Matthew Stone opened his eyes and looked down into the street below. People in twos and threes moved about languidly in the pale yellow haze as if constrained by a barely discernable gauze. A bus roared past and Stone could see a trail of vapour shimmering in its wake. The whisper of a gentle breeze on his face brought him back to his body, his hard-beating heart, and it convulsed in a sudden discordant two-step that left him gasping for air. He gathered his breath and wondered what it would be like to jump.

From the rooftop, looking across the river toward the city and the fading pink sunset, he could see the monolithic Twin Towers and the crenellated spires of the Woolworth Building all the way to the Chrysler Building half-way up the Island, rising like a stainless-steel rocket ship from the dissonant chaos of Midtown. A battered billboard on a neighbouring building read: COP SHOT. REWARD. $$$. It’s all useless, he thought.

He removed his glasses, and Manhattan’s jagged skyline smeared before him. Stone closed his eyes and the last rays of sun, red and dull, still managed to penetrate his eyelids. The pigeons cooing on a ledge down below sounded almost human, a choir full of sorrow and regret and loss, unintelligible, but almost human.

Stone wore his father’s robes again. They hung beyond his wrist and flapped awkwardly like fins as he sat hunched on a rusted bridge chair with his elbows resting flat against his knees.

As a child he used to sneak into the Judge’s room, proud of his father’s tremendous body, and pull the massive and majestic robes from his closet which forever smelled like the stale smoke of Nat Sherman Originals. Young Matthew would drape them over his body, feeling slight, thin, and weak. But something almost magical happened when he wore the robes. He felt transformed, filling them with his burgeoning body. He felt like a superhero, like Batman, like the Caped Crusader. Any-thing was possible.

But that was a long time ago.

Now he felt like a joke, he looked more like the Angel of Death, or a mental patient. Stone could feel the nubs of his spine against the robes, and he shuddered. He hadn’t faced a mirror in days, and hadn’t shaved more than twice since the funeral. He could smell the grease from the Chinese takeout restaurant on the corner and felt nausea boiling up in his stomach. Stone had become a champion of the fried Szechuan chicken and broccoli over the past month, eating nothing but takeout, but now his body seemed to be rebelling against that as well.

Still breathless from the walk up five flights to his roof he pulled a pack of matches out of his jeans pocket and lit a joint. As he inhaled, he felt the heat of the burning tip near his skin, and he was reminded of the old feelings, the need for release.

Stone now realized that he had become a nearly perfect receptacle of pain; in the morning his sides ached as if wet cement had dried within him overnight, his throat tightened like a clenched fist around his larynx, his head pulsed in time with his heart. Sometimes he had trouble speaking.

He dropped the match into the street below where a pair of buses grinded noisily by. He lit another match, held it for a five count, and dropped it, still flaming, into the street. A cluster of grey and white pigeons suddenly rose into the sky as one, a pungent rush of air blowing past on the updraft. They scattered and took flight, their wings cracking against the sky. A few streets over a car alarm wailed and an ice cream truck’s blaring speakers warbled out the delicate tune to the Music-box Dancer, as if it were being played from underwater.

Stone pulled the robes tight around him, binding his chin for a moment against his chest. He could smell his father now, the stale scent of his tobacco as if he were towering over him at that moment. He felt his father’s strong hands on his shoulders, heavy and firm. He felt his father’s fingers tighten around his neck, a school ring ice-cold against his skin.

Stone took a drag of the joint and expelled the grey filaments of smoke into the air. Already, as the smoke filled his lungs he could feel his muscles slacken, his blood slowing, his seasick stomach starting to calm.

He thought of his father, who appeared before him, a paragon of scholarly civility, wearing a three-piece suit and half-moon glasses, shaking his head in disapproval.

Stone’s eyes filled with tears, and he smoked. He felt the fibres of his father’s robes blown against his skin by a breeze and heard sirens in the street below that seemed to scream from all directions. The sky had turned a murky grey. A single green iridescent feather floated in the air just out of Stone’s reach. It drifted, hesitated in mid-air, then drifted off the ledge and out into the air above the street. The wind was picking up when the steel door swung open behind Stone, and his roommate Pinky called out, "Matty! Phone!"

"Who is it?" he called, but Pinky had already disappeared back down the damp stairwell. Probably Seligman again, Stone thought. He can wait.

The sky continued to darken; heavy black clouds rolling in high on the wind, as eerie yellow lights came on in the greasy streets between his apartment house and the river. Brooklyn looked somehow more lurid in the gathering dark, its low buildings more shabby, its windows filling with the broken silhouettes of WIC assisted poor, bent over dinner plates in the blue glare of their televisions; rooftop water tanks hunched formless shapes of smeared darkness against darkness; disembodied renegade shouts filled the air, the streets below burning with anger freed by the falling night. He had heard gunshots the night before, four of them, but no sirens.

Manhattan too looked different; its jagged spine lit up spasmodically, randomly, lights flaring up the length of the island like torches lit by primitives in another age.

When Stone had first heard Seligman’s brassy voice on the line, the valves of his heart had constricted, the familiar baritone, forceful, calm so similar to that of his father it had nearly caused Stone to lose consciousness. The dead cannot speak, they cannot, he had thought. His father was dead and buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. But the voice persisted. "It’s me, Uncle Zal."

Stone had not seen him at the funeral and had put the Judge’s friend out of his mind, figuring he was afraid to leave the barbed wire compound of Giv’at Barzel. He had offered his condolences: "It is never easy to lose a parent. But mourning is a natural part of life. Your father will be the first in line when Redemption comes."

He had asked Stone where he was saying Kaddish. "As the only surviving son, it is your obligation. Saying Kaddish for a parent goes a long way towards easing the pain the soul feels separated from its body and the world."

Stone had hung up the phone then.

His worst fears had been realized. Seligman was an emissary sent by his father from the Other World to belittle him, make him feel small, the way the Judge had done for his entire life. The finish line was always being extended, just out of his reach. He would never be free.

Now, in the cool air of the rooftop, Stone tried to mouth the words of the Kaddish, but they tasted like ash on his tongue, and the pounding subsonic bass beat of a car stereo down below caused a vein in his temple to throb. He wrapped the robes tight against him and smelled his father again, the stale smoke of his cigarettes, his sour sweat.

A pigeon appeared on the rusted railing before Stone, strutting with avian bravado. He flapped his wings and disappeared into the sky.

Stone spread his arms out like wings, the fabric flapping in the wind, and stepped forward to the railing. He looked down and saw a storekeeper rolling down his heavy steel shutter with a clattering slam. He threw one leg over the railing, feeling dizzy exhilaration, a vein jumping in his wrist. At that moment Stone was prepared to separate his soul from its body, it didn’t matter who would say Kaddish for him. He counted back from ten.

"What the fuck?" Pinky called, stepping on to the roof. "Get offa there before anyone sees you. You look like a fuckin’ Dracula."

All Stone had to do was tilt forward and he was gone.