Love and Other Ways of Dying

by Michael Paterniti

  That was the question that occurred to me now in that mung-bean-and-hooch restaurant, that hole-in-the-wall, listening to the guttural rebukes of Mr. Chen: What was I doing here at all, in a place where people came to kill themselves, seven thousand miles from my home and family? This wasn’t an assignment that had been given to me. I’d chosen it. I’d come as if there were some message here, some fragment to justify, or obliterate, that slow bloom of doubt in my chest. But now I could feel the pressure under the soles of my feet: The bridge ran under me, too.

  If you dig deep enough into the past, almost every family has its suicide. My maternal grandmother once told me the story of a relative dating from the nineteenth century: a young woman fresh from Ireland, a Catholic who’d married a Protestant. She was isolated, living with her husband’s family in upstate New York, in the region known as the North Country, and her life became a slow torment from which there seemed to be no escape, even after bearing a child. Her beliefs were pilloried and belittled. She slowly unraveled. One day she put rocks in her pocket and stepped into a cistern, where she drowned.

  But such events didn’t just belong to the past—or to some mythic country, either. From my own suburban hometown, I remembered a sweet, shy kid, roughly my age, who seemed incapable of any sort of demonstrativeness, who drove himself to the Adirondacks in winter, purchased a coil of rope along the way, found a sturdy tree, and hanged himself. I had nightmares about that boy, shagged in ice until his father found him and cut him down.

  And the neighbor down the street, found in the bathtub … And the kid who ran his motorcycle into a tree, an accident but for the note left behind saying that’s exactly what he intended to do … And so on. Even in suburbia, suicide had seemed like its own opaque parable, the never-happened, glossed-over secret.

  I came upon the story of a boy, a British art student named Christian Drane, who’d photographed suicide spots in England for a school project—including a bridge in Bristol, where he was approached by a stranger who wondered if he was all right—and then hanged himself in the Polygon woods of Southampton. No one could believe it. He’d made everyone laugh. He had a tattoo on his arm, representing his family. Afterward, his girlfriend told an inquest that Christian was the happiest person she knew, “cheeky, spontaneous, excitable.” He whisked her to Paris for her birthday, wrapped her in “fairy lights” and took her portrait. He posted other photos from his project online: other bridges, subway stations, and Beachy Head, the chalk cliffs of Eastbourne, the most famous of English suicide spots. Each bore the moniker “Close Your Eyes and Say Goodbye.”

  The photograph of Christian that accompanied many of the news stories showed a boy with mussed-up hair and pierced ears with black plugs, looking impishly askance at the camera. Had the pretense of the project emboldened him, or was “the project” merely his eventual suicide? His final note, which no one claimed to understand, read: “To mum and anybody who cares. I have done something I can never forgive myself for. I am a bad person. I am sorry.”

  The Yangtze ever beckoned. And its pull was finally felt at the family restaurant by Mr. Chen, who abruptly stood, grunted, walked out the front door like a superhero summoned by dog whistle, then fired up his moped and went swerving off, his They spy on you double-bill back on his head, binoculars dangling around his neck. Left in his wake, we—Susan the translator, Mr. Shi, and I—straggled back to the bridge in a slow-motion amble. It felt good to be in the open air again, somehow cleansing after all the smoke and noise.

  Bent like a harp, Mr. Shi was the kind of gentle man you instantly wanted to protect, to shield from life’s bullies or from the falling monsoon rain that now switched on again. It seemed to pain him to have to speak. He was too slight for his somewhat dirty slacks and pale blue dress shirt—and carried himself with so little swagger he seemed resigned to the fact that he interested no one. Except I was interested. I wanted to know what Mr. Chen had meant when he’d identified Mr. Shi as one who’d failed really hard. Mr. Shi squinted at me as he lit a cigarette and then started to speak, hesitated, and started again. He said that several years back, his daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. He’d borrowed money for her treatment and had fallen tens of thousands in debt, even making the desperate blunder of engaging with a local loan shark.

  When he went to the bridge on that fateful day, he loitered by the railing long enough for Mr. Chen to lock in on him through his binoculars, and then this man was suddenly standing next to him, saying, “Brother, it’s not worth it.” After a while, Mr. Chen got Mr. Shi to smoke a cigarette and coaxed him off the bridge, down to the family restaurant to drink and talk, whereupon Mr. Shi’s entire story poured forth. Mr. Chen listened closely, trying to understand as best as possible Mr. Shi’s predicament, and then began to formulate a plan. Mr. Chen would speak with the loan shark and all the other vengeful parties in the matter. He’d negotiate a truce, a repayment plan, a job search. He insisted that Mr. Shi meet him the following day, at his workplace at the transportation company, where he often welcomed the weekend’s forlorn and misfit to his desk, a recurring gesture that had left his bosses exasperated and threatening to fire him. He’d given Mr. Shi hope and friendship (though details of the repayment plan were murky), and Mr. Shi had found a way to begin life anew.

  In this moment of sheepish intimacy—Mr. Shi had a habit of making eye contact, then looking away as if embarrassed—he reminded me of something Mr. Chen had said: “The people I’m saving are very, very kind. They don’t want to hurt anyone, so the only way they can vent is by hurting themselves. In that moment when they are deciding between life and death, they are much simpler, more innocent in their thoughts. They almost become blank, a white sheet.”

  In a way, Mr. Shi was human pathos writ large; in another, he was the smidgen of hope that caused the caesura before jumping. It struck me as odd, however, that it required a moment like this, walking with him now, to realize that while the deeper, more ancient brain was at all times in dialogue with death, and while that dialogue asserted itself into one’s conscious mind from time to time, the frontal lobe was a powerful combatant in self-denial. No matter what declivities I’d found in my own life, I’d always thought of suicide as something occurring over a divide, in the land of irrevocable people, when evidence suggested again and again—sweet Mr. Shi, right here in front of me!—that wasn’t the case at all.

  We climbed the South Tower stairwell back to the bridge and found Mr. Chen again, standing sentry, and he proffered us a slight if somewhat cool nod. He seemed so alone, standing there; even his wife and daughter knew little of his life on the bridge. They didn’t know he’d once been stabbed in the leg; they didn’t know the emotional storms he’d weathered on those days when he lost a jumper. (“I want to give them a clean piece of land,” he said, using a local turn of phrase. “I don’t want them worrying.”) Now the rain galloped harder; a sea of umbrellas popped open, moving south to north and north to south. Then, as quickly, the rain stopped and a low-lying monster cloud filled with a muggy kind of light and a crowding heat blanketed everything. One wondered if there’d ever been blue sky in Nanjing. Below, the barges glided downriver in the same stream that carried fallen trees and clumps of earth in the direction of distant Shanghai. While Mr. Chen scoured the crowd, Mr. Shi crouched under the shelter of the fort and lit a cigarette. Cars and trucks and taxis came and went, honking horns, the taste of fuel and smog thick in the air.

  Another reporter appeared on the bridge. Young and wearing a flouncy miniskirt with white high heels, she held a device that looked to be the size of a pen, which acted both as her tape recorder and camera. It seemed like secret-agent stuff, but she announced herself to be a student from Shanghai, here to do a big exposé on suicide. Softened a bit by alcohol and the spectral vision of youth itself, Mr. Chen intermittently answered her questions, allowing that the hours between 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. were the most likely for attempts and that his method on the bridge boiled down to intuition. “I’m loo
king for their spirit as much as their expression and posture,” he said. Then he made a grand show of getting on his moped, kicking it to life, and put-putting off on patrol, John Wayne again on his Shetland pony.

  We both stood watching him go, the young woman and I, until he disappeared behind tatters of sky-fog that had come loose. In his absence, I was buffeted again by a wave of ennui, this crescendoing sense of uselessness. But then the young student reporter turned to me, beaming with bright eyes, and blurted in broken English, “What angel is he!”

  There are always two countercurrents running through the brain of someone contemplating suicide, much like the currents working at odds in the river itself: the desire to escape and the dim hope of being saved. The mind, having fixated on suicide as an option, might take signs of encouragement in everything: cloud formations or rough seas or a random conversation. In the failure of the mailman to arrive. Or the store sold out of a particular brand of cereal. As the mind vacuum-seals itself to its singular course of action, and as the body moves in concert—as suction takes hold and begins to claim its molecules—the only solution to the inevitable chain of unfolding events, the only possibility of being saved, is an intervention of some sort, a random occurrence or gesture. The hand on the shoulder. Then, the mind that has held so long and fast to the body’s undoing might shift, and unburden, and deaggregate, in some cases, almost instantly. Recidivism rates for those mulling suicide are low for all but the severely depressed. Help someone focus step by step across the bridge and he or she will be less inclined to ever return.

  In my reading, I kept coming back to William James, brother of Henry, journeying across the European continent in 1867, his despair at feeling a failure, the pull of ending it all. In his Norfolk coat, bright shirts, and flowing ties—“His clothes looked as if they had come freshly pressed from the cleaners,” a contemporary once said, “and his mind seemed to have blown in on a storm”—he decamped to Berlin, and took the baths at Teplice, in what was then Bohemia. Later, plagued by intense back pain that had migrated to his neck, he took the hypnotic drug chloral hydrate as a sleep aid, and tried electric-shock therapy, which failed to provide relief. In his deepest depression, he felt he’d arrived at a terminus. And yet he withstood the urge of self-annihilation, never again contemplating suicide. A friend of his, a woman named Minny, who helped encourage him through his troubled time (then died herself at a young age), reminded him in a letter of the proposition ever at work: “Of course the question will always remain, What is one’s true life—& we must each try & solve it for ourselves.”

  Now, in the country that brought the world 20 percent of its annual suicide victims, I stood awaiting Mr. Chen’s return while breathing in the particulates and invisible lead chips of progress. Time came to a very still point in the late afternoon, and I ambled out onto the bridge with Susan, the translator, realizing that whatever vision of Mr. Chen’s heroism had brought me here in the first place, it was folly to think I’d actually ever see him save someone.

  Susan was telling me about a family acquaintance who, years back, had jumped from the bridge in winter (most suicides here occurred in the fall and spring). Bundled in many layers against the elements, she had gone to the bridge in distress, climbed the railing, and leapt. One hundred and thirty feet down, at the speed of sixty-five miles an hour, she had hit the river, but if it was the angle or the specifics of her swaddling, if it was will or fate, she had lived, survived not just the fall but also the currents and hypothermia and, most of all, the killer flotsam. Every once in a while, for whatever reason, someone was indeed spit back out—but what I wanted to know was this: Having returned from the river, was she happy now, had she found in the aftermath her true life, solved the thing that had first gone missing in her? Susan considered the question. “I think happy enough,” she said, “but who knows?”

  Just then, as silence fell between us, a man lurched past in a blur of green. We paid him no mind, really, until he was about twenty steps beyond, out where the bridge first met water. Once there, he stopped, put both hands on the railing, and just like that, threw a leg up. The green man’s body rose, and now he was hooking his ankle on the top bar, then levering himself from vertical to horizontal until he lay on top of the railing. People streamed by, apparently unaware, staring down. The green man began to push his way over the railing, at which point I knew that I was not dreaming and that he was going to kill himself. I shouted, and then burst toward him, sprinting past Mr. Chen’s posters and flags.

  The green man began shifting to the other side, listing as if on the curl of a wave, half of him letting go into space. Reaching him, I reflexively planted a foot against the concrete base of the railing, latched an arm up and over, then wrenched his body as hard as I could while I pushed back from the railing. His body, which was as limp and resigned as if he’d been filled with sawdust, came tumbling back into the real world, where he assumed the full proportions of his humanness again. He had a very tan face and rough hands. He reeked of alcohol. Even before we’d hit the ground, he’d blurted something in Chinese, and then repeated it as I held him in a tight bear hug, readying for a struggle that never came.

  “I’m just joking,” he implored. He had the supplicant, bedraggled demeanor of a man at loose ends. “I’m okay, thank you.…”

  Shocked back into the world of the living, the green man didn’t wait for the question; he just began talking, in a fit of logo-mania. “The reason I tried to kill myself,” he blurted, “is because my father was in the army.…”

  His story seemed disjointed, and more so because Susan was trying to do three things at once—translate, call Mr. Chen, who was not answering, and figure out how to get the attention of Mr. Shi, who was stationed back at the fort, casually smoking cigarettes. A crowd began to gather, an airless huddle. The man went on. “My father is ninety and very sick. We lost his documents in a fire, and we have no money to care for him. The government needs proof that he was in the army, but we are a family of soldiers. I was one, too.…”

  Mr. Chen had said that people become innocent again on the bridge. They become simple and open in a way that they never otherwise were in real life. And here I was, bear-hugging a man in green coveralls named Fan Ping, trying to crush some spirit inside him that had opted to, in Mr. Chen’s words, “dive downward.” He was talking to me earnestly, though I didn’t understand a word. He was a child, needing someone to understand. His eyes swelled, and two streams of water released over his smooth, rounded cheeks. I don’t know, but it didn’t seem like crying, exactly. It was like something done less out of grief than reflex. With my arms around him, hands chained, I could feel his heart thudding into mine. His breath of stale spirits filled my lungs. When I looked down, my shoes were his, two terribly dirty, scuffed sheaths of cheap, disintegrating leather. We could barely stand as we swayed together.

  Fan Ping said that he was thirty-seven years old and that his mother had died three years earlier. He worked for a gas station, Sinopec, and made $400 a month. He was one of those known as a guang gun, or “bare branch,” unmarried, a victim of demographics in a country where tens of millions of men went without wives. “What am I supposed to do now?” he said.

  The crowd of onlookers registered their concern and curiosity. Some in the back were laughing, unsure of what indeed was transpiring, or just made nervous by it. I had an irrational second of hating those people in the back, of wanting to lash out, but all that really mattered was keeping my body between Fan Ping and the railing, in case he made another lunge. Eventually Mr. Chen appeared and dismounted from his moped. On cue, the crowd parted while Mr. Chen stepped forward, invested with the power and understanding of all the nuances at play here. Fan Ping started his story again—army … sick father … dead mother … gas station … so sorry to try to kill self—and Mr. Chen asked me to let go of the man, something I wasn’t at all inclined to do. Then he pulled out a camera and took Fan Ping’s picture, which seemed at best like an odd way to beg
in and at worst like a major violation of the man’s privacy. Then, glaring straight at Fan Ping, who stood slumped and dirty, with bloodshot eyes, Mr. Chen spoke.

  “I should punch you in the face,” Mr. Chen said. “You call yourself a family man … a son … Chinese? If your father hadn’t been in the army, and if you didn’t try to kill yourself just now, I’d punch you. You’re not thinking—or are you just shirking your responsibility? I really would like to punch you now. Hand over your ID.…”

  Fan Ping seemed utterly flummoxed, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his identification card. Mr. Chen made a show of studying it, then derisively handed it back—was this a diversion, part of a new therapeutic method?—and in the same brusque tone asked what in the world was he thinking, coming up here like this? Fan Ping replied that he wasn’t thinking at all; he just didn’t have the money necessary to care for his father—and that his life boiled down to this vast, sorrowful futility.

  Mr. Chen sized him up again, with a withering look. I could see part of Fan Ping’s blue sock poking through the worn leather of his shoe. “Yes,” said Mr. Chen dismissively. “We all have our troubles.”

  Watching Mr. Chen face off with Fan Ping in that gray late afternoon was like watching twin sons of different mothers: They were both short and round. Mr. Chen asked Fan Ping where he lived. A country village outside the city. Mr. Chen asked how he’d gotten to the bridge. By foot, from his job. The conversation went on like this for some time while slowly Mr. Chen’s tone shifted from outrage and aggression to a more familiar, fraternal concern, even sweetness. “I promise you that there’s nothing we can’t fix,” he said, “but first we have to get you off this bridge.” Then later: “I’m here to help you.” In his dishevelment, Fan Ping didn’t seem capable of movement, as perhaps he hadn’t entirely given up on the idea that had brought him here in the first place. And Mr. Chen intuited this. He moved in closer and clasped his hand, a special shake, a locking of pinkies that meant brotherhood, then didn’t let go, dragging Fan Ping to the fort and a bus stop there while the crowd followed. He arranged for Fan Ping to meet him at his office first thing Monday morning. He wrote the address on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into Fan Ping’s pocket. He punched the digits of Fan Ping’s cell-phone number into his own device.