Gravity of Life (or...The Witness)

                        Gravity of Life (or…The Witness)
                                              By
                                      Jessica Shear


When I saw the body falling from somewhere far above my head, I thought of the parachutes I used to make out of my father’s handkerchiefs.  I’d drop them from the top of our back porch or from the lowest limb of our backyard elm.  I was afraid of heights but loved the idea of seeing the effects of gravity and thinking of how man has been driven to slow the effects, or defy them all together.  So, when I saw the body falling, I thought, “Her handkerchief isn’t big enough.”

I had been walking to my apartment from the Alice Coachman Adult Education Center on the corner of Main and Corday.  I work there trying to teach the lost, the looking, and the un-teachable.  I instruct them on how to fill out job applications, put together resumes, type fast and accurately – with more than two fingers if possible.  I talk to them about the best interview outfits and gently advise them that breasts (large, small, pushed up, or crammed in) shouldn’t be the first thing an employer notices about you.  As a man, I felt like a traitor to my gender, but I do have a job to do.  That topic recently brought on a debate about just how a woman should dress if she knows the interviewer is a man; the argument being that men love breasts, so why not show them?  Debates are big at the Center.  Clear winners are rare.

About an hour before I’d locked up and headed home, I’d had a lengthy, circular debate with Jazmin.  She wants to be a paralegal and needs to learn to type well, but she refuses to reduce the length of her nails.  They are real, so long that they curl under at the ends and are adorned with blood red polish and nail tattoos of flowers or stars.  Jazmin gestures a lot so her nails are the focal point – rather than her words or her face.

Sherill, one of the Center’s instructors – not known for tact or subtlety - had asked Jazmin, “Just how in the hell do you wipe your ass without poking yourself?”  To which Jazmin had smiled, licked her index finger and said, “Nothing wrong with a poke now and then, baby.  You should try it.” 

I don’t completely understand the women I work around, although I spend more time with women than most men do.  I see heartbreaking sincerity, full-frontal defiance of authority, inexcusable laziness, unequaled determination – all on display without apology.  Emotion is worn like a trendy accessory that seems to say – “I am a proud survivor.  I will hold my head up high and succeed where others thought I would fail…until I screw up on something, and then I will hold my head up higher just DARING anybody to criticize me.”  Or – “I will walk with my eyes cast down, wearing my shame like a body cast, limiting my mobility and minimizing the expectations others will have of me.” 

There is anger, jealousy, hate, love, sisterly support, drive and determination, fear and satisfaction.  So much emotion.  So much energy spent and swirling within the small rooms of the Alice Coachman Center.

I was thinking about a client who’d gone to a job interview that morning and returned tear-stained and despondent because she felt she’d performed poorly in answering questions.  I tried to ease her anxiety by saying that there’s a lot of competition for jobs, and the best any of us can do is try.  She’d prepared well for the interview, and I didn’t want her to get discouraged so easily.  She was angry with herself, but also seemed to have lost faith in my ability to guide her – my advice not having helped her the way she’d hoped.  This is what I’d been thinking on my walk home.  And then I saw the body falling.

It wasn’t like slow motion at all.  It was really fast, but it seemed dreamlike because of the white floating around the body.  I saw both her hands.  One was clenched into a fist, and the other was pointing, like Michelangelo’s painting in the Sistine Chapel. 

Then gravity took claim of the woman, and the white surrounding her took on red and took on form.  Of course, it wasn’t a handkerchief.  She was wearing a white dress.  Not a wedding dress.  Not a toga.  It was like a white graduation robe, only fuller.  What had looked slightly ethereal in flight now looked institutional, and very bloody.

I stood less than a car’s length from where the woman landed.  My backpack weighted down my shoulders so my posture was terrible, and the bottle of water I’d been sipping was still touching my bottom lip.  This woman, any woman, any person deserved a better witness to their death than I was.  I was useless. 

Forgetting my own cell phone, I said in a “standing in front of a class teaching” voice, “Somebody call 911.”  Nobody was immediately around me.  Nobody heard me.  I said more loudly, “Somebody!  Call 911!”  I hadn’t moved my feet yet.  Finally, I bellowed, “Somebody call 911.  Somebody’s hurt here!  Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ!” 

I couldn’t take my eyes off the woman, but I couldn’t move my feet.  When some pedestrians joined me, I heard two people calling 911 at the same time.  One person said, “Somebody got hit by a car on the corner of Corday and Frost.  Another person said, “There’s a lady down in front of Parker’s Jewelry.” 

“She fell,” I said.  “She wasn’t hit by a car.  She fell from up there.”  But nobody was listening to me.  It suddenly became extremely important to me that everybody know exactly what I’d seen, but nobody was listening to me, and I couldn’t get all the words out loudly enough.

“For God’s sake!  Don’t touch her!  You’ll ruin the evidence” one man said as he pushed one of the cell phone people to the side.

“I wasn’t going to touch her, ass hole.  Don’t push me” said one bystander, giving a blow-by-blow of the situation to somebody on her cell phone.

“Everybody take a few steps back.  Step back so you don’t trample anything,” said pushy guy.

I felt hands pulling me from behind - pulling my backpack so the straps dug in across my chest.  I wouldn’t be moved.

“I saw what happened.  She wasn’t hit by a car.  She fell from way up there.  She floated down and landed here” I spoke loudly enough to be heard this time.

“Move back. You can tell all that to the cops when they get here” pushy guy said.

I didn’t move back.  I knelt on the ground where I’d been.  I knelt on the ground and looked at the hand that had been clenched – the hand closest to me.  It was still clenched, and the fingers hidden from my view.  I wondered if her nails were bitten to the quick – the nails of a distraught, over-burdened woman who had taken her own life.  I wondered if they were manicured and showy; the nails of a woman with something to prove. I wondered if the closed fist contained the hair of her murderer, or a suicide note, or any evidence of why this had happened.

I didn’t hear the sirens.  There must have been sirens, but I didn’t hear them.  I don’t know why I wasn’t physically moved, either.  There was so much going on, but I was still sitting on the ground, just a few feet from the woman. It wasn’t until one of the paramedics shifted the woman’s hand that I finally moved.  The fact that they didn’t know her hand had been clenched during her silent fall made me panic.  I had to tell them what I had seen.  It must have had significance.  I thought that if I didn’t tell them, an important part of the woman’s last moments would be lost.  I felt compelled to let them know.  If I didn’t, I knew something would be lost. 

It’s like when you’re a kid walking home from school, and you tell yourself that you can’t step on any sidewalk cracks or your mother will break her back.  It starts out as just a game – just a thought, and then it becomes real and nobody can distract you or you will be responsible for your mother getting hurt.  You ignore your friends calling to you from the opposite side of the street.  You aren’t startled by the dog barking behind the fence.  You – must – reach – home – without – stepping – on – a – crack.  You must!



“Her hand is closed” I yelled as I jumped up.  I stumbled under the weight of my pack and almost fell onto the woman and the three men working on her.  They yelled at me to get back.  The police arrived just as I was yelling, “Her hand.  One was closed tight.  She fell from somewhere up there and her hand was closed.  One hand was closed but one was open, like in that painting of whoever reaching out to God. But the one stayed closed.  I don’t know about the other because I can’t see it.  Can I see it, please?” And then a cop dragged me away and put me with the rest of the crowd.

I know now that I was in shock.  We like to think that we’d be cool, calm and collected in emergencies.  As a man who, on a daily basis, has to earn the respect of women who don’t always trust men, I know how important it is to hide weakness.  I know that showing any sign of loss of control opens me up to ridicule, confrontation and failure.  So, why I lost it so completely, I can’t figure out.  Certainly, it’s an awful thing – seeing somebody fall to her death.  It’s surreal while it is happening, but the impact causes injury that is raw in its realness. 

Nothing is more real than a broken person lying in front of you.  So, maybe I just couldn’t process it all.  Maybe it was my lifelong thing about gravity.  Hey kiddo – you like to experiment with the effects of gravity?  Here you go.  How’s that for gravity?

But there you have it.  I was the only witness to the woman’s free fall to earth, and I couldn’t get it together enough to tell the authorities what I saw.  To them, I didn’t even exist; I was just one of the crowd. 

When the police finally approached the now large group of bystanders, I felt great relief.  I knew I’d be able to tell them what I’d seen.  But they started at the opposite end of the semi-circle that had formed.  I saw people speaking.  I saw the cops taking notes and nodding.  What could they possibly be saying?  Nobody saw it happen.  What if the “she got hit by a car” theory got spread?  What were they saying?  Everybody wants to be a part of the story.  They were cheapening the whole thing.  This was somebody’s life.  It was somebody’s death.

I thought of all the women I’d met at the Center.  Their faces melded as one and then fanned out in front of me.  I saw them in all their beauty despite the ugliness they shared with me in breathy whispers, defiant outbursts or hoarse confessions.

I started yelling, “Over here!  Over here!  I am the witness.”