If the young man in a wrinkled black suit had waited another hour that summer morning, I would have probably missed his dive off the Park Office Tower outdoor patio. I've always avoided the noon business lunch crowd and the line at the deli just inside the double doors leading to the fifteenth floor patio. I didn't fit the suit and tie crowd. I wore jeans at work and kept to myself. After a nasty divorce last year, my social self-confidence had taken a beating.
But at eleven o'clock, I was smoking at a shaded umbrella table with the only other person on the patio, the gorgeous Jenna Sparks, an advertising firm secretary, who had a lover named Mary.
We had met during the winter while smoking outside the lobby front entrance. She was one of the few people I knew in the building, other than Harvey, the security guard at the front desk, and the people in my VA Benefit office. Harvey told me Jenna was a lesbian. She proudly confirmed the story, which made me want her more.
Jenna knew how I felt and tempted me constantly. At age thirty, I still refused to acknowledge that sex drive killed brain function. I believed I could change her.
A hot breeze wafted Jenna's curly brown hair as I sat in the chair across from her. Wearing a short, sleeveless lime green dress cinched tight around her narrow waist, she crossed her legs to display more thigh, brushed her left hand through her hair, and arched back to push out her breasts.
"Hi, Mark." She smiled. "I'm just cooling it off."
"Stop messing with me."
I tried glancing over the umbrella up the remaining twenty floors of the glass tower. A flag jerked in the slight breeze, furled against blue sky. When I looked down and lit a Winston, I got lost in her brown fawn eyes. Her smooth white complexion was accented by bright red lipstick. She pulled a long, reed thin cigarette from a blue case and moved it back and forth between her lips as if sucking it.
"Stop it."
Jenna lit the cigarette and grinned, her teeth too white for a nicotine habit.
"It's my birthday next week," she said.
"How old?"
"Twenty-five. What would you like to give me?"
I inhaled deep.
"I know what you're thinking." She blew smoke and a kiss at me.
That's when the double doors opened, and the young man in the black suit walked past without a glance our way. He climbed the yard high, concrete safety wall, maintained perfect footing on the round iron railing, then spread his arms and did a swan dive across the narrow alley through the Chinese restaurant roof fourteen floors below.
Jenna's red lips formed a circle; her brown eyes bulged and smoke wafted from her nose as she held her breath. We heard a thud impact, a cracking crunch, and a clash like a thousand tin cans spilling on concrete.
Jenna's voice rose an octave. "What just happened?"
Crushing my cigarette, I stood and tried to remain calm. "He jumped."
"Oh, my God."
I walked to the wall and gripped the railing. I'm afraid of heights, and when I looked down, my stomach tingled like a quick roller-coaster dip. Traffic moved along the streets; people waited at crosswalks. A taller glass building across the street to my left reflected blue sky. I saw empty black tar and gravel roofs on the older smaller buildings beyond the Chinese restaurant. No one else had seen his jump, but people in the restaurant kitchen sure knew about it. The black tar roof had a circular hole about five feet wide.
Jenna now stood on my right. We heard faint frantic voices yelling what must have been Chinese. An oily black smoke wisp rose from the hole, spreading until it faded. A distant siren whooped.
Then, something weird happened.
Thick gray smoke rose from the opening, but didn't rise. Rolling sideways like fog, it formed a perfect circle around the hole. I felt Jenna's trembling fingers on my right hand.
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