Falling in Love… Again.

As I approached the window, the first thing I saw was a woman, standing with a man on one of the lower roofs of the building.  She wore an evening gown, though the first snowflakes were twirling lazily down from a sky heavy with clouds. I could only see him from the back as gripped her bare arms and they kissed, so tenderly.  It was a moment of crystalline intimacy.

Then he pushed her.  There was no sound, and no violence but the act itself as she went over the edge, the light fabric of her gown billowing like a wing or a sail, and then she was gone.  The angle from which I watched prevented me from seeing the bottom of the courtyard or airshaft into which she had fallen… into which he had thrown her.  I banged on the window frame, shaking the panes of frost-etched glass and yelled something… I’m sure he couldn’t have heard me.  He stood, his back toward me, motionless in a dusk that gathered like smoke.

The super of the building croaked, “Don’t do that.  You’re flaking the paint.”

“He pushed her,” I cried.  “Didn’t you see?”  I avoided banging the window frame again, and found myself pointing, vehemently.

“No need to shout,” he said sternly, as he shuffled over to the window.  “See what?”

The man was gone.  The rooftop was bare, but for flakes of snow the wind had begun to chase in shifting waves. “There was a man… he’s gone, but we have to find her.”  I could hear my voice climbing in volume.

“You said a man,” he replied, squinting up at me.  He stood a head shorter, and his breath was bad. 

“A woman,” I shook my head, “And a man.  He pushed her… into the… courtyard.”  My teeth had begun to chatter.  It was getting darker beyond the window and there wasn’t much to see except the lights coming on in the lower floors of the building.  “I saw it,” I insisted.

Then the little man smiled a gray, uneven smile, ‘You think you saw.”

I know he didn’t believe me, and I had to wonder myself… I sometimes get things confused.  But I got him worried enough that he agreed to lead me through the complicated maze of passages and stairways. “Elevator’s out,” he’d explained.  “And there’s no courtyard.  It’s an airshaft… meant to give light to lower floors,” he grinned, as though he’d said something funny.

We climbed up the last, crooked steps and he let me the weight of a heavy lead lined trap door to emerge on the stretch of rooftop I’d seen from above.  It was deserted, as any roof would be on a snowy evening.  I approached the edge of the airshaft carefully… I have no fear of heights, and that’s the problem. The void calls to me, a seductive vertigo that tempts me to fly.  I looked over the edge.  The shaft plunged down several floors, the gloom was thick as the last, violet light glowed feebly in twilit clouds.

“See anything?” the twisted little man called with the ring of a challenge from the trapdoor.  He wouldn’t venture onto the roof with me.  I bent further over the edge of the airshaft, straining my eyes to see into the shadowed depths of the well and felt myself giving up.  The dark was too deep.  I couldn’t stay out in the cold wind much longer.  Even if I could convince the super to return with a light, how far would its beam reach into the airshaft, which must be eight floors deep at least?  Then a light turned on in one of the windows facing into the airshaft, casting a golden light on the floor of the shaft. 

There was nothing there.  A few bottles gleamed among mounds of unidentifiable garbage in one corner, and that was it.  I blinked.  I’d been sure that what I had seen was real…  Reasonably sure.  I was about to turn away as a gust of wind caused me to falter. Instinctively I dropped down flat to avoid falling, and found myself gripping something sharp along the roof’s edge.  I’d cut my hand, though not badly, and I peered over to see what it was.  Just beyond the lip of the roof, I could see what remained of a corroded copper drainpipe… and something else.  I reached out and lifted the object from where it hung from a filigree of torn metal.

It was a woman’s shoe, high heeled and impractical, with a single ruby strap.

It made no difference when I showed the shoe to the super.  If there was no woman lying broken at the bottom of the airshaft, there was no problem that was worth his bother.  But I knew.  I knew that I’d seen something, though I had begun to doubt what it was.  There had been a woman who had worn an evening gown and an elegant high-heeled shoe.  She haunted me now, and I knew she would continue until I discovered what had happened to her. 

The next day I moved into the building, taking a year’s lease on that empty apartment at the top of the northern tower. And that’s how I came to live here, in the place where I first saw her as she kissed the man who threw her from the rooftop.

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