WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO OVER THE PAST WEEK III:

Some things I forgot to mention:

After my last Final Cut Pro class ended last Friday, I went to Bobst to check my e-mail, and to read. I was sitting in sub-basement A, just decompressing from the busy week. There was a sound like a small explosion, or like something heavy toppling over, from upstairs. Everyone in the basement sat straight up. A moment of eerie silence followed, where people were probably wondering if terrorists were attacking again. Then we all got up, picked up our belongings, and calmly made for the stairs. No one was ordering us to evacuate; this was automatic behavior.

There was already a crowd in the stairwell. It moved slowly, and in the short time it took me to ascend the two flights of stairs to the lobby, I saw one girl crying, and another one starting to cry. The students and library workers gathered at the top of the stairs all stood there quietly, staring into the lobby. I looked over someone's shoulder in the same direction as everyone else. I stared at the same thing they all stared at: a body lying on the floor, twisted in an awkward way at the waist.

Someone whispered that the man had jumped. A tall black man went up to the body to check for signs of life. Someone--an administrator?--kept yelling at him not to touch him, or he might go into shock. She yelled for us to make a path for the paramedics. Sirens from an ambulance were already ringing and getting louder.

Though he was told not to touch the body, the black man put his hand on the jumper's neck. The administrator kept yelling at him, yelling for someone to cover the body to keep it warm. Something, maybe blood, had begun to pool around the jumper's head. There were jerks of movement--no, twitching. I overheard the student working the booths everyone has to walk through as they enter and exit the library say that the man had leaped from the fifth floor at least--she hadn't seem him jump, but she saw the body falling past the fifth floor. Paramedics and police arrived. They wanted to question anyone who saw anything, and they kept anyone else from entering the library. I hadn't seen anything, and I didn't want to hang around anymore, so I left.

My friend Dennis had also been in the library. I met him outside, and we hung out the rest of the evening. We went to a sushi place nearby and talked about the jumper. Neither of us knew if he had died, but we both saw the body, so we didn't have to say anything. It had looked so unnatural, the man's torso pointing straight down into the floor, his hips and legs a perfect 90-degrees to the side. But we didn't talk about it. Dennis is applying to law school, and we talked about that instead.

An hour later, we walked past the library, but it was still closed. Dennis said "They're carrying his bookbag," and yes, a cop was walking out of Bobst with what had been the dead man's bookbag. The big pouch was still unzipped, and Dennis had seen a book by Aristotle inside. Had he been a philosophy kind of man, this jumper? Had he been into classics? I wanted to wonder aloud if he had been considering law school, but stopped myself. I took a train to Times Square instead, and just went where the living people were.