The goodbye girl sits at the picnic table watching the boy fall from the sky. He wears a yellow jumpsuit and she has nicknamed him Chicken Little. She sips her ginger ale. In the center of the park, an Eastern Orthodox priest gives away toothpick crucifixes next to the fountain. He doesn't appear to notice the boy's plummet. The boy completes his fall from the Georgics Skyscraper, hits the pavement, dusts himself off, and walks over to talk to her.

"What are you doing?" she asks. Two weeks ago her parents threatened to kick her out of the house because she didn't want to spend any time at home with them. So she sits in the park in her summer vacation and eats her brown bag lunch of baloney sandwiches and Fritos. Next year she will be a senior at Pency Prep. He gives a crooked, beaky smile.

"Practicing."

She finds him fetching.

#
The next day she gathers the nerve to touch his arm as they sit on the picnic table. It wasn't feathers attached to his body. But beneath his jumpsuit his skin has a yellowish tint, the color of lemon jello. The skin is soft. "You're not normal."

He doesn't argue. He can't remember much except his name and the urge to jump off buildings. Chicken Little, he repeats. He grew up in Nebraska.

"The sky was huge there," he says. "Dark wheat and deep blue sky." He shakes his head slightly. "All vaguer than a dream..."

No one else in the city appears to notice him. It's a private show for her. She doesn't mind, because the boy certainly breaks up the monotony of the lunch hour, and her lunch hour breaks of the monotony of the day.

One day, while watching him fall, she realizes that her life has been incredibly unhappy. The velocity of his descent doesn't change, yet she can see him in mindless, excruciating detail, like a slow close up. She stands up from the picnic table, body awash with sadness. Looking more closely, she sees that Chicken Little closes his eyes when he falls, a slight smile, his tawny hair whipping.

The goodbye girl realizes he's in ecstasy. She drills him about this later, not about why he doesn't die when he hits the pavement (and at the same time she doesn't want to know, she doesn't want to know). He gives a bright easy laugh. His body is lean and taut, and the yellow jumpsuit is almost baggy draped over his narrow bones.

"You flatter me," he says. "Nothing makes me happier than falling, nothing."

"But why do you do it?" she asks. She wants to touch his hands, his soft, roan fingers.

He laughs again. "Why do you watch me?"

Because you're beautiful, she wants to say. Instead, "I'm bored most of the time. I have enough money to live, but too much time to force me to spend it." She offers ginger ale and he accepts, tipping the entire aluminum can back. "I have work to do," he says finally, after drinking. "I might not be back for awhile." He points to the top of the skyscraper, thirty stories high. It used to be the headquarters of a long forgotten financial institution. Now the building houses minor telemarketing franchises, art students, and carpetbaggers. The boy keeps pointing to the top of the building. "Yes?" she says, trying to see the exact spot where he points to.

"I have to remember these tiny falls for when I do big ones." He arises off the picnic table and glances back. "You'll see me soon. Keep an eye out."

And he's gone before the goodbye girl knows to say goodbye.

#

It's two weeks before there's any more sign of him. Time slows for her, like it must slow for Chicken Little as he falls off the skyscraper. But this slowing, she realizes, doesn't give her anything. The slowness makes her miss him even more.

She sees a poster for a fiction writing workshop in the basement of a Greek Orthodox Church--apparently run by the priest who's always in the park--but she figures it would be a bad scene to really write what she would like to write in public. She keeps a journal instead, where the thoughts pour out like hot wine. "The wings, I want the wings to take me cool as a feather, because I want him to be my feather-boy. . . "

Such thoughts cannot bring him back, or help her contend with her parents. The house is not actually a house but an apartment, but she likes to pretend. Her room resembles a monk's cell. She has to sleep somewhere. White walls, a few magenta candles littering the window sill, a trigonometry textbook on her desk. She carved the book out to make a safe, where she keeps her lockets.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Marlena," her father says to her mother. "She's moping around for a reason."

"Am not," the girl shouts down from the top of the stairs, from her room, where she can hear anything she wants to hear.

"I think she's in love," her mother mutters to her father, bemused.

The girl stands on the bed. "Fuck you!" she yells. She can almost see his father rising out of the rickety chair, and then holding his hands up in a supplicating gesture.

"See what I tell you?" her father says to her mother. "Look what we have to put up with."

"I know what we put up with," the mother says, sighing.

The girl closes her eyes and hops off the bed. Her knees buckle and she nearly lands on her dresser.

"What was that?" her mother calls up.

"I'm coming up there after I eat supper," her father says. The girl has scraped her knee and doesn't bother to band-aid it, or swab the scratch with cotton. "Damned if I'm not going to come up there." She hears him sit.

#

That night, she bolts out the door and wanders to the park. It's not the safest place in the city to be at night; the empty streets chill her. The pigeons sleep in secret coves. Even though it is July, a brisk air has entered the city. She holds her thin, violet colored jacket close to her.

The girl stares up at the looming skyscraper. There ought to be gargoyles there. Or him, perched on someone's window. Maybe to watch TV. But then she thought that maybe he's too sophisticated for TV.

She walks across the street to the entrance foyer but the door is locked. A security guard has a booth adjoining the vestibule inside; he watches TV and his unclipped cardboard badge rests on his desk.

She knocks on the door. "Closed," the man says, turning back to the set.

"Have you seen a boy?" she begins, but then realizes it's hopeless. No one has seen him. She squints at the television, through the grainy glass of the foyer. A disaster has just struck in a south-east Asian country whose name she can't pronounce. Some terrorist tried to blow up one of the new, hundred story high rises. The shards of glass glitter on the narrow street in what must be afternoon on the other side of the world. As the security guard turns away, the live camera shows bodies carried away on makeshift stretchers made of sailing canvas. She opens her mouth and stares. One of the men in the blurry camera's eye, rushing a bloodied man away to an ambulance, is Chicken Little.

#

Next week he returns, and falls off the skyscraper again, and the girl tells him what she saw. "Cat's out of the bag?" he says.

"Way out." She crunches down on an apple. "I'm somehow intrigued by this double life of yours." She's pissed at him, for being away for so long and not telling her why, or at least dropping her a postcard.

"It's really hard to talk about," he says. "But I'm here for a reason. I have important tasks."

"Whatever," she says, crossing her arms. "You could have told me."

He begins laughing, not unkindly, and her face flushes.

"Falling is a gift for me," Chicken Little explains. "I get presentiments about disasters that might happen. These dreams, these images of terrible events come to me only during my falls." He shakes his head. "I try to save people afterwards, if it feels right, but it doesn't always work." "What do you mean?" Here, she takes his hand, and he doesn't pull away.

"Five times out of six I'm wrong. It's hard work having these dreams while I'm falling; I'm improvising this as I go along. But I have to."

The priest next to the fountain sees her, and turns his head away, hands jammed full of toothpicks.

"This is strange," she says, her stomach flushing. "I don't understand how you can do this."

"If you don't understand, I want to make you understand." He sits up from the picnic table, still holding her hand. "Come on."

It takes them about fifteen minutes to walk the dusty stairs all the way to the top, silent except for their footfall. The stairwell smells like old taffy; she sees his old footprints crisscrossed on the tiled stairs.

All of the footprints lead up.

When they reach the top door, she gathers her breath, slumping in the hall. He doesn't look particularly tired but he waits for her. When her breathing calms, he creaks the door open and they step out.

The platformed roof of the Georgics Skyscraper could have been the roof of the world to the girl. Barren, blistering, hardly an atmosphere between her and the sun. She clenches onto his arm for support. A few pigeons linger and hop, but they're lean and look more like ravens than the fat coo-ers she's used to in the park.

"Come here," he says, and walks to the edge. Vertigo hits her; her legs want to buckle, but he keeps her steady. "Look down there."

She looks. The street, the park, even the black trash bags sagging on the curb, all appear microscopic and pristine. "It's beautiful," she stammers. She's scared out of her wits but continues to look.

"Hold my hand before I go, all right?" he says.

"Are you scared?" She wants to clench him close and tell him not to jump.

He kisses her neck; she puts her arm around his and notices an extra softness there, like goose down, or extra-fine tissue paper. "Scared?" he says. "I'm always scared." He touches her sandy brown hair and leaps.

She crouches to the edge and for an instant wants to follow him, to see what would happen if she follows him, to let the air kiss her slowly. She stays there and watches him land, though since the ground is so far away she can't see the exact details. Pigeons dart next to her and then scuttle away.

An hour later he opens the ancient door. His narrow face looks tired but purified.

"Anything?" she asks.

"Maybe. It's too early to say." He sits beside her, and both of their legs dangle off the edge. "It's always too early to say. I'll have to sleep on it."

"Sleep with me," she says, and she can barely believe the words streaming from her mouth. "I mean," and he slides his arm around her waist. "Where do you sleep?"

"Here, on the roof. Don't you have a home to go to?"

"Not really," she says. The thought of her parents milling around the kitchen fills her with dread. "I want to stay here."

That night he discloses blankets in a corner of the roof, with a heating duct providing warmth from the wind. They huddle together as the long darkness comes, as pigeons flutter around them. "You're shaking," she says in his ear, running her fingertips along his thigh. She has never wanted to do this before, like this.

"Yes," he says, moving on top of her. "Shaking."

She opens her legs. As he moves inside of her, deep guttural sounds come from the back of his throat. The noise arises from a place inside of him that she hasn't uncovered until now. He comes quietly, and she not-so-quietly. She holds onto his soft neck for dear life.

#

Weeks pass. The girl makes perfunctory visits home to eat and gather her things. When her parents ask her where she is going, where she has been, she makes up an elaborate story about a Nostradaman named Amanthar she shacks up with on the east side. The entire thing is a fiction; she considers what the Orthodox priest would think of her story. The story keeps her parents arguing long enough about what to do about Amanthar that she's able to slip away, after her parents move to the basement to fight. She tells Chicken Little nothing about her family and home, wanting to keep those two worlds as separate as possible.

Yet school would be starting in a month. She can't imagine classrooms, desks, the mundane world she used to know.

The fifth time they make love on the roof, it is afternoon, and she notices that the color of his semen, which she wipes from her with a box of tissues stolen from home, is a milky blue color.

"Should I even ask about that?" she says, tossing the kleenex into a ventilation duct.

Chicken Little doesn't say anything at first. Then, after they've put on their clothes, and he jumps, and returns to the top of the roof, he says, "You know I'm different."

"Yes, but--" She wants to kiss him again and does. "It makes me wonder what you're made of."

"The sky." It takes her a few seconds to realize that he has answered completely seriously.

A week later, she notices that the sky begins to cool. The slightest hint of Indian summer is around the corner. That morning, Chicken Little looks worried.

She knows what he's going to say next. The girl has been dreading it for ages.

"Something awful is going to happen," he says. He slumps down on their mat; the nest, she used to joke with him. I can't tell you much more, but I'm going to have to leave."

The color drains from her face. "Like before?" She sits next to him but he's either too distracted to hold her, or doesn't have the strength.

"Yes. Something like before." He rests his head on his knee and wraps his arms around himself. "Part of me wishes I wouldn't have to go through this. If I could, I would live normally, like you."

She laughs. "I'm not normal either. I'm with you, after all."

"You're right," he says slowly. "Maybe you're not normal anymore."

That night they sleep together, but apart. She is too caught up in her good-byes to say much, or touch him, even though that's what she wants more than anything else in the world.

#

School begins and he doesn't come back. The summer begins to seem distant to her. Though she doesn't like it much, she's forced to reacquaint herself with friends she doesn't care about, with classes she grows bored with after the second day. The thought of college nauseates her. She sleepwalks through the halls, through the house. There's no reason to get angry or depressed, she tells herself. I'm a high school student. At the same time, the girl knows that something is different inside of her, dormant and hushed.

She scours the newspapers for signs of disasters: floods, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, of which there are many. There are no signs of mysterious strangers in the grainy photos. Not too many people saved, either. What if he's always too late? she thinks to herself. I'm a morbid bastard.

On a Saturday in the beginning of October, she goes back to the park. The trees have all turned their colors, their pelts. The Orthodox priest still plies his trade, although there are even fewer passersby than in the summer. He gives her a frigid look, and for some reason looks terribly afraid of her. This surprises her. "I wish I would have taken your class," she calls out, lying, but he pretends not to hear her.

She looks up. For the first time, she sees the Georgics Building as a small building, not a vast superstructure but a normal, old skyscraper in a forgotten neighborhood of the city. She pries open the stairwell door and begins the walk up. Someone had cleaned the stairs of all the dust, and she begins to cry. "I don't even have his footprints anymore," she says, choking on her tears.

At the top she kicks the door open. The sunlight bursts upon her, but the air chills her deeply. The autumn must have driven the pigeons away. The roof is empty; even their careworn blanket is gone, probably thrown away by the same janitor who cleaned the stairs.

Trembling, she steps to the edge. The black frock of the priest looks like a tiny crow below her. The street is empty. She looks at the sky, the sharp blueness, the cirrus clouds stationary there. "I want to be there," she says, unafraid, and with her toes quivering, she jumps.

At first the girl imagines that she has only fallen off her bed in the middle of a bad dream, instead of a thirty story building. Then she is nowhere, and her mind slows, taking its time sifting through the sensations around her, relishing the rough breeze of her plummet. Her hair dances in front of her eyes. She doesn't need to close her eyes to see what she wants to see, what she has been craving and fearing since Chicken Little said goodbye.

The falling disappears. Sounds drown out into silence. She sees Chicken Little in a small jet plane tilted in a weird angle. Downward. The passengers, about ten of them--mothers and businessmen and small children--wail. A stewardess tries to walk through the chaos; she has an airline insignia on her lapel that the girl has seen on many commercials. All these views are crystalline to her. But Chicken Little is there, and from his under-the-seat compartment he pulls out--efficiently, as if he had been training for this his entire life--a huge bag, large enough that he must have smuggled it on board. She sees smoke come from the wing and she wants to cry out, but she can't cry out. All she can do is watch as Chicken Little pulls parachutes from the bag, about ten of them, and distributes them calmly. A couple of passengers rush towards him crazily, but he gives them a fierce look, and they calm down. The plane starts to shake and blur, and the last image the goodbye girl sees is Chicken Little looking at the crooked window of the jet in the middle of the disaster without a parachute. But of course he has none. And he looks worried.

She realizes that he doesn't know if can make this jump, so high in the air, and still land on his feet.

Then she finds herself falling again, the freeze frame loosening. Nothing in her life ever felt like that descent, gravity sweetly calling her down. The ground comes closer and closer and she rotates her feet forward. She lands, knees bending but not breaking.

She places her palms flat on the cool sidewalk and appraises the landscape around her, like a cat. The priest, who had been watching her fall, rushes to her, dropping his toothpick crucifixes along the way.

When the priest comes within earshot, sweat beading on his face, she says, "I've seen the future tense. There's still time." Time to find the airline, the flight number and track him. To save him if he needs to be saved.

The priest looks at her as if she was a ghost. "You've cut yourself on some glass," is all that he can manage to say.

She turns over her hand. A shard of clear glass has lodged below her thumb. The blood trickles down her palm. The blood is the color of the sky on a clear day.

This story originally appeared in Altair 6/7. Copyright 2000, Alan DeNiro. It may not be reproduced except for one-time personal use.