It was a dour, pewter day in the middle of April. Rain had fallen the night before, and oil slicked puddles coursed along the curbs, lending Philadelphia a strange and faint smell of metallic decay. I was walking south on 12th Street, headed to work, foggy in the way one is after too little sleep, the city beyond my periphery blurred like some lucid dream. My fiance was in the process of leaving me for an older man, an ex-marine turned into a bar owner, and I’d found myself frequently awake, alone, fretting away this supposed piece of permanence that was unfolding from me like a spool unraveling.

I was mired in a rather broad mid-twenties doldrums. My first novel had been roundly rejected, and instead of writing, I was spending my days smoking pot and playing video games. I would stay up until four or five in the morning and sleep until after noon. In the early hours of the morning, I would wander through neon Chinatown, smelling dead fish and hookers’ perfume, wondering what decisions I could possibly make to extricate myself from such a complete collapse. The sun would creep over the cities’ row homes, and I would meander home, feeling detached from the entire place.

Three days a week, I worked on the grill at a pizza shop in south Philadelphia with two El Salvadorians and a Greek. We would smoke in the alley behind the restaurant, and they would make lewd comments in Spanish about the women coming and going for cheesesteaks and hoagies. It was the kind of job you did without noticing you were there, drifting in and out of awareness like a phantom. At the time, it was ideal.

Coming to Market Street, there was a small crowd gathered. Across the wide, dry vein of traffic, a series of cones had been set up, yellow police tape drawn to create its own barriers of intrigue. A slew of broad, stiff backed cops drifted about the perimeter drinking coffee and looking somber in a forced way, the way someone looks at the funeral of a very distant relative. Yes, isn’t this sad? Sure, I’d rather be down at the Phils game, and no, I hadn’t seen them in thirteen years, but this always puts into perspective how fragile life can be.

I approached the curious blot of people on the north, unpoliced side of Market. They were an amalgamation of Philadelphians – a few men and women in business suits, a nurse in pink scrubs headed for Jefferson, a man peddling watches, a young girl carrying a violin case. All of them were huddled in cluster that was not quite intimate, each person’s arms extended far enough from their bodies to ward off too much closeness. So they stood, all staring perplexed at the scene across the rush hour street, trying to discern the proper bodily orientations for such an occasion. One of the business men stood separate from the larger body, busy on his blackberry. The girl holding the violin case, who curiously resembled a daffodil with her body lithe as a stem and her hair a luminescent saffron color, had inched her way to the front of the group.

“I thought I heard gun shots,” said a voice from behind me, hushed and accusatory, coming from drooped woman with soot colored hair and a charcoal pants suit. She stood back from us (I had now integrated myself with the group, uneasily swaying with my hands in my pockets).

“Nah,” said the watch man, “fucking guy just fell outta the sky. I’m ova there doing business, and this guy just blows up like a box of tomatoes.” This man of buckeye colored skin, his muscular face adorned in a ragged, not fully grown beard that resembled steel wool, smacked his large hands together, then splayed them apart in a mock explosion of flesh, blood and bone. “Blam,” he said, his pink soled hands still suspended as remnants of death. A few of the women amongst us scowled at him in a befuddled, not quite horrified way. The men, myself included, watched dispassionately, more concerned with the ongoings across the street, casting about our discerning eyes for a glimpse of pooled blood, maybe a fragment of skull or a piece detached brain.

“Poor guy,” one of the women said, a stocky, square jawed blonde with cerulean eyes and stout calves. “That’s so sad.” She lingered for a moment, pouting more too herself than anything else, before picking up her brief case and lumbering west towards City Hall.

“How do you do something like that?” asked a tall, languorous businessman with chestnut hair flecked grey. He wore glasses, and has small brown eyes that were lacerated with tired capillaries.

“I don’t know,” I said, stunned to hear the sound of my voice. I said it too loudly. “How do you do anything?” I said this too softly, and the man who had looked at me, perhaps prepared to answer, looked away, running a long, tapered hand over the small, shaved cone of his chin.

“Maybe he was pushed,” said the nurse draped in pink, her voice coarse and adenoidal. She was bloated and full like a fresh loaf of bread. We pondered this possibility in hushed breaths, though I could hear the nurse, who was directly to my right, heaving with the stertortuous rhythm of a smoker.

“Fucked up, you know?” said the watch man. “Fucked up world at times.”

“Was he old?” asked the girl who looked like a daffodil sprouting between the cracks of the sidewalk.

“I dunno,” said the watch man. “Didn’t really want to get too close or nothing.” He subtly recoiled a wavering half step, swinging his briefcase of watches in front of his body like a shield.

“I wonder if he has any family,” she said, less as a question than a longing coda to her already fading interest. It seemed then that the city rejoined us, as if suddenly the traffic turned its volume back on so we could hear the hissing hydraulics of a bus opening its doors, the dissonant melodies of unintelligible voices moving around us. But still, across the street, nothing had changed. There was still a person, and he was still dead.

Their minds were, I’m sure, rolling over the same unknowable questions as mine. What did he think in that sliver of existence when he felt his body lose touch with the building and he found himself suspended in nothing and falling with alarming finality? Was he conscious for that moment of impact, were his final thoughts overwhelmed by the physical sensation of his whole body shrieking in anger? And what in that moment after? Where did that lifetime - however brief or long, happy or, most likely, sad - of memories settle after the tumult? Or did it simply cease, like a rain that has expended its breath, nothing left but a drying puddle on the sidewalk, cleaned away by nightfall?

But, of course, none of us asked any of these aloud. Instead, we stood in our impromptu congregation a minute longer, never to be quite so assembled again, perhaps hanging onto that little fluttering ephemera before dispersing with unspoken alacrity. The business men and women diverged for their offices. The nurse shuffled off for death in its more contained form. The girl with the violin crossed the street and disappeared behind the buses and taxi cabs of the city. Before I had the time to measure this falling apart, I was left standing alone with the buckeye skinned man and his watches.

“Motherfucker bounced, man,” he said, though not certainly to me or to anyone. He said it almost in awe. “Bounced and exploded, all in one. How the fuck we bounce?”

I lingered an unanswerable few seconds more, looking away from him. I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how we could bounce. Or explode for that matter. But I didn’t, and he shook his head in the way we always do when we accept how little we really know. I nodded, half in his direction, and stepped down from the curb, feeling the smooth, abraded pavement of Market Street beneath my feet. As I crossed, I heard a man’s voice behind me. “What’s going on over there?” he asked. “Aw man, some guy…” the watch man began, but then I was out of ear shot, moving myself on.

I passed along the east side of Twelfth Street as the coroner’s truck pulled up beside the ambulance, which was blinking silently in impotence. Its driver leaned facing me, away from the carnage, smoking a cigarette. The smell wafted across the street, and suddenly I wanted one myself. I hadn’t smoked in two years.

Just then, a man stepped out of the windowless van with Philadelphia’s seal painted on its side. I could see the white sheet rumpled on the ground, softly contoured as if somebody had decided to plop down and take a nap right there on the sidewalk. The man, whose face was turned away from me, knelt down in an almost fatherly way, as if to say Wake up, dear. Wake up. It’s time for school. He lifted the sheet and peered under.

I could make out the face. To my astonishment, it was a woman. She could not have been older than me. My body jolted in the correcting way it does when we have to re-tabulate what we thought was known. I stared at this dead women, my heart beat reverberating to the tips of my body. Half her face was a shattered wreck, communed grotesquely with the sidewalk. But the other half, caked in drying blood spatter, was remarkably intact. Her hair was short and black, easily mistakable for a man’s cut, but her cheek bone was gently callow in an effeminate way, tapering in a soft curve to what had once been her chin, and was now concrete. Her eyebrow was thin and slumped, at rest.

It was her ear that struck me most. It was abnormally long and slender, as if someone had stretched it too far one day and it had never retracted. Its entire length was pierced in an array of jeweled studs, emerald and sapphire and ruby. Surely someone had loved this face, had cradled her jaw and kissed that long, endearing, comical ear in the waning, humid hours of a summer night. Perhaps someone had even loved that ear, that face that was no longer twitching and reacting with life, not far from me in this city, on the same streets and parks where I had loved and kissed and felt my knees go weary with the ache of a night that shouldn’t end.

Then, the man let go of the sheet and it fluttered to earth in a delicate fall. Looking behind me, another small crowd had gathered on the corner. I thought of my own brief gathering, and how I would remember them in some oblique, personal way. Years later, when I’d hear a siren behind me on the street, or see a man peddling Rolexes in some other city, I’d see a flash of white sheet, of studded jewels still clinging to a dead ear, of bodies wearily pulling themselves together against their impulses. All of us would. And for a few seconds, it would unhinge us the way sudden death can, make impermanent all our protective moorings. For those few seconds, we pulled ourselves close to all the fearful mystery that eludes us in the world.

I did not go to work that day. I found a bar instead, and sipped two shots of whiskey. Within an hour, I was on a train to my parents’ house. The grey, shapeless sky had worn itself out by late afternoon, falling apart in fissures of blue.. As the day worked through its final hours, I sat on the back porch with my father drinking martinis. The smell of fecund, moist grass drifted over us before giving way to the somnolent sounds of the suburbs at dusk: a lawn mower humming unseen, insects doing their ritual nightly rejoices, magnolia trees abscising with a sigh in the breeze. We sat in the crepuscular light of spring, and it was then that I decided to leave Philadelphia.