For those of us who were there at the very beginning, it is strange if not particularly surprising to reflect on how the media began to lose interest despite so much intense coverage in the first months. As might be expected, it had taken up almost the whole front page of all three of our local newspapers during that initial period. Then gradually the coverage got to be intermittent over the next year or so. By and by, as one year gave way to another, the story was relegated to page two then three then four of the locals, while soon there was hardly anything at all about it in the national press.

For most of the first year it was a big enough story nationally, not just locally, and even turned up overseas, in England and Australia as well as occasionally Japan and the Philippines. Here in town, Harry Mellon was covering it for the Gazette and Harry really gave it some great coverage, capturing all the immediate drama, especially in the first few months when the overall story was taking shape:

There is a man standing on the window ledge of the 11th floor of the Kingsley Building. He faces the South Porter Docks as the chill breezes waft into his face. He is a pleasant-looking man, pleasant-looking enough but, make no mistake about it, this is a desperate man. Part of this man wants to die but part of him says no, I can’t do it, I cannot die, I just can’t do it.

Yet throughout the mighty struggle, his face is strangely impassive as if he has somehow banished all thoughts, good or bad, from his poor tormented mind. Dedicated police officers are leaning out the windows on either side of where the man stands, teetering and tottering. They’re taking turns trying to talk him out of going through with this terrible, terrible thing.

Sgt. John Hinton, for example, is a twelve-year veteran now with the 7th precinct,  the same neighborhood where the drama is unfolding. ‘Please help us help you,’ says Sgt. Hinton, almost begging the man.

“I won’t," says the man.

“Won’t you at least tell me what your name is?" beseeches Sgt. Hinton.

“I won’t," says the man. And that is all the man says… I WON’T!

Harry did a number of terrific follow-up stories over the next six years, every one of which beginning the same way by reminding us that the man who’s been standing there year-in and year-out, hovering over the abyss, daring time and space and death itself, still has no name. They were great stories that Harry wrote in those days but he had to get on with his life sooner or later just like the rest of us, so, in 1963, Harry took a public relations job with a large cosmetics company. I believe he still works there.

Sarah Sonar from the Ledger took a somewhat different approach in those early days, not quite so dramatic, chronicling the man’s day-to-day subsistence and how he was managing to survive. Within twenty-four hours, a medical emergency team had contrived to pass him food of one sort or another stuck on at the end of what looked like an elongated pruning hook. Sometimes he grabs at the food like a wild animal, like he will do anything to eat and live. At other times, he just nibbles. He’s getting skinnier every day in any event.

“How much longer can this go on?” Sarah would ask in all her articles. By 1959, her tone had gotten philosophical:

Who is this man who for more than two years now pokes and nibbles at the fugitive chicken legs and ham hocks our kind city fathers vouchsafe him daily, who tears hungrily at succulent red tomatoes and green cucumbers hung out before him like fish bait? What brought him here, to the Kingsley Building and into our lives? Was his own heart broken in love? The tragic early death of a beloved young sister or brother? Or is he just too, too depressed by the world to live in it anymore, to endure the daily threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of our implacable adversary?

It is a world that all of us must live in and must live with, each day of our lives. We must, and we do! This man, whoever he is, wants to escape, but something, maybe the fear of the unknown that awaits us all, makes him rather grip his heels into that narrow ledge where, weak and wobbly, his very existence balances by a  thread. Or maybe it’s conscience that stays the hand of this self-executioner, stays it month after agonizing month. Maybe conscience keeps him alive in the knowledge that each man and woman on this planet owes it to every other man and woman on this planet to give it all his or her very best effort and to face the music, however hard it might be to do that. No, not to end it all in fear and despair, but to face whatever tomorrow might bring, resolute and courageous, in the hope that that tomorrow will truly dawn brighter and never more blessed.

I’ve known Sarah since she was a child and I’m very proud of how well she writes. I’m sure we’re all proud of her, although I think we’d agree there’s a lot of herself that Sarah doesn’t show in public. Our Sarah is as tough as any man I know, tough as nails. I’m thinking, for example, of one day fairly early on, right around the time when she wrote the article I’ve quoted above, when she said to me, “I wish they’d let me write the whole truth.”

“Like what, honey?” I ask.

“Like the way this guy shits and pisses his pants, and how it drips on down the cornice,” she says.

“Why would you want to write about that?” I ask.

“Because the people have a right to know. They ought to know all that piss- and shit-dripping is part of the ongoing drama,” she says, and she winks and grins at me a little. “Pretty fucking disgusting, don’t you think?” she asks.

There have been so many times over the years when we’d see him edge over to the brink and sway there, as if to resolve at last to bring this saga to its awful denouement. Each time, some of us who were leaning out the window from 1123 or 1127—the two suites on either side of where the man stands—renewed our remonstrances; reiterated, as if it were a catechism we memorized for this mission, our steadfast faith in the sacrosanctity of life itself. It was never quite possible to know if he really heard us or not at those moments, or the potential impact if he did, but over the years new generations of our townsfolk have all added their own refinements to the chorus, sounding whatever notes befit their own sensibilities, usually refinements of tone more than substance. I recall, for example, a certain importunity with which people in the 1970s urged him off the ledge; by contrast, a tone of cautious understatement prevailed among the choristers of the 1980s. All of them, though, have sighed in collective relief when on these occasions they saw him step back from the edge, resting his back at last against the wall. At that point, someone in 1123 or 1127 invariably asks again the basic questions that intrigued each of our generations: Oh by the way, what’s your name? Are you from hereabouts or just visiting? Any family you’d like us to contact? A mother? A father? A sister? A brother?

Of course, there are untold hours when no one’s there, not a soul in the late night or early morning hours when the Kingsley Building is deserted and the man swaying erect and unutterably alone in the drear cityscape is left wholly to his own thoughts, if, that is, the contents of so harrowed a soul can meaningfully be called “thoughts.” As the novelty of the endless crisis wore off through the decades, and most of the reporters lost interest while the police and medical teams now tended perforce to other exigencies, those hours naturally multiplied in number. Usually it’s the cleaning staff or the stray security guard that is the first to confirm each early morning that the interminable ordeal does, in fact, continue. Sometimes one of them shouts out a greeting from 1123 or 1127 or will perfunctorily assure him that “we’re on your side, fella.”

In earlier years,  Don Earn from the Tribune gave us great glimpses of our local public officials in action, recounting for the record their often uncertain deliberations. Onerous as it was, the decision was made to continue feeding him for as long as necessary. As Councilman Petrarcha argued, if he weakens from hunger and topples, the city is morally complicit. Each decade, the powers that be review a variety of devices by which to possibly force him off the ledge. In 1964, for example, the idea was floated to simply rush the man with deputies from each side. It was deemed too dangerous. In 1970, a sheriff’s deputy, Mike Delvaney, actually suggested the use of a large expertly wielded lasso strong enough to yank him off and haul him in. The preposterous suggestion became itself a prominent news story. For years afterward, when people saw Delvaney in a bar or at a ballgame, they’d wink and start yodeling “Home on the Range.”

Instead of any such contrivances, “First Do No Harm” became the rule of thumb, and so the status quo has prevailed for better or worse. Teams of psychotherapists have periodically attended; in the 1970s, the Hollingsworth Institute became interested and coordinated periodic visits by their staff members. “What is it that you would like to see happen?” they asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Are your parents still alive?” they asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Even in those few words, and in other brief declamations over the years, you heard an insidious tinge to his voice, which otherwise tended to be nondescript. When I conjure up the sound, it’s as if the whole riddle of the man were somehow contained in it. If the newsworthiness of the story has worn off through the decades, that riddle surely has not. As you can imagine, we’ve combed through thousands of missing persons reports. None of them correlate to the possibility of this man.

Relatively early on, by 1962, he’d already lost enough weight that he had to hold up his pants with one hand, which added a ludicrous aspect to the pictorial scene. Suicides on ledges are inevitably stark and prepossessing tableaux but not after years and then decades; in time, the physical laws of nature wreak an obviously progressive havoc. His shirt crumbled in the early 1960s. The leather on his shoes became caked here, cracked there and, by mid-decade, the laces disintegrated. His beard never really grew; scraggly light brown growths sprouted and then stopped.

Specialty cops, meaning specially trained police from newer departments created to serve special needs, were first deployed around 1970. One policeman I recall who tried appealing to his natural curiosity, assuming he had one. “Don’t you want to know what’s been happening in the world?” he asked.

“I can see what’s happening in the world,” he said. “I can see them build new docks down below me, and the buildings I can glimpse behind me get taller and taller above me,” he said. It was probably the longest sentence he had spoken since the prior February when he had remarked on how the weather felt at its chilliest since he’d been here. Winters here can hardly be characterized as tropical but they are comparatively mild, even pleasantly breezy at times. Years have gone by since we’ve stopped hoping for an anomalous frost that would freeze him off the ledge.

By 1969, he was enough of a fixture that a certain liberality began to apply. Not just cops and reporters and psychiatrists, but diverse well-wishers and other variously interested parties, the sort of people who seemed to know what they were about and might have something useful to contribute, were allowed to speak to him after first being approved for admission to 1123 or 1127. Even some people who seemed to just be curiosity-seekers, or looking to have the kind of experience they could talk about at social gatherings afterward, were often deemed harmless enough.

One starry night, Orville Bryson hurried over to 1127 because he wanted to be the first to tell the man about the moon landing. “Funny thing,” Orville said to me later. “It wasn’t like I thought it would matter much one way or another, I mean, I didn’t think his knowing about the moon landing would help persuade him off the edge in any way.”

“You were just anxious to share the big news,” I suggested.

“That’s it, that’s exactly right,” said Orville.

The moon itself was full and actually rather gigantic that night when Orville leaned out the window and said, “Hey fella, an American just landed on the moon.”

“I’m glad,” the man said.

“Ok, well, we’ll see you again,” said Orville.

He must have been no more than twenty years old when he first stepped out in 1956. Funny, people were quick to tell him then that “life is such a precious commodity” and I was still hearing people say that same thing in those very same words as late as 1988. Cancer survivors were encouraged to come and beseech; or, if not exactly encouraged, by no means discouraged. A variety of people who had known bitter loss in their own lives were given direct access from 1123 or 1127.

“I bet you don’t even remember why you wanted to take your life back then,” Sylvia Snyder asked him in 1982. Her tone was inevitably plaintive; Sylvia had lost a child some years earlier.

“It was a while ago,” he said.

“Some people treasure life so much and yet they get cheated out of it. And here you are, just throwing it away,” said Sylvia.

“I apologize,” he said.

“You were such a fine-looking young man once upon a time. I know, because I got a very good look at you back then after you stepped out on the ledge,” Margie Newsom told him in 1976.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You used to look a lot like my late husband,” said Margie. “Thirty-six years we were married, and he never said a harsh word to me, not once. I miss him so much.”

“I’m sure you do,” he said.

“I bet the girls would go for you,” said Margie.

“Some might,” he allowed.

I would actually say he was neither good-looking nor not good-looking. He had a kind of ashen look even back then. On the blond side, his eyes neither quite blue nor quite brown, he was what they used to call in those days “clean-cut.” Now his hair was as tangled as you might expect after decades of neglect, except, like the hair on his face, it never grew inordinately long. I suppose that’s also as you might expect from someone who is not really quite alive but isn’t actually a corpse just yet. The hair on corpses just grows and grows and grows.

Had this story taken place in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles instead of in our city, a bustling little industrial center in its heyday but that heyday is waning, of which the big great bright world may or may not take due notice when such notice is due, and then move on in its course, it likely would have gone very different. We’re like that town in New York State that made the news for a time because the girl was pregnant with the same pregnancy for decades and, to my knowledge, even by now nothing has come to term. When nothing ever changes, people lose interest no matter how strange the thing is that never changes.

Here, it’s the same man standing in the same place where he has stood so long. In the 1960s he was still saying what he had said in the 1970s, and in the 1990s he was still saying what he had said in the 1980s, that his name was unimportant so why do you keep asking, or that if he should jump, and there was no reason he might not do so at any moment, there’d be no one to claim him. “You won’t remember me if I jump,” he said ruefully. “I haven’t a soul in the whole world who truly cares for me.”

Maybe nothing more than such bitter loneliness had forced him onto that ledge in 1956. Things sometimes do have simple explanations. Some people there were who just wanted him to get it over with and jump and stop already all this tormenting the world with his miserable existence. There seems to be a universal animus in this regard. I remember when I visited London, all the trains at Paddington Station were late because some guy not far from Oxford committed suicide on the tracks. The commuters were really mad at the guy because he had no consideration for other people. Here, because the Kingsley Building overlooked a cluttered docking area of the port, there wasn’t ample space for crowds to mill and fester and shout Jump! Jump! Jump! like they used to do in New York.

By 1980, he was more nondescript-looking than ever. The pale face was paler. Wisps of sandy hair got wispier. By 1984, he gave up on his pants altogether, no longer trying to hold them up. He let them slide off and over the edge. That got the story back into the national news for a brief day, what with the photo that one of our local reporters had taken of him in his dirty undies just standing there. Since it was 1984, a newspaper in Chicago ran it with the caption “Big Brother Is Watching You.”

The more years went by, the more they asked him, “Don’t you want to know what the world looks like these days?”

“It’s not important,” he kept telling them. He told them that in 1960 when they asked if he wanted to see what America’s vigorous new President looked like. He told them that over a decade later when they asked if he wanted to join with them in mourning the tragic downfall of Saigon. Later, when they asked, he didn’t even remember what the Berlin Wall was or why it should have fallen as they seemed so certain it should, and that it was such a good thing it did. By the 1990s, they gave up on current events, nor was he himself included in the yearbooks they were beginning to compile to commemorate the old century about to pass.

Sleeping was always an issue. In the early years, certainly up until at least 1959, reporters would peer out from 1123 and 1127 to see how he’d manage it. He sure seemed asleep when he seemed asleep, especially at those moments when, his eyes closed and head nodding, he’d wobble and buckle so perilously. “Look out, look out,” they’d shout.

“Oh, let me alone,” he’d say irritably, coming to, like somebody who just wanted to get forty winks. Like somebody who was confident enough he wouldn’t tumble notwithstanding everybody else’s trepidations that he’d have to do just that. Once they tried to trick him with a beautiful woman. It was in the early 1960s and the woman was recruited from a touring burlesque show. They fastened her waist to a pulley-like mechanism housed just inside 1123 and she inched her way out on the ledge toward him. She held one hand against the wall for balance and with the other she caressed her breasts in an effort to arouse him.

“Get those tits out of my face or I’ll jump,” he yelled, and that was that. The incident got a few national papers to revisit the story. One hinted that it showed he was suicidal for sexual reasons.

Dedicated mental health workers redoubled the therapeutic effort over the years. There were a number of behavioral psychologists whom he blankly ignored while later in the 1970s some object relations theory folks tried their best. The most dedicated counselor of all, albeit for a brief time, was Aylin Ucansu. She’d come all the way from New York to lend her expertise and learn what she could learn. Sometimes she spoke to him from 1123, sometimes from 1127, as if to help him feel securely engirdled, as it were cradled by her on both flanks. Her thinking was, if he’d all along been splitting all-good object relations from all-bad object relations, maybe she could with this double movement sew him up and integrate the splintered dynamic.

Aylin started off small. She was masterful. She could talk to him about the weather and actually get him to say substantive things about clouds and skies and rain and what-not. That was important to people, actually, who’d begun to worry, even back in the 1960s, that he could lose the memory of language. That he’d even get to be feral.

To Alyin he said things like, “The early night is like a bunch of silt that will coagulate and become pure black night no matter how much the stars shine or don’t shine.”

“How very beautiful,” said Aylin.

“I like your name,” he said.

“It is Turkish,” she said. “I am of Turkish origin. My name means a halo around the moon.”

“Ah,” he said. But Aylin never got around to urging him off the ledge, maybe because she didn’t know how to make that jump, no pun intended. One day she didn’t come around at all, not the next day either nor any day after that. She disappeared forever and no one ever saw her again. The agency she worked for worked with the police for years to find her, to no avail. Maybe she was raped and eaten.

Meanwhile, successive generations of public officials have not wanted to be any more precipitate in their actions than their predecessors. Meanwhile, he eats less and less. Meanwhile, more people are hoping he’ll jump. Religious groups have gotten interested. For the more esoteric ones, he does seem to have the trappings of saint or devil, whichever; the memory of Simeon Stylites is evoked. Church fathers confer, gurus huddle. But among the Christians, neither Catholics nor Nazarenes will venture their studious pronouncements. Among the pagans, the Fourth Way sees a dark side of the moon and leaves it at that.

An evanescence of the man intrigues me, all the more so because I know of no ending for him yet. He waits there still, a facticity, tottering. Real he is, a thing to see, talk to. Yet erased, a world transpired, unremembering, it being left well enough alone, traceless, himself traceless, yet recurs, to be dredged, the penetrable strata, pluckable. To be plucked, dredged up, from cacophonies, Andrea Doria and a Suez Crisis, same time, same station, skip time, Pius XII dead Czechoslovakia invaded Nelson Mandela visits New York, plucked or not amid the figments, dying, about to die, a synchronicity, any minute for sure, Pius XII no longer dying Mandela no longer living, yet, here, he stands, unnamed as he has stood, shits as he needs to down the cornices though he eats much less these days than in the beginning when there was a word.

In late 1999, a news team set up in 1127 stuck a big microphone out across the side of the building over to where he stood. They asked him, not about himself or what in God’s name was he doing out there on that ledge, which thousands of people have asked before in thousands of ways, they asked him instead about the world—not something specific about the world, nothing topical, like what do you think of Yeltsin firing his whole cabinet for the fourth goddamn time, they don’t ask him about anything like that because how the hell is he supposed to know anything about that?—something rather general, a sort of open-ended question, “Sir, what are your thoughts for the new century?”

When he didn’t answer, they took a different tact, they asked him, “Don’t you think, with a whole new century upon us, that now would be a good time to make some kind of decision?”

“You mean I ought to shit or get off the pot?” he asked.

“Something like that,” they said.