It's just after 2:00 AM, and I'm climbing onto the rail of a bridge. I feel dizzy as my eyes adjust to the quarter moon's slight reflection on the river below. My calm decisiveness is being pulled into an eddy of anxiety. Is this bridge high enough? Will I develop the requisite speed for the impact to shatter my bones and send them ripping through my internal organs? Will I have enough control to hit headfirst? Will this hurt, like, a whole lot?

"Before you jump, may I have your cash?" a male voice scratches from somewhere in the darkness. Startled, I reach for a vertical support. "It doesn't look like you'll be needing it," says the man, stepping out from the shadows and onto the narrow pedestrian walkway, "whereas it might allow me to eat for a few days." He smiles up at me, expectantly.

Neither of us moves for a moment.

Finally, I reach for the wallet in my jeans. "Here, take the whole thing. I only have four dollar bills." I start to toss it toward him.

"No!" he says. "No credit cards, just cash. But thanks. Keep that wallet on you so they can identify the body." He grins, but my head is too cloudy to care why. I fish out the cash, slide the wallet back in my pocket, and extend the bills in his direction. He doesn't move.

"My shoulders are bad. I can't lift my arms that high." He grins again.

Sighing, I climb down from the rail and hand him the money. I apologize that I don't have more.

"That's okay; I'm resourceful," he says.

I turn to climb back onto the rail of the bridge.

"Hey," he says, "have a seat. Let's visit for a minute. You don't have anywhere to go right now, do you?"

"Well, yeah, I kinda do." I have just enough juice left to become annoyed.

He merely grins.

"What? You want my shoes?" I ask.

He shakes his head and makes a patting motion in the air, as if inviting me to a nearby chair.

"I like to interview the jumpers, that's all," he says. "I am a wandering collector of human stories, a street sweeper of anthropological oddments. Come. Sit." He ambles toward the end of the bridge and settles onto a curb, confident that I will follow. I do.

We are safely outside the beam of the nearest streetlight, but I freeze as a Sheriff's Intrepid races across the bridge. I don't look, but I know the street sweeper is grinning. He says, "It isn't actually illegal, you know. It is messy. It is an economic drain, a cruel injury to the person who discovers the body, and an unfair burden on the family, but it is not illegal. Like most jumpers, you are only thinking of yourself." He laughs.

I put my head in my hands.

"All right," he says, affecting a more serious tone. "You feel the weight of the world on your shoulders, but no one cares, etcetera, something along those lines. Multiple choice question: is it money, job loss, or has your lover done gone?"

"Fuck you," I mutter.

"Such language!" He laughs. "Or, rather, such lack of language. Profanity is the mark of a stunted imagination."

"That's bullshit," I say.

His laughter is so loud, the concrete rings.

My facial muscles attempt a smile, but can't lift past a smirk. "None of the above to your question," I say. "I'm a worthless nothing taking up space. Some people just don't need to be here breathing the air, so my intention was to remedy that."

"Tautology. Pleonasm," he mumbles to himself, stroking his grizzled stubble. "Well, I won't argue with your assessment because I have little context; however, I would like to point out that millions of worthless people are taking up space this very minute, embracing their absurdity without a second's hesitation. But that isn't the funny bit. You obviously aren't aware of the punch line, little jumper." His eyes sparkle with contained laughter. He makes me wait two beats. "You can't get out of the game by giving up. Quit, and you have to play the game again." He convulses in a fit of giggles like a little boy telling a toilet joke. "Again, again, again," he giggles.

I thought I was depressed before. If I believed that we are relegated to a continuous life replay like some video game protagonist, not moving forward until the correct sequence of buttons is pushed, I'd feel so much worse. Not believing in anything paradoxically allows me to believe I can decide when my game is over. But perhaps I don't believe in this, either. It would suck to be wrong.

He can see I am revising my plan, and he grins. I ask him if he has any proof of his theory, fully expecting him to spin the usual yarn of being the rebirth of a historical figure himself. As past lives go, famous ones do seem the most popular.

"When I died," he begins, "I floated aloft into pure, white, enveloping love and watched others do the same as they were released from car wrecks, wars, sickness, and other bodily terminations. Whatever the cause, it didn't matter. We were all the same energy and all was known. What was known about some caused their energy to shiver into millions of tiny stars-- a bliss of finishing. What was known about most caused their energy to separate into only a few stars that plummeted to our current planet to try again. (The repeaters were very disappointed.) Part of what was known is that we must be dedicated to learning and loving. Only then can we advance." His eyes are far away for several seconds, but they return, tugging along his grin, big as ever.

"Are you... a ghost?" I ask, forgetting for a moment that I've just listened to a typical near-death experience of dimethyltryptamine flooding the brain.

"No, dear, I'm a crazy college professor who won't take his meds. I live outside because ceilings are too low," he says.

"You are a college professor?" I ask.

"Was. English, I think. Forcibly retired," he says and then mutters, "Sentence fragments."

"I don't believe you."

"Believe anything you want. That light pole is a lethal serpent in camouflage recording our every utterance in a report to the Keepers of the Eighth Dimension. Do you believe that?"

"No."

"I do." He waves at the light and smiles as broadly as his face will allow.

Except possibly for seeing light poles as serpent spies, he seems as lucid as any English professor I've known. "So," I say, "the crazy person turns out to be saner than the normal person. I've seen this episode."

"Really? Here I thought I was so original. Then you know how it ends."

"With butterflies and rainbows or some such shit."

"Ooh, butterflies," he coos. "I like butterflies, but no. Guess again."

I was an idiot when I walked onto the bridge; I am an idiot now. I shrug.

"Think about it," he says, rising from the curb and stretching. As he walks away, he says, "Next time you see me on the street, give me twenty one-dollar bills." He laughs.

I can hear the street sweeper singing long after the darkness envelops him.