Voyeur by Meera Nair Lyrics

There's a man on the roof and he's tying a noose. He’s tall and slim and too close to the roof's thin edge a 100 feet above the Brooklyn street she's waiting to cross and she doesn't want to stop, she's late for her shift at the hospital, but there's a look about him, an alert stillness, as if he's vibrating in place and her high heels falter mid-step, and she can't look away when he, in a deft, practiced, almost professional move drops the noose around his neck. Its neat coiled heaviness rests comfortably against the front of his cream shirt like a fashion accessory, like it's a bespoke tie woven by artisans to fit the exact length of his torso and as he raises a hand to adjust the free end that emerges from the precise spirals of the hangman's knot a car honks beside her and the driver leans out and calmly says, “Watch where you are going, bitch,” and she stumbles back on to the pavement her heart pounding with fear or perhaps it's anticipation, she can't tell, and hurries up the steps of a brownstone nearby from where she can see the man on the roof at a better angle. She looks around and sees that no one else has noticed him, this tall man on the roof who has not moved from his place in the meanwhile, who now bends his spine back in an elastic arc, then straightens back up and thrusts one taut leg out then in like a wing, stretches his long arms up, light and free to the sky as if he's an athlete preparing to run, or maybe a dancer, a Fred Astaire of the rooftop. It occurs to her then that she's chanced upon a performance, a solitary, ironic artistic act like Banksy painting a mural under a bridge —this is New York city after all, stranger things have happened, of course that's what it is, what with the noose and all, a spectacle, she thinks, relieved, the weight of guilt and responsibility lifting, replaced with a secret thrill, the frisson she expects voyeurs feel watching unknown people perform private rituals alone and the thought comes unbidden, he was hers, at this moment he was hers, in this crowd, in this place, she alone has witnessed this man with the noose around his neck, no one else is watching in that great evening stampede that floods past her, everyone staring at their phones or feet or companion or slice of pizza, no one glancing up, no one noticing the blatant pink Brooklyn sunset or Instagramming the man who has now moved so close to the very edge of the roof she can see the black tips of his shoes teeter over the void as he stands there relaxed, fingers on the rope. She should name him, she thinks, her own secret name, James or Peter or Juan, and when he, her James, looks in her direction his expression slightly amused, almost as if he's laughing a little inside, it's as if the two of them are alone, twinned, bonded across the arc of the street and she thinks she's completing his performance, validating it by being the viewer, for doesn't every performance need a viewer for it to become one? Only now he's gone from the edge, walking away across the flat roof and she wants him back, come back she clamors in her head, come back, here I am, and sure enough he returns as if her need called across the space between them, but this time the noose is higher up against his throat and turned front to back and the free end no longer free but anchored out of sight, and she knows, O god, now she knows what he's planning to do, knows also that she's known it all this lost time, just as she knows the unbearable aftermath written in some resident doctor's scrawl, ischemic cerebral damage due to neck compression, elevation and posterior displacement of the tongue, occlusion of the cartoid artery and she thinks, move idiot, don't just stand here watching, her hand already on the cool rectangle of her phone, already dialling 9-1, imagining the words; operator, man, roof, noose. That's what she should do, save a life, only she looks back up and is transfixed at him standing there body loose and ready, set, head tipped back to look at the birds flung like charred fragments of paper against the same sky one more time and she asks herself what if he doesn't want to be saved? Isn't his will, his decision evident in the careful knots, the preparation, the practiced movements, she tells herself that he has been deliberate, meticulous, determined in his planning this, his last performance, and in that moment she thinks she loves him more than she has loved anyone else and understands then with a sick slither in her stomach that he's condemned, like her, but she's wants to let him go, unremarked, with nothing for Facebook or Twitter, no series of pictures on Tumblr, no news for the avid world, and watch alone, fascinated from a stoop in Brooklyn as a man steps off a ledge the rope uncoiling behind him and dives into the air and for a heart-breaking instant stays picture perfect, suspended --