THE FALLEN

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

A man was found at the base of the tallest building in town. Witnesses reported that he had jumped from the eleventh floor deck. From his jacket pocket, first responders retrieved a piece of paper with a handwritten message that they were unwilling to describe as a suicide note. “It is, however,” a spokesperson for the department conceded, “a note written by, and on the person of, a suicide.”  “It is important in this case to subtilize,” said another spokesperson. A third passed out a piece of paper to reporters that included a scanned copy of the note and a definition of the word “subtilize.” A fourth read the text of the note aloud: “The nation staggered forward, then staggered backwards, then staggered forward, then staggered backwards. During the forward movement, people imagined that the process had been streamlined and even perfected, that it would continue at the same if not a faster pace. Critical thought was blurred by good feeling. During the backward movement, people split into two camps, one characterized by hope (the backward movement would taper off and the nation would be returned to advancement), the other by despair (the backward movement had exposed the advancement as fragile, had shattered it, and the entire project now teetered on the brink of ruin). Both camps, in persisting in believing in progress as a real thing, were the mirror images of each other. They stood on opposite sites of a line, wearing expressions that were the inverse of one another, holding ideas that were the inverse of each other, believing that those across the line were benighted and misguided, rather than what they actually were, which was identical.” A fifth spokesperson then collected the pieces of paper, a sixth put them in a folder, a seventh put the folder in a briefcase, and an eighth pulled around. All of them crowded into it and, following the roar of an engine and the screech of tires, disappeared around the corner. A ninth spokesperson remained, evidently left behind, to answer the reporters’ questions that carbonated the air.