Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  He stood at full attention at the South Tower. Perched off one side of the structure was a concrete platform surrounded by Plexiglas, a capsule of sorts where yawning sentries did their own dubious monitoring of the bridge through a mounted spyglass, as if conducting a sociological study at a great remove. The sentries looked like kids, while Mr. Chen, who stood out front on the sidewalk, among the people, looked every bit of his forty years. He had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker—and he never stopped watching, even when he allowed himself a cigarette, smoking a cheap brand named after the city itself. He wore a baseball cap with a brim that poked out like an oversized duck’s bill, like the Cyrano of duck bills, the crown of which read They spy on you.

  Six years earlier, working as a functionary for a transportation company, Mr. Chen had read a story about the bridge in the paper, about bodies raining down to their end. Soon after, he quietly took his post at the South Tower. Ever since then, when not working his job, he’d been up on the bridge, pulling would-be’s from the railing. According to a blog he kept, he’d saved 174 jumpers—and in the process had been hailed as one of China’s great Good Samaritans. Of those he saved, some small number met near the bridge every year around Christmas to celebrate their new lives and ostensibly to offer their thanks. As part of the ceremony, they calculated their new ages from the date of their salvation. In this born-again world, no one was older than six.

  Back home I’d stumbled on Mr. Chen’s blog one day, reading it in jumbled Google translation, and became riveted by his blow-by-blow of life on the bridge. There’d been the husband and wife who’d jumped hand in hand. There’d been the man dressed in black, floating there on the water’s surface as a boat tried to reach him, until the current finally sucked him away. Another fellow had been pulled off the railing, back onto the bridge, and in the fight that ensued—one during which Mr. Chen had to enlist the help of others—the man had bitten his tongue in half and nearly bled to death on the sidewalk, leaving Mr. Chen covered in blood.

  Mr. Chen’s blog entries were sometimes their own desperate pleas: Lovelorn girls of Henan, where are you? read one. But more often they were a subdued, pointillistic chronicle of the day’s dark news:… Middle-aged man jumped off bridge where the body fell to the flower bed: died on the spot.… Speaking in northern accent, man gave me a cigarette, said: Alas! Wives and children.… A woman in the southeast fort jumped in riverbed, dead on spot.… Next to statue at southwest fort, man died jumping to concrete, one leg thrown from body, only blackened blood left behind. Meaningless life!

  And yet standing sentry among the hordes, Mr. Chen seemed a bit comical, or his mission seemed the ultimate act of absurdity. How could he possibly pick out the suicidal on a four-mile-long bridge? Were they marked somehow, glowing only for him? As no one seemed to pay him any attention, he was forced to take himself twice as seriously. And he was so engrossed in the Kabuki of his work that it occurred to me how easy a mark he might make for a practical joker tying shoelaces together. Had his heroics only been a figment of his imagination? Was he as unstable somehow as his jumpers? And was he serious with those binoculars, especially with visibility reduced to fifty yards or so in the murk? When I introduced myself, he waved me off. “Not now,” he said gruffly. “I’m working.”

  Then his binoculars shot up to his eyes, sheltered by the bill of his cap, and he fumbled with the focus knob while gazing deep into the masses, searching, it would seem, for that fleeting infrared flare of despair, for the moment when he’d be called into action, ready for his hero moment.

  One’s reasons for being on the bridge belonged to the mysterious underworld in all of us, but to choose to die so publicly, so dramatically—turning languid flips or dropping straight as a pin—was something I couldn’t quite understand. After all the humiliation one suffered, all the monotonies and losses, the erasures and disintegrations, after being constantly consumed by society, was it a small reclamation of the self? And what would it feel like to fly, to prove you could? The mere flicker of that idea seemed almost too dangerous to consider. If you let it in, is that when you started to feel the pull of this other force? Could it be stopped?

  There were the Stoics, who justified suicide, and the Christians, who condemned it. There was the honorable seppuku of samurai, and the cowardly cyanide of Nazis. And there were suicide’s other famous practitioners: Virginia Woolf, entering the River Ouse with a heavy stone in her pocket; Walter Benjamin, overdosing on morphine in a hotel room in Spain in the belief that he was about to be turned over to the Nazis; Sylvia Plath, turning on the gas … and then, later, her son, too, by hanging. Meriwether Lewis shot himself in the chest; Kurt Cobain, in the head. There were Spanish matadors and Congolese pygmies. Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz and Tattoo from Fantasy Island. William James, the great humanist philosopher, tilting dangerously close to self-annihilation, wrote his father, “Thoughts of the pistol, the dagger, and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention,” and later proclaimed, “I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.”

  Those on the bridge weren’t dallying anymore. They’d come, one after the other, to jump, their lives reduced to this single sliver. Beneath the hum and blare of traffic came that insidious sucking sound. How could just one man stop it?

  Mr. Chen appeared to have a very strict routine on the bridge, no matter if it was snowing, blowing, or broiling heat. He stood at full attention at the South Tower, where a large percentage of his encounters came within the first one hundred meters past the fort, in that area of the bridge that spanned from the riverbank to the river itself. “In so much pain,” he would tell me, “they jump the second they think they’re over the mother river. And a lot of them miss the water.”

  His routine called for maintaining his station for about forty minutes out of every hour—then he fired up his moped, an unconvincing contraption on the verge of breakdown, and putted off down the sidewalk, weaving between walkers, like John Wayne astride a miniature Shetland pony. These were his rounds, up and down the bridge, motoring out one mile to the North Tower and then turning back. If he sniffed trouble out there, he might linger—in some cases might be gone hours—but today he reappeared a short time later, stitching deftly through the crowd, then kickstanding his Rocinante and resuming his same exact position, his same exact suspicious disposition, his same exact focused gruffness beneath the bill of his cap. Though he was stout, with plump hands, he held himself like a much bigger person, like the one he felt himself to be when on the bridge.

  The sky roiled and spit, as if we were lost inside some potion. Again, the scent of diesel and fish. After fifteen minutes or so, I had a splitting headache, and yet Mr. Chen stood nearly stock-still, unfazed, scanning the crowd with binoculars. His life was a grand monotony, but in his stillness and stasis, the possibility for calamity existed in every moment, and that’s what kept him coiled and at the ready.

  Mr. Chen would later describe a recurring nightmare that went like this: Someone was up on the railing, and he was sprinting as fast as he could to save the jumper. Over and over, he would arrive too late, as the body pushed from the railing to the hungry maw below. He said that he’d been visited on the bridge by a foreign psychiatrist who asked him if he might draw a picture of whatever came to mind. So he did: of a large mountain disappearing up into the clouds, which the psychiatrist interpreted as Mr. Chen trying to carry the weight of the weightless sky. Or something like that. Mr. Chen was fuzzy on the details and didn’t have much time for this nonsense. The encounter smudged into the same colorlessness of every other colorless moment in the colorless flow of time on the bridge.

  The rain had let up and the fog shifted, though the weekend traffic had worsened—the city dwellers heading out to the country, the country dwellers heading into the city. I meandered out on the bridge for a moment, away from the tower and the armed sentries and Mr. Chen, who didn’t seem to care a whit about me unless
I planned to jump. As I gazed downriver, in the easterly direction of Shanghai, a shipyard with an enormous crane appeared in the near distance while a temple loomed with its wooden pagoda on a hill. Skimming the river’s brown, roiling surface came a steady, dirgelike stream of barges loaded with lumber, coal, containers, and sand. The view into its muddy waters was not for the faint of heart. There were two ways to die from here: on impact with the water’s surface, which at sixty-five miles per hour is like hitting concrete, the shattering of bone and internal organs, the instant blackout and massive bleeding, the general pancaking and dismemberment of the body—or by drowning, by somehow surviving the impact and waking underwater, swept away in the current, unable to muster a frog kick given the various possible combinations of broken pelvis/femur/back/jaw, etc. Below, the waters eddied and swirled, etching a secret language on the surface. When a train passed, the whole bridge seemed to buckle and sway, causing me to clutch the railing.

  One of Mr. Chen’s blog entries was simply entitled “Girl’s Tears.” It told the tale of a girl from the country who’d come to the bridge, not far from this spot here, to end her life. It started with the observation that tears shed by girls were like tears of angels “that come from disappointment—or was it regret?” This was a runaway, said Mr. Chen, and she stood “tummy railing,” looking down at the water, despondent. When Mr. Chen approached, he gave her three options: (1) leave the bridge, (2) call emergency services for help, or (3) let Mr. Chen take her to his house, where she could live for a time with him, his wife, and their daughter. Mr. Chen took her phone and called her belligerent boyfriend, and as he spoke to him, she climbed the railing to jump. He seized her hand; she pulled away, climbing higher on the railing, teetering for a second there. He tore her from the railing, but as the police arrived, she ran into traffic, then tried to disappear in the crowd. The police apprehended her and took her away. It was over just like that. One second he could feel her breath on him; the next she was gone, and Mr. Chen, tough as he was, claimed to have burst into tears.

  “Next day called number,” he wrote on his blog. “Always unanswered.”

  The reason Mr. Chen was in the business of saving lives now was that as a boy, he’d learned what it meant to go unanswered. There is a saying in Chinese he used to describe this condition, that he never possessed “mother’s shoes.” With those words, he threw back an oversized shot of a potent grain alcohol. “Getting drunk loosens the tongue,” he declared empirically, then refilled our teacups as we sat together in a tight, crowded restaurant near the bridge. He clinked them in a toast and tossed another mini-bucketful into the back of his throat, where, according to my simultaneous research, everything caught fire and napalmed down the gullet to the stomach, where in turn it flickered and tasered a while, like rotgut lava. We had left the bridge for lunch, and he had insisted that I drink with him. Sensing we might be in the midst of a transitional relationship moment, I joined him in the first few rounds but then thought better of it—there was no doubt this guy was going to drink me under the table—and eased off. He laughed when I did, a disparaging laugh, wondering aloud at what kind of American I was.

  Our party now included my translator, Susan—who had been born in Nanjing but raised in the United States—and a wordless man who had suddenly appeared, ostensibly a close friend of Mr. Chen’s, called Mr. Shi. We’d arrived at this “family restaurant” sometime after noon, after we’d all left the bridge together, Mr. Chen on his moped and the three of us on foot, taking endless flights of stairs down through the South Tower to the ground, where Mr. Chen was waiting to ferry us, one by one, on the back of his moped to the restaurant. I didn’t know where to put my hands, so I grabbed the bulk of his shoulders.

  We sat down to filmy glasses of beer and a clear, unmarked bottle of grain alcohol, and saucers of peppers and tripe, tofu soup, noodles, and fish stew. Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi began smoking Nanjings until we were wreathed in smoke. Overhead a fan lopped away off-kilter, on the verge of unscrewing itself from the ceiling. The walls of the restaurant were sepia colored, plastered with old posters, Buddha sharing the wall with a liquor ad. The hissing sound of the wok—onions and chicken and squirming mung beans—agitated beneath the clatter of plates and the hoarse voices of men (there were no families here, only workmen) huddled at the eight or so tables, heads sluicing with liquor, too.

  Mr. Chen explicated his opening statement. See, in the old times, before “the Communist liberation,” a great deal of pride was connected to these homemade textiles, for both parent and child. The shoes and socks were a declaration of individual love in a country obsessed with the self-effacing collective. His own mother had always been an erratic presence, but after his parents split when he was eight, she disappeared for the better part of a decade—and so, too, did his “mother’s love,” as he put it. That’s when he went to live with his grandmother, in a village outside the city. Widowed at eighteen, his grandmother served an important function in the village: She was a peacemaker and therapist of sorts, if utterly unschooled. It was from her that Mr. Chen had learned the fine art of persuasion. It was from the incompleteness of his own family that he’d built this not-so-secret life as the defender of broken humanity. And the weight of the task had become its own burden.

  “I’ve aged terribly in my six years on the bridge,” he said, again clinking teacups with Mr. Shi. “To age!” He drank and then admitted that he had a lot of gray hair, due to the weather and stress—stress on the bridge, stress at work, stress at home. He caught me gazing at the thick, black, spiky forest matting his head. “I’ve been dyeing it for years,” he said.

  He sat back, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. He poured another glass, this time hesitating before drinking, and spoke again as he stabbed a piece of tripe, then began to chew. On the bridge, he said, there were three types of jumpers, and they had to be dealt with either by force or finesse, by blunt words or wraithlike verbiage fashioned into a lasso. Mostly they came peaceably, but sometimes it was a donnybrook. The first category included the mentally unstable or clinically insane. In the frenzy of letting go, these were the ones who might take you with them, grasping onto anyone as some proxy for “mother’s love.” So—Mr. Chen would charge them like a dangerous man himself, wrestling, punching, kicking, doing whatever was necessary. “I’m very confident in my physical strength,” he said. “Since I have no psychological training, my job is to get that person off the bridge as quickly as possible.” Whereupon he might take him or her to “the station,” which, as it turned out, was an in-patient psych ward at the highly reputed Nanjing University, one of the few places in the city where the suicidal could receive professional care and treatment.

  The second category was the emotionally fragile, the wilted flower, the person who had lost someone—a husband, a child, a wife, a parent—or suffered from some sort of abuse and saw no way to go on. If the potential jumper was a woman, Mr. Chen’s strategy was to try to bring her to tears, for that often broke the tension, and once emotion poured forth, he might grab for her hand and huddle her away. Men, by contrast, were both simpler and trickier. You forked one of two ways. Either you told him bluntly that you were about to punch him in the nose if he didn’t step away from the railing, or you did the exact opposite: You approached in a nonthreatening, even companionable, manner, offering a cigarette to the figure lingering too long by the railing, and from there steered him to a place like this restaurant, where together you could drink grain alcohol and really talk, something that wasn’t so easy in a culture that still held fast to a Confucian ethic of stoicism.

  The final category, he claimed, included the ones who “failed really hard, or too often.” Usually men, these would-be jumpers had often lost a great deal of money and weren’t feeling so wonderful about themselves anymore, especially when their failures were thrown into relief by those riding on the heady high seas of the new China, driving fancy cars, wearing designer clothes, smoking expensive American
cigarettes. Mr. Chen then pointed to Mr. Shi and said, “He was one of those.”

  Mr. Shi, a thin man of thinning hair, blinked laconically through the smoke. Though the stage was set for him to unspool his tale, he showed no interest in taking up the story. “Later,” barked Mr. Chen. It was strange, and not a little confusing, how gruff he could be while making himself, and those around him, so vulnerable. When more plates of food arrived, he shoveled beans and noodles, fish and broccoli onto his plate, then lit upon it all as if it were prey, gobbling and drinking, then gobbling some more.

  I regarded him again in this dim light. He was unabashed in his mannerisms, a man who seemed to live so fully inside this hexed world of suicide that he had little time for polish or polite chitchat or getting-to-know-you. When I asked if he had heard of the famous Hollywood film It’s a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart plans to end his life on a bridge until an angel named Clarence saves him, he cut me off by shaking his head. No, he didn’t care about movies or my attempts to draw fatuous parallels. Nor were we kindred spirits: Simply showing up did not confer membership in the club. He barely bothered to look at me when responding to my questions.

  In turn, I soon found myself growing anxious there in that restaurant—very anxious—watching Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi drain glass after glass. My mind suddenly seized upon the notion that this was a Saturday, the busiest day on the bridge, and here we sat. However absurd it had felt to be standing on a four-mile bridge, thronged by thousands, trying to pick out jumpers, I felt a sudden onrush of dread at not being there at all, as if the welfare of all humanity depended on our vigilance. Part of it had to do with the effect of the grain alcohol. And part of it was fatigue—the result of all those time zones to get here. In that loud, hot space, I felt simultaneously this desire to stand and leave and yet to lay my head down and rest. The irrefutable truth was that nothing—neither butter nor Mr. Chen—would dissuade the jumpers from coming: So what was the point of being here at all?