Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [14]
“That was a good story,” he said.
He took another nap.
At about 7:00 P.M., he came into my mom’s room. He appeared dazed, disoriented.
“What’s going on? What’s going on?” he asked.
“Nothing’s going on,” my mother said soothingly.
“No, no,” he said shaking his head. He ran from her room, “as if he knew where he was going, knew the destination,” she would later tell me. My mother followed him as he ran up the curving staircase, into my room, through the sliding glass door, and onto the balcony.
By the time she got there, he was perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the terrace outside my room. His right foot was on top of the wall, his left foot was touching the terrace floor.
“What are you doing?” she cried out, and started moving toward him.
“No, no. Don’t come near me,” he said.
“Don’t do this to me, don’t do this to Anderson, don’t do this to Daddy,” my mother pleaded.
“Will I ever feel again?” he asked.
My mother is not sure how long they were out there on the terrace. It all happened very fast. He looked down at the ground, fourteen stories below. A helicopter passed overhead, a glint of silver in the late-summer sky. Then he moved.
“He was like a gymnast,” my mother remembers. “He went over the ledge and hung on the edge like it was a practice bar in a gym.”
“I shouted, ‘Carter, come back!’” she told me later, “just for a moment I thought he was going to. But he didn’t. He just let go.”
IN ANCIENT ROME, priests called haruspices, charged with predicting the future, would push their hands deep into the innards of freshly killed animals. They removed the heart, the liver, the entrails, and splayed them out on an altar to divine the will of the Gods. I see no signs in Sri Lanka’s bloodied remains, no augury of what 2005 will hold. I’m searching for stories about what has already happened. I’ve missed the warnings about what lies ahead, the signs of what’s to come.
After two weeks in Sri Lanka, I return to New York. I thought I’d dream of that train wreck, of Sunera and Jinandari, Maduranga, Father Charles, and all the others whose gazes I held and hands I touched. I don’t. Instead, I dream of the ocean, and all those still trapped deep beneath. Their eyes open, their hair swaying with the tide. Thousands of people submerged in silence, preserved in the cold saltwater, entombed. Thousands of people. Together. Alone.
IT TOOK SEVERAL hours for my mother to find me after my brother’s suicide. By the time I got her call, the last shuttle had already left Washington, so I rented a car at the airport and drove through the night.
I can’t remember what she said to me on the phone, the actual words she used. I just recall the shock in her voice. I could picture the stunned look in her eyes. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to be consoled. Since my father’s death, I’d wanted to control my life, control access to my emotions. When I heard that my brother was dead, I dove deeper into myself. I retreated, hoping to block the shock, the reeling fear, the wave of nausea that made me clutch my stomach.
I was sad, of course, but I was angry as well. How could he have done this to our mother, killed himself in front of her? How could he have left me behind to deal with the mess?
It was dawn when I reached New York. On the FDR Drive I searched the skyline for my mother’s apartment building. Out of habit I counted, seeing how long it would take me to find my balcony. Five seconds. When I spotted it I realized that it was the ledge my brother had jumped from. I wondered if someone driving on this road had seen him do it. He would have appeared as just a small speck hurtling through the air, disappearing into the sidewalk below.
In the four days between my brother’s death and his funeral, it seemed as