He was standing on a crossbeam high above the atrium.
“Please,” he said. “Somebody get me down from here.”
Something was wrong with him. His smiled was fixed to his face. He was standing with his legs splayed out and he wasn’t holding onto anything.
The crowd belong shuffled uneasily. Nobody liked this, not one bit, for within it they could glimpse fragments of similar stories being told up and down the country, stories which didn’t end well for anyone involved despite the lack of witnesses.
“How did you get up there?” A man shouted from the crowd.
“I’m not sure,” the man on the beam replied. “I was just going to close my account and then I was up here.”
More murmurs from the crowd. As if sensing their reticence, the man continued. Emphatically now.
“Please. Please can anybody help.”
He stressed it wrong. Any-BODY.
“This whole thing stinks,” the man next to me muttered under his breath. He took the child next to him by his wrist. “We are getting the fuck out of here.”
“What is going on?” I asked him, but he just shook his head.
“I’d leave if I were you,” he said. “Nothing good is going to come of this. Of that-” he gestured up to the man on the beam. “That thing.”
“Thing?” I said, but the man and his child were gone.
The crowd was beginning to grow restless. Some people were shouting angrily at the man on the beam. An empty can hurtled up at him but came several metres too short.
Someone shouted “Jump!” to scattered laughter.
There was something missing here, I knew. We were looking at a situation from this one angle, down below. There were other angles we couldn’t conceive of. Perhaps better to call them vertices, intersecting like a knife edge pressed to a photograph.
A ladder swung up from somewhere in the crowd and clanged against the beam. The man on the beam turned his head but didn’t move. There was a scuffle in the crowd and some groans, but the ladder stayed wedged in place. A young man began to climb it, unsteadily but with growing speed. A commentary followed him.
“There’s always one.”
“Don’t do it.”
“You’re being an idiot.”
Still, nobody went to stop the young man. The crowd was resigned to whatever was going to happen next, as if they had seen it a hundred times before. Surely the outcome was either the man on the beam being rescued, or his falling, yet the upturned faces and the set jaws betrayed neither fear nor hope.
The young man was on the other end of the beam now, visibly shaking as he grasped a strut.
“Come on,” he shouted. “You can come down now.”
The other man didn’t respond for a moment. Then he said:
“I need you to come and get me. I’m scared. I’m scared.”
The crowd surged and I was pushed onto my knees. People began to scream. Get down, someone cried. He doesn’t know, he’s from out of town. Someone stop him.
I raised my head in time to see the young man clambering along the beam, holding onto the crossways struts with both hands. There was a smell like bleach as he reached out.
“No,” I said, although I didn’t know why I was saying it. I just knew. I just knew that man up there wasn’t real, had never been real, and that to touch him would be a dreadful error.
I screwed shut my eyes as the screams reached a crescendo. When I opened them again there were two men standing atop the beam, legs splayed out. Same clothes, same smile.
Alexander James 