For a moment, the chauffeur recalls a Philip Roth story he'd read as a kid, "The Conversion of the Jews." In it, the teenaged Ozzie Freeman, rebelling against the unanswered questions of orthodox Jewry, locks himself on the roof of a synagogue and torments his rescuers below by sprinting left, then right across the edge of the roof, the rescue blanket moving in slapstick panic to keep up. But the chauffeur was no Jew and this was no conversion. And there was nothing funny, in his mind, about the plight of artists, all the shooting stars of unrequited love.
"You got a name, guy?"
It was easy for Kierkegaard to take the leap of faith, he thinks, after all, his first name was SÃ ¶ren. He chuckles at his own pun.
"You wanna share the joke? I like a laugh," says Gregory, trying to connect, as they trained him, inching toward his desperado.
SÃ ¶ren wasn't standing on a bridge overlooking the Oily, he says to himself, referring to the local nickname for the Mystic River, which was heavily polluted with untreated sewerage, shopping carts, sludge from the nearby oil refineries, and, some said, assorted mobster body parts. Whatever you found on the bottom of the Oily it sure as f*ck wasn't going to be faith. The chauffeur turns and looks down at the water below. Feteo, ergo sum.
"Don't do it, buddy. We've all been there," the paramedic continues, almost able to reach out and nab his hovering darkclad nutjob and send him on his way to the Cha-Cha Hall, as he likes to call the public psychiatric facility, overcrowded, underfunded and corporatized by Big Pharma.
Below, the roiling waters of sh*t, lit up by the chopper's beam, seem to smile up at him -- the ripples forming kisses: inviting, voracious, and forever becoming and disappearing, like hope. Heraclitus may not have been able to step into the same river twice, he muses, but he wouldn't have stepped into the Oily even once.
A young state trooper in gallant riding boots is just about to ratchet up the tentative hold he has on the chauffeur's legs when old Aeolus, seemingly tired of the teetering and the tottering, comes along and gives the chauffeur a swift kick in the tookus, lifting him up out of the heavily-armed Samaritan's hold and into a grand jete - up, up into the wilderness of the night, toward the spray-painted spiral of the Milky Way, up past the endless glowy cluster clouds of dialectical material (O, atoms in the eve!), to the very grasp of the Singularity, and then, suddenly, the forceful yank back down by the ankles, the headlong hurtle into the abyss, toward the stretched out arms of Mickey Sullivan, the snitch, rooted to the river bed, swaying like a colon polyp that's been strangled.
"Name of God," spouts the paramedic, and double crosses himself.
Siamo contenti? Son dio, ho fatto questa caricatura[4], laughs the fallen one.
But Gregory Milano hears instead the closing line of the opera Pagliacci, "La commedia e' finita!" and sees a Fellini moment in the leaper's shades, wherein he seems to watch himself recede and fall with the stranger, an eyeball tarantella, a mise en abyme.
The paramedic pulls back, nods knowingly at the dopplered exclamation from the poet, falling like a star toward the dark suck-swirl of filth and water, toward the interpenetration of being and nothingness, and the final submersion he so seemingly desires. Gregory feels a non so pià ¹ rising up from his solar plexus, but by the time he turns to face the ghosts and his partner, Tracy, the vibe is gone; he shrugs and simply says, "sh*t, we lost another one." And the toll baskets start their gurgle again.
In my end is my beginning. Right?
*
When news broke that a maxim-making chauffeur had thrown himself off the Tobin Bridge, the Triad knew and came together, as soon as Mrs. Steele had gone to work, to commiserate and remember him, Felix A. Culp. The Triad consisted of two 16 year old boys, Jim B. Crowe (JB) and Richy Steele, and the latter's 16 year old half-sister, Cindy. They all had known Felix in their several ways and drew on memories now assisted by the romance of sorrow. The heat pipes in the living room of the housing project apartment clanged and hissed and radiated so fiercely that the Triad often hung around in just their underwear and kept the windows open, even, as now, in winter. This proved extremely stressful most times for JB, who had a major crush on Cindy, and spent their sessions with a couch cushion crushed into his lap. He avoided gazing, as she lounged loosely in a stuffed chair opposite him, her black frilly underwear and bra and red lipstick making his metabolism gallop, a proverbial horse hot to trot, but even looking away he had pornographic flashes that made him want to do some serious populating. If Richy knew of the sexual tension between the two, he didn't write it to his face to read.
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