Free Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall by Will Self

gardening and library books.’
    At the time I’d realized that what Mueck was doing reversed everything I thought I understood about the distortion of scale: far from his giantess being a purely intelligible object, she was all feeling – her desperation magnified until it filled the gallery with the ultrasonic howl of a harpooned leviathan—

     

    Mounting the path that switch-backed up through Fort Point National Heritage Site, I was seized not by the Ektachrome of the evergreens and the waters of the bay; nor by the towers of the bridge that rose up before me, which appeared sandy-damp, as if freshly moulded by giant hands, then raised by massed Lilliputians drawing on their steel cables. What grabbed me were the walkers, in their T-shirts and sneakers, their jeans and sweat pants, who converging on the bridge’s approach reached a pedestrian density I’d seldom seen in the States before, except in an airport concourse, a mall or Midtown Manhattan.
    I, better than most, understood the compelling urge to walk across a big thing, an urge separated by a mere carpaccio of neurones from the compelling urge to throw yourself off it. It goes without saying that thoughts of suicide were never absent, but burbled repetitively in my ear – ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself’ – just as did the stream of anxiety: ‘You forgot to turn off the gas/shut-and-lock the door’ and, more recently, the times-10/divide-by-10 tic. It took only the signs to alert me: EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELING and then, a few score paces on, CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC .
    If I had had any reservations at all the ‘and tragic’ banished them entirely. The composers of the signs understood entirely not merely the anger-born-of-fear of the
felo de se
– in my view an emotion much exaggerated – but, more importantly, our narcissism. Yes! A tragedy! That’s what it would be, a fucking tragedy, I had been cut down in my prime, after struggling manfully for years against this debilitating condition, one that I had – still more tragically – vouchsafed to hardly a soul. My notebooks, left open on the table in my room at thePrescott, would explain all that, explain also the awful shame that pursued me, the tiny Eumenides sprung from the Titan’s blood.
    By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off – that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding.
    What possible purchase could Section 2193 of the State of California’s Penal Code have on the profound gravity of this situation; for this was about physics, about small things and big things – people hardly entered into it. And in those last few moments, when a woman in a hijab heading one way and a Japanese–American woman eating a beanshoot salad from a Tupperware container as she strolled the other, simultaneously gasped as I vaulted nimbly on to the thick, rivet-warty girder of the balustrade, my loved ones were of scarcely any concern, being irredeemably actual size.
    I had hoped ... for what? A game of
Scrabble
on the way down, or to get married, or at the very least to link hands with a serendipitous octet of fellow self-murderers – the drop had certainly looked big enough for such skydiving antics. After all, the waves in the bay were wrinkles, while from up there downtown San Francisco had no more civilization than a playroom Lego ruin.

    As I fell towards the