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"The bridge rose up and away from the city&amp;#39;s northwest quadrant, spanning the great Yangtze river. And yet, from the on-ramp where the taxi let me off that Saturday morning, it seemed more like a figment of the imagination, a ghostly ironwork extrusion vanishing in the monsoon murk, stretching to some otherworld. It was disorienting to look at, that latticed half-bridge leaving off in midair, like some sort of Surrealist painting. It gave off a foreboding aura, too, untethered and floating, and yet it couldn&amp;#39;t have been more earthbound\u2014and massive. Later I&amp;#39;d find out it was made from 500,000 tons of cement and 1 million tons of steel. Four miles long, with four lanes of car traffic on the upper deck and twin railroad tracks on the lower, it transferred thousands of people and goods to and from the city every day. But now the clouds clamped down, and a sharp scent of sulfur and putrid fish wafted on a dank puff of air. Rain slithered from the sky. There, before my eyes, the bridge shimmered and disappeared, as if it had never been visible in the first place.\n\n Its formal name was the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, and it served one other purpose for the masses: At least once a week, someone jumped to his or her death here, but a total was hard to come by, in part because the Chinese authorities refused to count those who missed the river, the ones who&amp;#39;d leapt and had the misfortune of landing in the trees along the riverbank, or on the concrete apron beneath the bridge, or who were found impressed in the earth like mud angels, two feet from rushing water. Perhaps such strict bookkeeping came in response to the fact that China already posts the highest sheer numbers, about 200,000 &amp;quot;reported&amp;quot; suicide cases a year, constituting a fifth of all the world&amp;#39;s suicides. For a long time, the Communist government simply ignored the problem, hoping it would go away, or maybe thinking in the most Darwinian terms of suicide as its own method of population control. One recent case highlighted just how the Chinese bureaucracy tended to deal with prevention. In the southern city of Guangzhou, workers had been ordered to smear butter over a steel bridge popular with jumpers, in order to make it too slippery to climb. &amp;quot;We tried employing guards at both ends,&amp;quot; said a government official, &amp;quot;and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here. None of it worked\u2014and so now we have put butter over the bridge, and it has worked very well.&amp;quot;\n\n In Nanjing, the bridge remained butterless, even as the city spit out its victims. Nanjing was now just another one of your typical 6-million-person Chinese metropolises, one of the famous &amp;quot;Three Furnaces&amp;quot; of China because of its unremitting summer heat. Daytime temperatures regularly topped ninety degrees here\u2014due to hot air being trapped by the mountains at the lower end of the Yangtze River valley\u2026and, oh yeah, because all the trees had been chopped down\u2014and the sun rarely shone. Meanwhile, the city continued to explode in the noonday of the country&amp;#39;s hungry expansion. The past was being abandoned at an astonishing rate, the new skyscrapers and apartment buildings replacing the old neighborhoods. Everything\u2014and everyone\u2014was disposable. Schisms formed. The bridge loomed. Loss led to despair, which, in turn, led to Mr. Chen.\n\nI&amp;#39;d come through thirteen time zones just to see him. Once free of the taxi, I began trudging, a quarter mile or so, the bridge trembling under the weight of its traffic, piled with noisy green taxis and rackety buses, some without side panels or mufflers. Unlike the suspended wonder of Brooklyn or the quixotic ponts of Paris, this couldn&amp;#39;t have been mistaken for anything but stolid Communist bulwark: At its apex, the bridge was about 130 feet above the water; was built with two twenty-story &amp;quot;forts,&amp;quot; spaced one mile apart, that from a distance had the appearance of huge torches; and contained 200 inlaid reliefs that included such exhortations as Our country is led by the working class and long live the unity of the people. A brochure claimed that the bridge was both the first of its kind designed solely by Chinese engineers, and also &amp;quot;ideal for bird-watching.&amp;quot; People teemed in both directions. Umbrellas unfurled, poked, and were ripped from their rigging, leaving sharp spiders dangling overhead. As I registered the passersby\u2014their eyes fid downward\u2014everyone seemed a candidate for jumping, marching in that mournful parade.\n\n He was close now. I could tell by the banners and messages\u2014some were flags, some were just scraps of paper\u2014that fluttered earnestly from the bridge. Value life every day, read one. Life is precious, declared another. His cell-phone number was emblazoned everywhere, including little graffitied stamps he&amp;#39;d left on the sidewalk, ones I tried to decipher beneath the blur of so many passing feet. And then Mr. Chen came into view, conspicuous for being the only still point in that sea of motion\u2026and the only one sporting a pair of clunky binoculars, the only one watching the watchers of the river.\n\nThe city continued to explode in the noonday of China\u2019s wild, hungry expansion. Everything\u2014 and everyone\u2014was disposable. Loss led to despair, which, in turn, led to Mr. Chen.\n\n He stood at full attention at the South Tower. Perched off one side of the tower was a concrete platform surrounded by Plexiglas, a capsule of sorts where yawning sentries did their own dubious monitoring of the bridge through a mounted spyglass, as if conducting a sociological study at a great remove. The sentries looked like kids, while Mr. Chen, who stood out front on the sidewalk, among the people, looked every bit of his forty years. He had a paunch, blackened teeth, and the raspy cough of an avid smoker, and he never stopped watching, even when he allowed himself a cigarette, smoking a cheap brand named after the city itself. He wore a baseball cap with a brim that poked out like an oversize duck&amp;#39;s bill, like the Cyrano of duck bills, the crown of which read &amp;quot;They spy on you&amp;quot;.\n\n Six years earlier, working as a functionary for a transportation company, Mr. Chen had read a story about the bridge in the paper, about bodies raining to their end. Soon after, he quietly took his post at the South Tower. Ever since then, when not working his job, he&amp;#39;d been up on the bridge, pulling would-be&amp;#39;s from the railing. According to a blog he kept, he&amp;#39;d saved 174 jumpers\u2014and in the process had been hailed as one of China&amp;#39;s great Good Samaritans. Of those he saved, some small number met near the bridge every year around Christmas to celebrate their new lives and ostensibly to offer their thanks. As part of the ceremony, they calculated their new ages from the date of their salvation. In this born-again world, no one was older than 6.\n\n Back home I&amp;#39;d stumbled on Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s blog one day, reading it in jumbled Google translation, and became riveted by his blow-by-blow of life on the bridge. There&amp;#39;d been the husband and wife who&amp;#39;d jumped hand in hand. There&amp;#39;d been the man dressed in black, floating there on the water&amp;#39;s surface as a boat tried to reach him, until the current finally sucked him away. Another fellow had been pulled off the railing, back onto the bridge, and in the fight that ensued\u2014one during which Mr. Chen had to enlist the help of others\u2014the man had bitten his tongue in half (good God!) and nearly bled to death on the sidewalk, leaving Mr. Chen covered in blood.\n\n Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s blog entries were sometimes their own desperate pleas: Lovelorn girls of Henan, where are you? read one. But more often they were a subdued, pointillistic chronicle of the day&amp;#39;s dark news: \u2026middle-aged man jumped off bridge where the body fell to the flower bed: died on the spot.\u2026 Speaking in northern accent, man gave me a cigarette, said: Alas! Wives and children.\u2026 A woman in the southeast fort jumped in riverbed, dead on spot.\u2026 Next to statue at southwest fort, man died jumping to concrete, one leg thrown from body, only blackened blood left behind. Meaningless life!\n\n And yet standing sentry among the hordes, Mr. Chen seemed a bit comical, or his mission seemed the ultimate act of absurdity. How could he possibly pick out the suicidal on a four-mile-long bridge? Were they marked somehow, glowing only for him? As no one seemed to pay him any attention, he was forced to take himself twice as seriously. And he was so engrossed in the Kabuki of his work that it occurred to me how easy a mark he might make for a practical joker tying shoelaces together. Had his heroics only been a figment of his imagination? Was he as unstable somehow as his jumpers? And was he serious with those binoculars, especially with visibility reduced to fifty yards or so in the murk? When I introduced myself, he waved me off. &amp;quot;Not now,&amp;quot; he said gruffly. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m working.&amp;quot;\n\nMr. Chen described a recurring nightmare: Someone was up on the railing, and he was sprinting to save the jumper. Over and over, he would arrive too late, as the body pushed from the railing to the hungry ghost below.\n\n Then his binoculars shot up to his eyes, sheltered by the bill of his cap, and he fumbled with the focus knob while gazing deep into the masses, searching, it would seem, for that fleeting infrared flare of despair, for the moment when he&amp;#39;d be called into action, ready for his hero moment.\n\nOne&amp;#39;s reasons for being on the bridge belonged to the mysterious underworld in all of us, but to choose to die so publicly, so dramatically\u2014turning languid flips or dropping straight as a pin\u2014was something I couldn&amp;#39;t quite understand. After all the humiliation one suffered, all the monotonies and losses, the erasures and disintegrations, after being constantly consumed by society, was it a small reclamation of the self? And what would it feel like to fly, to prove you could? The mere glimmer seemed almost too dangerous to consider. If you let it in, is that when you started to feel the pull of this other force? Could it be stopped?\n\nThere were the Stoics, who justified suicide, and the Christians, who condemned it. There was the honorable seppuku of samurai, and the cowardly cyanide of Nazis. And there were suicide&amp;#39;s other famous practitioners: Virginia Woolf, entering the River Ouse with a heavy stone in her pocket; Walter Benjamin, overdosing on morphine in a hotel room in Spain in the belief that he was about to be turned over to the Nazis; Sylvia Plath, turning on the gas\u2026and then, later, her son, too. Meriwether Lewis shot himself in the chest; Kurt Cobain, in the head. There were Spanish matadors and Congolese pygmies. Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz and Tattoo from Fantasy Island. William James, the great humanist philosopher who, tilting dangerously close to self-annihilation, wrote his father, &amp;quot;Thoughts of the pistol, the dagger, and the bowl began to usurp an unduly large part of my attention,&amp;quot; and later proclaimed, &amp;quot;I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide.&amp;quot;\n\n Those on the bridge weren&amp;#39;t dallying anymore. They&amp;#39;d come, one after the other, to jump, their lives reduced to this single sliver. Beneath the hum and blare of traffic came that insidious sucking sound. How could just one man stop it?\n\nMr. Chen appeared to have a very strict routine on the bridge, no matter if it was snowing, blowing, or broiling heat. He stood at full attention at the South Tower, where a large percentage of his encounters came within the first one hundred meters past the fort, in that area of the bridge that spanned from the riverbank to the river itself. &amp;quot;In so much pain,&amp;quot; he would tell me, &amp;quot;they jump the second they think they&amp;#39;re over the mother river. And a lot of them miss the water.&amp;quot;\n\nHis routine called for maintaining his station for about forty minutes out of every hour\u2014then he fired up his moped, an unconvincing contraption on the verge of breakdown, and putted off down the sidewalk, weaving between walkers, a little like John Wayne astride a miniature Shetland pony. These were his rounds, up and down the bridge, motoring out one mile to the North Tower and then turning back. If he sniffed trouble out there, he might linger\u2014in some cases might be gone hours\u2014but today he reappeared a short time later, stitching deftly through the crowd, then kickstanding his Rocinante and resuming his same exact position, his same exact suspicious disposition, his same exact focused gruffness beneath the bill of his cap. He wore a collared shirt and dark slacks. Though he was stout, with plump hands, he held himself like a much bigger person. Like two of himself.\n\n The sky roiled and spit, as if we were lost inside some potion. Again, the scent of diesel and fish. After fifteen minutes or so, I had a splitting headache, and yet Mr. Chen stood nearly stock-still, unfazed, scanning the crowd with binoculars. His life was a grand monotony, but in his stillness and stasis, the possibility for calamity existed in every moment, and that&amp;#39;s what kept him coiled and at the ready.\n\n Mr. Chen would later describe a recurring nightmare that went like this: Someone was up on the railing, and he was sprinting as fast as he could to save the jumper. Over and over, he would arrive too late, as the body pushed from the railing to the hungry ghost below. He said that he&amp;#39;d been visited on the bridge by a foreign psychiatrist who asked him if he might draw a picture of whatever came to mind. So he did: of a large mountain disappearing up into the clouds, which the psychiatrist interpreted as Mr. Chen trying to carry the weight of the weightless sky. Or something like that. Mr. Chen was fuzzy on the details and didn&amp;#39;t have much time for this nonsense. The encounter smudged into the same colorlessness of every other colorless moment in the colorless flow of time on the bridge.\n\n The rain had let off and the fog shifted a little, though the weekend traffic had worsened\u2014the city dwellers heading out to the country, the country dwellers heading into the city. I meandered out on the bridge for a moment, away from the tower and the armed sentries and Mr. Chen, who didn&amp;#39;t seem to care a whit about me unless I planned to jump. As I gazed downriver, in the easterly direction of Shanghai, a shipyard with an enormous crane appeared in the near distance while a temple loomed with its wooden pagoda on a hill. Skimming the river&amp;#39;s brown, roiling surface came a steady, dirgelike stream of barges loaded with lumber, coal, containers, and sand. The view into its muddy waters was not for the faint of heart. There was one of two ways to die from here: on impact with the water&amp;#39;s surface, which at sixty-five miles per hour is like hitting concrete, the shattering of bone and internal organs, the instant blackout and massive bleeding, the general pancaking and dismemberment of the body\u2014or by drowning, by somehow surviving the impact and waking underwater, swept away in the current, unable to muster a frog kick given the various possible combinations of broken pelvis/femur/back/jaw, etc. Below, the waters eddied and swirled, etching a secret language on the surface. When a train passed, the whole bridge seemed to buckle and sway, causing me to clutch the railing.\n\n One of Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s blog entries was simply entitled &amp;quot;Girl&amp;#39;s Tears.&amp;quot; It told the tale of a girl from the country who&amp;#39;d come to the bridge, not far from this spot here, to end her life. It started with the observation that tears shed by girls were like tears of angels &amp;quot;that come from disappointment\u2014or was it regret?&amp;quot; This was a runaway, said Mr. Chen, and she stood &amp;quot;tummy railing,&amp;quot; looking down at the water, despondent. When Mr. Chen approached, he gave her three options: (1) leave the bridge, (2) call emergency services for help, or (3) let Mr. Chen take her to his house, where she could live for a time with him, his wife, and their daughter. Mr. Chen took her phone and called her belligerent boyfriend, and as he spoke to him, she climbed the railing to jump. He seized her hand; she pulled away, climbing higher on the railing, teetering for a second there. He tore her from the railing, but as the police arrived, she ran into traffic, then tried to disappear in the crowd. The police apprehended her and took her away. It was over just like that. One second he could feel her breath on him; the next she was gone, and Mr. Chen, tough as he was, claimed to have burst into tears.\n\n &amp;quot;Next day called number,&amp;quot; he wrote on his blog. &amp;quot;Always unanswered.&amp;quot;\n\nThe reason Mr. Chen was in the business of saving lives now was that, as a boy, he&amp;#39;d always gone unanswered. There is a saying in Chinese he used, that he never possessed &amp;quot;mother&amp;#39;s shoes.&amp;quot; With those words, he threw back an oversize shot of a potent grain alcohol. &amp;quot;Getting drunk loosens the tongue,&amp;quot; he declared empirically, then refilled our teacups as we sat together in a tight, crowded restaurant near the bridge. He clinked them in a toast and tossed another mini-bucketful into the back of his throat, where, according to my simultaneous research, everything caught fire and napalmed down the gullet to the stomach, where, in turn, it flickered and tasered a while, like rotgut lava. We had left the bridge for lunch, and he had insisted that I drink with him. Sensing we might be in the midst of a transitional relationship moment, I joined him in the first few rounds but then thought better of it\u2014there was no doubt this guy was going to drink me under the table\u2014and eased off. He laughed when I did, a disparaging laugh, wondering aloud at what kind of American I was.\n\nOur party now included my translator, \u00ADSusan\u2014who was born in Nanjing but raised in the U.S.\u2014and a wordless man who had suddenly appeared, ostensibly a close friend of Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s, called Mr. Shi. We&amp;#39;d arrived at this &amp;quot;family restaurant&amp;quot; sometime after noon, after we&amp;#39;d all left the bridge together, Mr. Chen on his moped and the three of us on foot, taking endless flights of stairs down through the South Tower to the ground, where Mr. Chen was waiting to ferry us, one by one, on the back of his moped to the restaurant. I didn&amp;#39;t know where to put my hands, so I grabbed the bulk of his shoulders.\n\n We sat down to filmy glasses of beer and a clear, unmarked bottle of grain alcohol, and saucers of peppers and tripe, tofu soup, noodles, and fish stew. Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi began smoking Nanjings until we were wreathed in smoke. Overhead a fan lopped away off-kilter, on the verge of unscrewing itself from the ceiling. The walls of the restaurant were sepia colored, plastered with old posters, Buddha sharing the wall with a liquor ad. The hissing sound of the wok\u2014onions and chicken and squirming mung beans\u2014agitated beneath the clatter of plates and the gruff, rising voices of men (there were no families here, only workmen) huddled at the eight or so tables, heads sluicing with liquor, too.\n\n Mr. Chen explicated his opening statement. See, in the old times, before &amp;quot;the Communist liberation,&amp;quot; a great deal of pride was connected to these homemade textiles, for both parent and child. The shoes and socks were a declaration of individual love in a country obsessed with the self-effacing collective. His own mother had always been an erratic presence, but after his parents split when he was 8, she disappeared for the better part of a decade\u2014and so, too, did his &amp;quot;mother&amp;#39;s love,&amp;quot; as he put it. That&amp;#39;s when he went to live with his grandmother, in a village outside the city. Widowed at 18, his grandmother served an important function in the village: She was a peacemaker and therapist of sorts, if utterly unschooled. It was from her that Mr. Chen had learned the fine art of persuasion. It was from the incompleteness of his own family that he&amp;#39;d built this not-so-secret life as the defender of broken humanity. And the weight of the task had become its own burden.\n\n &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve aged terribly in my six years on the bridge,&amp;quot; he said, again clinking teacups with Mr. Shi. &amp;quot;To age!&amp;quot; He drank and then admitted that he had a lot of gray hair, due to the weather and stress\u2014stress on the bridge, stress at work, stress at home. He caught me gazing at the thick, black, spiky forest matting his head. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve been dyeing it for years,&amp;quot; he said.\n\n He sat back, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. He poured another glass, this time hesitating before drinking, and spoke again as he stabbed a piece of tripe, then began to chew. On the bridge, he said, there were three types of jumpers, and they had to be dealt with either by force or finesse, by blunt words or wraithlike verbiage fashioned into a lasso. Mostly they came peaceably, but sometimes it was a donnybrook. The first category included the mentally unstable or clinically insane. In the frenzy of letting go, these were the ones who might take you with them, grasping onto anyone as some proxy for &amp;quot;mother&amp;#39;s love.&amp;quot; So\u2014Mr. Chen would charge them like a dangerous man himself, wrestling, punching, kicking, doing whatever was necessary. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m very confident in my physical strength,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Since I have no psychological training, my job is to get that person off the bridge as quickly as possible.&amp;quot; Whereupon he might take him or her to &amp;quot;the station,&amp;quot; which, as it turned out, was an in-patient psych ward at the highly reputed Nanjing University, one of the few places in the city where the suicidal could receive professional care and treatment.\n\n The second category was the emotionally fragile, the wilted flower, the person who had lost someone\u2014a husband, a child, a wife, a parent\u2014or suffered from some sort of abuse and saw no way to go on. If the potential jumper was a woman, Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s strategy was to try to bring her to tears, for that often broke the tension, and once emotion poured forth, he might grab for her hand and huddle her away. Men, by contrast, were both simpler and trickier. You forked one of two ways. Either you told him bluntly that you were about to punch hi mm in the nose if he didn&amp;#39;t step away from the railing, or you did the exact opposite: You approached in a nonthreatening, even companionable, manner, offering a cigarette to the figure lingering too long by the railing, and from there steered him to a place like this restaurant, where together you could drink grain alcohol and really talk, something that wasn&amp;#39;t so easy in a culture that still held fast to a Confucian ethic of stoicism.\n\n The final category, he said, included the ones who &amp;quot;failed really hard, or too often.&amp;quot; Usually men, these would-be jumpers had often lost a great deal of money and weren&amp;#39;t feeling so wonderful about themselves anymore, especially when their failures were thrown into relief by those riding on the heady high seas of the new China, driving fancy cars, wearing designer clothes, smoking expensive American cigarettes. Mr. Chen then pointed to Mr. Shi and said, &amp;quot;He was one of those.&amp;quot;\n\n Mr. Shi, a thin man of thinning hair, blinked laconically through the smoke. Though the stage was set for him to unspool his tale, he showed no interest in taking up the story. &amp;quot;Later,&amp;quot; barked Mr. Chen. It was strange, and not a little confusing, how gruff he could be while making himself, and those around him, so vulnerable. When more plates of food arrived, he shoveled beans and noodles, fish and broccoli onto his plate, then lit upon it all as if it were prey, gobbling and drinking, then gobbling some more.\n\n I regarded him once more in this dim light. He was unabashed in his mannerisms, a man who seemed to live so fully inside this hed world of suicide that he had little time for polish or polite chitchat or getting-to-know-you. When I asked if he had heard of the famous Hollywood film It&amp;#39;s a Wonderful Life, in which Jimmy Stewart plans to end his life on a bridge until an angel named Clarence saves him, he cut me off by shaking his head. No; he didn&amp;#39;t care about movies or my attempts to draw fatuous parallels. Nor were we kindred spirits: Simply showing up did not confer membership to the club. He barely bothered to look at me when responding to my questions.\n\n In turn, I soon found myself growing anxious there in that restaurant\u2014very anxious\u2014watching Mr. Chen and Mr. Shi drain glass after glass. My mind suddenly seized upon the notion that this was a Saturday, the busiest day on the bridge, and here we sat. However absurd it had felt to be standing on a four-mile bridge, thronged by thousands, trying to pick out jumpers, I felt a sudden onrush of dread at not being there at all, as if the welfare of all humanity depended on our vigilance. Part of it had to do with the effect of the grain alcohol. And part of it was fatigue\u2014the result of all those time zones to get here. In that loud, hot space, I felt simultaneously this desire to stand and leave and yet to lay my head down and rest. The irrefutable truth was that nothing\u2014neither butter nor Mr. Chen\u2014would dissuade the jumpers from coming: So what was the point of being here at all?\n\n That was the question that occurred to me now in that mung-bean-and-hooch restaurant, that hole-in-the-wall, listening to the guttural rebukes of Mr. Chen: What was I doing here at all, in a place where people came to kill themselves, 7,000 miles from my home and family? This wasn&amp;#39;t an assignment that had been given to me. I&amp;#39;d chosen it. I&amp;#39;d come as if there were some message for me here, some fragment to justify, or obliterate, that slow bloom of doubt. But now I could feel the pressure under the soles of my feet: The bridge ran under me, too.\n\nIf you dig deep enough into the past, every family has its suicide. My maternal grandmother had told me the story of a relative, dating from the nineteenth century: a young woman fresh from Ireland, a Catholic who&amp;#39;d married a Protestant. She was isolated, living with her husband&amp;#39;s family in upstate New York, in the region known as the North Country, and her life became a slow torment from which there seemed to be no escape, even after bearing a child. Her beliefs were pilloried and belittled. She slowly unraveled. One day she put rocks in her pocket and stepped into a cistern, where she drowned.\n\nBut such events didn&amp;#39;t just belong to the past\u2014or to some mythic country, either. From my own suburban hometown, I remembered a sweet, shy kid, roughly my age, who seemed incapable of any sort of demonstrativeness, who drove himself to the Adirondacks in winter, purchased a coil of rope along the way, found a sturdy tree, and hanged himself. I had nightmares about that boy, shagged in ice until his father found him and cut him down.\n\n And the neighbor down the street, found in the bathtub\u2026 And the kid who ran his motorcycle into a tree, an accident but for the note left behind saying that&amp;#39;s exactly what he intended to do\u2026 And so on. Even in suburbia, suicide had seemed like its own opaque parable, the never-happened, glossed-over secret.\n\n I came upon the story of a boy, a British art student named Christian Drane, who&amp;#39;d photographed suicide spots in England for a school project\u2014including a bridge in Bristol, where he was approached by a stranger who wondered if he was all right\u2014and then hanged himself in the Polygon woods of Southampton. No one could believe it. He&amp;#39;d made everyone laugh. He had a tattoo on his arm, representing his family. Afterward, his girlfriend told an inquest that Christian was the happiest person she knew, &amp;quot;cheeky, spontaneous, excitable.&amp;quot; He whisked her to Paris for her birthday, wrapped her in &amp;quot;fairy lights&amp;quot; and took her portrait. He posted other photos from his project online: other bridges, subway stations, and Beachy Head, the chalk cliffs of Eastbourne, the most famous of English suicide spots. Each bore the moniker &amp;quot;Close Your Eyes and Say Goodbye.&amp;quot;\n\n The photograph of Christian that accompanied many of the news stories showed a boy with mussed-up hair and pierced ears with black plugs, looking impishly askance at the camera. Had the pretense of the project emboldened him, or was &amp;quot;the project&amp;quot; merely his eventual suicide? His final note, which no one claimed to understand, read: &amp;quot;To mum and anybody who cares. I have done something I can never forgive myself for. I am a bad person. I am sorry.&amp;quot;\n\nThe Yangtze ever beckoned. And its pull was finally felt at the family restaurant by Mr. Chen, who abruptly stood, grunted a little, walked out the front door like a superhero summoned by dog whistle, then fired up his moped and went swerving off, his They spy on you double-bill back on his head, binoculars dangling around his neck. Left in his wake, we\u2014Susan the translator, Mr. Shi, and I\u2014straggled back to the bridge in a slow-motion amble. It felt good to be in the open air again, somehow cleansing after all the smoke and noise.\n\nBent like a harp, Mr. Shi was the kind of gentle man you instantly wanted to protect, to shield from life&amp;#39;s bullies or from the falling monsoon rain that now switched on again. It seemed to pain him to have to speak. He was too slight for his somewhat dirty slacks and pale blue dress shirt\u2014and carried himself with so little swagger he seemed resigned to the fact that he interested no one. Except I was interested. I wanted to know what Mr. Chen had meant when he&amp;#39;d identified Mr. Shi as one who&amp;#39;d failed really hard. Mr. Shi squinted at me as he lit a cigarette and then started to speak, hesitated, and started again. He said that several years back, his daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. He&amp;#39;d borrowed money for her treatment and had fallen tens of thousands in debt, even making the desperate blunder of engaging with a local loan shark.\n\n When he went to the bridge on that fateful day, he loitered by the railing long enough for Mr. Chen to lock in on him through his binoculars, and then this man was suddenly standing next to him, saying, &amp;quot;Brother, it&amp;#39;s not worth it.&amp;quot; After a while, Mr. Chen got Mr. Shi to smoke a cigarette and coad him off the bridge, down to the family restaurant to drink and talk, whereupon Mr. Shi&amp;#39;s entire story poured forth. Mr. Chen listened closely, trying to understand as best as possible Mr. Shi&amp;#39;s predicament, and then began to formulate a plan. Mr. Chen would speak with the loan shark and all the other vengeful parties in the matter. He&amp;#39;d negotiate a truce, a repayment plan, a job search. He insisted that Mr. Shi meet him the following day, at his workplace, at the transportation company, where he often welcomed the weekend&amp;#39;s forlorn and misfit to his desk, a recurring gesture that had left his bosses exasperated and threatening to fire him. He&amp;#39;d given Mr. Shi hope and friendship (though details of the repayment plan were murky), and Mr. Shi had found a way to begin life anew.\n\n In this moment of sheepish intimacy\u2014Mr. Shi had a habit of making eye contact, then looking away as if embarrassed\u2014he reminded me of something Mr. Chen had said: &amp;quot;The people I&amp;#39;m saving are very, very kind. They don&amp;#39;t want to hurt anyone, so the only way they can vent is by hurting themselves. In that moment when they are deciding between life and death, they are much simpler, more innocent in their thoughts. They almost become blank, a white sheet.&amp;quot;\n\n In a way, Mr. Shi was human pathos writ large; in another, he was the smidgen of hope that caused the caesura before jumping. It struck me as odd, however, that it required a moment like this, walking with him now, to realize that while the deeper, more ancient brain was at all times in dialogue with death, and while that dialogue asserted itself into one&amp;#39;s conscious mind from time to time, the frontal lobe was a powerful combatant in self-denial. No matter what declivities I&amp;#39;d found in my own life, I&amp;#39;d always thought of suicide as something occurring over a divide, in the land of irrevocable people, when evidence suggested again and again\u2014sweet Mr. Shi, right here in front of me!\u2014that wasn&amp;#39;t the case at all.\n\n We climbed the South Tower stairwell back to the bridge and found Mr. Chen again, standing sentry, and he proffered us a slight if somewhat cool nod. He seemed so alone, standing there; even his wife and daughter knew little of his life on the bridge. They didn&amp;#39;t know he&amp;#39;d once been stabbed in the leg; they didn&amp;#39;t know the emotional storms he&amp;#39;d weathered on those days when he lost a jumper. (&amp;quot;I want to give them a clean piece of land,&amp;quot; he said, using a turn of phrase. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t want them worrying.&amp;quot;) Now the rain galloped harder; a sea of umbrellas popped open, moving south to north and north to south. Then, as quickly, the rain stopped, and a low-lying monster cloud filled with a muggy kind of light and a crowding heat blanketed everything. One wondered if there&amp;#39;d ever been blue sky in Nanjing. Below, the barges glided downriver in the same stream that carried fallen trees and clumps of earth in the direction of distant Shanghai. While Mr. Chen scoured the crowd, Mr. Shi crouched under the shelter of the fort and lit a cigarette. Cars and trucks and taxis came and went, honking horns, the taste of fuel and smog thick in the air.\n\n Another reporter appeared on the bridge. Young and wearing a flouncy miniskirt and white high heels, she held a device that looked to be the size of a pen, which acted both as her tape recorder and camera. It seemed like secret-agent stuff, but she announced herself to be a student from Shanghai, here to do a big expos\u00E9 on suicide. Softened a bit by alcohol and the spectral vision of youth itself, Mr. Chen intermittently answered her questions, allowing that the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. were the most likely for attempts and that his method on the bridge boiled down to intuition. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m looking for their spirit as much as their expression and posture,&amp;quot; he said. Then he made a grand show of getting on his moped, kicking it to life, and put-putting off on patrol, John Wayne again on his Shetland pony.\n\n We both stood watching him go, the young woman and I, until he disappeared behind tatters of sky-fog that had come loose. In his absence, I was buffeted again by a wave of ennui, this crescendoing sense of uselessness. But then the young student reporter turned to me, beaming with bright eyes, and blurted in broken English, &amp;quot;What angel is he!&amp;quot;\n\nThere are always two countercurrents running through the brain of someone contemplating suicide, much like the currents working at odds in the river itself: the desire to escape and the dim hope of being saved. The mind, having fixated on suicide as an option, might take signs of encouragement in everything: cloud formations or rough seas or a random conversation. In the failure of the mailman to arrive. Or the store sold out of a particular brand of cereal. As the mind vacuum-seals itself to its singular course of action, and as the body moves in concert\u2014as suction takes hold and begins to claim its molecules\u2014the only solution to the inevitable chain of unfolding events, the only possibility at being saved, is an intervention of some sort, a random occurrence or gesture. The hand on the shoulder. Then, the mind that has held so long and fast to the body&amp;#39;s undoing might shift, and unburden, and de-aggregate, in some cases, almost instantly. Recidivism rates for those mulling suicide are low for all but the severely depressed. Help someone focus step by step across the bridge and he&amp;#39;ll be less inclined to ever return.\n\n In my reading, I kept coming back to William James, brother of Henry, journeying across the European continent in 1867, his despair at feeling a failure, the pull of ending it all. In his Norfolk coat, bright shirts, and flowing ties\u2014&amp;quot;His clothes looked as if they had come freshly pressed from the cleaners,&amp;quot; a contemporary once said, &amp;quot;and his mind seemed to have blown in on a storm&amp;quot;\u2014he decamped to Berlin, and took the baths at Teplice, in what was then Bohemia. Later, plagued by intense back pain that had migrated to his neck, he took the hypnotic drug chloral hydrate as a sleep aid, and tried electric-shock therapy, which failed to provide relief. In his deepest depression, he felt he&amp;#39;d arrived at a terminus. And yet he withstood the urge of self-annihilation, never again contemplating suicide. A friend of his, a woman named Minny, who helped encourage him through his troubled time (then died herself at a young age), reminded him in a letter of the proposition ever at work: &amp;quot;Of course the question will always remain, What is one&amp;#39;s true life\u2014 we must each try solve it for ourselves.&amp;quot;\n\nNow, in the country that brought the world 20 percent of its annual suicide victims, I stood awaiting Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s return while breathing in the particulates and invisible lead chips of progress. Time came to a very still point in the late afternoon, and I ambled out onto the bridge with Susan, the translator, realizing that whatever vision of Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s heroism had brought me here in the first place, it was folly to think I&amp;#39;d actually ever see him save someone.\n\nSusan was telling me about a family acquaintance who, years back, had jumped from the bridge in winter (most suicides here occurred in the fall and spring). Bundled in many layers against the elements, she had gone to the bridge in distress, climbed the railing, and leapt. One hundred and thirty feet down, at the speed of sixty-five miles an hour, she had hit the river, but if it was the angle or the specifics of her swaddling, if it was will or fate, she had lived, survived not just the fall but also the currents and hypothermia and, most of all, the killer flotsam. Every once in a while, for whatever reason, someone was chosen\u2014but what I wanted to know was this: Having returned from the river, was she happy now, had she found in the aftermath her true life, solved the thing that had first gone missing in her? Susan considered the question. &amp;quot;I think happy enough,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;but who knows?&amp;quot;\n\n Just then a man lurched past us, a flash of green. We paid him no mind, really, until he was about twenty steps beyond us, out where the bridge first met water. He stopped, put both hands on the railing, and threw a leg up. The green man&amp;#39;s body rose, and now he was hooking his ankle on the top bar, then levering himself from vertical to horizontal until he lay on top of the railing. People streamed by, apparently unaware, staring down. Now the green man began to push his way over the railing, at which point I knew that I was not dreaming and that he was going to kill himself. I shouted, and then burst toward him, sprinting past Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s posters and flags.\n\n The green man began shifting to the other side, listing as if on the curl of a wave, half of him letting go into space. Reaching him, I reflexively planted a foot against the concrete base of the railing, latched an arm up and over, then wrenched his body as hard as I could while I pushed back from the railing. Just like that, his body, which was as limp and resigned as if he&amp;#39;d been filled with sawdust, came tumbling back into the real world, where he assumed the full proportions of his humanness again. He had a very tan face and rough hands. He reeked of alcohol. Even before we&amp;#39;d hit the ground, he&amp;#39;d blurted something in Chinese, and then repeated it as I held him in a tight bear hug, readying for a struggle that never came.\n\n &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m just joking,&amp;quot; he implored. He had the supplicant, bedraggled demeanor of a man at loose ends. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m okay, thank you.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\n Shocked back into the world of the living, the green man didn&amp;#39;t wait for the question; he just began talking, in a fit of logomania. &amp;quot;The reason I tried to kill myself,&amp;quot; he blurted, &amp;quot;is because my father was in the army.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\n His story seemed disjointed, and more so because Susan was trying to do three things at once\u2014translate, call Mr. Chen, who was not answering, and figure out how to get the attention of Mr. Shi, who was stationed back at the fort, casually smoking cigarettes. A crowd began to gather, an airless huddle. The man went on. &amp;quot;My father is 90 and very sick. We lost his documents in a fire, and we have no money to care for him. The government needs proof that he was in the army, but we are a family of soldiers. I was one, too.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\n Mr. Chen had said that people become innocent again on the bridge. They become simple and open in a way that they never otherwise were in real life. And here I was, bear-hugging a man in green coveralls named Fan Ping, trying to crush some spirit inside him that had opted to, in Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s words, &amp;quot;dive downward.&amp;quot; He was talking to me earnestly, though I didn&amp;#39;t understand a word. He was a child, needing someone to understand. His eyes swelled, and two streams of water released over his smooth, rounded cheeks. I don&amp;#39;t know, but it didn&amp;#39;t seem like crying exactly. It was like something done less out of grief than reflex. With my arms around him, hands chained, I could feel his heart thudding into mine. His breath of stale spirits filled my lungs. When I looked down, my shoes were his, two terribly dirty, scuffed sheaths of cheap, disintegrating leather. We could barely stand as we swayed together.\n\n Fan Ping said that he was 37 years old and that his mother had died three years earlier. He worked for a gas station, Sinopec, and made $400 a month. He was one of those known as a guang gun, or &amp;quot;bare branch,&amp;quot; unmarried, a victim of demographics in a country where 20 million men went without wives. &amp;quot;What am I supposed to do now?&amp;quot; he said.\n\n The crowd of onlookers registered their concern and curiosity. Some in the back were laughing, unsure of what indeed was transpiring, or just made nervous by it. I had an irrational flash of hating those people in the back, of wanting to lash out, but all that really mattered was keeping my body between Fan Ping and the railing, in case he made another lunge. Eventually Mr. Chen appeared and dismounted from his moped. On cue, the crowd parted while Mr. Chen stepped forward, invested with the power and understanding of all the nuances at play here. Fan Ping started his story again\u2014army\u2026sick father\u2026dead mother\u2026gas station\u2026so sorry to try to kill self\u2014and Mr. Chen asked me to let go of the man, something I wasn&amp;#39;t at all inclined to do. Then he pulled out a camera and took Fan Ping&amp;#39;s picture, which seemed, at best, like an odd way to begin and, at worst, like a major violation of the man&amp;#39;s privacy. Then, glaring straight at Fan Ping, who stood slumped and dirty, with bloodshot eyes, Mr. Chen spoke.\n\n &amp;quot;I should punch you in the face,&amp;quot; Mr. Chen said. &amp;quot;You call yourself a family man\u2026 A son\u2026 Chinese? If your father hadn&amp;#39;t been in the army, and if you didn&amp;#39;t try to kill yourself just now, I&amp;#39;d punch you. You&amp;#39;re not thinking\u2014or are you just shirking your responsibility? I really would like to punch you now. Hand over your ID.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\n Fan Ping seemed utterly flummod, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his identification card. Mr. Chen made a show of studying it, then derisively handed it back\u2014was this a diversion, part of a new therapeutic method?\u2014and in the same brusque tone asked what in the world was he thinking, coming up here like this? Fan Ping replied that he wasn&amp;#39;t thinking at all; he just didn&amp;#39;t have the money necessary to care for his father\u2014and that his life boiled down to this vast, sorrowful futility.\n\n Mr. Chen sized him up again, with a withering look. I could see part of Fan Ping&amp;#39;s blue sock poking through the worn leather of his shoe. &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; said Mr. Chen dismissively. &amp;quot;We all have our troubles.&amp;quot;\n\n Watching Mr. Chen face off with Fan Ping in that gray late afternoon was like watching twin sons of different mothers: They were both short and stout. Mr. Chen asked Fan Ping where he lived. A country village outside the city. Mr. Chen asked how he&amp;#39;d gotten to the bridge. By foot, from his job. The conversation went on like this for some time while slowly Mr. Chen&amp;#39;s tone shifted from outrage and aggression to a more familiar, fraternal concern, even sweetness. &amp;quot;I promise you that there&amp;#39;s nothing we can&amp;#39;t fix,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;but first we have to get you off this bridge.&amp;quot; Then later: &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m here to help you.&amp;quot; In his dishevelment, Fan Ping didn&amp;#39;t seem capable of movement, as perhaps he hadn&amp;#39;t entirely given up on the idea that had brought him here in the first place. And Mr. Chen intuited this. He moved in closer and clasped his hand, a special shake, a locking of pinkies that meant brotherhood, then didn&amp;#39;t let go, dragging Fan Ping to the fort and a bus stop there while the crowd followed. He arranged for Fan Ping to meet him at his office first thing Monday morning. He wrote the address on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into Fan Ping&amp;#39;s pocket. He punched the digits of Fan Ping&amp;#39;s cell-phone number into his own.\n\n &amp;quot;You promise you&amp;#39;ll be there,&amp;quot; Mr. Chen said.\n\n &amp;quot;I will,&amp;quot; said Fan Ping.\n\n &amp;quot;Unless you try to jump off the bridge between now and then,&amp;quot; Mr. Chen deadpanned. It wasn&amp;#39;t quite a joke, but Fan Ping laughed, as did several in the crowd looking for some sort of release\u2014and then Mr. Chen made it all okay by laughing, too.\n\n Meanwhile, the student reporter from Shanghai grabbed me, tottering on high heels, and asked if she might conduct an interview. Not waiting for an answer, she began peppering me with questions, compensating for my lack of Chinese with her almost-English: &amp;quot;Do American engage in this so-called suicide event?&amp;quot;\u2026 &amp;quot;From bridges is always the favorite, no?&amp;quot;\u2026 &amp;quot;Does American\u2014you\u2014have fis for problem?&amp;quot;\u2026 &amp;quot;Do you also enjoy Sex and the City?&amp;quot;\n\n I couldn&amp;#39;t even pretend. My hands, which rarely shake, were shaking. And I floated from my body, watching Mr. Chen and Fan Ping walk ahead, watched\u2014from some high, hovering angle\u2014as Mr. Chen placed the man on a bus and Fan Ping squished down the aisle in his disintegrating shoes and took his place by the window, looking straight ahead. The bus gurgled, backfired, then lurched forward, gone in a plume of gray smoke. That&amp;#39;s when some part of me came tumbling back down to myself. I turned and strode back out on the bridge to the spot where Fan Ping had readied to die. I came to the railing, peered down once more to the dark, roiling waters, and felt as if I might regurgitate my lunch noodles.\n\n There would have been no way to survive that fall. And for some reason, standing there, I felt a sharp pang of loss, though no one had been lost. I felt I&amp;#39;d been a step too late, though I&amp;#39;d been one step ahead. It wasn&amp;#39;t Fan Ping I was thinking about; it was all the other lives\u2014within me and disparate from me\u2014that had been lost. Yanking Fan Ping from the railing hadn&amp;#39;t offered a stay of any kind; instead, it brought death nearer. Mr. Chen wasn&amp;#39;t a caricature but a bearer of so much imminent grief. I was bound to him by a feeling Mr. Chen had elucidated for me in one of our talks, a feeling of standing in a spot like this on the bridge, after an incident like this, hovering between heaven and earth, &amp;quot;heart hanging in air.&amp;quot;\n\n Back at home, the months passed, and so the day-to-day reasserted itself. And yet sometimes, randomly, Mr. Chen appeared in my mind, standing guard at his station at the South Tower, scanning the crowd. And on those few occasions when I found myself describing what happened on the bridge to friends, I could hear my voice retelling the story of Fan Ping, and it sounded preposterous, even delusional. It sounded as if I might be a man of comical self-importance or full of conspiracies, the sort who wears a hat that reads They spy on you. Soon I stopped mentioning it altogether. After Fan Ping pulled away on the bus that day, I had joked with Mr. Chen about catching up to him on the big scoreboard of lives saved.\n\n &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s 174 to 1,&amp;quot; I told him. &amp;quot;Watch your back.&amp;quot;\n\n He smirked dismissively and said: &amp;quot;You&amp;#39;re only given a half point for that one.&amp;quot;\n\n As it turned out he was right again. He already knew what I&amp;#39;d later find out. That is, if I&amp;#39;d ever imagined saving someone from a bridge, it probably would have been a fantasy bathed in altruistic light, in which I\u2026SAVED\u2026A\u2026HUMAN\u2026LIFE! But then it slowly dawned on me: I&amp;#39;d tried to stop Fan Ping merely so I wouldn&amp;#39;t have to live with the memory of having watched him fall. My worry now was that he would somehow succeed in trying again.\n\n So I contact Mr. Chen. He tells me that on the Monday morning after Fan Ping tried to kill himself\u2014the morning that the two men were supposed to meet at his office\u2014Mr. Chen arrived at work and his boss promptly fired him. He left the office building immediately and went to his station at the bridge, not so much because he was despondent but because that was where he felt he belonged. All the while, he dialed Fan Ping&amp;#39;s number over and over again, but the phone was out of order. And remained that way, all these months later.\n\n There&amp;#39;s nothing to do now, says Mr. Chen, but wait for him to come back. Rest assured, he&amp;#39;ll stop Fan Ping. Even as he&amp;#39;s recently saved a father, and a few students, and a woman with a psychiatric problem. He knows what Fan Ping looks like. In broiling heat and blowing monsoon, he&amp;#39;s out there, ever vigilant, waiting in his double duck-bill, scanning the crowd for Fan Ping\u2014and all the others, too, who might possess thoughts of a glorious demise. He assures me he&amp;#39;ll be waiting for them all\u2014and you and me, as well\u2014binoculars trained on our murky faces, our eyes sucked downward, trying to read the glimmer off the surface of the river below.\n\n The only question remains: Can he reach us in time?\n\n\n\nMichael Paterniti is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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