Incident Report by Taylor Koekkoek

When I got to work in the morning everyone was standing in the parking lot and looking up as if there were an asteroid incoming, but it was only Margaret Wyman. She was standing naked on the edge of the building. Totally nude. We didn’t know what to make of it, except that it was bad. All wrong. She yelled something down to us that we couldn’t hear. And while we cocked our heads and held a hand to our ears, she sort of just stepped off.

The morning was cold and cloudless and blue in every direction. The trees were bare like her and my hands were still red from scraping the ice from my windshield earlier.  

You spend so much time imagining what someone looks like naked, and then to see her up there—probably it was the context. It wasn’t like you imagined.

Work for the day was cancelled at the building, which was shared by four tenants: on the ground floor there was Great World Travel Agency, and Prewitt Staffing on the second floor—that’s where I worked, a temp agency. And then the insurance agency on the third. The top two floors of apartments were owned by a property management company. The exterior was mostly glass so that in the day it was blue or gray, depending on the blueness or grayness of the sky. Night turned the building black, except for any lighted windows. It wasn’t crazy tall, but it was the tallest in our suburban stretch, except for the Days Inn up the street. At any rate, our building was tall enough.

The story was Margaret had, just that morning, received the news that a tumor in her brain was inoperable. Janice Welty told us this. She worked reception and prided herself on knowing more about coworkers than we did. We suspected that she listened in on our phone calls. She was attractive in that way women you see everyday, day after day, are attractive. Margaret was attractive in the same way. The brain-tumor narrative competed for only a very short time with another narrative: that she had a lover from Argentina who had decided he was not prepared to run away with her after all. That second one was totally false. No one was sure where the alternate theory came from, except I knew. It was me. I’d said so to Janice. But I’d misremembered. It was Diane who had a secret Argentinian lover. She told me this drunkenly at the Christmas party, seeming proud and unhappy. I was also drunk.

We never found out why Margaret was naked. Maybe it had made sense to her at the time. Even her earrings and her ring and her necklace—she’d taken them off, like skinny dipping, which I’ve done only one time on a family vacation when I was in the eleventh grade, and it was with a girl I had met just that afternoon, just a few hours earlier. It was the happiest night of my entire life—there in the black water of her neighbors’ unattended pool. That’s nothing to do with Margaret though.

That morning, after her jump, we walked hesitantly into the building and were turned away by the collective managers of the place—all of us except for the tenants of the upper-floor apartments. They were allowed to come and go. Pete Gibbs was our manager. “Go on home, all. Sad day,” he said. “Sad day. Be with your families.” Then he looked at me and added, “Be with your friends,” because, though he was uncertain if I had friends or not—and I did have a few—he was certain I had no family in the area.

So we all went home. I picked up a rotisserie chicken on the way and ate most of it over the course of the day, lounging in a white undershirt, which had shrunk too much in the wash. When I stretched it revealed the lower curve of my bellybutton like a fat lip. At nightfall I moved the party to the bedroom and passed out.

The next day I scraped the frost from my windshield again and went to work again and glanced up at the northeastern corner of the building on my way in. Things were mostly the same except that Margaret had died and some of us had seen it happen and this leaves a mark. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I wondered, would it be the parking lot or the office or the roof that was haunted?

What I did at Prewitt Staffing was coordinate with clients who needed workers. They told me how many they needed and I arranged for that many to be sent. I also dealt with client complaints, which frequently resulted in me firing a temp, or sometimes saying I fired a temp, when really I’d only switched them to another assignment. This is the nice thing about temps, that they are replaceable.

I got a call from Andale, which was a bottling facility. Workers stood beside a conveyor belt and slipped bottles of beer into sixer variety packs. It was a notoriously awful assignment that killed your back and left your hands raw from the bottle caps, even with your hands gloved. This is what the temps told me. It’s not that I didn’t sympathize exactly; I just have low emotional affect (my mother used to explain that all the time to other mothers, but it never made me any more likable as far as their kids were concerned—there was no reasoning with them). The woman from Andale said they had caught an eighteen-year-old temp stealing beers. He’d snuck off during lunch break and chugged eight bottles and thrown up into his hands. So he was drunk and stranded on the property too, and I knew the kid had vomit just all over himself. Of course I refunded Andale, and then I called the police to go get the kid and slap him with an MIP, which would solve the problem of him being drunk and stranded on their property.

What Margaret used to do at Prewitt was the same thing I did. Except she worked harder and was paid a little less, since I’d worked there longer. Plus Margaret didn’t like to ask for raises. If Margaret had been alive to take the call from Andale, she would have driven there herself and picked the kid up and taken him home. She would have been stern with him, but she would have driven him home.

The office appeared busier and more heavily staffed than it was because of the temporary workers who passed through, picking up assignments and dropping off timecards. The permanent fixtures of the place (Me, Pete, Janice, Becky, Diane, Dennis, recently Margaret) were much fewer. You could learn the temps’ names if you wanted, and sometimes you couldn’t help it, but most of them would leave after a few weeks. Every name you learned eventually became another name to carry around and never use. Bill Raston, for instance, and Lorraine Quigley and Omar Nunez. These are names I know now for no purpose anymore. They rarely committed my name to memory. Someday I will meet someone I’d really like to remember, except I won’t be able to, because of Omar, or whoever, who has already filled me to capacity with names. I’ll have to say instead, “Hey, you.”

“It’s so creepy back there, isn’t it?” Janice said from behind the reception counter.

“What’s that?”

“Back in Margaret’s office—it’s so creepy. You know, because, well, you know. Isn’t it creepy?” There were four offices in the place—Margaret’s was a door down from mine—and then a few cubicles in the annex. Margaret’s shades were drawn open and her office looked just as it would have if she had been alive. A blinking yellow light still came from her computer tower.

“I guess a little,” I said.

“I know, right? So creepy. Anyway, I have to use the bathroom, except Becky is in there and you know.”

“Ok.”

“It’s just, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“She tries to talk all through it, stall to stall.”

You’re bound to catch an honest glimpse of someone if you spend enough time around them. Becky for instance: I was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot and Becky was there and it was freezing and she was drawing imaginary lines into the asphalt with the toe of her sneaker. She said there was a guy she’d met. “He said he’d come by today and take me to lunch. But this was a week ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s forgotten.” I nodded and said sure. Becky went on, “And he said it in passing you know. So. And he lives a ways away.” We stood in silence for a while and I finished my cigarette. “I mean, I’m sure he’s probably forgotten.” She was wearing mittens and holding her cellphone prayerfully with both hands. “No. He probably won’t show up, and that’s fine, you know. I should wait though. Just in case. I should wait.” I told her I was going up and she said, sure, sure, she’d see me up there. She followed me into the building after waiting another twenty minutes out there with her nose turned red. “Oh well,” she said to me as she passed. “He probably just forgot and that’s fine.”

She was blushing as she went and I pretended not to see. That’s one of the many cruelties of the human body. It blushes, it grows tumors and sometimes, and even if it’s been two years since you’ve slept with anyone, it might refuse to get hard for a girl who’s miraculously ended up in your bed.

So Janice waited for her to leave the bathroom before using it herself and I looked at the parking lot from my window. Across the way there was the Shoemill and I liked to pick one girl out of every ten who entered the store who I thought was the most attractive, and I imagined her and me sitting on sofas and petting strangers’ dogs and, of course, sex stuff. The day passed more quickly like this. If Margaret had jumped later in the day, I would have seen her pass like a blur between the Shoemill and me. I think about that sometimes.

That day I forgot to bring my lunch. I thought this was supremely unfortunate. I’d made the sandwich and everything. I’d used the remaining rotisserie chicken and I put a poppyseed dressing on it and I left it in a bag on the counter. In the promenade there was a Target, where you could eat the garbage from the café, Icees and such, corndogs, with all the shoppers watching at the checkout. Also there was the Machismo Mouse, but there’s some bad blood between Randy, who works there still, and me, which I’d rather not get into with him.

So I sunk in my chair and swiveled around aimlessly. From that vantage I could
see Dennis at his desk with a salad on his hands. I watched him pick every single crouton
from it and pop those in his mouth until there were only the vegetables left, and then he
just sort of stared at it for a while. He told us in the breakroom that his wife was trying to
slim him up some, slapping his gut as he said so, but then I’d already heard it straight
from his wife at the holiday party that she didn’t care if he ate himself straight to
hell. That was up to him, she said, as though the matter were finished and of no interest to her at all.
To make his presence known, Pete Gibbs knocked on my door with the backs of his knuckles.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“How are you doing?”

“Not well,” I said. “Like not at all.”

“It’s a rough day,” he said. “For all of us.”

I folded my hands over my stomach, which felt then like something cavernous. I agreed with Pete, about the roughness of the day, and wondered for a moment how it was that Pete knew of my situation, the utter lunchlessness of it, and why he sympathized so much. It didn’t occur to me that he was talking about the suicide situation until he said, “Well, if I can do anything to help, you’ll let me know?” and I told him, “Unless you packed a second lunch, I’ll just have to tough it out.” He stood there in the doorway and stared at the floor and wrinkled his forehead.

“Okay,” he said, and backed out.

This exchange still visits me some nights when I’m trying to fall asleep.

Even knowing as I did that my sandwich was on my counter at home, unrefrigerated, I went to the office kitchen to check things out.  Janice’s lunch was there in the refrigerator. Diane’s and Dennis’ and so on. And then a red-lidded piece of tupperware and inside it an eggsalad sandwich. On the side a strip of masking tape that said, “Margaret” in purple sharpie.

I won’t pretend that I even thought much about it. I cracked it open and sat with it on my lap in front of reception, Janice behind the desk. The bread was quality. It was cut diagonally into quarters. We are capable of real unpleasantness as long as no one is watching. Remorse doesn’t even occur to some of us when no one is there to see. Or shame—that’s an interpersonal emotion too.

“Pete hasn’t been the same, don’t you think?” Janice asked me from behind the reception desk.

“Uh huh.”

“He always liked Margaret. We all did of course. But there was that way he looked at her. And he wouldn’t have ever acted on it, but there was that way he looked at her. You liked Margaret, didn’t you?”

“Uh huh.”

“So did I. I liked Margaret. What are you eating?”

And then someone was in the doorway. He knocked on the open door and walked in. His eyes were raw and the skin beneath them was dark and sagging. A corpsey look overall. His sweater hugged his belly and his pants were just a little high-watered. He had a remarkable neck—the sort you don’t forget, even if you forget the man. The sheer length of it, and the Adams apple bobbing as it did, reminded me of a trombone being played. He looked Margaret’s age just about, but he also looked a million years old.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Margaret’s husband. Here to collect her things.”

“Hi,” Janice said.

“Hi,” I said, with my mouth half-full.

“Hi,” he said again, and then he pointed toward Margaret’s office. “Do you mind?”

“Please,” Janice said. “Go ahead.”

He nodded and stepped into her office and stood there with his hands on his hips.

Janice turned to me and said, “Oh my god, isn’t that sad?”

“Yes,” I said. The sandwich was in my hands and a wad of it was chewed and hanging in the pouch of my cheek against my molars.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said.

Pete Gibbs was standing in his office with the blinds drawn closed, but he’d pried an opening with his thumb and index finger so that, from here, what we saw was just the shape of his eye, peering out. He watched the poor husband put Margaret’s things into a cardboard box. Margaret’s husband sat in her chair. He put his hands on her desk. Looked out her window.

After something like ten minutes he came out and said thank you and stepped toward the door.

“Wait,” Janice said. “Let me get you Margaret’s last paycheck.”

“Thank you.”

“Let me print it out. Just a minute,” she said.

“All right.”

Janice pointed at the two open chairs beside me. Margaret’s husband sat in the seat farther away so that there was one empty seat between us. He rested the cardboard box on the tops of his thighs. Margaret’s effects poked above the box flaps. There was a lamp and a calculator and a mousepad and what looked liked framed photographs but I turned away so that I couldn’t see what they were of.

He looked over the contents. Pushed things around. My jaw made a clicking sound as I chewed slowly. The man’s gaze drifted from the box on his lap to the tupperware on my own. I felt a bit of mayonnaise at the corner of my mouth, which I wiped away with the back of my hand.

“You know,” he said to me—I braced myself. I was prepared to book it, to change my name—“this is only the third time I’ve been here. Margaret worked here for four years and I’ve only been here three times. It’s funny.”

I swallowed delicately.

He shook the box gently, so that there was the sound of its contents knocking about. “I don’t know what I’ll do with this,” he said. “I just figured I ought to get it.” He was quiet for a moment, nudging the contents of the box around. He picked a snowglobe out of the box, which contained a tiny version of the Seattle Space Needle. “Just knickknacks,” he said.

I tried to position my hands over the Tupperware in such a way that it was hidden from his view. I desperately wanted to leave the man there in the chair, pinned beneath that box. We sat there in silence, except not total silence because there was the hum of computers and the soft milling about of people behind closed doors and somewhere there was a printer beeping. He and I, though, were totally silent. I sat trying to reason out how grave was my crime. Was it unforgivable? It was only a sandwich, but it was the last sandwich of its kind.

Pete was in his office. Dennis was wherever. Janice was so intoxicated by the husband’s sadness that she went mute. The office lobby was the most desolate thing I’d ever seen, and I’d been through Death Valley once as a kid. This was before my dad took up with a woman he met online and before my mom converted hardcore to Mormonism.  

“Excuse me,” I said. “Restroom.” I slipped from the chair and, at the same time, I set Margaret’s tupperware container on the floor beneath the seat, where I hoped it would never again be seen by another living soul, except for Donny, who was the janitor, and he would not know what it meant. And even if, by some bizarre coincidence, he recognized the tupperware as Margaret’s and knew also that I had eaten the contents (were the surveillance cams filming?) no one would believe him since he was once caught sniffing Janice Welty’s biking shoes on two occasions, so we knew it was no accident.

There are messages written on the walls above the urinals, some in sharpie and some carved and faintly visible in the white tiles. These were not from me and they were not from Pete or Dennis, or any of us permanent fixtures of the office. They’re from the temps. This is the luxury of passing though. There was one message above the leftmost urinal, which I am partial to, that said, “Mindy Sue I’d die for you.” Whoever it was that loved Mindy Sue didn’t know that, for whatever reason, this would become something I’d repeat when trying to sleep at night. Mindy Sue, I’d die for you. Like counting sheep, except there was some other sort of peace in those words.

“It’s all right,” a voice behind me said.

I was still unzipped. “What?”

“The sandwich,” he said. “It’s all right. You didn’t have to hide it.”

I hoped he was a figment of my guilty conscience, but upon zipping up and turning around, Margaret’s husband was standing in the bathroom’s entrance.

He said again, “It’s all right.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—I didn’t know it—”

He saved me with a wave of his hand. “Hey, it was just a sandwich. She’d rather it not go to waste, I’d guess. Well, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Still, I stood there nodding and nodding, as if he raised a very valid point.

“I’m hoping I could ask a favor of you. Would that be all right?”

He had me. Hook through the gills. Suddenly I felt as though he’d played a trick on me in being so understanding. It wasn’t a free lunch. “All right,” I told him.

“Would you show me the roof?”

“Like the roof roof?”

“Would you take me there?”

“I don’t know if we’re allowed to go up,” I said. “I mean because, you know. I don’t know if they’d like it.”

The way he looked at me, so directly—his eyes like fingers touching over my face. “Please. I’d just like to see it. Only for a short while. It would mean a lot to me,” he said.

Inevitably, I told him I would. I was backed into a corner, and literally too because of the urinal at my back, which flushed automatically as I walked away.

“Thank you. I really mean it.”

He followed me quietly through the place. The way to the roof was a stairwell at the west end of the building. Our twin footsteps echoed through it. He took the box with him and carried it to the top. The door, which said, “ROOF ACCESS,” was a big metal thing and, when opened, it swung in the wind as though someone was pulling at it from the other side.

We stood there at the center of the roof for a while, me with my arms folded tightly because I hadn’t brought a jacket. Margaret’s husband was entirely impervious to the cold. The rooftop was gravel, so that there was both the sound of the wind and the crunch of tiny stones rolling underfoot. He scanned the skyline, then looked to each of the four corners of the building and then to me and waited until I understood he was asking a question. I pointed to the northeast corner.

He went to it and set the box down gently by his feet and put his hands on the parapet, which rose to the bottom of his chest. I followed only close enough so that he knew I had not abandoned him. He turned back and looked at me as though he were trying to imagine me as a person, like wholly, and that there were thoughts working through my head. He looked at me in that way you will only be looked upon a handful of times in your life. My personhood seemed discrete in such a way that it had never seemed before. Gave me a weird feeling. There, hunching beneath the sky, pressed up to it, and him looking at me like he was—I was like a pocket turned inside out.

“Did you see her?” he asked. “You know.”

“Yeah.”

He had another question, but paused first. I don’t know why he needed to know it all—why he had to picture her up there with her arms outstretched and her skin chilled white as marble—that quick mess of hair as she plummeted.

“Did she say anything before it?”

I paused. “She did. But we couldn’t hear her.”

He thought about this for a moment and looked out over the vastness of the suburbs and beyond it the city and the hills, a birdless sky. There were clouds above the city, which in the wind were moving toward us, and there was the sensation of standing in a receding tide, like when you were a kid, and feeling like you were moving, or being drawn out, but you were only standing still.

“What else?” he asked me. He closed his eyes.

“She wasn’t wearing any clothes,” I told him, though I suspected he already knew. “We didn’t understand it.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “Yes, I loved the woman, but I never once really understood her. Some times I thought I did. But I didn’t.” The wind took up his hair and pulled it around his scalp, revealing that he was balder than he appeared. “I knew the moment I met her,” he said, “that someday I’d never be happy again.” Then he asked if there was anything else I remembered.

“No,” I told him. “Except that there weren’t any clouds. Blue. It was all blue. Not like this.”

He nodded and laid his chest down on the parapet and looked at the parking lot below.

“Just there?” he asked without turning away.

“Yeah.”

He stood looking below.

“There wasn’t much more to see,” I told him. Of course this was a stupid thing to say. It was only a naked woman on the ground, but I suppose this is a lot if you loved her. There would have been something else to see in her skin, which turned almost immediately blue-red, and in the blood. There would have been something more in the horrifying angles of her arms and her legs and fingers, in the ragged clump of her hair. Or maybe there wouldn’t have been, but it would have felt that way.

“Janice told us about the cancer,” I said. “We think Janice listens in on our phone calls. We think that’s how she knew.”

Margaret’s husband paused. “What about the cancer?”

“Just that she had it. That Margaret had the bad cancer.”

“She told you it went into remission?”

“Oh. No,” I said.  “Janice told us it was terminal. We figured that was why—” I nodded toward the edge.

“That would have made more sense, I guess.”

“I guess it would’ve, yeah.”

“I think she was happier when she thought she was dying.”

He paused as though I might add something that mattered. I wanted to ask, why then? Did he know why? But I decided he probably didn’t know why, and if he did know, then I didn’t think he’d be interested in explaining it to me, and even if he was interested, then I didn’t think that I would understand.

For whatever reason, her being naked made more sense to me when she was terminal. I remembered watching Margaret in her office, staring at the screensaver on her monitor, which hadn’t meant anything to me at the time. This was something we all did. I did anyway. I stared at stock photos of beaches and meadows and mountains and thought about nothing. Then I worried someday maybe I’d kill myself too. I imagined myself as a threat to myself. Not to be trusted. I’d never treated myself with much affection after all, or grace. Thought conspicuously little of my future.

Without warning, Margaret’s husband hoisted himself up onto the parapet, which was three or so feet tall. He put a shin up and then a foot and he stood. I reached out and grabbed the back of his pants, his belt, and I yelled out expletives and sacrileges and said, “Get down.”

“It’s all right,” he said. I felt him lean out.

He held his arms out and his shirt whipped about in the wind. I have never been more terrified by anything in my whole, stupid life. “What are you doing?”

“I just want to look.”

“Please, don’t jump. Please.” I closed my eyes and held on tightly.

He swayed lightly in the wind, which passed more strongly this distance up, unbroken now by the other buildings lining the promenade. I felt his balance shift, losing it for moments and finding it again. I pleaded with him to get down.

He wasn’t looking at the lot anymore. There was only the peripheral glimpse of the promenade below, and the Shoemill and the women—my car was somewhere down there too. Ahead there was the horizon. If it had been blue, if there had not been the weather front coming to take us over, I imagined there might have been some small splendor in the view, with the city beneath us carved into blocks.

“You can let go,” he said.

I told him I wouldn’t.

“It’s all right. You can let go, but please stay close.” He told me he desperately did not want to fall. I clung to him anyway.

“Let go.”

Whimpering, and closing my eyes, I loosened my grip from his belt, but kept my fingers hovering at his waist, just there beside his belt loops.

“It’s all right. It’s all right,” he said. I didn’t know if he was saying it to me, or if he was saying this to himself, or maybe to Margaret. He closed his eyes and faced that great, sprawling distance and the approaching dark.

Standing up at the edge outstretched he looked sturdier than he had in the office. And there was now something magnificent to see in the length of his neck, and in his slender silhouette cut against the sky, the sound the wind made whipping through his clothes. This is how it appeared to me anyway. A skinny man in the sky. This is what love looks like, I thought. Not exactly love, but the space love occupies. A man at the edge of a building. You almost wish that Margaret had been there to see it.

Mindy Sue, I’d die for you.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s okay,” he said. “Help me down.” I took him by the waist and then by an arm and helped him step down and realized I was crying and had been for a while. I have often tried to imagine what it was he felt up there, but I have, every time, given up.

After we’d left the roof, after we’d gone back to the office, and after he left with Margaret’s box of knickknacks—that was the last I ever saw him. We didn’t say we’d meet again for a beer. And that was okay.

He placed his hand on my shoulder, and he said, “Thank you, Sam,” because that’s my name. I hadn’t thought he knew it. I didn’t mention it because I didn’t think it would come up. But there it is. That’s what they called me.

Taylor Koekkoek is a writer from Portland, Oregon. He received his MFA from Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.