to be. She called and I answered, and she felt her way toward me.

She said, “My God, how did this happen?”

She'd heard about the jump from Karen. I wanted to call it “the accident” but couldn't. Accidents are things that aren't meant to happen. There was no avoiding this.

“I'm fine,” I said. “By the way, we were robbed. They took my TV.”

“Oh God.”

I told her it was fine. That everything would be all right. I didn't need a TV, I said. I never wanted another. Not while films of Mal were being shown. I said all this while she held me. Inside I thought,
Not while sex tapes of me are being shown
.

 

MAL'S FUNERAL WAS
small and quiet and Karen cried through the entire ceremony. Deep into fall, the sky hung low and the leaves were gone. The cemetery was surrounded by a gray haze of barren trees that refused to move despite the wind. Afterward, as everyone else be
gan to leave, I stayed beside the grave, safer and calmer there than anywhere I'd been in weeks.

Karen was comforted by her mother and Hiko. She pointed at me and then separated from them. I thought she would go to the car, to leave the cemetery, but she came directly to me. “We need to talk.”

“Of course.”

“Not here. Tomorrow, come to my place. Bring anything of Mal's that you still have.”

“I don't know if I—”

“Just look around. You might have something. It's mine now and I want it. Even if you don't have anything, come to my place tomorrow at two.” She walked away without looking back.

This left me rattled. I'd always thought that Karen didn't like me. Much the same way that I thought Hiko didn't like Mal. We formed an odd circle, Mal to Karen to me to Hiko. Neither woman trusting the other's man, neither man quite trusting the other. What had kept us together, what kept us from pushing the others away, was an emotional gravity that keeps people in orbit despite so many reasons for them to tear free and float by themselves. Now, without Mal, Karen would probably break free, and there was nothing to keep her from ripping into me on her way out.

There had been something in her voice, I thought. Something present in its lack, something that told me she'd decided enough was enough.

Later that afternoon I made up another lame excuse to Hiko. I said I was going to do some research at the library or a bookstore, looking for information on my “condition.” I went to Emilia's.

At first she didn't want me to come up to her place. I ignored the fact that she had ended our nonrelationship, I ignored the fact that I had convinced myself that the ending hadn't happened. I stood outside her building and pushed on the buzzer over and over until she finally let me up.

She met me at her door, no smile on her face and no clothes on her body. There were packed boxes throughout the apartment, small spaces barely left for a chair here or a pile of magazines there. She took my hand and with a sad resignation took me to her bedroom and lay down with me.

Afterward, feeling the sweat roll off my sides and mix with the pale bloody spots on her sheets, I realized that my patterns and habits revolved more and more around Emilia, with fewer of my moments spent around Hiko. Hiko demanded more somehow, and I was ready to move away from that. I drifted between two islands, it seemed. One was more dangerous but was closer, and so I tried to reach land. Even though Emilia and I didn't really talk, I thought there must be some sort of security there.