In Touch (Vassi Collection )

1

"How unhappy do you have to be to kill yourself?"

"What makes you think she's unhappy?"

"Why else would she be committing suicide?" The two policemen spoke in whispers, but their sergeant heard them and shot a glance over his shoulder to silence them. The offenders did their best to look chastened until their superior turned his head again, and then winked at one another.

They were among a dozen policemen, two doctors, a building attendant and four reporters who were crouched and standing some fifty feet from the edge of the still unfinished helicopter ramp on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings. They had been summoned because of a report that a woman had smuggled herself into the huge glass mausoleum and made her way to the roof. A Port Authority helicopter pilot had spotted her and sent out the alarm.

She stood perfectly still and was stark naked, her opalescent skin glowing dimly against the black sky. She faced west, looking out over the Hudson River to the plains of New Jersey, now a vast smoldering conglomerate of ugly cities, sterile suburbs, and mile upon mile of oil refineries, dying marshes and garbage dumps.

A fifth of a mile directly below her, New York gave its nighttime show. A hundred million lights. Cars winding among streetlamps. And a panorama of windows. Here and there the flashings of fire trucks and ambulances, their sirens barely audible. The whole an incredibly dense heap and spread of gaudy display made somehow terrifying by its underlying pattern, the notion that the awesomely unnatural creation was not the product of an insane demonic force but the result of intelligence.

The woman trembled slightly in the chill breeze, her long hair stirring about her shoulders. Her dancer's body was a sculptor's dream. Not yet thirty, she seemed to arch up from her calves into deeply muscled thighs which flared into hard buttocks and thinly padded hips. Her breasts were small, like champagne cups. She stared straight ahead of her, and what the men behind her could not see was that a soaring sweep of sparkling awareness had captured her eyes.

It was a bizarre tableau: the nude and superbly balanced woman at the edge of that shattering precipice and the heavily clothed and armed men unable to get near her. Each attempt on the part of the latter to inch closer was met by a minute but intimidating tensing in her leg muscles. One of the doctors had been talking to her for almost an hour, using most of the standard approaches he had been taught were effective in such instances. But the thing he wanted to say most and, who knows, which might have been most successful, caught in his chest.

Tom Madden, M.D., twenty-eight years old and starting to taste the first disillusionment with his chosen profession, had been fighting the stirring of an erection from the moment he laid eyes on the woman who seemed intent on killing herself. The combination of the extraordinary danger of her situation, coupled with his own fascination-fear of heights, joined his male lust that found tremendous potential in such a beautifully formed and trained body. These mixed with an idealistic desire to save-the-damsel-in-distress and, perhaps, then marry her and take her to his laboratory where she would keep him endlessly delighted with arcane erotic uses of bunsen burners and beakers whenever he was not preoccupied with alleviating the sufferings of humanity.