Fear of Falling

I met him in the springtime, when the flowers start to bloom and the wakened energies of the people in the city create a new blood that flows down the streets. I don’t remember how I met him, only that I didn’t know him one day, and the next I did, and I couldn’t imagine ever not knowing him. He became intrinsic to my health, to my life. He carried in his presence a direct link to my happiness, and I both hated and loved him for it. Because he knew it, he knew his power, but instead of exploiting it, he gave it back to me, so that I had the same stranglehold over him. And because he gave that power to me, I became his jailor, his warden. He wanted that of me, and demanded that I keep him on a short leash. It is what eventually became our undoing, but for a while, it is what brought us together.

I said before that I do not remember meeting Lukas the first time, but I do remember one specific day when he became part of my soul. It was the middle of April at Rio’s house.

Lisa told me to meet her at Rio’s place that night around eight for a party. She was already over there, and I was on my way. I walked from the café near Notre Dame down one of the little side streets and paused in front of the apartment building. It was one of the more ugly buildings on the street, built probably somewhere early in the seventies, made of whitish grey stone and metal. I stood in the street and looked up. This is the building, I am sure of it. But Lisa did not give me the code to enter and I didn’t know which flat was Rio’s so I didn’t know which button to push. I paused and studied the panel with all of the last names. There were fifteen slots, but only eight of the names were filled in. None of them said Rio or were in anything like his handwriting, which is a very distinctive flourished script. I looked down the street, and up the street, and then I looked up in the air, supposedly to try and get a fix on the music and see if I could determine by the placement of the apartment as to which button might be correct. I was standing there, in the street, looking up in the sky like a crazy person, when a couple brushed past me and buzzed themselves into the building. I casually looked around and then stepped in behind them. They were nice enough, and I smiled and assured them that yes I knew someone in this building. They didn’t care, shrugged and clambered into one of the flats on the ground floor. I headed for the stairs and began to climb.

I miraculously remembered from some other long ago drunken trip to this apartment that we had climbed four flights of large winding stairs. I remember this because I used each flight as a sounding board for each stanza of a poem I was working on out loud to keep me from passing out cold on the stone floor. And so, when I entered the building and glanced at the stairs, I gave thanks for that one evening of drunken poetry and began to climb.

At flight four I rounded the corner and ran headlong into four extremely drunk students from university who were laughingly propping up their French teacher while trying to maneuver her and them all into the tiny elevator. I had not known that there was an elevator, but decided after seeing five people squished into the wooden coffin that the stairs were prettier and much more comfortable, despite the climbing. I held the door for them and shoved in elbows and shoulders as it struggled to close. Before the elevator door had shut all of the way, the apartment door opened and Lisa stumbled out, clinging to a bottle and singing along to the strains of Cher I heard coming from inside. The elevator people heard that and began to sing along as well, and when the door finally was shut, all you could hear were the grinding of gears and four drunken voices chanting lyrics of “do you believe in life after love.” It was surreal for a moment as I stared at the closed doors and wondered if the five entombed people would ever make it out alive or if they would be forced to live their entire lives in a small box singing along to tinny Cher.

Lisa shrieked out my name as soon as her unfocused eyes recognized me and shoved the bottle of wine in my hands. She threw a bear hug around me, and I scrambled in the apartment after her, struggling to maintain my composure and my coat. Once inside, I looked around in amazement. Rio, in true bohemian fashion, or what he assumed and hoped was true bohemian fashion, had not spent a dime on furniture, opting instead for large white throw pillows grouped around a small wooden table adorned with three candles of various heights set in iron holdings. Groups of people sat or stood huddled around other ensconcings of candles and pillows about the room, speaking in low hushed whispers about art and politics and literature and music. I smiled and thought various things to myself and kept them all inside. Lisa shoved me towards the low table and I found an unoccupied pillow in the corner, which suited me just fine, and sat back with a glass of wine and a cheese cracker to watch the theatre unfold before me. But before I could truly entrench myself in the inner workings of Rio’s ongoing drama, I glanced to my left.

He was sitting there, his left hand wrapped around a glass of wine which sat on the table, his right hand nervously clutching a cigarette in the way that was to become so familiar, and so annoying. He glanced up at me and smiled.

“Madeleine. Do you know, I think I have discovered that God was the one who told the first lie.”

“Really?” I said, wondering where he would go with this.

Lukas took a small nervous drag on his cigarette and looked at me. “I believe He told Adam and Eve that when they ate the fruit off of the tree, they would die. And yet?” He waved his cigarette in the direction of the kitchen, as if to say that Adam and Eve were certainly not dead and in fact he had seen them in Rio’s kitchen just a moment before making a cheese and tomato panini. I smiled.

“Well, I think the point is that they did die.” Lukas quit waving his cigarette and looked at me. He took a sip of wine, a gesture that I would come to interpret as continue. “That is to say, they did not have the option of death before the fruit. Not to say that death is an option, but rather, death did not exist for them. So for God to say, ‘eat the fruit and you will die’ was not saying that He, as such, would kill them, but that the fruit contained death and for them to eat it would be to take death into themselves. It was not a lie; it was a truth He told. We die. That is a truth.” I paused for a moment. “Although not a truth we must readily accept.” I pulled a cigarette out of Lukas’s case. He lit it for me absently and swirled the dark liquid in his glass.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only that death is unnatural. We were not created to die. Why accept as normal something that is unnatural?” Lukas was still swirling his wine. I stared, transfixed by the lights glinting off the liquid.

“But that would be to say that death exists independently of God.”

“I don’t know Lukas. But it would seem to me that life and death cannot exist in each other. One is one thing and another is another and to exist in a single place, a single thing, would be chaos. It is something we strive as humans strive to reconcile. I would say that is what the great battle, in fact, is all about. Reconciliation between life and death.” I looked around the room and noticed Lisa dancing in the middle of the kitchen with a red scarf around her head. Jen was flirting shamelessly with one of the millions of models and actors that Rio surrounded himself with. I lifted my glass and glanced back at Lukas. He was staring at the candles and looked to be wholly engrossed in their flame. I knew better and touched him on the shoulder, then on the cheek.

Without looking at me, he lifted his hand and laid it on mine, against his face, and leaned into my palm. With a small sigh, or maybe it was a shudder, and without raising his head, he lifted his eyes and looked into mine.
“Do you deny death?” Lukas asked me.

I thought a moment. I shivered a bit also and thought about the other times I’d asked myself this question. I looked at Lukas and didn’t answer him.

“Denial, you know, gives away power.” I smiled again. A vague Lukas statement like always but this time he was on to something. “Don’t give death your life Madeleine. That is The Great Battle.”

He lowered his eyes again to the flame. I brought my hand back down to the table and leaned back against the corner wall. Lukas invisibly shook off his depression and reached for the wine glass. We talked then, as all the others, of music and art and film and literature. But it was lighthearted talk. The kind made when you know what the other person thinks and it is the same as your own thoughts, and you speak merely to fill the darkness. I enjoyed the way we bantered off one another and the way he followed my train of thought as seamlessly as if it were his own. In the middle of a mock heated discussion on Voltaire however, we had both run out of wine. And so with the promise that my seat might be saved, I excused myself to refill our evening.

When I returned from both the kitchen and Lisa who had now donned a blue scarf and finger symbols, I noticed Lukas had shifted slightly into my corner to make room for Sonya, who was now animatedly retelling a story of her adventures in the Ukraine. I had heard this story once before and it seemed she had changed nothing in the telling, so I scooted in beside Lukas, handed him his wine glass, and lit another cigarette, prepared to people watch for a moment. At the end of Sonya’s story, when it became apparent that she was not going to be pausing in her monologue for quite some time, I began to entertain myself with one of the river stones that Rio had on his table, which he kept to remind him of his conception and of his name. Unconsciously, as I slipped the small black stone through my fingers, I began to hum.

“Someday, When I’m awfully low, and the world is cold. I will feel a glow, just thinking off you, and the way you look.” And when I came to that point in the song, without arresting his attention from Sonya, and without even so much as a glance towards me, Lukas gave the last word. “Tonight.”

It was then that I fell in love with him. It was that moment entirely that I felt our minds merge together and I knew that he felt it as well, because not soon after, he shifted against me and took the rock from my hand.

“This is ours” he said and skipped the rock from his hand to mine and back again. I stared hungrily at him, at his heart and his jaded innocence, and I wanted to know everything that had made him that way. I was to find out bits and pieces over the weeks, and none of it made me smile, but for that moment only, and never again, I loved him completely.

***

“Tell me something interesting.” We were walking along the Pont Neuf bridge and I had stopped on the western railing to watch the swirling mass of water below. Lukas was in the middle of the road, looking up at the sky. I turned toward him, rested my arms against the railing and leaned back over the wall.

“Something interesting,” he mused. “I once counted to a million.” He spun once in the street, arms wide, head back as if to catch any falling rain, though there was none that night.

“A million? How long did that take?”

“About three years. I counted to five hundred in the morning and five hundred in the evening.”

“That’s incredible. A three year count. Why?” Lukas had opened the black satchel he always carried with him and had taken out his camera.

“Stand right there, just like that. I counted because I could, because I hadn’t done it before. I wanted to know if I could.” He took my picture then, with my head to the side and my arms out parallel on the railing. I turned my body then, I didn’t like having my photo taken, and faced the water once more. He continued to snap pictures.

I was curious about that answer. “Would you do that with anything? Would you do something insane, like jump off this bridge, just to see if you could?”
I was looking through the darkening dusk down into the river. The word for it that evening would be roiling. It was a roiling river, black and brown and smudgy like an el Greco painting, the few drops of rain that managed to loose themselves from the sky dropped stones like into the swells. It was evidence of the growing cold that the raindrops were able to cut their way through the acidic air of Paris.

I turned slightly to the left to see what Lukas was doing. “Stay right there. Don’t move.” He set up the camera and snapped picture after picture. I looked at the camera once then turned back to the water. There is something mesmerizing about moving water, about being high above a river. I believe there is a tiny piece in every person, a small suicidal part, that commands them to consider that leap off of cliffs. I looked down into the water and leaned my body over the railing. I heard the clicking of the camera cease, then Lukas walked up behind me.

“It’s easy to do.”

I looked at him and he laughed. “Okay, not so easy. But it’s honest. More honest than your denial. You know, your first argument was correct. Death is a truth; it does happen. But your second argument; that is just fear. What will your life be like if you never take chances that lead you near the edge?”

I straightened my body and looked at him. I wouldn’t put it past him to jump. The thought is enticing, the action itself seems easy enough, but when it comes time to follow through, the first step is like learning to walk again. He surprised me once again, however, when he wrapped the camera case about his neck and leaped lithely atop the wall. He held out his hand for me.

“Trust me.”

What do you do when you hear those words from someone you love and know that to follow them leads to absolute death?

I took Lukas’s hand and stepped up beside him on the slippery stone wall. I looked down into the river again and then back up, up into the black sky. I thought of Lukas’s question about God the evening of the party. I thought about Adam and Eve and love and death and then I thought about fear.

“Trust me,” Lukas said once more and took a step forward. I took the step along with him, because I loved him, but more so, because I trusted him. As my left foot followed my right into the space and darkness, and gravity sucked us down into the black, I searched for what I had done. I gripped his hand tightly, and the moment stretched out into eternity. And then, I felt my body land on a soft bed of grass, water roiling all around us as the light disappeared. Lukas was laughing, and I looked around at what I thought would be my grave. We had landed on the tiny island in the middle of the river. I had completely forgotten about it, and you could not see it from the bridge above.

“You thought I would lead you to death?”

I just looked at him and he stopped laughing but continued to smile. “Well, perhaps I might have. But you didn’t deny it. You feared it, but you did not deny.

(all content Copyright National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, 2000-2003, do not use without permission)