The Jump

Jimmy sat at the edge of the landing, six stories up, looking down. How will it feel he asked himself, will I pass out before I hit the bottom? He had read somewhere that most suicide jumpers pass out before they hit thus feel little to no pain. Is this high enough? He also heard that time slowed down and your life would pass before you. Will the fall kill me, or just break my legs? Several minutes passed and Jimmy's thoughts floated in and out of his mind without sticking anywhere. His original plan was to climb to the top of the towns water tower and just jump off the side, plunging to his death. However the recent sullying of the tower by a graffiti artist who identified himself with the tag BOOG made the attention on the tower too great. The local cops would now drive by too frequently, shining their spotlights onto the tower. Jimmy couldn't risk that, what if they caught him before the jump, they'd blame him for the graffiti and that would be all he'd be known for.

Jimmy mused on that for a while, What kind of person calls themselves BOOG and paints that name all over town? On the water tower, the Pizza Hut, the Dumpster behind the School. What's the purpose? Jimmy wondered if he knew BOOG and didn't even know it, like how people live next door to serial killers for years and don't suspect a thing. Then they end up on the evening news " He was such a quiet young man" they always say. He remembered the first time he'd seen the big friendly balloon letters spray painted on the side of the hardware store, BOOG, was all it said. No signature required it was after all a kind of signature in of itself. Does BOOG stand for something, Booger, is what the other kids on the bus connected to almost instantly. It became a big joke around school, but to Jimmy it was a serious mystery. BOOG struck almost on a weekly basis for about a year from around Halloween, through Christmas and into the summer, by the time school started again the town was BOOG central.

Jimmy had spent much of that summer in pursuit of BOOG, and on one or two occasions was just behind him. Finding walls with fresh sharpie or still wet spray paint and one time he found one perfect impression of a size 11 Converse All Star at the scene, the left shoe to be precise. Was it BOOG or just a random shoe print? How many people wore that brand of shoe, he'd never noticed before, but after this, he made a mental note every time he came across an All-Star wearer. He'd visually inspect from afar, trying to judge size and detect any errant droplets of dried paint.

Teenagers need hobbies after all and unmasking BOOG became Jimmy's, but not in any legal sense. Jimmy didn't necessarily want to see BOOG brought to justice, in fact the time he found the shoe print he casually swiped it away with his own foot after carefully studying it of course. He didn't want the authorities to find BOOG, he wanted to find BOOG, so he could ask him why. What did it mean? Was it just a goof, or did it hold some other meaning?

Most of the time though BOOG left no trace, no fingerprints, shoe prints, not even an empty spray paint can or lid. The local police, jokingly known as the Fifes, were mostly known for rousting drunks from the local watering holes or harassing teenagers on lovers lane, they weren't equipped to handle a criminal genius such as BOOG. They were clueless, despite longer shifts and patrols, they had no suspects at all. The one time they thought they had gotten close was when a wall was tagged in plane view of a surveillance camera across the street from the bank. When they looked at the footage, however, it was all distorted and they couldn't make out a thing. The distortion was only on the footage while BOOG was at work, before and after was crystal clear. At least that was what the rumor was, by the time Halloween had rolled around again BOOG was an urban legend.

It was right around that time that BOOG hit his most public and confounding target yet. The Delmonte bridge which crossed the Sissiack River just south of town. It was a tall railroad bridge made of stone and concrete, it was easily 43 feet tall, and there one morning seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of its span in big friendly balloon letters a huge purple BOOG. The letters were easily three feet tall and could be seen for miles, there was no ledge or foothold which where BOOG could have stood to paint this masterpiece. Yet there it was, BOOG risked life and limb by walking out on this busy railroad bridge in the middle of a dark October night and somehow managed to paint his name and return to safety. It was astounding, the local cops had no idea how he did this and since no one knew who BOOG was he or she was the only person who knew the secret. This fact was unacceptable to Jimmy, by this time he needed to know who BOOG was. He needed answers.

Jimmy didn't realize it at the time, but this bridge stunt was where the idea of the jump was seeded in his mind. As he stared up at the bridge where BOOG had defied gravity to paint his name a thought occurred to him, a seemingly random, innocent thought which came and went with barely a glimmer of recognition. Would I die if Jumped from that height? Jimmy wondered. The thought stuck with him, however, and from time to time he'd stare longingly at some tall building or the towns water tower and think about jumping. At first it was just simple questions such as what would happen if I jumped from there, would it be fatal, survivable? How would I explain it if I survived? I slipped, Lost my grip. Why was I up there that high in the first place? Curiosity, stupid teen pranksterism.

As it turns out the Delmonte bridge was BOOG's next to last work, for the next seven months there were no BOOG tags reported. Jimmy held out hope of finding out who BOOG was but as Christmas came and went and spring gave way to summer it seemed BOOG was gone. The only thing that remained was the idea of the jump. That's what Jimmy called it in his mind, it wasn't a thought of killing himself but a fascination with the act of it. The jump had, in his mind, become his Delmonte bridge BOOG painting, something would make his mark on this small town. Indelible like a sharpie signature on whatever he chose to jump off of. Death or survival didn't really play a part in Jimmy's fantasy, only the jump.

So as irony would have it as Jimmy was planning his leap from the water tower, it seems BOOG decided to come out of retirement and painted his biggest BOOG ever in seven-foot-tall purple letters across the towns water tower. Now Jimmy needed to find a new place to make his jump from, yet in a town this small there were precious few high places to choose from. Two had already been made famous by BOOG, and admire BOOG as he did Jimmy wanted his infamy to be separate from BOOGs. He didn't want to ride BOOG's coattails he wanted a story all his own.

By mid-summer it had been almost a year and a half since BOOG had started his reign of terror and had become a kind of urban legend. Stories of who the BOOG was and what his tagging meant were rampant. Jimmy disregarded most of them as childhood bunk, which most of them were. Jimmy had turned his mind to the jump, and how to cultivate his own urban legend. He thought about leaving behind some creepy shrine of some sort in his father's barely used woodshed, something with candles and animal bones like in the movies. Jimmy, unfortunately, was a depressingly normal teenager, who lived an un-impressively regular life. Parents still married, siblings that were cordial and loving, no weird abusive relatives, no drinking, no drugs, no dis-function of any kind. It was a particularly daunting challenge for Jimmy to overcome, he thought about starting to be disruptive in class, but all his teachers liked him. He didn't even know where to begin being a bad kid.

Most of the stories were just the same old stories just bent to fit BOOG and his graffiti tags in, but one story caught Jimmy off guard. One afternoon while Jimmy was standing in line at the drug store with a fist full of dollars and a stack of comics, he heard Smitty Thompson and some other kids talking. Smitty had moved from two towns over a couple of years ago and was ahead of Jimmy in school. This afternoon he was un-spooling a story about how when he was a kid a similar thing happened in his town, graffiti and such for a whole year he couldn't remember if it was a word like BOOG or something different. Shortly after the graffiti stopped, the mysterious deaths began. People, mostly teenagers and young adults dying in odd ways, with no foul play suspected the police never could connect the deaths so they just never were solved. This was all according to Smitty who was a child at the time. Not a very solid source, Jimmy thought to himself, but what if he's telling the truth.

Jimmy hadn't made the connection between the jump and BOOG until he heard Smitty's story. Was his obsession with the jump of his own minds making, or of some kind of sinister suggestion from BOOG? A subliminal message in the graffiti or some kind of supernatural compulsion? Could this be, was he following his own path or a path laid out before him by some unknown force? These thoughts were disconcerting, Jimmy had always been strong headed and willful. He didn't follow trends or pay attention to what the "in" crowd was doing. He thought of himself as a sort of lone wolf, blazing his own path, but now how could he be sure his thoughts were his own? His mind as of late had been busier than normal, more fraught with competing often times conflicting voices. There was his voice, his conscience the one that kept him out of harm's way, but then there was something else. A small voice almost undetectable underneath all the other chatter, just barely decipherable.

Was this the voice of BOOG? Had he somehow gotten into Jimmy's mind and warped it from the inside out? Jimmy sat on the ledge six stories up and tried to quiet his mind, tried to single out that small voice and focus on it and only it. The town was silent, the night was still and calm, it was as if the whole world had just stopped. At first Jimmy had a hard time isolating the voice, it seemed distant and muffled, but the more focused he was the clearer it became. As the voice came out of the shadows of Jimmy's mind and into the forefront it became more and more apparent that it wasn't a voice at all, at least not any voice that could be conjured by human vocal cords. It was an unearthly murmuring in an indecipherable language, something about it was cold and ancient.

Now the voice was all that Jimmy could hear, he tried to push it out of his mind and find his own voice again but it was no use. The unearthly voice was too powerful now as if by focusing on it the voice gained strength. Jimmy was disappearing into the noise when out of nowhere a single thought appeared, one word in Jimmy's own voice, "JUMP."

At first it was just the one word, then it began repeating, over and over in a kind of singsong playfulness.

"Jump, Jump, Jump, Jump..."

Almost without thinking Jimmy's feet left the ledge, this was it, he jumped. In an instant, the noise and voices stopped and he realized everything he heard was wrong. Time didn't slow down, his life didn't flash before him, and he didn't pass out before he hit the ground. For the briefest of moments all his questions were answered, he knew how it felt and the hight of the fall was indeed enough to kill.