Unexpected

It's a bad way to go.

Trooping home after a very long day, contemplating my upcoming dinner and the growing cramp in my leg, stopping to capture the last fleeting breath of daylight on what may likely be my last clear evening in Mainz. I stopped often on the bridge, marvelling at the clear air, the flocks of birds collecting on the lampposts above me, the magnificant sunset behind the pariament buildings, the palace, and the Kaiser's Church. I photographed. I lingered.

Two minutes is a long time.

As I was passing the halfway point I heard someone yelling, and looked to see someone in the water. In the river, swimming, yelling something incoherent. I asked a young bicyclist:

'What's with him?' I ask.
'He jumped off the bridge,' the guy replies calmly.
'He did what?!' I'm not getting it.
'He jumped off the brige. He wanted to commit suicide and asked me to push him in. I refused. He jumped on his own.' Still calm. I'm standing there, watching this man swimming. The goosebumps crawling slowly up my legs and arms like an ant colony do not make me realize the swimmer's danger, at dusk of a not so warm day. My companion on the bridge comes to the eventual conclusion that the guy deserves whatever he gets. I'm speechless. I continue walking. I still don't really get it.

911 is not 911 everywhere else. Honestly, I don't know the number here--I think it's 101, or 112. I should learn. I don't know the answer when another passerby, a girl, asks me. She goes on to ask others. She must have found the right number.

I stand on the bridge and watch. He's swimming, midstream, in a river several hundred yards wide. Out of the corner of my eye, out of the growing dusk, I see the blue lights slowly converging on the bridge, first the left bank, then the right bank, police and firemen lining up behind me like a string of glittering pearls. First the scene is the coast guard boat, closely followed by a helicopter. We wave frantically at the boat, trying to direct him to where we last saw the swimmer.

I don't see him anymore. Two minutes is a long time.

No, I don't remember what he was wearing. No, I only saw him swimming, and I didn't understand him. I'm not a particularly useful eyewitness.

He doesn't surface.

Into the growing dusk the boats patrol the river; meanwhile, the cavalry has arrived, and basically join me at the railing. Our collective eyes scan the surface, but neither our combined wishes nor our powers of observation yield results.

The bicyclist said he told the jumper it wasn't going to work, he wouldn't be able to commit suicide that way. And he survived the fall...only to succumb to cold and water. If he reconsidered, if he had second thoughts, he had awhile look inevitability in the face. If he changed his mind, well--some times, there's no going back. I hope he still wanted an end to it all as badly in the water as he did in the moment of his brief and tragic flight. What a helluva way to go.