Absurd

As I heard a thud on the roof, I looked up through my roof window and saw a girl crouching right beneath it. She glanced at me with mischievously glinting eyes for a moment, then leapt over the window. I heard the sound of her scrambling over the roof, then that of a roof tile coming loose. I climbed on my desk, opened the window and craned my head back to see her straddling the ridge.

“What are you doing?” I called. But the look in her eyes had already answered my question: she was crazy. I knew quite well when I climbed out my window that the safest thing to do was to call the police, but something about that strange light in those wild eyes was contagious. I followed her, still thinking that I was doing so to talk her out of her craziness.

“I’m running,” she said.

“For whom?” I sat down next to her on the ridge.

“From everyone and everything. But actually mostly from myself, or what's left of her.”

“From yourse—”

“Shh! She might be listening.”

Before I could ask what she meant, she got up and walked dexterously over the ridge.

“Wait!” But at that moment she darted down to the edge of the roof and jumps.

“No!” I scream, but then I see she has jumped onto the wall of a terrace next to the roof and she quickly runs over it to the other side, where she climbs onto the next roof.

“Come on!” she shouted, as she swung her legs back and forth from its edge. "Flying is falling and missing the ground."

“Alright, but if the police comes, you say I only did it to stop you, right?”

I crept down feet first to the side nearest to the wall, and, holding on tight to the gutter, lowered my feet onto it. I spread out my arms wide as I shuffled to the other side, looking down all the while. The girl chuckled.

“What are you so afraid of?” she asked. She had asked it with such lightness in her voice that for a moment, even as I was still standing on the wall, I looked up into her eyes. She had an expression unlike any I had ever seen before. I lowered my arms and walked to the other side of the wall.

But no sooner had I reached the roof when she clambered to the other side of it. I began to suspect where this was going, and sure enough, when I had come to the ridge of the roof, I saw her standing on another. I covered my face with my palms and groaned. She laughed loudly.

“You’re being absurd!”

“I didn’t start it. It did.” She points at the sky.

Before I had time to think of what she meant, she made as if to move away again.

“Oh, but don’t think you can keep outrunning me. When I’ll catch you I’ll pin you to the floor.”

“That would be interesting,” she said in a mock serious tone, “considering that we’re on the roofs.”

I stared for a long while at the gap between the two roofs. She darted off again. “Goodbye!” she said.

“Alright,” I said. “I can do what you can do…” I tried to take on some of that fearlessness she’d shown, and began running down the roof. As soon as I was doing so, I was regretting it, and tried to stop, but found I could not, and stumbled. When I ended up at the edge of the roof I could do nothing but jump anyway — and ended up crashing into the window below the next roof, landing onto the floor of a room. “I’m alright, sorry” I said, but looking up I found that no one was there.

I heard a sound from the roof, and the girl came clambering in through the window.

“Aww… are you alright?” But when I looked up at her, she was still smiling, albeit with concern in her eyes.

"Why you little…" I begin, and then for some reason, I burst out laughing.

“I didn’t think you’d still follow me,” she said as she bent over me.

The residents of the building had apparently heard us, for soon we heard the sound of people coming up stairs.

“Come, quick.“ She took my arm. She picked me up from the ground, and led the way back through the window.

I looked at the window, then at the door, and thought for a moment of trying to explain myself, but then realized that, of course, they’d never believe me. It was back on the roofs or in jail.

I stuck my head out the window, looking for something to hold on to, but saw only the gutter and a pipe. I reached for the pipe with one hand but wavered. But at that point I heard the clicking of a key in a lock.

“Come on!”

All of a sudden I knew the contagion was complete. I smiled, shrugged, mumbled “whatever” under my breath and, still holding the pipe with just one hand, jumped out the window. I stared down into the depths. The sight of a quadrangle four floors down reeled below me as I dangled from the pipe. I scrabbled for the gutter and scrambled up the roof.

For a moment I still looked through the window and saw a man looking at the glass on the floor. He hadn’t seen me.

At that very moment, the girl started to loudly tramp on the roof tiles toward the ridge, so that the man could well hear. I closed my eyes and sighed for a moment before I withdrew my head. At the same time, the man stuck out his head and looked at me, just a few inches away. I started back and scuttled over the roof.

“This way,” the girl said from somewhere. I looked over the ridge and saw she’d already jumped onto the ridge of another roof. This time I didn’t hesitate to follow, fearing the man would follow. When I landed on the next roof and looked back, though, I didn’t see him. One thing was sure, however: he’d call the police and give them a detailed description of my face.

Looking back forward, I could no longer see the girl. I was alone. I walked forward to the end of the ridge, but there was no one to be seen anywhere over the roofs.

“Hello!” a voice came from beneath. I looked down and saw her standing on a patio. Hanging on to the edge of the roof I lowered myself and dropped onto the ground, bending clumsily through my knees and falling backwards on the ground.

The girl came over to me and looked at me with a bit of a smug look.

“You sure are a nimble one, you.”

“No, I’m not nimble.”

“If you’re not nimble, then what are you?”

“I’m free.”

I sat up. “Tell me about it,” I said. I realized I’d had in mind to say that from the moment I saw her, but in quite a different context, and with quite another purpose in mind. Now, I asked not to talk sense into her, but out of interest to learn more about her, and about how she could be this way.

She sat with her back against the wall. The building didn’t seem to be used, so I followed suit. For a moment she stared out in front of her over the roofs around us, and I half expected in a moment she would start up and leap for them again. But her face was contemplative now, as, I suddenly realized, it had somehow been even in the midst of her absurdities. Then, she spoke with the same kind of boldness with which she’d jumped over the roofs. The answer was anything but what I had expected.

“I was going to kill myself today.”

“Today?” I asked, surprised.

“Just now, actually.”

“What? Is this some kind of joke?”

She looked at me. “It’s true.”

“If so, then how come you seem so happy?”

She smiled. “Because I guess I did kill myself, and God, am I glad she’s dead.”

I was becoming surer by the minute that she really was mad.

“When were you going to do it?”

“I wasn’t just going to. I tried it.”

“When?”

“Just before I met you.” She looked at me, then back into the depths just before us. I realized that if her moods changed so quickly, she might perhaps do it again any moment. I readied myself to stop her.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “I was standing on my terrace staring down, about to jump, but found I couldn’t do it. Something was holding me back. And I thought how convenient it would be if someone would be so kind to just push me.” A wolfish smile spread over her lips. “So I pushed myself. In my mind I pushed myself down and saw myself falling into the depths and hit the ground. And somehow, at that point, it seemed that part of me did fall down. And I smiled and jumped without thinking. But I jumped over the gap, onto your roof, and I guess I’d been meaning to. But part of me hadn’t made it, and now lay dead on the ground: my fear. She was gone.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“So many things. I guess mostly I was afraid of being free. All along I’d been wanting to kill myself because I thought I wasn’t free. Now I realized the only thing holding me back was me. And now she was dead and I was free. There’s no place on earth that I couldn’t go if I tried. Come to think of it, there aren’t even that many things I can think of that I couldn’t do if I tried to. So how could I not be free?”

“Because you’re going to jail?” a voice said from beside us. Through the doorway came a police officer, then another.

“Oh hello,” the girl said. “How are you doing?” she burst out laughing. Perhaps she was still laughing at what had become of her fear, but I couldn’t laugh. Not quite yet.

“You could have died!” another police officer later said in the interrogation room of the police office.

The girl drew in a sharp breath and put her hands before her mouth. “But that’s terrible!” she said with a smile. I stared at her with a certain intrigue. Apparently, in her view life itself had turned into a joke, and death was nothing but the punch line.

At this point, being where I was, I couldn’t quite appreciate the humor of the situation. Or could I? Was that grimace on my face, perhaps, a smile that I strained to suppress? But what was so funny about having almost lost one’s life? Was my life itself an absurdity? I thought back at what had happened and found myself unable to suppress a smile, though it was a smile, I felt, more of affection than of humor. Or were they the same thing, if the affection was for absurdity? So is a sense of humor anything but to smile at the absurdity of life, the very thing that drove so many, almost including this girl, to suicide?

Suddenly I understood her, and I was unsure if it was at the situation, or at her, that I chuckled. At the same time, so did she. As this made it seem as though we were laughing at the officer, I shook my head as compensation.

The officer turned his head at me. “What were you doing up there?”

“I was trying to stop her suicide.” The officer looked at her.

“No, I was trying to stop his suicide!” I rolled my eyes. She really needed to learn how to stop. Or did she mean something by that after all?

The police officer nodded, and looked from her to me and back. “I believe you,” he said dryly.

“She’s a little—” I made the cuckoo sign and found myself grinning in spite of myself.

“Hey!” she gave me an elbow in the side. And now, to my surprise, I saw that for a moment even the police officer was smiling. He only barely passed it off as a grimace.

He crossed his arms. “Maybe you should be committed to a mental hospital?”

“Maybe you should be.”

He leaned forward on the desk. “How is that?”

“Because to be honest, sir, it’s not my death you should be worried about. It’s yours.”

A smirk spread over his face. “Is that a threat?”

“Oh, you would like that, wouldn’t you? But it would be hard to threaten you with death. You have nothing to fear of death because you are already dead. And here a dead man is telling me to fear for my life.”

He drew back. “What would you know of me?”

“Because I’ve been there. I’ve had someone like you in my head all along. I’m a lot saner without her.”

“Missy, what you did was dangerous.”

“Oh, I admit that it would be a very dangerous thing to do for a dead person to try and live like that. But maybe that’s our misunderstanding. I’m alive. And as long as I’m truly alive I have nothing to fear of death. As long as I’m alive to whatever may come my way, I’ll stay alive long enough.”

The officer blinked his eyes and shrugged. “Maybe a psychiatrist would be able to make more sense of this.”

“Look,” I said, not sure if this wasn’t going the right way, “she was going to kill herself. She told me. But she made the other side, and when she did, she felt another person. That’s all. Surviving a suicide attempt can have strange effects on one’s mind for a while, but I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Alright, I will keep it at a warning. So be warned. If I ever see this kind of thing again from you in this city, it’ll be the madhouse.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said, grinning. “I’ll do it in another city next time.” I hoped she was joking.

The officer shrugged. “Out of my hands,” he mumbled as he began writing his report. Then he remembered himself, looked up with a start, and gave the warning a second try with a louder voice and a wagging finger. This time the girl looked at him with a straight face that was all innocence, nodding all the while he spoke.

A very thoughtful-looking officer led us to the exit. “Good evening,” he said, with what sounded like an ironic nonchalance, bemused himself at the whole thing.

“I thought you’d never behave.”

She grinned. “Behave? Do I?” Suddenly she stopped, looked at me, and lay her arms around my neck. “I just felt I wanted to be alone with you.” She looked me straight in the eyes, her eyes fixed on mine with a stillness that made it feel as though they were frozen in place. Time itself seemed to stand still in her eyes. Here and now became the center of the universe, and everything else merely revolved around us, around this moment.

“This is absurd, isn’t it?” she said.

“So are you.”

“It’s comical,”

“And tragical.”

“Tragicomical,” she retorted.

“Absurd,” I breathed, and now I realized that absurdity applied both to tragedy and comedy.