UNITED STATES—Biggest mistake of my life, Max E. White, reminded himself. White in Hebrew symbolism is associated with being purified of sin, virtue and knowledge, the true color of light and enlightenment, meanwhile back at heartbreak ranch, is also symbolizes death. Which stands to reason: to breathe is to wallow in sin. So there Max, or Big Max, as he was known, though there was nothing big about him, quite the unassuming opposite was true. He would be in the elevator coming down in Warren Hall, and there’d be all these business majors, and they were like two and three heads higher than Max.
At five-foot-six Max E. White (née Woycowitz) was in the lower 13 percentile of American business executives. He knew it; being called Napoleon gave him moxie and drive…In the old days, but in the here and now…Gosh, Max was in a weird place, dwelling in this point of light, taking it all in from about the 31st floor of the Pan-Am building. (A fiery Aries businessman founded March 14, 1927) Human is a bug, it is the only bug that knowingly defects this mortal coil without the incentive of bug spray…Max was so caught up in his thoughts, he still hadn’t realized that his downward trajectory had ceased, in the roar of the air had been replaced by a vastness of silence. Above the carpet of clouds…
And as a radio, conversations started tuning in. The first officer on the scene, Officer Dunbar, had barely taken in the putrid was of bones and organs, the fluids not yet seeping into the black topcoat, that landing on a post office ramp on nearby Park Ave. and this Dunbar is already grousing (I can hear his thoughts), if he’d spoken the steam-puff syllables would be visible: Damned jumpers never think about anyone but themselves. Well, they don’t think, they’re not in their right mind, if anybody was in their right man they’d sober up pronto. He coulda landed on some poor old lady or a pregnant woman with a waiting for its whole life, only to have it spooked out. A miracle nobody got hit…
(Why am I hearing all this, Max wondered, he wanted to plug his hearing with his fingertips but he had no fingers to plug them up with. When you take a decision like that and didn’t acknowledge that you could take somebody out on your way out—that was remiss. . . He could see the headlines already in Business Week, “Loss Leader Lost.” You cannot explain what happened, it came out of nowhere, then again nothing comes out of nowhere, it had to come somewhere. You can’t get something for nothing, as my malleable grandfather said. And I never believed a word of it. Of course you can get something from nothing.
Bingo! Oh am so sorry to interrupt, but please continue, Mr. White. . . with our little deposition.
I owe you everything, why do you need me to go through with this…?
I want to hear it from you. . . And I promise I won’t interrupt for the next 50,000 years. . .
There was premeditation. I got all the heavy books, when Nathan did undergrad at Columbia King’s College. All those G-d damn heavy books that nobody ever reads for the humanities requirement, I mean if you’re gonna be a sawbones or a bean-counter who needs that crap. Hey, these weighty tomes finally came in handy. Ala-damn-bama. Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov (824 pages), Ulysses, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1245 pages) [book of the Month club], Don Quixote de la Mancha (976), War & Peace (1296), Middlemarch (880 pages). Christ, it’s a good thing they don’t really read the stuff they assign; it’s unfeasible anyhow. Of course I had to hire a “tutor” for little Max, who could read the books and go pass the exam. Now I’m happy that Max, Jr. is in Harvard Medical School. And I stuffed all these books into my briefcase.
So yeah, maybe it wasn’t an impulsive act like to 13 year-olds deciding to get married down in Honduras, where it all started to long ago with Sam Delaney. The depravity cavity of sense experience densens where you where I was. Each second became an engrossing eternity, no heed for the last moment’s fad. I had to get out of the air-conditioned box and I guess I had planned it (here I am second guessing myself). Rids myself of my overcoat first. Fresh air, I’m alive. Alive, I died…Conspiracy is a pillow, Max, like the nice eiderdown pillows Rega would get the Bloomingdale after-Christmas sale. This is a funny one, a Soviet study came up with the red-dye prohibition prohibition for us. It was really a play to placate Hoover, who had some smut on me the virtuous Max E. White (née Woycowitz), this virtue that harshened, and even showcased, the shock-value of my, shall me say, precipitous fall from grace: I had a reputation for being a moral man. Beware of such a brittle achievement…
Listen, Mr. Sir, I almost died a second death when hearing the police officer’s fears of the murder that could’ve been wrought when that heavy briefcase clobbered a taxi roof…Or how about my Bally loafer, the one the slipped off, meeting some poor schlub’s cranium at 95 mph…It’s not that you believe in G-d, it’s that G-d is imbuing every quark and molecule of creation.
The issues that seemed so unsolvable before I jumped could all be changed. The only thing I could not change was that I was now falling to my death. In other words, intense regret is what I felt.
Yeah, death toll of one at ground zero a miracle…And then everything went white…
To be continued…
Grady is the Wizard of Fiction.
