The Man on the Crane

There’s a man climbing around the top of an 18-story crane in Atlanta right now, threatening to take his life simply by surrendering to the gravity that has been tugging at him for over 25 hours. Apparently he killed his girlfriend earlier this week. It’s a sad situation from whatever angle you look at it. His angle happens to be 150 feet in the skies of Atlanta, ready to spend a second cold and restless night clinging to chilled steel after baking in the hot sun all day, more thirsty than hungry by now, probably a fair bit delirious from the weeks events and subsequent pain of exposure. The police negotiators were kind enough to give him a jacket this afternoon.

For some reason I am empathetic of his situation. I’ve never been a hostile person, but I’ve seen enough bad tempers in otherwise good people to realize that some animal is left in us humans. He obviously lost his temper and saw no other way to release the emotion than to take his girlfriend’s life. Regret is probably all he’s felt since it happened, enough so that he began climbing a construction crane at around 4 PM yesterday to escape the realities that chased him on the ground. It’s inevitable that he’ll return to the ground once again before long, whether it be at a velocity of 33 compounding feet per second, or with pepper-spray in his already dry eyes and an impatient arm tightly around his neck.

I wonder if he’s been looking back at the fluctuating number of faces staring at him from below, presumably roped off from what’s been calculated as his drop zone, with enough of a buffer to keep the potential splatter from staining the clothes and minds of curious onlookers. I wonder if some of those onlookers have unspoken hopes that he does jump so they can have the thrill of witnessing a short-lived historical event. I wonder what the ratio of sympathy versus hate there is in the situation. I wonder if he’ll go through with his presumed plan and retain some personal dignity or if the Atlanta Police have their way and bring another man to justice in a cement cage far away from the public eye for his last few decades.