Everything is Advertising 2

 

The glass wasn’t meant to stop anyone. It was there to frame the skyline. The way an artist frames a painting. Keep the eyes where you want them to look. He’d said that to a client once, on this same roof, when they were workshopping names for a new energy drink. “Contain the chaos,” he said. “The suggestion of danger sells better than the danger itself.” The client wrote it down like gospel. They always do.

 

Steve, the Managing Director, stood on the wrong side of the glass. Fifty something, gray hair pompadour flapping in the updraft, and a jaw that has never known a hamburger not made by a private chef. He gripped the glass with the private school panic of someone who’d only ever fallen into soft things like goose feather pillows. The wind lifted his cuffs. Beyond him the city buzzed as it always does, even after a train delay when someone ends it all. But that’s not why he was here.

 

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The banging was like thunder, far away then somehow immediately here. Fists on metal. Someone should really oil that stairwell door, he thought for a moment. Nobody ever would. 

 

BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.

He looked back, they were there, and there was nowhere else to go. 

 

The woman in the high rise across the street remembers only this: the leather toe dropping into the night. The blackness swallowing him like a mouth taking a small expensive bite. Suddenly he was gone. His shins. His knees. His hips. His chest. His head. A sequence of vanishing nouns. 

 

He didn’t scream. The woman on the street said her mother always talked about the rich. That with the right amount of money you can teach yourself not to scream.

 

On the ground, the city had gathered with its usual lookie-loos. The Ford, an older, boxy model, had been parked directly below the drop line like a bowl waiting under a leak. The roof of the truck had collapsed in a clean, tidal indentation. The glass had burst into aggressive, sharp glitter across the street. Steve had done the last thing he would ever be paid to do. At least he made an impression.