Don’t Do It — We Love You, My Heart
Julio De Leon is pedaling across the George Washington Bridge,
his trim form, though sixty-one, leaning into the eastbound breeze
as tractor-trailers apply hydraulic brakes and shudder
in between the honking cars, all twelve lanes of the upper level
stalled as Julio glides on the pedestrian path, the one artery
unblocked from the city’s heart where Julio works as a doorman
on the Upper West Side, having memorized the faces and names
of the residents for whom with a gloved hand he has waved
down taxis or lifted packages from the trunk of a Town Car
five days a week for the previous thirty-one years, the cartilage
in his knees ground down almost to bone so that now
he must ride this route to and from work instead of run,
his body more attuned to nuance on the bike, the way the bridge
trembles like a sheet of tin and sends vibrations through the frame
into his arms and legs, or how he sometimes parallels a flock of birds
above the Hudson moving at his same velocity and height,
so close he used to sit up in the saddle, arms extended at his sides
while steering with light gestures from his knees and hips,
a man in flight, at least until the day he fell, the front wheel
catching on some unseen stone, the whole bike set
to wobble, his wife making him promise that night in their bed,
after she’d dabbed his swollen lip, tweezered beads
of asphalt from his shoulder, that he would not carry on
like this again, taking his hands from the bike or his eyes
from the path, no matter what flies next to you, his wife
had said, knowing where to place the limits of her claim,
the wisdom of a long marriage, the two of them having raised
their sons and a daughter, Julio himself the youngest of ten,
still the mischief-maker who winks at his wife over dinner prayers,
over her faux-stern gaze, his right hand slipping the dog a strip
of pepper steak beneath the table, the dog’s tail thumping
the ground like Julio’s wife’s heart in her chest, the way her heart
still leaps each evening when she sees him coming up the drive,
setting sun at his back, his body in eclipse, features taking
form as he slows into the shadow of the carport’s awning,
releases his toe clips, and swings his leg from the bike
in a singular motion, the same way, now halfway across
the George Washington Bridge, he slows at the sight of a dog
leashed to the railing, Julio’s bike shoes clicking on the asphalt
when he lays the bike down, bends slowly to the small dog,
and rubs the dog’s sternum to quiet its whimpering,
Julio not looking down at the dog but ahead to the boy
just beyond the waist-high railing, the boy leaning
out from the bridge like a carved figurehead on the prow
of a ship, the boy two-hundred feet above the slate-gray chop
of the Hudson, his T-shirt and striped shorts whipping
against his body like a sail in cross-cutting winds
so that when the boy turns, his face beneath the baseball cap
visible to Julio for the first time, Julio opens his hands
and steps slowly toward the boy, Julio working through
the scene’s improbable calculus, the rush-hour jam
of cars, the Port Authority officers who walk the bridge
for jumpers all now gone for the day, evening coming on,
and though he does not scroll through numbers in his mind,
he knows them from the daily papers sold outside
the building where he works, the voices on the sidewalk
rising with the news each day, or, worse, the silence after,
the nothingness of how it seems the sky absorbs each jump,
the body disappearing in the air, though Julio, of course,
knows that isn’t true, that the earth pulls every form to it
indifferently, eight dead this year already, another forty saved
by intervention, the papers say, the public calling for a barrier,
some kind of shield, the process stymied by facts and figures,
actuarial will, prohibitive costs, even the danger the barrier
itself would pose, catching the wind like a sail and causing
the deck to flex and jump, though Julio thinks of none of this
in the moment and instead searches for words to be a plank
to the boy, don’t do it — we love you, my heart, Julio will later tell
a reporter he said, Julio unsure, though, if this were the phrase,
the spell gone, disappearing in the air the moment Julio moves,
the words a ribbon descending to the Hudson as Julio reaches
for the boy, in a second, only in a second, his right arm curling
around the boy like a shepherd’s crook the reporter will write,
Julio unaware of the other man nearby on the bridge,
a bystander who snaps a photo of the boy beyond the rail
before hurrying to Julio’s side, Julio and the bystander pulling
the now-crying boy back across the rail together, Julio not letting go,
talking to the boy, words to pin him to the path, the bridge,
though not words alone, Julio’s arms encircling him,
the boy not fighting Julio, but coiled, the urge to jump,
Julio believes, still incubating there, as the other man waves
the traffic forward, the expressions of the drivers quizzical,
one woman rolling down the passenger window to point
to the small dog tethered to the rail, the dog barking,
jerking at the leash, so that the man unties it and carries
the dog to Julio and the boy, the two of them sitting upright,
Julio not letting go when the man sets the dog in the lap of the boy,
and it places its paws on his chest, traffic parting for the cruiser
and ambulance pushing through as lights splash the bridge’s cables
and girders, both Julio and the boy looking up together to see
the faces of the EMTs, one woman bending to them, her hand
on Julio’s shoulder, instructing him to release the boy, Julio’s fingers
intertwined and cramping, knotted roots that he shakes loose
then stands, Julio already looking for his bike, his wife anxious
at home, how he knows that she will worry, his phone vibrating
in the bike’s cloth satchel as an officer waves Julio over
for a statement, the bystander showing the officer the photograph
of the boy, all of them soon to be gone, dispersed like the ambulance
moving now from the bridge or the signal horn sounding below
on the Hudson, a lone boat passing unseen in the dark.