Alex had done everything he could.
No one could accuse him of not doing everything he could.
He’d seen shrinks, talked to friends, talked to family, talked to himself. He’d taken a comprehensive regiment of antidepressants, tried CBT and yoga and finger painting. He’d undergone electroshock therapy—which accomplished nothing but to erase his memory of the electroshock therapy—and hypnosis. He’d even admitted—albeit to a stranger in a bar—that he was having suicidal thoughts. He’d done everything he could to avoid ending up here, standing outside the railing of the Jeston Bridge, his hands freezing to the icy handrail, leaning out over the gash of white water surging a hundred and thirty feet below through a narrow ford of the Wallkill River. Alex was here.
And no one could accuse him of not doing everything he could.
He’d pictured this so many times. Standing on the edge. Looking down. Sometimes the view was different. Sometimes there was a ravine, dry and steep with packed dirt and gangly roots. Other times there was concrete, and throngs of people, and the distant cacophony of traffic. Once, he’d pictured an endless gray sea, crinkled like a salvaged sheet of tinfoil, the white eye of the sun bared back in its surface. Of course that last one didn’t really exist as an option, unless he’d found an oil platform to jump from. No, it was a fantasy, just like, it turned out, all of Alex’s other hopes and aspirations. The truth was a surge of white water, black rocks, snowy woods. It didn’t matter what was down there anyway, just so long as it was hard enough to stop him when he landed.
He’d done everything he could. He’d left a note, tied up loose ends, said his goodbyes as best he could without disclosing his intentions. He’d even made his bed this morning. He didn’t know why, but he knew it felt like the right thing to do. He’d left the thermostat at 68° to keep the pipes from freezing, and made sure every light in the house was turned off except for the lamp near the downstairs window, to deter break-ins. He didn’t know how long it would take people to notice he was gone. He hoped only a day or two. But it didn’t matter. Everything that came after was outside of his concern. That was the point, right? He adjusted his hands on the railing and glanced back. His car was there on the bridge’s shoulder. He’d seen no other traffic since he got here. It was a familiar feeling. Wherever Alex went, other people seemed to steer clear. Even here on the Jeston Bridge—the major thruway from Eastriver to Westriver Wallkill—on a wintry Saturday afternoon, other people were nowhere to be seen.
It was time. And the truth, which surprised him, was that he wasn’t afraid. What was there to be afraid of? The worst was behind him. He was finally taking steps to rescue himself. He was finally doing something important—even if that importance extended only as far as tending to his own wellbeing. Maybe “wellbeing” wasn’t the right word. Maybe it was more appropriate to use a word like “comfort” or “relief.” “Resignation” sprang to mind, and he smiled then in the cold, overcast day, amused by the absurdity of engaging in a semantic debate with himself at this late hour. And, content in that amusement, recognizing it would never be more pleasant than it was right then, he let go of the railing and leaned forward, and fell.
He was proud of himself, as the freezing air whipped around him, for following through on something. His deepest fear, among countless shallower ones, was that he would fail even to commit to his own suicide. The consequences of such a failure as that would be unimaginable. He had never read No Exit, and was not familiar with its plot, but he thought about it often, and imagined, given its title, that maybe it dealt with such an unimaginable premise. But it didn’t matter. He had done it. He was falling, faster and faster, toward the black rocks and frigid water of the Wallkill River. It would stop him. It would do exactly what he wanted it to do. He was proud of himself. He had made the world work in his favor for once.
But there was a problem. He was falling feet-first. He’d heard horror stories about people leaping from great heights and landing feet-first and shattering their legs and spines but ultimately surviving. In his case, he would likely lie there in the icy water, paralyzed, consumed with pain, and freeze to death over long hours or days. He was halfway down—more than halfway—and no matter how he twisted or leaned, he could not reposition himself any other way. The white water hurled toward him. The air screamed in his ears. He was going to land feet-first. He would keep his legs as limp as possible, so they would give way for his body to take the brunt of the impact. He had a twitchy, panicked thought about the irony of struggling against the world’s conditions all the way into the final moment of his life, but it was interrupted when he met the riverbed.
There was an explosive instant of pain so severe it may have been nothing at all. But he passed through that—passed through the frozen rocks as if through the surface of a bathtub—and the dark blur of the water consumed him, and then changed, seemed to expand or to shrink into millions of separate parts, particles whizzing around him, clicking and bouncing together, and he felt himself slow, and slow further, until he was floating gently among colorless triangles that ballooned into even more triangles, whirring quietly, and he landed softly on his butt atop a warm, wide surface.
He blinked—or maybe he didn’t blink, but only thought about blinking. There was something large to his right, and as he turned toward it he felt an enormous hand caress the top of his head.
“Hello, Alex,” said a deep, soothing voice above him.
Alex peered upward. A mouth smiled down at him from high overhead, filled with huge gray teeth. A mouth, floating there, four times bigger than Alex’s whole body. The skin hung down off of it in tatters, and the black jaw bones’ joints protruded from its top, smeared with blood.
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There was a nose, too, and cheeks, and ears, and eyes—orange eyes—all the components of a whole face—but like the mouth, they were disjointed, separate from one another, like the old anatomy illustrations from pre-industrial text books. Every part broken free.
The same was true of the rest of the body. The black ribs each were suspended, draped with sinew. The lungs pulsed along with the other organs. There was a heart, beating slowly, its arteries pulsing, its musculature contracting and expanding. Intestines dangled like a tie coiled on a doorknob. Skin surrounded it all is ablated sections, as if cut with a dull knife.
Alex looked behind himself, where he’d felt a hand caress him, and sure enough, an enormous gray hand floated there, its fingers the length of Alex’s body. Its black wrist bones, jagged, stuck out from the back of it, marrow bubbling like worms. Then there was the arm itself, a thick length of gray, separate from the shoulder. Beneath Alex was a leg. A huge leg as big as a bus which, like the jaw and hand, ended in jagged black bones extending beyond the flesh, both at the hip and below, where the foot rested on the gray floor, alone.
And then there was the penis. It was huge and erect, extending over Alex’s head like an awning and partially obscuring the scattered face.
The parts of a huge man. Each one accounted for.
And though it was like nothing Alex had ever seen, and should have been grisly to look upon, Alex was not afraid.
“Hi,” Alex said, sitting on the leg’s thigh.
“Horus,” said the mouth, smiling down, and the eyes smiled behind it. “My name is Horus.”
“Horus,” Alex smiled, nestling his head against the big hand that stroked his hair. He felt, for the first time in his life, safe.
“It’s good to see you,” Horus said. “You’ve gotten so tall.”
Alex kicked his legs gently as they dangled from Horus’ thigh. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m nearly six feet.”
“Yes you are!” Horus’ hand paused on the nape of Alex’s neck and he laughed a deep, boisterous, joyful laugh. “Someday perhaps you’ll be as tall as me!”
Alex blushed. “I don’t think I’ll ever be that tall,” he said.
Horus smiled. “Perhaps not.” Around them, translucent triangles floated through the gray air like pollen. There was no temperature. There was no sound other than their voices. “I am sorry we cannot spend more time together,” Horus said then, his smile darkening.
Alex’s chest tightened. “Why can’t we?”
“Because that’s not how this works.”
Alex pouted. “But I want to be with you.”
Horus’ huge finger lifted Alex’s chin gently. “It is okay,” he said, smiling down from his floating mouth. “Do not be sad. You are here for a reason. An important reason. And meanwhile, I know everyone is excited to meet you.”
“Everyone?” Alex asked, blinking away tears.
“Yes!” Horus’ hand gestured outward.
Alex looked up.
There were people, thousands of them—maybe millions—as far as he could see, standing in rows, all with their backs turned. They were dressed in the widest assortment of clothes, and their shapes and sizes and hair colors ran the entire spectrum of human features.
At some great distance, in the direction they faced, was an enormous gray pyramid, which stretched up into the nondescript sky.
“Who are they?” Alex asked, clinging to Horus’ finger.
“They’re your big brothers and sisters,” Horus said. “They are just like you. They all took control of their lives, just like you did.”
Alex looked out at the pyramid. “What are they looking at?” he asked.
“Why don’t you go find out?” Horus stroked Alex’s head a final time, then patted him on the back.
Alex didn’t move. “I’m scared,” he said.
Horus laughed his boisterous laugh. “There is nothing to be scared of,” he said. “They are your family. They will be so happy to be with you.”
“But what if they don’t like me?”
“My child.” Horus slid his enormous hand under Alex’s arm, lifted him from his thigh, and placed him on the smooth gray floor. “What could there possibly be not to like?”
Alex swallowed and stepped toward the people. He glanced back at Horus, whose disunited face grinned with pride. My brothers and sisters, Alex thought. He didn’t know he had this many brothers and sisters. He knew of one sister... though as he tried to recall her he found her face obscured in his memory. He saw only the backs of a million heads. Then these must be my real brothers and sister, he thought. I must have imagined that other one.
He approached the back row. “I’m Alex,” he said to the backs of the heads.
None of them moved.
Maybe I spoke too quietly, he thought. My mouth is dry, and sometimes I speak too quietly when my mouth is dry. He cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Alex.”
Nothing moved.
Alex stepped around the sibling in front of him. “I’m Al—“ he started.
The back of a head. He turned to another. And another. The backs of heads. He walked completely around one, leaned this way and that way. The backs of heads, from every angle.
Why won’t they look at me? Alex thought, his breath quickening. This wasn’t right. How could he get to know his brothers and sisters if he could not see their faces? If they had no faces? Horus would never have sent him into the midst of such a place deliberately. There must have been some kind of mistake.
He looked back toward Horus, for direction, or just to take in his gentle smile. But where Horus had been there were now only more rows of brothers and sisters, all facing the pyramid, which was always in the distance.
Alex turned in a circle. The backs of heads. His brothers and sisters. The pyramid. As far as he could see.
Something was wrong.
“Horus?” He called.
“HORUS?!?!” the sea of brothers and sisters wailed from mouths Alex couldn’t see.
“Horus?!” Alex yelled, tears welling in his eyes and terror rising in his throat.
“HORUS?!?!?!” the brothers and sisters echoed in deafening unison.
“Horus!?”
“HORUS!?!?”
“I want to go home!” Alex covered his eyes, then uncovered them.
The backs of heads going forever in all directions. The pyramid on the horizon. Alex was as alone as he had ever been. He had done everything he could. He looked around for something to jump from, but there was nothing. Horus’ lap had been the highest point here, and now it was gone. Horus was gone. And Alex had gone as far as he could.
It started to rain then. Big, red droplets. All at once, the brothers and sisters turned their hidden faces up to the white sky, revealing the tops of a million heads. Alex looked up with them. The drops spattered on his face. He was thirsty. His mouth was dry. He opened his mouth to catch some liquid. It was warm and ferric. But it soothed his dry throat.
Maybe if I drink enough, I can talk louder, and they’ll hear me, he thought. The liquid pooled in his mouth. He drank and drank.