Sky Sightings
John McKinney
This was how it happened, the day I decided to kill myself and nearly died in a terrorist bombing. New York—what are you going to do? The sun was appearing somewhere east, rising behind the concrete rubbish—which looms pretentiously and routinely spits out more muddles around itself in such small gaps the cars, buses, trucks can’t drive considerately. The tallest of the big buildings make it hard to see the sun; it can be easy at times to feel circumscribed to the grid. I stood there outside my twelfth-floor window, against the black wrought iron, trying to trace the sun’s rays and absently listening to a morning news podcast while the fire ladder rattled. I stood there telling myself I’d never see any of it again.
I used to, for years, regularly navigate the underground subway stations. Even those who fancy themselves as New Yorkers are eventually whittled down by coarse lights and city sound. Some wander off the island, and some wither away on it. It may seem an evasive maneuver: take the train, escape the chaos. But both worlds, above and below, are quite similarly unfavorable. So, one day, I walked to work, and that became my new routine. Pants were simple. I grabbed a crisp pair from the bottom drawer of my credenza, which doubled as a TV stand until I left the TV outside (it was gone within an hour). The button-down was another matter as I’d run out of functional space in my closet, so most of my shirts were doubled up on hangers—I found one, shuffled my hair, grabbed the envelope thumbtacked to the calendar next to my front door, and I walked toward work. It was a warm November day: splashed puddles and cigarette drags, closed pubs, craft coffee spots opening.
It was still around 6 a.m., that prime time of my day, and Friday, the end of my week. The small motor of a drill whined off in the distance, a cordless on a gypsum panel, perhaps, spackling aside, over concrete floors—clean except for isolated prints from old boots of crumbled dust and mortar compound, swirling beneath drafty air, all behind the sloppy, green, plywood-covered scaffolding. Beats of hammers feel like drums. You have to try and feel the sounds of this city. Try to taste the colors, but I sometimes feel too strangled. Morning autumn air—and there was that aura after a hard rain. I crossed Vandam and made my way toward Chelsea.
I’d addressed the envelope in my bag to a close friend, Colin Josselyn, back in Oregon. It contained a letter in which I started off how while postcard-writers leave their words fully exposed to postal workers and anyone else, letter-writers tuck their words safely inside sealed envelopes, so maybe postcard-writers are braver. I went on to explain that I was going to have ended my life by the time the letter made it out west and landed in his mailbox for him to open. I write letters to a few select friends occasionally, and the letters go unanswered sometimes, but that’s not why I write. When the soul speaks, it spills. Tangentially I’d been reading online about suicide methods, and I found that the most popular in New York are not the most popular in other places—pistols are used understandably less, and ropes, bags, balconies, bridges, and pills are used more, but I didn’t include any of this. When I first moved to New York, I was told some kid jumped out of a sixth-story building on his second day at Columbia, which also isn’t relevant, but I haven’t been able to forget it.
I let the letter fall from my hand and slapped the small door shut on the USPS box, imagining Colin opening the envelope and reading. I glanced at the pickup times to make sure the mail would be taken out that day: 3 p.m. I was early enough. A woman was planted on a sodden, wool army blanket and leaned against the wall of a sealed-up freight entrance. Middle-aged and very homeless, she’d covered herself with plastic shopping bags.
I maintained my pace right past her. You’re supposed to walk in New York with your eyes down low. Eye contact might even incite apologies but you don’t apologize. The woman was snoring. I’ve heard that homelessness necessitates insomnia as a habit of survival. See, the homeless rob other homeless at night, and that’s why the innocent ones have to stay awake too. That’s why they all sleep late. Maybe last night’s rain meant a safer night and that she could fall asleep a little earlier. A plane soared silent and low overhead, full of passengers who surely didn’t call New York home. I am no different. Eleven years and still foreign. I concentrated on the next street ahead, where the pedestrians’ walk-sign was lit.
I imagined an alternative: Turning around, then leaning close, I speak tenderly, “Miss, I know you’re sleeping, but I just wanted to say that somehow, and I know this is strange, somehow the way your hands are folded together reminds me of my sister, whom I haven’t called in just too goddamn long, and truthfully she could use some help herself, but I can’t offend her by offering help, especially after so much time, it would just be taken as condescension. What’s more, the contact with her would just solidify how long it’s really been, and then we’ll both have this reason, you know, a quantifiable reason with a number of years slapped onto it, to feel awful about, but regardless, I digress, and this is supposed to be about you, I know you’re in need here, I know you need somebody out here to care, and you know how this goes, how the people who give you money, how they don’t really care, at least half the time, a high majority of the time even, it’s probably more for their own gratification that they give anything, and Christ, that’s horrible to say, I’m sorry, and I mean, well, listen to me here, I genuinely want to help you, and look, I’ve got, like, sixty in cash, and I can walk you to a shelter if you’d let me. Let me know how I can make your day a little better.”
We hold this uncommon eye contact. A warm and wholesome sincerity emanates from both our souls, and while I struggle to understand her struggles, she seems to understand mine.
But instead of saying any of that, I crossed the street without checking for cars, feeling my face fall paler with each step. I reached the next corner, and the walk-sign flickered over to that blinking, prophetic blood-orange and I turned the corner. Some kindling narcissism had crept about me, and I imagined Colin opening that damn letter.
New York, the city I called home, was too confident in its ugliness. Everyone on that island-city belonged in quiet anonymity. The occupants didn’t live under atmosphere and clouds but beneath destructively despotic shadows. All too seriously, cashmere lined that synthetic city.
Should I call my sister? Should I just be normal at the coffee shop I patronize? How can I pretend “normal”? They know my soy cortado, so I’ll tip them like it’s Christmas. I was being ridiculous, rambling along with my inner monologue. Maybe I was trying to feel good. Or maybe I was trying to feel less. I didn’t care about the baristas or the woman who slept with her hands folded together.
I could wait at the mailbox for the postal worker so I could find my letter. Is that legal? I could show him my ID. I wanted to be able to think it all through without the neurotic anxiety. I wished I would somehow regain some functionality through the moments and hours of tireless thought-attacks. Automatic Negative Thoughts, as a professional told me. ANTs that drove and swelled, filling voids like some viscous and dreadful liquid, like poison honey that might seem sweet until you’ve suffocated.
Soon I was at my desk, holding on to my ergonomic chair like a barnacle against the clatter and other bullshit of that office, whirling in waves of mundane minutiae and monotony. I tried to not forget: this is water. I’d found myself surprised that more people there didn’t wish they were dead. They were already more alive when they were asleep. I closed the Chrome tab and disappeared. Maybe I’m a masochist, going in there day after day. I cupped my hands to rest my forehead and pretend I was tired.
On my fire escape above ten others, smoke tails squall in poetic circles before my nose and eyes, rise above and whisk off with a breeze, disappearing to nothing. Another drag, a new dragon of smooth smoke scrawls the lining of my gorge and creeps down my lungs. Blood sticks to the pollution, carries it high to the cavity inside the walls of my skull. Currents pulse and I raise my hand to bring the warmth to my lips. A cigarette doesn’t fix the cold, but it makes you not care. I clink the ice chips in my glass and sip the rum. My chest warms and my stomach next and I am content.
Still, my eyelids are cold, and I don’t leave them shut for long. I remember a time, while the cigarette is burning out and my glass rests empty on the rail. I have a eulogized moment of silence, and my inner monologue pauses for a breath. Then I’m back. I extend my numb fingers and fold them in. Let me pour over this rail like a blot of ink to a black well. Let me dry out, with dead dreams, to dust on cold ground.
My glum paradise daydream was interrupted by Bleatler, my boss. His hairy knuckles always became the crux of his entire mass against my desk while he pulsed on each strained breath and bled sweat through his forehead creases. Despite his weight, he was short and unimpressive. Both pluming cheeks tugged his face low while he droned along through salivated speech. Does his face maintain this same scowl when he’s sleeping? When he’s fucking his miserable wife? The man was plain easy to hate and I’m no saint. I smiled and nodded, and he left, and I got to my work.
It felt like the last day before a long-planned vacation. I didn’t talk to anyone besides Bleatler. On three occasions he interrupted me. The nerve. I finished my work to a dignified point and emptied my desk of personal receipts and old trash. No reason to put that chore on someone else. I left while it was still light out, earlier than usual.
Walking home, I heard no drills. Traffic was gridlocked but too tired to fight itself. An occasional horn sounded off for too long. Finally I approached the place I’d seen the woman without a home. The army blanket and the plastic bags were abandoned. The woman was gone. Crossing the next intersection, I neared a younger woman who turned onto my path, pushing a stroller that held who I assumed to be her daughter. She was bundled in all black except for a light-gray, wool shawl and she strode with vigor.
“Mamamama.”
“Okay, bub, we’re almost here.”
I thought of my sister and her daughter, who had just turned eleven, and I tried to feel something. Before us, myself and the woman and daughter, as we walked beneath a large, glass vestibule, an oversized van sharply blocked the widened sidewalk. Should I walk around? Or wait?
Then there was the explosion. Brick erupted. My ears were crushed by a low whine, silence. I saw torn glass and bone littering the street. I was stumbling on charred ground toward what was left of that stroller. Next I knew I was down on all fours, just crawling through molasses.
And I woke up to white, white curtains, white cables and tubes, a white ceiling, ugly white lights. Everything faded again and the next time I awoke to three doctors hovering. Terrorism. These things happen this way, “unexpectedly,” one said. Shattered wrist, burns, ruptured eardrum, blast lung, cerebral contusion, complications, more pain, the coma was phenobarb induced. I was alive and I couldn’t quite feel my body, but I knew it was all there.
Then my sister, she leaned over me. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she cried into my shoulder as if it was my mantra, or hers, and consciousness faded. I woke up again to Colin and his wife seated next to me with my sister seated beside them. A new melancholy had filled that treacherously white room. Words wouldn’t. Silence and white.
So I thought of my small apartment down below Vandam, the haunting solace of my high fire escape, wondered what happened to that woman on the wool army blanket, and thought of what had happened to the city I’d learned to call home. It was all a dark impetus to gloom. These people, my family, searched my emptiness, tried to trace the lines of my face for meaning. I felt the sun gleam through the curtains and on my eyelids as I let them close.
John McKinney
This was how it happened, the day I decided to kill myself and nearly died in a terrorist bombing. New York—what are you going to do? The sun was appearing somewhere east, rising behind the concrete rubbish—which looms pretentiously and routinely spits out more muddles around itself in such small gaps the cars, buses, trucks can’t drive considerately. The tallest of the big buildings make it hard to see the sun; it can be easy at times to feel circumscribed to the grid. I stood there outside my twelfth-floor window, against the black wrought iron, trying to trace the sun’s rays and absently listening to a morning news podcast while the fire ladder rattled. I stood there telling myself I’d never see any of it again.
I used to, for years, regularly navigate the underground subway stations. Even those who fancy themselves as New Yorkers are eventually whittled down by coarse lights and city sound. Some wander off the island, and some wither away on it. It may seem an evasive maneuver: take the train, escape the chaos. But both worlds, above and below, are quite similarly unfavorable. So, one day, I walked to work, and that became my new routine. Pants were simple. I grabbed a crisp pair from the bottom drawer of my credenza, which doubled as a TV stand until I left the TV outside (it was gone within an hour). The button-down was another matter as I’d run out of functional space in my closet, so most of my shirts were doubled up on hangers—I found one, shuffled my hair, grabbed the envelope thumbtacked to the calendar next to my front door, and I walked toward work. It was a warm November day: splashed puddles and cigarette drags, closed pubs, craft coffee spots opening.
It was still around 6 a.m., that prime time of my day, and Friday, the end of my week. The small motor of a drill whined off in the distance, a cordless on a gypsum panel, perhaps, spackling aside, over concrete floors—clean except for isolated prints from old boots of crumbled dust and mortar compound, swirling beneath drafty air, all behind the sloppy, green, plywood-covered scaffolding. Beats of hammers feel like drums. You have to try and feel the sounds of this city. Try to taste the colors, but I sometimes feel too strangled. Morning autumn air—and there was that aura after a hard rain. I crossed Vandam and made my way toward Chelsea.
I’d addressed the envelope in my bag to a close friend, Colin Josselyn, back in Oregon. It contained a letter in which I started off how while postcard-writers leave their words fully exposed to postal workers and anyone else, letter-writers tuck their words safely inside sealed envelopes, so maybe postcard-writers are braver. I went on to explain that I was going to have ended my life by the time the letter made it out west and landed in his mailbox for him to open. I write letters to a few select friends occasionally, and the letters go unanswered sometimes, but that’s not why I write. When the soul speaks, it spills. Tangentially I’d been reading online about suicide methods, and I found that the most popular in New York are not the most popular in other places—pistols are used understandably less, and ropes, bags, balconies, bridges, and pills are used more, but I didn’t include any of this. When I first moved to New York, I was told some kid jumped out of a sixth-story building on his second day at Columbia, which also isn’t relevant, but I haven’t been able to forget it.
I let the letter fall from my hand and slapped the small door shut on the USPS box, imagining Colin opening the envelope and reading. I glanced at the pickup times to make sure the mail would be taken out that day: 3 p.m. I was early enough. A woman was planted on a sodden, wool army blanket and leaned against the wall of a sealed-up freight entrance. Middle-aged and very homeless, she’d covered herself with plastic shopping bags.
I maintained my pace right past her. You’re supposed to walk in New York with your eyes down low. Eye contact might even incite apologies but you don’t apologize. The woman was snoring. I’ve heard that homelessness necessitates insomnia as a habit of survival. See, the homeless rob other homeless at night, and that’s why the innocent ones have to stay awake too. That’s why they all sleep late. Maybe last night’s rain meant a safer night and that she could fall asleep a little earlier. A plane soared silent and low overhead, full of passengers who surely didn’t call New York home. I am no different. Eleven years and still foreign. I concentrated on the next street ahead, where the pedestrians’ walk-sign was lit.
I imagined an alternative: Turning around, then leaning close, I speak tenderly, “Miss, I know you’re sleeping, but I just wanted to say that somehow, and I know this is strange, somehow the way your hands are folded together reminds me of my sister, whom I haven’t called in just too goddamn long, and truthfully she could use some help herself, but I can’t offend her by offering help, especially after so much time, it would just be taken as condescension. What’s more, the contact with her would just solidify how long it’s really been, and then we’ll both have this reason, you know, a quantifiable reason with a number of years slapped onto it, to feel awful about, but regardless, I digress, and this is supposed to be about you, I know you’re in need here, I know you need somebody out here to care, and you know how this goes, how the people who give you money, how they don’t really care, at least half the time, a high majority of the time even, it’s probably more for their own gratification that they give anything, and Christ, that’s horrible to say, I’m sorry, and I mean, well, listen to me here, I genuinely want to help you, and look, I’ve got, like, sixty in cash, and I can walk you to a shelter if you’d let me. Let me know how I can make your day a little better.”
We hold this uncommon eye contact. A warm and wholesome sincerity emanates from both our souls, and while I struggle to understand her struggles, she seems to understand mine.
But instead of saying any of that, I crossed the street without checking for cars, feeling my face fall paler with each step. I reached the next corner, and the walk-sign flickered over to that blinking, prophetic blood-orange and I turned the corner. Some kindling narcissism had crept about me, and I imagined Colin opening that damn letter.
New York, the city I called home, was too confident in its ugliness. Everyone on that island-city belonged in quiet anonymity. The occupants didn’t live under atmosphere and clouds but beneath destructively despotic shadows. All too seriously, cashmere lined that synthetic city.
Should I call my sister? Should I just be normal at the coffee shop I patronize? How can I pretend “normal”? They know my soy cortado, so I’ll tip them like it’s Christmas. I was being ridiculous, rambling along with my inner monologue. Maybe I was trying to feel good. Or maybe I was trying to feel less. I didn’t care about the baristas or the woman who slept with her hands folded together.
I could wait at the mailbox for the postal worker so I could find my letter. Is that legal? I could show him my ID. I wanted to be able to think it all through without the neurotic anxiety. I wished I would somehow regain some functionality through the moments and hours of tireless thought-attacks. Automatic Negative Thoughts, as a professional told me. ANTs that drove and swelled, filling voids like some viscous and dreadful liquid, like poison honey that might seem sweet until you’ve suffocated.
Soon I was at my desk, holding on to my ergonomic chair like a barnacle against the clatter and other bullshit of that office, whirling in waves of mundane minutiae and monotony. I tried to not forget: this is water. I’d found myself surprised that more people there didn’t wish they were dead. They were already more alive when they were asleep. I closed the Chrome tab and disappeared. Maybe I’m a masochist, going in there day after day. I cupped my hands to rest my forehead and pretend I was tired.
On my fire escape above ten others, smoke tails squall in poetic circles before my nose and eyes, rise above and whisk off with a breeze, disappearing to nothing. Another drag, a new dragon of smooth smoke scrawls the lining of my gorge and creeps down my lungs. Blood sticks to the pollution, carries it high to the cavity inside the walls of my skull. Currents pulse and I raise my hand to bring the warmth to my lips. A cigarette doesn’t fix the cold, but it makes you not care. I clink the ice chips in my glass and sip the rum. My chest warms and my stomach next and I am content.
Still, my eyelids are cold, and I don’t leave them shut for long. I remember a time, while the cigarette is burning out and my glass rests empty on the rail. I have a eulogized moment of silence, and my inner monologue pauses for a breath. Then I’m back. I extend my numb fingers and fold them in. Let me pour over this rail like a blot of ink to a black well. Let me dry out, with dead dreams, to dust on cold ground.
My glum paradise daydream was interrupted by Bleatler, my boss. His hairy knuckles always became the crux of his entire mass against my desk while he pulsed on each strained breath and bled sweat through his forehead creases. Despite his weight, he was short and unimpressive. Both pluming cheeks tugged his face low while he droned along through salivated speech. Does his face maintain this same scowl when he’s sleeping? When he’s fucking his miserable wife? The man was plain easy to hate and I’m no saint. I smiled and nodded, and he left, and I got to my work.
It felt like the last day before a long-planned vacation. I didn’t talk to anyone besides Bleatler. On three occasions he interrupted me. The nerve. I finished my work to a dignified point and emptied my desk of personal receipts and old trash. No reason to put that chore on someone else. I left while it was still light out, earlier than usual.
Walking home, I heard no drills. Traffic was gridlocked but too tired to fight itself. An occasional horn sounded off for too long. Finally I approached the place I’d seen the woman without a home. The army blanket and the plastic bags were abandoned. The woman was gone. Crossing the next intersection, I neared a younger woman who turned onto my path, pushing a stroller that held who I assumed to be her daughter. She was bundled in all black except for a light-gray, wool shawl and she strode with vigor.
“Mamamama.”
“Okay, bub, we’re almost here.”
I thought of my sister and her daughter, who had just turned eleven, and I tried to feel something. Before us, myself and the woman and daughter, as we walked beneath a large, glass vestibule, an oversized van sharply blocked the widened sidewalk. Should I walk around? Or wait?
Then there was the explosion. Brick erupted. My ears were crushed by a low whine, silence. I saw torn glass and bone littering the street. I was stumbling on charred ground toward what was left of that stroller. Next I knew I was down on all fours, just crawling through molasses.
And I woke up to white, white curtains, white cables and tubes, a white ceiling, ugly white lights. Everything faded again and the next time I awoke to three doctors hovering. Terrorism. These things happen this way, “unexpectedly,” one said. Shattered wrist, burns, ruptured eardrum, blast lung, cerebral contusion, complications, more pain, the coma was phenobarb induced. I was alive and I couldn’t quite feel my body, but I knew it was all there.
Then my sister, she leaned over me. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she cried into my shoulder as if it was my mantra, or hers, and consciousness faded. I woke up again to Colin and his wife seated next to me with my sister seated beside them. A new melancholy had filled that treacherously white room. Words wouldn’t. Silence and white.
So I thought of my small apartment down below Vandam, the haunting solace of my high fire escape, wondered what happened to that woman on the wool army blanket, and thought of what had happened to the city I’d learned to call home. It was all a dark impetus to gloom. These people, my family, searched my emptiness, tried to trace the lines of my face for meaning. I felt the sun gleam through the curtains and on my eyelids as I let them close.
