gaps, feeling the parts that would always be missing, and the parts that were whole again.
Falling
Victor selects a square of glass and touches it with his palms. He’s very high up: from where he stands, he can see the whole long flank of the mountain and, on the other side, the Cape Town suburbs fanning out to the sea. At his feet is a stained concrete surface never meant to be seen, and before him rises a shining dome, three times his height. It reflects the soft pink sunrise and his own lean figure. His face is severe, deeply lined for a man still in his thirties, and determined. Only Victor himself can see something daunted in the eyes.
He blinks it away and shifts to the side, so that he’s looking instead at one of the rising steel beams. The beams support the dome, converging like the ribs of an umbrella. From street level, they seem as delicate as lines of latitude and longitude on a model globe, but up close, each is as broad as a big man’s hand. The glass they support is thick and greenish, a cloudy mirror. Where it’s bolted into grooves in the beams, there’s a gap between glass and steel, wide enough to admit fingers.
Victor finds the grooves, grips and leans back so that the weight hangs from his shoulders, and braces his feet against the glass. Up he goes now, climbing the curve, hand over hand.
Near the top, where the gradient eases out to almost horizontal, he picks a pane and lays himself flat, belly and chest against the glass. Below, the mall is waking, busying. At 9 a.m. the interior lights snap on, muted through the tinted pane. And then the glass becomes porous, revealing its depths.
Here, now. This is the place.
At this moment, Victor is calm. He shifts his gaze in increments from near to far. First, he concentrates on the surface of the glass. The reflection of his own eyes. This is not hard: all it requires is a kind of squint. Then, when he’s ready, he takes a breath and cautiously extends his focus. Pushes it through the glass and into the space beyond.
The dome floats above the open atrium of the shopping centre. Down there are mezzanine floors with ornate railings, escalators, elevators. Victor concentrates on these forms. It’s easier than contemplating the drop itself, the body lengths of space. Deliberately he moves his gaze from feature to solid feature, eyes gripping one detail at a time, down, down, all the way down through three storeys of light and movement to the tiled floor at the very bottom.
The first time he tried this, he failed. He’d touched the glass with his forehead and recoiled after just one glimpse. He had not yet learnt the trick of the incremental gaze. The next time, it was easier. Now he finds he is able to lie still and contemplate his fear. Because the fear is still there, of course.
The thing is, he can picture it so easily. The consequences. The sequence of events. It would all happen quite quietly. First just a snap, like the snap of fingers, and a small crack would jag across the pane directly under the weight of his body. A broken corner would drop cleanly from its frame, leaving a triangle punched out of the reflections. The breeze would assume a different pitch. From far below, faint cries would float. Small faces would look up, then scatter out of frame. And then, after a ceremonial pause, a creaking would start up, and a soft, percussive popping as glass and metal shifted, trying to adjust to a balance of forces fatally skewed … tap … tap tap … tap … A chain reaction, working its way through to the edges, each failure in the structure triggering the next until tiny cracks infested the dome.
And then the collapse; and a million fragments debouching into the waiting vault, losing their brilliance all at once, like a swarm of bees dropping from sunlight into shadow.
Leaving only a skeleton, a drawing, the concept of a dome. Through which it would be possible – easy – to plummet like a stone.
He closes his eyes. His heartbeat
Falling
Victor selects a square of glass and touches it with his palms. He’s very high up: from where he stands, he can see the whole long flank of the mountain and, on the other side, the Cape Town suburbs fanning out to the sea. At his feet is a stained concrete surface never meant to be seen, and before him rises a shining dome, three times his height. It reflects the soft pink sunrise and his own lean figure. His face is severe, deeply lined for a man still in his thirties, and determined. Only Victor himself can see something daunted in the eyes.
He blinks it away and shifts to the side, so that he’s looking instead at one of the rising steel beams. The beams support the dome, converging like the ribs of an umbrella. From street level, they seem as delicate as lines of latitude and longitude on a model globe, but up close, each is as broad as a big man’s hand. The glass they support is thick and greenish, a cloudy mirror. Where it’s bolted into grooves in the beams, there’s a gap between glass and steel, wide enough to admit fingers.
Victor finds the grooves, grips and leans back so that the weight hangs from his shoulders, and braces his feet against the glass. Up he goes now, climbing the curve, hand over hand.
Near the top, where the gradient eases out to almost horizontal, he picks a pane and lays himself flat, belly and chest against the glass. Below, the mall is waking, busying. At 9 a.m. the interior lights snap on, muted through the tinted pane. And then the glass becomes porous, revealing its depths.
Here, now. This is the place.
At this moment, Victor is calm. He shifts his gaze in increments from near to far. First, he concentrates on the surface of the glass. The reflection of his own eyes. This is not hard: all it requires is a kind of squint. Then, when he’s ready, he takes a breath and cautiously extends his focus. Pushes it through the glass and into the space beyond.
The dome floats above the open atrium of the shopping centre. Down there are mezzanine floors with ornate railings, escalators, elevators. Victor concentrates on these forms. It’s easier than contemplating the drop itself, the body lengths of space. Deliberately he moves his gaze from feature to solid feature, eyes gripping one detail at a time, down, down, all the way down through three storeys of light and movement to the tiled floor at the very bottom.
The first time he tried this, he failed. He’d touched the glass with his forehead and recoiled after just one glimpse. He had not yet learnt the trick of the incremental gaze. The next time, it was easier. Now he finds he is able to lie still and contemplate his fear. Because the fear is still there, of course.
The thing is, he can picture it so easily. The consequences. The sequence of events. It would all happen quite quietly. First just a snap, like the snap of fingers, and a small crack would jag across the pane directly under the weight of his body. A broken corner would drop cleanly from its frame, leaving a triangle punched out of the reflections. The breeze would assume a different pitch. From far below, faint cries would float. Small faces would look up, then scatter out of frame. And then, after a ceremonial pause, a creaking would start up, and a soft, percussive popping as glass and metal shifted, trying to adjust to a balance of forces fatally skewed … tap … tap tap … tap … A chain reaction, working its way through to the edges, each failure in the structure triggering the next until tiny cracks infested the dome.
And then the collapse; and a million fragments debouching into the waiting vault, losing their brilliance all at once, like a swarm of bees dropping from sunlight into shadow.
Leaving only a skeleton, a drawing, the concept of a dome. Through which it would be possible – easy – to plummet like a stone.
He closes his eyes. His heartbeat
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