The University has always had a problem with suicide. Since its most prestigious founding, its students have been killing themselves over exam grades, love affairs, social complications, and God knows what else. I suppose that's just what happens when you build a campus along the edge of a blustering, bellowing gorge. It beckons.
While there were other ways to go besides jumping (pills, ropes, razor blades...), at the University, none was so much in fashion as the swan-dive before dawn. They went like lemmings my first year there, five in three months. A couple more after that. One on graduation day itself. A colleague of mine, out for an evening stroll, pulled one of them off the bridge railing before she'd worked up the nerve to jump, and when questioned as to her motivation, she said she had spent the semester researching the origins of the "Humpty Dumpty" rhyme and had "felt seen" in a way she was not expecting.
There had been a similar spate of suicides some ten years prior to my arrival, during which the University president had erected eight-foot-tall chain link fences along the bridges and the exposed gorge lips. He had also, in an act of foresight, hired a man by the name of Dr. Edward Moffett, whom he'd found in the employ of the Department of Defense, where Moffett was developing a flighted bird so large and so intelligent it could, in theory, drop a bomb, or catch a falling person before they hit the rocks below.
This rescue program was almost impossibly ambitious and highly controversial, as, in the process of breeding the perfect avian retriever, Moffett would create countless monstrosities so ill-suited for life they had to be put down immediately after being born. PETA had a field day, as you might expect. Upon Moffett's arrival, they set up an encampment in the town surrounding the University and from there incited a general frenzy amongst the townspeople, the faculty, the students—the entire country, it seemed, was outraged. Moffett himself was (forgive the pun) unflappable. When, during his first year at the University protestors barricaded the door to his laboratory for a week, he simply remained inside, sleeping on an examination table and subsisting, it was rumored, on birdseed and rabbit cooked over a Bunsen burner.
I knew him, yes. Dr. Moffett. Sometimes "Professor," depending on what company and what mood he was in. We worked together on the breeding project for 28 years, co-authored 62 papers, and between us won the Mendel Prize an unprecedented four times. I would say I knew him rather well, though that isn't saying much. He was a private person, even amongst friends.
Eventually, whether out of shifting mores or boredom (I often can't tell the difference), the country reconsidered Moffett. He was cast as a humanitarian educator working long hours in the lab, sacrificing his beloved birds out of a deeper love for his troubled students and concern for their wellbeing. Never mind the fact that the sections of BIO101 for which he was responsible received such poor course ratings and so many complaints about arcane lectures and complete inaccessibility to students that the chair of the Biology department eventually had to terminate the arrangement.
Had this been public knowledge, it likely would only have deepened the infatuation. Titillated by his neglected wardrobe and brusque persona in interviews, the media praised Moffett to the point of canonization. These apologetics and puff pieces, though they are amusing, and perhaps provide an anthropologically useful portrait of a country wavering between superstition and science, contain nothing of the actual man.
Moffett rarely read any of it, thanks in part to his disdain for the Internet and my handling all our mail, but on occasion a piece would slip through. The day the Times published their big profile, I came upon him in the kitchen, muttering over a copy of the newspaper he must have picked up at the cafe and smuggled into the house. "Where did they get these images?" he shouted, holding up the paper and shaking it at me, as if it were a prized sock and I the dog who had chewed it up. "Mister Kaufman... whoever he is, clearly hasn't reviewed avian neurology in the last century. Your undergraduates could have done better."
The breeding program went on for years, and along the way there were several viable birds, each one larger than its predecessor, offered up as proof Moffett was in fact making progress. Each bird, and ultimately, the Moffett eagle itself, was a cross between the red-throated caracara, the Eurasian black vulture, the wandering albatross, and the Steller's sea eagle. I could describe these species in detail, and the reasons why each one's genes were necessary, but that would be meaningless to you, I suspect. You'll be interested mostly in the final product.
Much of the breeding work was done in vitro, as the incubation and maturation time intrinsic to each species varied wildly. Moffett quite literally gave his life to the project; he was a young man of 25, fresh from graduate school when he began, and he was 68 when he died, three months short of the realization of his perfect bird. Of course we named it after him.
The Moffett eagle. There were 14 of them ever bred, and each one was unique in appearance. The plumage of a Moffett eagle was black, or gray, or a stippled salt and pepper. Some had orange beaks and feet (that's the Steller's in them) and others a sort of wormy gray. Their eyes were black for the most part, though a handful were owlish yellow, and one, a diminutive girl (relatively speaking) whom I christened "Annika," had eyes of glacial blue, so pale they were almost white.
We first met when he kicked me out of his lab. I was visiting the University, where I had been accepted as a PhD candidate, and my host, a researcher named Anthony Scarappa, had suggested in our prior correspondence I accompany him to a lab meeting. Or perhaps I suggested it to him. Either way, we both agreed it would be an efficient use of my visit, as I had been unable to secure a one-on-one meeting with Moffett through the usual channels. And so it was that Anthony and I found ourselves walking a chilly 7:00 AM mile from his off-campus apartment to the Biology building.
When we arrived at the meeting room, the conversation within fell abruptly silent. There were five or six people seated around a table, and they offered only lukewarm smiles and nods as Anthony introduced me. "We're not the most gregarious group," Anthony said, ushering me towards an empty seat. "Especially this early."
Across the table, an older woman addressed Anthony. "Does Moffett know you brought someone?" She jerked her head in my direction.
"I believe he's been duly notified."
The woman (Georgia) shifted her gaze to me. "It's nothing personal," she said. "We just prefer to keep our work-in-progress private."
The woman seated beside me cleared her throat. "Some people have accused us of being a cult." This was Fatima, who would become one of my good friends in years to come.
Anthony, who would not, huffed in annoyance. "Let's see," he began. "We've got the secrecy." He held up one finger. "The paranoia." He held up another. "I don't know about you all, but I'd call my stipend a form of financial blackmail." This earned at least a chuckle from everyone in the room. "And—" Anthony held up four fingers and checked his watch. "Our charismatic leader, who is going to make me late for Spin again."
In the pause that followed, Fatima asked where my research interests lay at the same time Georgia asked if I was visiting other schools. Ignoring Georgia's question (I had known for years that Moffett's lab was where I belonged, and I hadn't even bothered applying to other programs), I instead took the opportunity to mention my recent paper on beta-keratin upregulation in Nature Genetics.
"No shit!" Fatima leaned back in her chair and considered me. "That was you?"
My heart rose in my chest with pride—
"We had a huge fight about that paper when it came out!"
—and then plummeted.
Fatima barreled on. "So you're the hot-shot-first-author undergrad, huh?"
"Well, technically, yes," I stammered, "But I had a very supportive, very generous advisor. There was a lot of hand holding."
"Still," she said. "That's a big deal."
"Little good it did me. I cited Dr. Moffett 11 times in that paper, and can't get a single reply to an email."
It was at this moment—or during some equivalently self-pitying speech—when Edward Moffett himself crashed through the open door. I recognized him immediately, having seen photographs on book jackets and the faculty page of the University's website, but those images hardly prepared me for the turbulence of his person. His voice preceded him into the room: a hard-flung complaint of some sort, for which I had no context, but which caused the people around me to shift and stiffen in their chairs.
In his arms, he carried what looked like a year's worth of western blot film (this was before his begrudging switch to digital imaging), which he dropped on the table with a thud. "Georgia, if you would."
Georgia scooted her chair closer to the pile of paper and began sifting through it. His hands now free from their burden, Moffett used them to punctuate his rant. "How we missed a lethal dominant allele is beyond me," he stormed. "As of this morning, we are up to 50 percent fetal mortality rate, which, if you haven't already surmised for yourself, is the single most costly oversight in the history of this program." He fished a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket and jammed them atop his nose. That was when he spied me, sitting amongst his disciples, and frowned. "Who are you?"
His look of obvious displeasure (the first of many I would receive) gripped my gut and twisted. I said my name aloud and then waited, hopefully, for him to recognize me. Clearly, he did not.
"Christopher's one of the accepted PhDs," Anthony said, coming to my rescue. "He's been staying with me during his visit."
"I've emailed you a few times," I added, trying to recover my composure. "This program—your lab, specifically—is my top choice."
"Ah," Moffett waved his hand. "I don't read non-essential email during grant application season. Anthony could've told you that."
"It hardly seems non-essential for you to meet with a qualified prospect," Anthony said, an edge in his voice. "We are painfully understaffed." He gestured to the five or so people seated around the table, who received his acknowledgement either by averting their eyes, or for the more artless among them, by fixing him with the incredulous open-mouthed glare of a child whose sibling has just tattled on them.
"Are we now?" Moffett stalked over to the white board and plucked up a dry erase marker. "I must thank you, then, Anthony, for your keen interest in personnel management." And, with barely a glance in my direction or a change in tone: "I appreciate the visit, Mr..."
"Larkin," I supplied.
"Mr. Larkin. But you should know—Anthony could have told you this, too—that I don't take first years in my lab, and, seeing as this is a closed meeting, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave."
Next to me, Anthony puffed and bristled like a blowfish, while I deflated in defeat. There was nothing left to do but gather my things and leave them to their secrets. On the way out, I forced myself to approach Moffett and offer my hand. He looked more surprised by this gesture than he had by my unbidden presence at the seminar table. But after a moment he took my hand. His own was warm and tense.
I had a whole speech prepared about how much I respected him and how important his work was to me, but all I managed to say was, "Until next time," and scurry off like a fox caught infiltrating the hen house.
I got an email from Moffett in mid-August (subject line "Response Required ASAP") informing me that Anthony had quit "unexpectedly and inconveniently" and if I could learn fast enough to take over his rounds, an exception could be made to the prohibition against first years.
In the following decades, there were rarely more than ten members of the "Moffett Office," myself included. Like chicks in a clutch, we fought amongst ourselves for the smallest scrap, and in the end only a few of us survived. Most of us began as graduate students under Dr. Moffett and stayed on as postdocs, research fellows, and, for the lucky few, professors.
The others were always a bit nervous around me, perhaps because my birds always seemed to do the best, to live the longest, and grow the largest; perhaps, too, because I was a beautiful young man, and he had noticed. I was always aware, on some level, that my appearance was pleasing. People often told me so. Relatives, friends, strangers on the street. In my youth it rarely felt important, so concerned was I with being recognized for my intelligence and contributions to the field. But I am old now and can admit I was indeed exceptionally beautiful, and all this I can say without shame because said beauty, and those who most admired it, are gone.
Euthanasia. From the Greek, "eu": happy; and "thanatos": death. This mercy killing, inevitably, is part of doing science with animals. Moffett gave the same rambling speech every year during the onboarding meeting for new lab members. He'd say, "Many of you will be tempted by the idea that you're 'playing god.' Trust me, you are not. That line of thought is a metaphysical and moral dead end, and if you can't take my word for it, I recommend you avail yourself of our decorated Philosophy department."
Many times I performed the detestable task of euthanizing a bird whose insides were so convoluted, it would starve to death sooner than reach its first molting. I wondered in the beginning if it would get easier. It never did. I only grew harder, my soul more gnarled. One calcified wound atop another.
I'll never forget the first time, when I was at my softest, only a few weeks on the job. Moffett seemed to decide mid-lecture it was time for one of the birds to go. He dismissed the class with time to spare, tucked his pointer in his pants pocket, and approached the front row of the auditorium, where I sat with the other TAs. "I need your help with something, Christopher," he said. Fatima and Tyler, who sat beside me at the time, stopped talking to listen to the exchange. I could feel their eyes sweeping the sides of my face. "Of course, sir." I had not been invited to call him Edward yet.
"It's your bird," he said. "Her bowel is perforated."
I grimaced, as if I were an undergraduate student again and had been handed back an exam with a grade of "C minus."
"I'm very sorry, sir."
"It's no matter. She would not have done for breeding very well. All the same, she'll suffer more the longer we wait. Shall we?"
I quickly gathered my notes, shouldered my bag, and followed him out of the building.
Back at the lab, I sedated my bird, who was about the size of a Golden Retriever, and laid her down on her side on an exam table. While the birds' large size proved an ever-expanding inconvenience in most facets of laboratory life, it was an advantage when it came to euthanasia. In smaller creatures, especially birds, it can be difficult to achieve and secure intravenous access to their miniscule vascular systems. At least we did not struggle to find the vein.
Moffett stood over the bird and instructed me to hold her head. Without thinking, I began to hum an old lullaby my grandmother used to sing to me, and the bird's eyes, lids already drooping with the sedative, drifted towards the source of the melody. "Good," Moffett murmured, as he injected the pentobarbital, slowly, into her jugular. I kept on humming and stroking the feathered head until I felt the full weight of it all at once in my hands. She had died with her beak open. Inside her mouth I saw her tongue, pink and dainty as a cat's, cradled in the bottom of her bill.
"She's gone," I said, in more of a whisper than I'd intended.
Moffett removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes. He slid the glasses into his back pocket and bent over the bird so that his ear was against her chest, listening, waiting. Moffett's face, expressionless and inverted like that, jarred me; it was so unfamiliar, I started when he suddenly looked me in the eye.
"So she is," he said, straightening up.
"I'll put it in the log," I mumbled, looking around for the laptop. The room swam a bit, and then I felt as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head. There was a smell, too: something acrid and pervasive—bile, I thought, pooling in the bird's throat? But, more likely formaldehyde, from the next room over.
"For God's sake, Christopher." Moffett grabbed me by the shoulders as my vision blackened at the edges and pushed me down into the nearest chair. "Sit. Until you've recovered yourself."
I dropped my head into my hands. "I'm so sorry... I think I must have forgotten to eat today."
"That was unwise of you," he said, his voice distant. "Can you remind me: how old?"
I blinked at him through my fingers. He was standing at the far end of the room, in front of a computer. "Twenty-seven, sir?"
He laughed, then: an unexpected sound flooding the empty laboratory and washing like warm saline across my senses. "Not you," he said. "The bird."
"Oh, she—she would have been... five months next Tuesday."
"Wingspan?"
"Twelve and a half feet."
I sat there in the chair and listened to the quick clattering of the keys as he typed. When he spoke, he turned around, but it remained unclear whether he spoke to himself or to me. "That's not quite good enough, is it," he said, quietly. I stared at him, searched for some further explanation in his eyes, but they were turned inwards.
"No," he repeated. "That is hardly good enough."
"I expect she would have gained another three inches at maturity," I began. "She only needed more time."
"They will always need more time—" and here his voice vaulted suddenly from the intimate tone I had been enjoying into the boom with which he lectured—"Time is the most wretched variable!"
He paused and shook his head at me, as if I had said something to disagree. "But I have myself to account for. And I suspect I will need more time than I've got. In theory, it could go on forever so long as there's funding available and some party or somebody who is interested in the results..."
"And the jumpers," I cut in.
"Well, yes. The jumpers." And he laughed again, but the sound this time was mean and tired. "Thank god for them."
I stood up, then, testing my legs. "The generational growth trend is steady," I said. "I charted it just last week. We only need patience. And perhaps another shipment of peanut butter pine cones; they really enjoy those." He looked on the verge of a smile and so, my heart hammering, I said, "Professor, what you've done is incredible."
His expression wavered and froze somewhere between indignation and amusement.
"Every day, I watch you choose to face the unknown," I continued (stupidly, earnestly), "and walk blindly—some might even say bravely—into it."
He rolled his eyes. "There's no such thing as bravery," he said. "There's fear. And there's the lack thereof. The latter being the state towards which all life is constantly striving."
"But what of those without the fear-processing organ?" I rejoined. "Those proteans and amoebae who lack an amygdala?"
He quirked an eyebrow. "Oh, them? To them, everything is sex."
I started to say something. I held my tongue. He looked at me, seemed to be looking at me anew, as if he were calculating something. And then: "I'll tend to the bird," he said. "You may go."
We began to train the Moffett eaglets as soon as they were old enough to open their eyes. They fledged in the fall, at about five months old, each one already the size of a horse. I was in and out of the lab at that time, and regrettably more often out than in. Moffett had died earlier that year, in August. Pancreatic cancer. We learned from the autopsy it had gone undiagnosed for about a year and then taken him rapidly, in two month's time. It irks me still there was not more to it than that. His death: so banal when compared to his life. I suppose, though, that that's how it usually goes.
We both lost weight during that time. Those nauseous summer days pressed in upon me from all sides, and I sweated even inside our house, as Moffett was never warm enough and insisted we keep the temperature above 75 degrees. It was all I could do to eat one meal a day, often at his insistence. "Your stomach is in prime condition," he would bark. "Why don't you fucking use it!"
When he became too ill to leave bed, he would ask me to bring him the reports on each bird our lab assistants would write, their growth charts, and any new research I could find that might help the birds grow faster and stronger. When he could not think well enough for this sort of review, he insisted on playing the number games and puzzles I would clip from the newspaper and leave for him on the bedside table. "There is no excuse," he told me, "for letting one's mind lapse. Especially not when it's all you've got left."
I don't think he knew the Moffett eagles would be hatched in a few months' time. Neither one of us did. Our lives in the lab had taught us the hazards of hope and unfounded speculation, and the Moffetts were, as every generation before them had been, a product largely of chance, of fortuitous genetic mutation.
That Moffett ignored his own health while tending meticulously, obsessively over that of his birds surprised no one. When finally he collapsed from searing back pain in the middle of a lab meeting, there was not much to be done for him, medically speaking. He refused chemotherapy and held off on the palliative morphine for as long as he could. As soon as he would let me, though, I fed it to him several times a day from a bottle and was much relieved when his moaning and trembling stopped.
Annika was what saved me, ultimately. She seemed to have some of him in her, if you'll allow me my bathos. Their eyes were the same dauntless, incisive blue. She was my 144th bird: the first to hatch, but the smallest of the clutch, which was unusual for any creature under my care. Her chest and underwings were entirely white, while a swath of bluish gray crested her brow, washed uniformly across her back to her wingtips and down to her tail. She took quickly to training. They all did.
Our birds were socialized with their humans intensely as eaglets and juvenile birds. It was not uncommon for one of the Moffetts to share its food with a primary human caretaker, but at the same time the bird would not squawk and carry on when its caretaker took his leave. This last point was important, as we certainly could not loose the eagles on the campus had there been a risk of one of them mistaking a student for one of the Moffett Office and subsequently descending upon him and whisking him back to the nest, as if he were an errant fledgling.
Annika did nip me once on the head when I made to leave her, but not hard—I saw no reason to record it as a bite. More likely an attempt to preen what was admittedly a dire case (I was not sleeping much during those months and bathing, let alone grooming, was hardly a consideration...).
With the help of our undergraduate and graduate lab assistants, we took the birds down into one of the least-frequented gorges and shot water balloons the size of human children out of a large wooden trebuchet: the winner of the School of Engineering's annual pumpkin chunking contest, which they gifted to us in a display of camaraderie, wishing, as engineers do, to be relevant and involved.
With the balloons, and later, crash test dummies (the University's Medical school had refused to lend us any of its cadavers), we taught the eagles the basic recovery maneuver: dive, glide, grab, soar. In addition to those experiments sanctioned by the Institutional Review Board, we did run some unofficial performance tests, mostly by night and far away from campus, involving pigs and goats (none of which was seriously injured). It was so thrilling—watching Annika rip through the air like a spirit and seize a squalling billie just moments before it plunged into the river—that we were almost able to forget his absence. For a little while, at least.
When word of the program's success reached the new University president (the old one had died of a heart attack), she authorized the removal of the nets and the fences and the installment of the Moffett eagles in artificial aeries built underneath the gorge bridges and on the roofs of surrounding buildings. Spring was just around the corner.
For the first few weeks there was nothing. No suicides, gorge-assisted or otherwise. I imagine the students were, understandably, terrified of the eagles, though if they knew them the way we did in the laboratory, they'd not have worried. Within a month, however, the jumping started again. Carmen, a big stippled female, made the first retrieval. It was the middle of the night, and Carmen performed exactly how she was supposed to: caught the boy, a small freshman, with about 90 feet to spare, and deposited him unharmed at the Moffett Laboratory, at which point the campus police were summoned.
My whole life had been rushing towards this moment, this conclusion. There was happiness initially. And much fanfare amongst the Moffett Office. But I became aware, gradually, in between the press conferences and interviews and public viewings of the eagles, of something besides happiness hanging around me like a shadow. A greediness; or rather, a confusion, because I did not know what I was greedy for. An unexpected halt, like that experienced by a foot that tries to descend one more step and finds itself confronted instead by the floor.
I spent my nights pacing the aviary, where a new crop of Moffett eagles was incubating, composing letters to him in my head. This exercise was the only thing that helped with the feeling of bottomless want plaguing me so. "Darling Great Blue," or "His Majesty GBH" (a reference to that most stately heron), I began, and amended, customarily, to "Dear Edward"—he hated frivolous displays of affection—"the program is a success. They've made celebratory posters of our birds and strung them up on the lampposts in place of those awful 'Fighting Wolverine' banners. You would have thought they were awful, too; the creature depicted looked more like a rabid bobcat than a wolverine..."
And: "Our Horus (the fourth of his name) made a spectacular save over lunch today. A young lady dressed in garish all-white had weaseled her way past the fences and dove, headfirst, into the gorge bordering the Engineering quad. Horus was after her in an instant, and his retrieval etiquette—grip gentle but precise, flight path steady—was textbook. It was a sight to see, which, of course, everyone now has, since a bystander had a camera on hand and videotaped the whole thing. The video has since 'gone viral,' consequent of which, your program is better funded now than ever before..."
And: "I wonder sometimes, GB, if you'd be pleased with them. They are, from a scientific standpoint, perfect, although I have a feeling you would find in their perfection something to tweak. I cannot sleep and am too tired to be thinking much of the future these days. I find my mind straying, more and more, to the past..."
The eagles had made about ten retrievals before Gary Westing decided it was his time to go. Gary jumped in broad daylight, off the main footbridge connecting the academic quads to the dormitories. He chose a spot in plain view of Annika's nest up on the Human Ecology building, and she was in the air before Gary's feet had left the railing. Those who saw it say that Annika swooped down, opened her talons, grabbed Gary and glided with him a few seconds before screeching, going into a dive, and throwing Gary's body into a cliff wall, killing him upon impact.
What most people perhaps don't know is that Gary had a knife on hand when he jumped. A rather large one, some kind of Asian blade. I found it embedded in Annika's talon when I was finally able to coax her down from her nest later that day. I believe the investigators have it somewhere in their possession. I stand by my conviction that Gary's death was entirely Gary's fault. He chose to jump, and he died in doing so. I don't see what the difference is in hitting a rock at the bottom of the gorge versus the side.
The local police arrived at the University almost immediately, along with a troupe of animal control officers, who made an entirely unnecessary display of subduing the "killer eagles," which they accomplished by ousting the Moffett Office from our laboratory, as it contained the only enclosures large enough to hold the birds, and posting a guard outside the building. Gary's body was air lifted out of the gorge and analyzed for any evidence of claw marks or other wounds that may have been inflicted by the bird (none, I think, was found). And then there were the police detectives, and later the private eyes, hired by some higher up at the University, who were sent after me.
My absence from the University grounds in those days after Gary's death and later from the courtroom during the trial proceedings was indeed conspicuous, but there was no helping it. I realized when I was back at the Moffett Laboratory, bandaging Annika's talon, that I could not take the chance that the law would be on our side.
You might ask, and naturally so: how does one hide a nine-foot-tall bird? And I would tell you: with difficulty! If I told you more than that, I might as well turn us both in to the authorities, as I know they're still looking. Over the years I've heard bits and pieces of news pertaining to the University. The 13 remaining Moffett eagles were not euthanized but sent to various zoos around the country.
I did manage to slip unnoticed into the Bronx Zoo, once, and saw Pollux, Tyler's bird, with his wings clipped, living in an enclosure that was for her perhaps worse than death, for it was all turf and no trees, no vertical space, which is necessary for the happiness of any bird. It looked for all the world like a pen constructed for a fat and lazy antelope. Pollux squealed when he saw me. Much to the amazement of the other zoo patrons, Pollux chirupped at me kuk-kuk-kuk and tapped the glass three times with his beak, a gesture he had been taught to perform when asking for a treat. I held up my hands to him. "I'm sorry, darling, I've got nothing." I saw a crowd was gathering around us, and at the risk of drawing too much attention, was forced to take my leave.
The water below screamed indistinct and angry as a ghost. He stood beside me, his shoulder warm against my own, even through the fabric of our jackets. We had stopped in the middle of the bridge, beneath a streetlight, whose bulb was like a proto sun in the ashen sky.
"What they want is to jump, not to die," he said to me.
"How can you be so sure?"
"If they wanted to die, they would do so by other means, easier means. They're too young to really want death. What they want is the fall, the total loss of control, the relinquishing of their destinies to fate, if you will. To jump, they must simply accept death as a possible potential outcome."
I leaned over the railing, as far as the chain link fence would permit. "Seems a pretty certain one to me."
"Not necessarily."
I glanced at him, and he went on: "Sometimes, very rarely, one of them will jump from a lesser height and hit a tree, or a particularly deep pool of water, feet first, so that he breaks most of the bones in his legs but survives after all."
"God," I muttered. I imagined our hypothetical young man hauling himself like a muskrat out of the water and onto the pebbled beach, unable really to call for help and forced to wait, prostrate upon a rock, until some fellow student on her way to class looked down into the gorge and saw him there. "And what then?"
"The parents pull the child out of school and sit him down in a psychiatrist's chair, where he belongs."
"Sure," I said.
"It's not how I would do it, if I were in such a dire predicament."
I hesitated. And he watched me hesitating. Did I really want to know? Yes, I did; I was a scientist after all. "Well?" I prompted.
"Oh, I imagine I'd buy a gun and shoot myself," he said, sighing a bit. Then he moved so that he stood flush against me, his fingers skimming up my arms to brush my neck. I glanced around. We were alone in the gray and yet unrealized landscape. It could not have been six in the morning. The last thing I saw were his eyes, before I closed my own. So blue, and without his glasses, inhuman. Elemental. Like twin planets in the slant of his face.
